Jerry O'Connell does Tom Cruise

Well played, Jerry. Well played.

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Heath Ledger: Golden Years

There's not much we can say about Heath Ledger that won't be said better elsewhere, but here's a nice and very fun dance scene, set to Bowie's "Golden Years," from "A Knight's Tale," a movie which on paper didn't work but somehow did due to the infectious enthusiasm of everyone involved, Ledger most of all. R.I.P.

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A Talk with Alex Gibney: Director of Taxi to the Dark Side

Alex Gibney's Academy Award-nominated documentary Taxi to the Dark Side

Note: This article on documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney appeared last month in Venice Magazine. Today, he received a well-deserved Oscar nod in the Best Documentary Feature Category for Taxi to the Dark Side, his disturbing investigation into torture in American prisons during wartime, that being now. His previous directorial doc, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, is also a masterwork of investigative journalism.

Taxi Driver
Alex Gibney’s new documentary on torture is a harrowing new ride you won’t want to take. But you have to.
By Terry Keefe

About six weeks before he passed away, Alex Gibney’s father, once a Naval interrogator during World War II, and later a journalist himself, unhooked his oxygen tank and asked his filmmaker son to get his video camera. Frank Gibney wished to speak about the subject of torture and how outraged he was at the revelations about the use of torture on prisoners in Iraq, Guantanamo, and Afghanistan. Specifically, the elder Gibney directed his indignation at the leaders (you know them, but for the record, they include George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Alberto Gonzalez), who he believed the buck stopped with. Frank Gibney had interrogated Japanese prisoners during the battle of Okinawa, one of the bloodiest, and although they were dealing with that era’s version of suicide bombers in the form of kamikaze pilots, Gibney and his fellow soldiers chose not to cross the line into brutality. When asked why not by his son, Frank Gibney replied that to do so would be to sacrifice the very values they were fighting for. Alex Gibney elaborates, “It’s not to say that there weren’t suspensions of human rights during World War II. The Japanese Internment Camps in particular come to mine. But it was so far from my father’s frame of reference that FDR would have condoned torture. One of the things that he was fighting for, particularly against the Japanese, who did torture prisoners, was for a better possibility.” Alex Gibney’s interview with his father closes his new documentary on the use of torture during the War on Terror, entitled Taxi to the Dark Side, a film which should be required viewing for every American, from the highest towers of political power to the youngest soldiers in the field. Gibney’s latest continues his examination of the force of corruption, explored via the business world previously in his documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and how it virals itself into every part of an organization, whether that be a company or a country, when immorality is left unchecked, or condoned, by the people at the top of the power structure.

The taxi cab referenced in the title was driven by an Afghan named Dilawar, who was taken prisoner as a suspected terrorist by the military and brought to the air base at Bagram, where he was tortured and eventually died. It turned out that Dilawar was innocent, a fact that was known by his interrogators towards the end of his life. But they continued to abuse him anyway, largely because Dilawar had been stuck inside an organizational culture of torture that knew few boundaries and was sanctioned at the highest levels. Says Gibney, “Structurally, the story of Dilawar allowed me to show the breath of the policy, a relentless torture mechanism that corrupts everything in its path.“ Indeed, although Dilawar himself never left Afghanistan, the passengers in his cab, also suspected terrorists, were brought to Guantanamo and tortured. And that same system of torture, when used in Guantanamo on the suspected “20th Hijacker” of 9/11, Mohamed al-Qahtani, eventually extracted statements about links between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda, which Colin Powell later used in his now-infamous U.N. speech in the lead-up to the current Iraq War. And who knows whether the information al-Qahtani provided was true? A man who is getting waterboarded might say anything. “The one thing we know about torture is that the interrogator gets what he wants to hear,“ explains Gibney. “And I think that became appealing for the Bush administration over time. It became a mechanism, conscious or unconscious for them, which got them back the info they wanted to hear. That’s a terrifying idea. That’s the Soviet Union. That’s the gulag. You’re intentionally seeking false confessions to confirm your beliefs.” He goes on to say, “People were stating for years that this was just a few bad apples at Abu Ghraib. But it was a much more pervasive policy. It gets into the corruption of the American character.”

