Brett Ratner: The Movie

Forget the midlife crisis. Director Brett Ratner’s putting out a retrospective DVD. He talks about shooting Madonna, interviewing Michael Jackson, and the time Mickey Rourke camped out in his garage.

There’s a point in Hip Hop to Hollywood: The Brett Ratner Story—a short documentary included on Director Brett Ratner: The Shooter Series: Volume 1, a DVD that comes out Tuesday—when legendary producer and Ratner mentor (one of many) Robert Evans summarizes the filmmaker’s career to date. At the end, Evans exclaims, “And he’s just getting started!”

“In my public life, I’m just a guy who enjoys having fun,” Ratner said.

All due to respect to Evans, but that will come as news to anyone who has followed the work of Ratner, now 40, since his days as the house video director for Russell Simmons’ Def Jam in the late 1980s and 1990s. In fact, what makes Ratner Ratner is that he wasted absolutely no time in imposing himself on the entertainment business.

But breaking into the film industry when you’re a kid from Miami Beach is no easy task. So Ratner followed a passion for music and latched onto the hip-hop scene in New York while still a student at NYU. This led to directing gigs for Public Enemy, LL Cool J, P. Diddy, Mariah Carey, and Madonna. Feature films soon followed, most notably the Rush Hour franchise, with Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan, which according to some estimates has grossed close to $1 billion worldwide.

Now a selection of Ratner’s oeuvre has been collected on The Shooter Series. It includes more than two dozen music videos with director commentary, as well as hip-hop inflected PSAs, Guitar Hero commercials, several spectacularly tasteless and pretentious NYU student films that Ratner selected specifically for their amusing awfulness, and two never-before seen short films—one about the photographer Peter Beard, the other about Mickey Rourke in the late 1980s, when he had dropped out of acting to become a prizefighter.

A never before seen interview between Brett Ratner and Michael Jackson. Watch the full interview here.

“Mickey grew up at my house in Miami,” Ratner said. “He lived there before I was even born. So when I got to film school, I couldn’t wait to put him in a movie.” Ratner was understandably shocked when, after they reconnected in the mid-1980s, Rourke informed the wannabe filmmaker that he was going to quit acting to become a boxer. “Are you out of your mind?” Ratner said. But then he decided to film Rourke’s training.

Meet Mickey Rourke is the result, a black-and-white promotional short included on The Shooter Series. The footage was edited by filmmaker Albert Maysles after Rourke, Ratner, and The Wrestler director Darren Aronofsky viewed it during a party that Ratner threw at the time of the 2009 Oscars. “I snuck them into my bedroom and said, ‘Guys, look at this footage,’ which I had found in my garage.”

In it, a pre-plastic-surgery Rourke is a lean, cut fighter-in-training, musing on life, acting, and his destiny while skipping rope, talking on a gigantic '80s-vintage cellphone, sparring, and eating Cuban food. “He’s known me since I was a little kid,” Ratner said. “It was down-to-earth—there was no pretentiousness about it. And he really looked like a movie star then.”

The short, which Maysles assembled from hundreds of hours of footage and is now editing and producing as a full-blown documentary, depicts Rourke at the beginning of his Hollywood downfall. “He had too much power and control at the time,” Ratner said. “He was telling directors to fuck off.” In retrospect, the film makes Rourke’s comeback all the more meaningful. “Mickey was in tears when he saw it,” Ratner said. “And Darren said, ‘This is the real Wrestler! You should have directed it!’”