It’s something that has kept every parent awake at one time or other. For Andrew Klavan, the thought came just after his daughter was born, when he was getting up several times a night to check on her. “One night,” says the young journalist-turned-novelist, “I wondered, ‘What if I looked in… and she was gone?’”
Don’t Say a Word, the novel that came out of that one nagging thought, was one of the easiest Klavan had ever planned. “The basics of the story unrolled in front of me,” he says. And it was (in every sense) a story so close to home that the setting of the book ended up being clearly identifiable as Klavan’s own apartment.
The novel was a huge success, winning the coveted Mystery Writers of America’s ‘Edgar’ award for best mystery novel of the year. Not surprisingly, the film rights were immediately snapped up by veteran producer Arnold Kopelson (Platoon, The Fugitive). “I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough,” Kopelson remembers. “My skin was crawling and my heart was thumping.”
But the progress from that moment to the September, 2001 opening of Don’t Say a Word, starring Michael Douglas, was a slow one, not because there were any doubts about the story - Douglas committed as soon as he saw an early draft of the screenplay - but because of the very thing that made the novel so gripping: the way the story shifts around in time and place. “The book is a great page-turner,” says screenwriter Anthony Peckham, “but it’s non-linear structure was difficult to translate to the screen.”
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It’s a question every parent asks themselves: what would you do
if you woke up one morning and your child was gone? It’s a
question Michael Douglas’ character is forced to answer in Don’t Say a Word. And doing so, says Max Levant, forces him - in director Gary Fleder’s words - to “embrace the shadows”.
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Don’t Say a Word focuses on Dr Nathan Conrad (Douglas), a gifted psychiatrist who used to work for the love of the job but has now made the move uptown and spends most of his time treating troubled rich kids. Driving home for Thanksgiving, however, he gets a call from a former colleague, Louis Sachs (Oliver Pratt), who is still working at the front-line Bridgeview Hospital (read ‘Bellevue’, for those familiar with New York’s healthcare system). Sachs reckons Conrad is the one man capable of ‘saving’ Elisabeth Burrows (Brittany Murphy), a severely disturbed teenager who has just beaten a man almost to death and is about to be institutionalised for life.
Conrad’s first meeting with her is disturbing. All she will say to him is: “You want what they want, don’t you..? I’ll never tell… any of you.”
What Conrad doesn’t realise is that Elisabeth’s words will soon become more than just a professional puzzle: they will hold the key to the survival of his family. For, next morning, he wakes up to find every parent’s nightmare has come true. His eight-year-old daughter, Jessie - played by Skye McCole Bartusiak who, at one year older than the character she plays, is already the veteran of seven movies (including The Patriot) plus a host of TV shows - has vanished.
Conrad and his wife, Aggie (Famke Janssen), who is immobilised with a broken leg, soon learn not just that Jessie has been kidnapped, but that their apartment has been comprehensively bugged, so that any attempt to alert the authorities will result in Jessie’s immediate death. Hence the title of the novel and the film.
Famke Janssen as Aggie Conrad; below, Michael Douglas as her husband, Nathan, with their daughter Jessie (Skye McCole Bartusiak) before she is kidnapped
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What the kidnappers (led by a more than usually evil Sean Bean) are looking for is a number which, it turns out, is the secret buried deep in Elisabeth’s mind - the thing ‘they’ want from her and she will never tell. If Conrad can get her to remember (or reveal) the number, Jessie will be released. If he can’t, she won’t. And he has until the end of the day. Which, of course, is Thanksgiving Day, the symbol of American family togetherness.
That latter fact gives Don’t Say a Word one of its most memorable scenes: struggling to reach Elisabeth in time for one of the deadlines set by Bean’s character, Conrad has to fight his way against the tide of Macy’s traditional Thanksgiving Day Parade, his rising panic offset against the manufactured happiness all around him. It’s a sequence that Hitchcock - to whose tales of innocent men caught up in do-or-die situations Don’t Say a Word owes a number of obvious debts - could easily have imagined: think of the fairground climax of Strangers on a Train.
“It’s a thriller in the classic tradition,” declares Douglas. “Its strength lies in the unexpected qualities of its characters. For example, Nathan Conrad is someone who appears to have everything. Then suddenly what he loves most is taken away from him, and he struggles against a ticking clock to get her back.”
Michael Douglas as, Nathan, with his daughter Jessie (Skye McCole Bartusiak) before she is kidnapped.
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“Nathan never had to get his hands dirty,” adds Patrick Smith Kelly, who collaborated with Peckham on the screenplay. “But, by the end, he’s become like a primal man, determined to get his daughter back at all costs. He’s thinking that he’d be better off dead than letting his child be killed.”
The two writers admit they had to make several major adjustments to the original story to make it work as a movie: Aggie’s broken leg - the result of a pre-Thanksgiving skiing holiday - is one of them, helping explain why all the onus is on her husband and adding a dimension of acute frustration to Aggie’s normally very active character. New, too, is the character of the over-zealous detective (Jennifer Esposito), whose investigation of a murder almost destroys Conrad’s attempts to save his daughter and still not ‘say a word’.
