Robert Benton: The Hollywood Interview

Writer/Director Robert Benton.

ROBERT BENTON:
ADVENTURES IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE
By
Alex Simon

Editor's Note: The following article appeared in the March 1998 issue of Venice Magazine.

Robert Benton's films and screenplays make up some of the most important and defining works of the American cinema. From Bonnie and Clyde to Nobody's Fool, Benton's examinations of the common man thrown into extraordinary circumstances are viewed by many as some of the most quintessentially American films ever produced.

Benton was born September 29, 1932 in Waxahachie, Texas, near Dallas. Intending to become an artist, he served a stint with the Army as a diorama painter before landing an assistant's job at the art department of Esquire. In 1958 he became the magazine's art director, a position he held through 1964, then a contributing editor through 1972.

During that period, he wrote three books and began a long and fruitful collaboration with writer David Newman, first on special pop-culture projects at Esquire (among them the annual college issue and the Dubious Achievement Awards), then on "Extremism: A Non-Book" in 1964 and the short-lived Broadway musical It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman in 1966. They next tackled the movies, making a fortuitous start with their original script for Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, one of the most influential films of the 1960's. It earned them a nomination for an Academy Award. They followed this with screenplays for the western There Was a Crooked Man (1969) and the zany What's Up Doc (1972, with Buck Henry). Benton then ventured into directing with Bad Company (1972), a highly-regarded Civil War-era western. In 1977, he wrote and directed the critically lauded The Late Show, an homage to the hard-boiled detective genre. The following year, he collaborated again with Newman, Newman's wife Leslie and Mario Puzo on the screenplay of the hit Superman.

In 1979, Benton scored a major triumph with the child custody drama Kramer vs. Kramer, a box office smash and winner of five Academy Awards (Best Picture, Actor, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actress). The film established him as one of Hollywood's most sought-after director-writers. He reaped more critical kudos with Places in the Heart (1984), a semi-autobiographical tale of survival during the depression in a small Texas town. Benton won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and the Berlin Festival Silver Bear as Best Director. In 1991, Benton directed the adaptation of E.L. Doctrow's novel Billy Bathgate, starring Dustin Hoffman as infamous bootlegger Dutch Schultz. He followed this with Nobody's Fool in 1994, starring Paul Newman. The film received numerous Oscar nominations.

Benton's latest is one of his best and is, in many ways, a companion piece to his masterwork The Late Show. In Twilight, Paul Newman plays Harry Ross, a tired private eye who's seen too much and gotten way too little from the City of Angels. When Harry agrees to help longtime friends, and former screen legends Jack and Catherine Ames (Gene Hackman and Susan Sarandon) with what appears to be a simple favor, he becomes embroiled in a spiraling web of deceit, betrayal and murder. Twilight, which also stars Stockard Channing and James Garner is a delicious treat, smart, funny, nail-biting and easily one of the best films of still-young 1998.

In person, Robert Benton possesses the same warmth, depth and humanity as the characters that he writes and makes films about. Mr. Benton, who considers cinema an extension of painting, sat down recently to explain how he creates his masterly brush strokes.

Tell us about growing up in Waxahachie, Texas.
Robert Benton: I moved there when I was ten. It was my mother's home. When I was there, I really thought I couldn't wait to get out of there. But what I didn't understand then is that everything I've drawn on since then came from those eight years that I was there.

What did you study in college?
Art history. And the girl I was in love with was an English major, so I followed her around and took a lot of English courses.

What did you do after graduating from the University of Texas?
I left to go to New York. I had been in love with this girl. I thought we were going to get married, that I'd go to graduate school, stay out of the army and that she'd support me until I could get a job. She was smarter than that and married a guy who was a much wiser and better person than me. (laughs) So I went to Columbia for one semester, then ran out of money and had to drop out. I supported myself in New York by working for various art studios and trying to hustle freelance work. Finally I got hired to do some work for Esquire and got hired to be an assistant to the Art Director. Then I got drafted in 1954, went back to New York in '56, back to Esquire in '57 and in '58 I became the Art Director.

