Director John Schlesinger. JOHN SCHLESINGER:
HIS BEST NEXT THING
By
Alex Simon
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the March 2000 issue of Venice Magazine.
John Schlesinger is celebrated for his ability to elicit sensitive performances from his actors, a skill which draws on his own experience on the British stage in the 1950s. His style is also influenced by techniques he developed while directing TV documentaries—a period of his career characterized by extensive location shooting, tight production schedules and an emphasis on the role of editing in shaping narrative structure.
Schlesinger was born in London February 16, 1926, the son of a pediatrician. He first became interested in film at the age of 11, when he received a 9.5 mm movie camera as a gift. While serving with the Royal Engineers during WWII he made an amateur film, Horrors, and performed as a magician in the Combined Services Entertainment Unit. When he resumed his education in 1945 he immersed himself in the theater, joining the Oxford University Dramatic Society and soon becoming president of the Oxford Experimental Theater Company. (He would continue to direct for the stage, in between movie assignments, throughout the 1960s and 70s.)
From 1952 to 1957 Schlesinger worked in England, Australia and New Zealand, appearing in five feature films, acting in nearly 20 plays with various repertory companies and performing on TV and radio. During this period, a chance meeting with director/producer Roy Boulting catalyzed his interest in photography and filmmaking and led to the creation, with theatrical agent Basil Appleby, of a 15-minute documentary, Sunday in the Park (1956). The film brought Schlesinger a series of documentary assignments for the BBC. After a stint as a second-unit director, he was commissioned to make an industrial documentary of daily life in London's Waterloo Station. The poignant result, Terminus (1961), achieved nationwide commercial distribution and earned him a Venice Festival Gold Lion and a British Academy Award.
Motivated in part by the festival success of Terminus, producer Joseph Janni offered Schlesinger his first shot at a feature film with A Kind of Loving (1962). The result was a critical and financial success which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Festival and propelled its director into the front rank of young British filmmakers. In Billy Liar (1963), Schlesinger continued to examine the themes of inarticulate ambition and frustrated tenderness he had explored in A Kind of Loving. Both films showed the influence of the British Free Cinema (or "kitchen sink drama") movement, with its emphasis on the constraints and restrictions of working-class life. Schlesinger then moved into very different terrain with Darling (1965), a flashy satire of "swinging London" that certified its lead actress, Julie Christie, as an international star when she won the Academy Award for best actress. Schlesinger followed this with a sweeping adaptation of Thomas Hardy's classic Far From the Maddening Crowd (1967) starring Christie again, and Terrence Stamp.
Midnight Cowboy (1969) was perhaps Schlesinger's greatest success commercially and critically, winning Oscars for best picture and best director and launching a long but rather turbulent Hollywood career for Schlesinger. Films such as the bi-sexual love triangle drama Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), the vastly underrated adaptation of Nathanael West's Hollywood novel The Day of the Locust (1975) and the classic thriller Marathon Man (1976) all bear witness to Schlesinger's remarkable ability to weave meticulously observed, realistic backgrounds into his complex studies of human relationships.
Schlesinger's later films have included The Believers(1987), a gripping contemporary horror story starring Martin Sheen and Helen Shaver, Madame Sousatzka (1988), about an eccentric London piano teacher (Shirley MacLaine) and her gifted young student, the thrillers Pacific Heights (1990), The Innocent (1993), and An Eye for An Eye (1995). Schlesigner most recently helmed a delightful adaptation of Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm (1996) starring Kate Beckinsale and Ian McKellen.
Schlesinger's latest effort is the comedy-drama The Next Best Thing, starring Madonna, Rupert Everett and Benjamin Bratt. Madonna plays a yoga instructor who is devastated after a nasty break-up with her boyfriend. When her gay best friend (Everett) accidentally gets her pregnant, she decides to have the child, and the three as a happy, if unconventional, family. Several years later, when Madonna falls in love with überhunk Benjamin Bratt, complications ensue when she and Bratt decide to marry, and move the boy with them to New York. John Schlesinger sat down with Venice recently to reflect on his remarkable career.
