He knows about second chances

PHIL JOANOU doesn’t mince words. “When I was growing up, I wanted more than anything to be a movie director,” he says. “But it’s been seven years since I made my last movie. I had a very lucky beginning in film, but I blew it. I’d argue with people and act like a jerk and they decided that they didn’t need to hire a guy who was such a pain ... and didn’t make hit movies either.”

This is what you might expect a down-on-his-luck filmmaker to tell his therapist, not a roomful of juvenile offenders in a youth probation facility. When Joanou was shooting “Gridiron Gang” last summer, the filmmaker took time out to speak to a film class run by Lee Stanley, one of the “Gridiron Gang” producers. The class of 20 kids were all serving time at Camp Kilpatrick, a facility in the Santa Monica Mountains that houses troubled young men who’ve had run-ins with the law, from shootings and assault to petty theft charges. Years ago, probation officers here organized a football program, hoping that the discipline and self-respect that comes with teamwork might cut down on the number of kids who were arrested again after their release.

Having spent time as a volunteer at the facility, Stanley made a 1993 documentary about the program, also titled “Gridiron Gang,” that serves as the inspiration for the new Sony Pictures film, which stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and opens next week. When Stanley asked Joanou to speak, he hoped the filmmaker would give the kids a sense of the craft that goes into filmmaking, especially since they’d seen Joanou film much of the movie at the facility.

But what they got was a confessional on earning second chances. “I know what it’s like to lose your dream,” Joanou explained, nervously pacing in front of the room. “I went to a lot of people and said I was sorry. I’ve never had it like you have it, but I know what it’s like to be told that you’re not good enough. I can’t tell you how many people -- a lot of people -- told me I’d never direct again. But I’m here to tell you that if you believe in yourself, and you take responsibility for yourself, you can do it. You can go somewhere.”

Joanou has been missing in action for so long that one young agent who heard his name thought the filmmaker had left the business. Now 44, with traces of gray in his close-cropped hair, Joanou was one of the industry’s first film-school phenoms. Before Bryan Singer or even Steven Soderbergh, there was Joanou, a cocky kid from La Canada who made a short film at USC’s film school that changed his life.

“They screened it at the academy and the next thing I knew I got a call from Steven Spielberg -- at home! -- who asked me to come over and meet him,” Joanou recalls over lunch at a noisy Beverly Hills eatery. After a couple more calls from Spielberg, Joanou had an agent at CAA and found himself directing two episodes of “Amazing Stories.”

“I had an office next to Robert Zemeckis,” he recalls. “It was one of those ridiculous magical breaks of a lifetime.”

At first, Joanou could do nothing wrong. Spielberg helped him get a job directing a feature, “Three O’Clock High,” then got him attached to a big-budget sci-fi film. However, while in pre-production, Joanou met U2. He left the sci-fi film behind, going on the road with the band to make the documentary “Rattle and Hum.”

Afterward, Joanou headed east to make “State of Grace,” a Scorsese-influenced film that featured Sean Penn, Ed Harris and Gary Oldman as Irish American gangsters in Hell’s Kitchen. The movie had its admirers, but it barely got a release, since Orion, which made the film, was in financial turmoil.

“It really took the wind out of my sails, because I had this dream cast and the movie just disappeared,” he says. “It was like it didn’t even happen.” It took 15 years for the film to show up on DVD. Joanou says when he once found a copy of the film on EBay, someone else outbid him for it. “I even told him that I was the guy who directed the movie and he said, ‘Too bad.’ ”

Convinced he needed to do something more commercial, Joanou took a job making “Final Analysis,” a big studio thriller starring Richard Gere and Kim Basinger. The movie did OK, but it made Joanou look like a gun for hire. “I know people were saying, ‘What is Phil Joanou doing making that movie?’ because I asked myself the same question. The studio treated me well. I was mostly disappointed in myself. I felt very confused, because as a director, it’s all about choices -- you have to have confidence in your decision making. And instead of being confident, I was full of self-doubt. I was constantly looking over my shoulder, waiting for the boom to drop.”

Joanou moved to New York, hoping to rejuvenate himself in the indie world, but he couldn’t get a job. He finally made another thriller, “Heaven’s Prisoners,” with Alec Baldwin, but its financiers went out of business before he could finish editing the picture. Joanou’s only film project after that was “Entropy,” an autobiographical film that went straight to video.

To add insult to injury, Joanou’s personal life was a mess. In the early 1990s, while shooting a U2 video, he met a girl, ran off to Vegas and got married. It lasted two weeks. “It was certainly my lowest moment in terms of making bad decisions,” he says ruefully. “I’d started out as the luckiest guy ever and I got a taste of what it’s like to not have things go your way -- and I got a pretty good dose of it.”

Unemployable in Hollywood, Joanou took stock of himself. “I’d been dismissive and arrogant, which came from my thinking I was always right,” he admits. “To executives, I must’ve seemed like a young punk, always barking about what I wanted to do. It always ended up being me versus them. I had my gloves up and ready to fight before anyone had opened their mouth.”

What helped Joanou rehabilitate himself more than anything else was his decision to become a TV commercial director. Over the past half a dozen years, he’s made dozens of spots for Bud Light, T-Mobile, Coke, Nike, Honda and UPS. Instead of waiting for a movie to materialize, Joanou was constantly on a set, honing his craft.

“Now I have all these relationships and technology to draw on,” he says. “My whole technique for shooting ‘Gridiron Gang,’ using hand-held cameras, with long lenses and no dollies, I worked out doing a UPS spot.”

More important, Joanou finally learned to collaborate. “On a commercial, the agency and the client are there, watching each shot, giving a thumbs-up before you move on,” he says. “It’s not unusual for them to say, ‘Can we get [the product] a little closer?’ Or ‘Can she smile a little more?’ In my younger days, that would’ve been hard to handle. I was too defensive and scared -- so I’ve had to conquer my fears. Now when I’m asked to try something, instead of complaining, I’ll say, ‘Sure, let’s see what happens.’ It’s made me a more open, less self-conscious director.”

Joanou’s relationship with Bono has also broadened his horizons. He recently spent several weeks in Africa, filming a documentary about Bono’s efforts to fight AIDS through a new project that launches in October with corporations raising money for AIDS relief through consumer purchases. “We were in shantytowns with 80,000 people and no toilets, in clinics where there were five babies to a bed. You just couldn’t imagine people on our planet live like that every day.”

Besides Bono, Joanou found one other supporter, Neal Moritz, who’d been at USC when Joanou was there. Now a top producer, Moritz tried to hire him on an earlier film, but the studio, knowing Joanou’s reputation, wanted nothing to do with him. Moritz finally persuaded Sony to hire Joanou for “Gridiron Gang.”

“He’s not the arrogant young guy he once was,” says Moritz. “No one understood this movie better than Phil. He’s got his head on straight and our movie is lucky enough to be the beneficiary. The film is all about these kids getting a second chance, so we really have the right guy to tell that story.”

Joanou doesn’t view his years of struggle as wasted time. “In some ways, I’m lucky I wasn’t such a big success. When you fail, people are a lot more honest with you, so I’ve learned more about myself. When I was young, I was always going after the big guns, like Scorsese. This time I wasn’t trying to emulate my heroes. It was just me, trying to tell a story I cared about.”

Joanou recently bought a famous Richard Avedon photo of John Ford, showing the fabled director at the end of his life, a patch over one eye, his face mottled with sagging flesh and liver spots. Joanou put it up right by his front door. “I like seeing it every day when I walk out the door because I think, ‘Now that’s what a real director looks like.’ ”

*

patrick.goldstein@latimes.com