When did you fall in love with film?
I think when I was a kid, because I was dyslexic. It was hard for me to read. I had what they call today attention deficit disorder, so I could only read for short periods of time. Nobody understood how to deal with that then. And the one thing I found I could do was draw. That held my attention for a longer period of time. I wanted desperately to read, but I couldn't. And the only narrative structure I could deal with, was film, was movies. It was visual. I could follow the story. Now my father, who was a terrific man, would come home at night from work and would say, instead of "Have you done your homework?" would say "Let's go to the movies." Going to the movies beat doing homework anytime! I was a terrible student. The one advantage I had is that my mother played bridge with all my high school teachers and it would've destroyed their game if they'd flunked me! So I eked my way through high school and spent every summer in summer school. Fortunately as I grew older, the dyslexia started to fade. So I could read for longer periods of time. I also developed strategies for dealing with it. One was, I read books with a strong narrative line. I could trick myself into reading longer before getting that edginess you get from being dyslexic. So I read pulp science fiction, detective stories. My father used to get furious with me for reading this rather than reading something that was really good. And what I couldn't explain to him, was that I couldn't read anything else! None of us knew what was really going on. Then when I reached the University of Texas, I finally became a good student.

Did you take any writing courses there?
I took one creative writing course and flunked it. I didn't start writing seriously...I once wrote a novel in my late 20's, then did what a lot of people did, which is tear it up. Actually, I gave it to a friend, who read it and said, "You know, this isn't bad..." I thought, if it's that terrible...so I tore it up. I was then about to fired from Esquire and no other magazine would hire me. No advertising agency would hire me. And yet through all this, I'd gone to movies constantly. And in New York at that time, it was just when the (French) New Wave had hit. Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless, Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows, Jules and Jim, and Shoot the Piano Player. I saw Jules and Jim...God, I don't know, twenty times...A friend of mine had written a treatment for a Doris Day movie and gotten $25,000. I could've lived five years on that, back then. But like I said, I took a creative writing course in college and I flunked.

Tell us about meeting David Newman and Bonnie and Clyde.
David Newman was a young editor at Esquire. He was an incredibly gifted writer, a good friend, and we both loved movies. I spun in these sort of dreams of glory of the life of a screenwriter and we decided to write a movie together. And by chance, we were both reading a book by a man named John Toland on John Dillinger. In that book there's a footnote about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. My father had gone to their funeral. He was an absolutely straight-arrow upright man, wouldn't cross the street if the light was red but, he was a closet criminal. He had a brother who was a gangster, at least according to family legend. I grew up with all these stories about Bonnie and Clyde. So I started telling David all these stories about them. So we decided to write an American New Wave film for Truffaut to direct, since we loved his films. We didn't know how to write a screenplay, so we wrote a treatment, which was about 80 pages long, and I've still got it somewhere, and through a woman named Helen Scott, who was a friend of Truffaut's, got it to him...he liked it. Truffaut came to New York, sat in a hotel room for two days with us, Helen was there as translator, and gave us the only lessons we ever had in screenwriting. He said he would like to do Bonnie and Clyde if he didn't do Fahrenheit 451, which he did wind up doing, so he gave the script to his good friend Jean-Luc Godard. Godard came over to the States and said "I would like to do this film, but I'm supposed to do a film called Alphaville, which I don't want to do. I'll get out of it." Alphaville, of course, is now one of the greatest films ever made! The people who had optioned the script and had given us money to do more research and have more time to write it, didn't have any more money. They were doing something that's customary in the U.S., which is, you option a script, get that script to a director, from there go to an actor. The actor says 'yes' and then you go to a studio. Godard was used to the European way where the producer is really the finance man and has the money when you have the script and you just go right away. So Godard says "Let's go make the movie now. I'll go back to Paris and come back in six weeks and we'll do it." So those people were stuck. In hindsight, they should have been more straightforward up front. They said to Godard, "Look, this movie takes place in the summer. Wouldn't it be better to wait until the summer?" Godard said "I'm talking cinema, and you're talking meteorology." And he walked out of the room. So the picture just sat. It was submitted to every studio and countless directors for close to four years. It was turned down by everybody. Meanwhile, I'd gotten married. David and I would joke about how we were going to be 85 years-old and still slogging this script around! (laughs) One day Truffaut had lunch with Warren Beatty and told Warren about Bonnie and Clyde. Warren called me and...said he'd come over and pick up a copy of the script. Now my wife and I hadn't even been married six months. She opens the door, and there was Warren! (laughs) Her knees almost buckled. So Warren read the script and said he wanted to do it. I'm really very proud of that script, but it was Warren, and this is a great example of a collaboration, Warren and (director) Arthur Penn together, are really responsible for that picture. I can't tell you what a strong influence Warren was in making that picture. They were both just in the top of their form. And Robert Towne came in and did some work on the script, also. It was one of those times where it just worked.