The Next Best Thing is an unusual film, in that it starts out as a comedy, then turns very serious toward the end. What are some of the things you hope people will take away from this story?
I hope they realize that a family can be made up of all sorts of elements that are not necessarily conventional. I hope they'll understand the issues of biology versus commitment to being a parent, because I think Rupert's character is dedicated to being a father...and his commitment to this child is very strong and powerful, and not the accepted thing from a gay man, necessarily. It also addresses the fact that being gay is all things to all people. It isn't just a limp-wristed fag going to the gym all the time. I hope they'll accept that. It's all there, for anyone who wants to see it.
Many of your films have featured up-and-coming talent. Can you tell us about working with Benjamin Bratt?
We took our time (casting the role). I had seen him in Law & Order and thought he was rather serious, never smiled, rather mournful at times. But he came out and read absolutely brilliantly for us. The light side of the character was there. It was very obvious that all our preconceived notions went out the window, which is what happens in casting quite often, and one of the delights of making movies. Jon Voight, for example, was all wrong for me as Joe Buck initially, then he just came round to it from tests, and things like that.
This isn't the first film you've done that dealt with gay relationships. Midnight Cowboy, and particularly Sunday Bloody Sunday, very honestly portrayed homosexuals. Do you think society has become more accepting of the gay lifestyle in the 30 years since those films?
Yes, I think it has. I still think there's an awful lot of prejudice and I think that AIDS, seen by many as a "gay disease" even though it clearly isn't, has not helped at all. I hope this film will bring some understanding of that, as well, since we address the issue.
Tell us about your background.
My father was a pediatrician. I suppose I was always drawn towards the arts. It was encouraged in the family. My father met my mother in a children's orchestra. He played the cello and my mother was a violinist. So musically, the family was encouraged. I was the eldest of five and we all played instruments. During the second World War, my father was in the army in India, and we'd send him records that we'd all made, to show how our music was progressing. They gave us a very good musical upbringing, taking us to opera, festivals, and so forth. So I was very privileged in that way to have parents who were that committed to the arts. It was a happy childhood, really.
When did your fascination with film begin?
I suppose when I was in school. I was very interested in film and theater. I never thought I was going to get involved the way I have done, but I made various amateur films when I was at university (Oxford). During my vacations, we made movies which got some attention critically and the opportunity to go to work for Ealing Studios presented, then taken away because they didn't really have a vacancy. It was a long time before I really got into (making films) professionally. I became a researcher and assistant director on a British documentary about cheese! (laughs) It was one of my first professional jobs. Then I got the opportunity to go to the BBC and make documentaries for magazine programs. I worked on a documentary series about Winston Churchill and interviewed all these high-ranking members of the military brass who were just incredible prima donnas! (laughs) Then I bummed around in the profession for years before I settled. I never would have been a good corporation man at the Beeb (BBC). Never would have been able to adapt to that corporate attitude.
Was there one film you saw as a young man that inspired you to become a filmmaker?
No, it wasn't like that. There are dozens of famous films I've never seen. Then you have someone like Marty Scorsese who's devoted his life to seeing every film imaginable. He'll call me up and say "I just saw this amazing film with Rex Ingram!" (laughs) I could never be like that. There are other things I enjoy far too much, like opera, like ballet, like music. I want different experiences because they all inform each other.
A Kind of Loving was your first feature.
Yes, it was a great success. Won the Golden Bear at Berlin and started an association I had with a wonderful producer called Joe Janni. He's dead now, but we made six films together and it was wonderful at the time. I was fond of that film, but Billy Liar, my second film, far eclipsed it.
That film introduced both Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie.
Yes, it was. I had made a documentary called Monitor for the BBC about the Central School of Acting in London. Julie was in one of the classes. She wasn't in the film, but we noted her. She was very striking. When we came to cast Billy Liar, there we were in Joe Janni's office, and there was a magazine which Julie was on the cover of. I pointed at it and said 'Someone like her,' not recognizing her. She came in and tested, twice, and we turned her down. I didn't think she was "earth mother" enough. The other girl who we cast got ill during the first week of shooting and had to drop out. So we went back to the tests and saw Julie, and thought 'My God, we're mad! Why didn't we cast Julie?' So we put her in and that's how it happened.
Since we're talking about Julie Christie, let's talk about Darling.
The genesis of that was a conversation we had with a journalist called Godfrey Winn, who played the man in Billy Liar who played all the records on Housewives' Choice. He was quite a character. He told me a story about a syndicate of show biz people who'd rented a flat for a kind of call girl to live in, to whom they all had access, and how she eventually threw herself off the balcony, in Park Lane. We thought that was an interesting premise, but we veered very far away from it. Freddie Raphael came on board to write his script and it was total fantasy. Joe Janni said, 'I know a girl who I'd like you to spend time with and follow around, who's the perfect type for this movie.' So we spent a lot of time with this girl, and finally a script based to a certain extent on her life, was produced by Freddie, which was much closer to the mark. And we went ahead and made it.
Dirk Bogarde, who died last year, was also wonderful in that film. He was also an accomplished author, painter, a real renaissance man. Tell us about him.
He was wonderful and was very nice to Julie during the shoot. He became rather a bitter older man, I don't know why. But he was very embittered. We rather fell out as friends, which is sad, but it happens. Julie still remains a good friend of mine. As was Laurence Harvey, who died far too young.
Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy (1969). Tell us about how Midnight Cowboy came about.
A friend of mine, an American painter living in London, had read the book and suggested that I look at it. I read it and thought 'If I'm going to make a film in America, then this is the one that I want to do.' David Picker of United Artists had issued a kind of blanket invitation, saying "When you find something you want to do, do bring it to us." So Jerry Hellman, who was a producer I knew, and I brought the book to David, who agreed to do it if we could keep the budget low enough.
Parts of it were improvised, right? Like Hoffman's famous "I'm walkin' here!" bit.
I don't know that that was improvised. I think we got an extra inside a cab and did it. I can't swear to the fact that it was in the script or not, but I don't think that was improvised.
Waldo Salt, who did the screenplay for Midnight Cowboy, was a fascinating character. Talk about a man who could have been embittered (from the Blacklist).
He never was. Never was. He chose to be amused by the memories of it all. He was great to work with and I loved him dearly. He also did Day of the Locust for us.
Let's talk about Day of the Locust, which is a wonderful, very underrated film.
Thank you. It's one of my favorites, as well. I was fortunate to have wonderful designers. We got Richard MacDonald out here to do it. Driving from the airport to his hotel, he did a little tour. He said, "I'll tell you what my impression of L.A. is: it's tied together by telegraph wires with bizarre architecture." He did a marvelous job, with Ann Roth doing the costumes...the final scene, the riot, took about 10 days to shoot. We used three stages at Paramount, linked together with black plastic. The fumes from the cars was one of the problems. But it was very exciting to do.
Marathon Man is one of my favorite films. It had a wonderful sense of foreboding. Was Hitchcock an influence on that film?
Well, I can't say I was imitating him, although I'm accused of it. You can't help but be influenced by his mixture of humor and suspense. I hadn't done a thriller up to that point, and I loved doing it. I got very hooked on making suspense pieces after that. It's a game you play with the audience that's unlike any other kind of filmmaking.
Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier in the notorious "Is it safe?" sequence from Marathon Man (1976). There are all the legends of Olivier and Hoffman clashing. How much is truth, and how much is legend?
I think that Olivier didn't want to improvise and Hoffman did. And it's true, Olivier's line "Why doesn't he just act?" that he said to me, not Hoffman, happened, because Hoffman was trying various acting techniques to appear out-of-it during the dental scenes. When I looked at the dailies I realized there was no reaction from Hoffman's eyes, so I had to completely reshoot all the close-ups. That's when Olivier said to me "Why doesn't he just try acting?" (laughs)
Any advice for first-time directors?
Never take 'no' for an answer. It's a long business getting something off the ground and it takes very great determination. That's the only advice I can really offer.
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