What happened after it was released?
I remember turning to my wife after seeing a rough cut and just being thrilled with it, and saying "Look, as much as we love this picture, it's gonna come and go. It's a movie, it's gonna open, be gone three weeks later. Don't get upset about it. Well it opened, and it got the worst reviews you've ever seen. The New York Times, Newsweek, everyone. Just vicious. The only person who gave it a good review was Penelope Gilliat in The New Yorker. Then critics started to slowly reverse themselves and recant their original reviews. Warren got Warners to rerelease the picture. Then we got the Time cover story. Then by early '68, it was an enormous hit in Europe...and we were all nominated for Academy Awards. All our friends told us we were going to win. What we didn't realize then because we hadn't been nominated before, is that everyone's friends tell them that they're going to win! That year the Academy Awards were held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, which is a big, flat sort of set-up, not raised like the Shrine...We got to the part of the ceremony where our names were called. I started fixing my cuffs, doing my tie, remembering who to thank...and they started reading off the nominees. "And the winner is..." and I stood up, the only person standing up in this huge crowd, and I hear "William Rose, for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (laughs) You've never seen anybody sit down so fast! Subsequently, when I've won, I'm always very careful and ask my wife "Did I hear right? It's okay to stand up now?" (laughs) It's funny, because the whole experience with Bonnie and Clyde was like being run over by a train. It was just too much. And I became very depressed afterward, probably because I thought it was all downhill from there.

Of course that wasn't the case at all.
No. After years of eking out a living writing magazine articles and writing industrial films and dozens of things that never got made for every lunatic in the book, and borrowing money from my father-in-law, finally David and I were solid citizens and got signed to a three picture deal with Warner Brothers. We wrote There Was a Crooked Man, a version of Choice Cuts, and a picture called Hubba-Hubba for Bud Yorkin and Norman Lear, which was a terrific piece that never got made.

How did you move into directing?
David and I came back from the set of Crooked Man after watching Joe Mankiewicz work and David said to me that he wanted to direct. I just thought that was crazy. We were great friends and had a huge fight about this. I had visions of our partnership breaking up and me having to call my father-in-law again to borrow money...so I did the only thing I could to save face. I said, 'If you're going to direct, I'm going to direct. ' He said 'fine,' he didn't care...Remember, I didn't know how to write before I met David. He taught me and it was a long process. David could have written on his own at that point, I couldn't. Plus, we were told that no studio would hire us to write anything solo since we were known as a team...I wanted to do this little picture called Bad Company. The one rule of Hollywood I didn't know then is that if you want something badly, they won't give it to you, but if you don't give a shit, they'll give it to you. The phone rang one day. It was Paramount, saying they were interested in Bad Company. And if I'd been there alone, I'd have said 'Fine, take it it's yours. Now we have money.' But David was there, so I said, 'Of course you know I'm tied to it as a director.' And they wanted to talk about it. So I met with this executive from Paramount. I told him I'd never directed. So I waited for him to say, "Well, what makes you think you can direct?" so he could lower the boom and that would be it. But he didn't! He did ask me to do a screen test. So I worked with these actors, John Ritter and Barry Brown, for two weeks to prepare for these scenes I was going to shoot, and I didn't know what the fuck I was doing! (laughs) So on the way to the set to shoot the tests, I'm saying to myself, 'At least now I'll know not to lie and say things like 'I want to direct' when I don't mean it.' So I get to the set, expecting to fail miserably, and about an hour into it, I realize 'I love doing this!' Then I wanted to do it! And, with the help of the producer, Stanley Jaffe, I got to do the picture.

How was it working with Robert Altman on The Late Show?
Robert Altman (who produced the film) entirely changed the way I work with actors. He taught me to loosen up. He was a great teacher. He believes you allow a film to happen, that you stand there and control it, but don't make up your mind ahead of time and stick rigidly to that. Let the actor bring something to it. Altman's the one who said to me "The only heroes in movies are the actors." It's easy for me to stand behind the camera and tell you a lie. But if the actor can't make my lie into truth, then it won't work...He also taught me that editing is the last chance to rewrite. He said "Movies are not written on a typewriter. They're written in a camera." And that's the truest advice I've ever gotten.

Give us an example of how you direct actors.
What I try to do is talk with them a lot ahead of time. I try to talk it through the night before we shoot. Then if they do something the next day that I don't like, I make adjustments...I used to worry about the blocking and things, but now I don't. On The Late Show I remember I gave Lily Tomlin some direction on how to throw a pot at someone. She said, "I wouldn't do that." I don't know why, but I really heard her. I said to myself 'Okay, she wouldn't do that. She's the character. She knows the character.' What she was going to do was real, and much better than what I wanted. And in that moment, a door opened up for me about acting. I learned how to shut up and watch, and only interfere if I know it's not working and trust my actors.

Casting is 98%, then.
It really is. There are directors who can get performances out of people, but I'm not one of them. If an actor can act, then I can work with them.

So you don't do improvs or theater games?
We do improv sometimes, but I don't do theater games. I'm very classical about the way I direct. I try to rehearse for three weeks. We sit down and read the script through, twice without stopping. And then we go away. The next day we start working again and stop every time somebody has a question. Then we read it through again. Then we break it down into scenes and we sit there and read it and finally get on our feet. But we read it, and read it, and read it until the words fade away into the first idea of how it should be done, into the rhythm of it. And then we see what happens.

The main theme throughout all your work seems to be friendship and family.
It is. Family and community is probably the one consistent theme in all my work. But the one thing I have spent my life looking for, has been family. Not only my own family, but a larger family. Somebody asked me once when the Academy Award nominations came out and I'd been nominated, "What's the great thing about the Academy Awards?" I said "When you go to the awards and you see people, some of whom you've had bitter fights with, some of whom you're close friends with, some people you haven't seen in ten years, some people you just saw two days before--it's your family." It's home. And home is what I've spent my life looking for.

Speaking of family, let's talk about Kramer vs. Kramer. For my generation, it really taught us about our parents, all of whom seemed to be getting divorced at the time it came out.
My wife read the novel by Avery Corman and urged me to do it. What I decided to do instead was send it to Truffaut, who'd just done Small Change, and see if he'd direct it if I wrote the screenplay. Truffaut's schedule was such that he couldn't do it for two years. Stanley Jaffe had the book and he wanted to do it then...For me, Kramer became about a couple of things. One is, my son was about 12 years-old when I did it. I remembered the beauty of when he was about 4, 5, and 6. I remember taking him to nursery school. I remember sitting there eating breakfast with him in the morning, eating those Entemann doughnuts. He'd be watching television and I'd read the paper. Just the beauty of that. The other is, someone early on gave me great advice about that picture. She said, "The most important person in this film is Joanna Kramer (Meryl Streep). If you make her a villain, the movie will never work. You must make her a great hero, an extraordinary woman." And that was very smart advice.

There were no villains in that film.
No. There couldn't be.

Speaking of villains, let's talk about Dutch Schultz and Billy Bathgate.
Dutch Schultz turned out to be a mistake. That book is a great book, and the film doesn't do justice to it. It was Tom Stoppard's screenplay, and he was terrific, a great friend, a wonderful writer and it taught me that I should do my own script. I tend to figure out directing while I write. I write my way through a picture. And when I don't do that, I lose control of the picture. I think it was a deeply unsuccessful picture, personally. I loved all the actors and a lot of the picture, but I was aware at some point that it needed a different director. I'm a director of smaller things. It needed someone who was used to a bigger canvas.

In many ways Twilight seems to be a companion piece to The Late Show.
It is. It starts the same way. It has a lot of relationship to Nobody's Fool. You have one man who was shot in the leg, the other man limps. In each picture a man has a best friend and is in love with the best friend's wife. I think what got me to this, is getting older I've really come to find myself thinking a lot about love and affection. It's much different than I thought it was, much more complicated and much more pervasive. Love isn't something that happens. Love is simply there, like the air. We sometimes pay attention to it, we sometimes don't. But it is in a kind of order in life. And in this film, it's about a powerful sense of affection that goes back and forth between these people. It's also about how dangerous love is. It's a, and this is a pretentious word that I hate using, it's a meditation on love. And it's also on finding their proper place in the world. It's about someone who's found a home, but it's not the home he belongs in. And he must now find a home where he fits. I think my other concern regarding finding family has changed to finding ones proper place within that family.

Some of the other parallels I saw in the film, and you might find this rather way out, was with some of the characters. Paul Newman could have been Lew Harper (from Harper, 1966) as an old man and Gene Hackman could have been his character Harry Moseby in Night Moves (1975).
That's not way-out, that's dead-on right! There's a scene in Twilight with Paul and Stockard (Channing) where she asks him if he's going back to being a private investigator and he says "Why should I do that? When I was a private eye, I slept in my office and showered at the YMCA." Harper, he sleeps in his office! Harry Ross, Newman's character, is Harry, for Harry Moseby, and Ross, for Ross MacDonald (author of the Lew Archer series, that Harper was based on).

I always felt that Harry Moseby lived at the end of Night Moves. He was too much of a survivor.
Oh, he had to! He had to live! And Melanie Griffith in that movie, she was so sexy! Night Moves was a great film.

Any advice for first time directors?
Know that there's going to be a second picture. Don't try to do it all in your first. Set a limited objective. Do the best you can. Shoot a lot of coverage. Know this much, what Truffaut said is very true: you start out wanting to make the greatest movie ever made, and you end up just wanting to live through it. Know that you're going to get very discouraged and that's just part of the process. It doesn't mean anything. Somehow it's about endurance. Exercise, because you're going to be on your feet all day. An enormous part of directing is simply physical stamina. Dustin (Hoffman) made me start exercising and it's one of the greatest gifts anyone's ever given me. Know this much: you're going to be working seven days a week, 12-14 hours a day. You're going to have no other life, nothing except that movie. The other thing is, when you're editing, start working on your next picture. Start writing your next picture, otherwise the first one will become too important. So plan on doing a whole bunch of movies in your lifetime. Do it, then let it go. Pick one or two people you can listen to, when you get so close to it that you don't have any distance. Find the people you can trust and trust them. Spend all your time casting, take all the time you want. Make sure you can talk to your cinematographer, that he understands you. Do as many tests beforehand as you can and do as much rehearsal as you can, then go into it and then walk away from it.