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Interview with Ashley Jensen of "Ugly Betty" and "Extras"!

This article originally appeared in the February 2007 issue of Venice Magazine. Since then, “Ugly Betty” has gone on to be one of the top-rated shows on television. And Jensen, along with co-star Ricky Gervais, recently wrapped up “Extras” with the “Extras Holiday Special” which premiered on HBO last month. The final 2-hour episode was the perfect capper to a series which was frequently hysterical but also quite sad at the same time. The finale visits Gervais’ Andy as he has become the walking definition of a celebrity jerk. He gets an extra on his catchphrase-driven sitcom fired for approaching him about getting a throwaway line on the show, and has completely taken his friendship with Jensen’s Maggie for granted, at one convincing her to play his assistant when a journalist visits his house for an interview. But the series ends on the higher note of Gervais' rejection of being famous for the sake of being famous, and finally SPOILER AHEAD………………………………......................he and Maggie drive off into the sunset together, that being the grey skies of England in this case, presumably to move on to being more than just friends.

Although I’m going to miss “Extras” greatly, it’s nice that Gervais knew when to end the show. The commerce of the entertainment industry dictates that a successful show be milked for all it is worth, but in this case, someone with the success of Gervais was able to dictate that the story end where it naturally should.

OUT OF THE WARDROBE CLOSET
Ashley Jensen, the wardrobe mistress of “Ugly Betty,” sews up a great year.
By Terry Keefe

It doesn’t get much better for an actor than being on two of the best series on television at the same time. The actor in question being Scottish-born Ashley Jensen, who has plum roles on both “Ugly Betty” and “Extras.” Her part on “Betty” is as the wardrobe supervisor Christina, who in the initial episodes is one of the only kind characters that Betty encounters during her first days at the fictional Mode Magazine. The character has provided a nice grounding counterpart for some of the flashier characters on the show, as well as a much-needed sounding board for Betty.

And as for the new season of “Extras,” tastes in humor certainly vary but this writer thinks the new material is some of the funniest material ever in a series. For the uninitiated, the show features the adventures of career film and television extras Andy and Maggie, played by Ricky Gervais and Jensen. The new season adds the wrinkle that Andy has now written a show called “When the Whistle Blows,” for the BBC, in which he has been somehow cast as the star. Although Andy set out with higher artistic aspirations for the show, it’s been dumbed-down for the lowest common denominator and its humor now revolves almost entirely around a series of constantly-repeated catchphrases such as “Are you having a laugh?” and “I don’t get it!” [Say these with a thick British accent fast and they get a lot funnier.] Despite his contempt for his own material, Andy starts to take on haughty star trappings, but finds that real stars like David Bowie still don‘t want to hang out with him. Meanwhile, Maggie is still an extra, but now Andy is at least able to get her hired on some of his own productions. A particularly great running gag is that the male stars always find themselves irresistibly attracted to the extra Maggie, while she wants nothing to do with them. This provides one of the season highlights when Daniel Radcliffe plays himself on the set of a Harry Potter film and he subjects Maggie to every sort of verbal sexual advance imaginable. She still turns him down. And in another episode, Orlando Bloom strikes out with her as well.

You’ve been very busy!

Ashley Jensen: I can’t believe my luck. To go from “Extras” to “Ugly Betty,” I feel like I walked into the best show that went to pilot, that won Golden Globes, all in a matter of steps. “Ugly Betty” is charming and delightful and just sort of tumbled into America at the right time. And it’s hopeful too, with nice underlying messages. So it’s great to be a part of something like that. Because so much of what’s on television is gloom and doom and you have to cover the children’s ears. It’s a show that everybody can watch.

The underlying messages are what sets it apart. When the first promotional picture of America as Betty was released, with the braces and bad fashions, it seemed like the show would be a very broad comedy. And it often is broad, but it’s also very grounded in reality.

I think the acting kind of covers everything, really. There are moments when we are quite heightened, and then there are moments when we have to kind of pull it in. And the tone slightly changes. So having the likes of America as a central character, someone with such a big heart, it really gives the program heart as well. It roots the show really. So because of her strength of character, all of us other characters can afford to be heightened at times and it all sort of balances out. It’s great. You know, the tone is not something we all sat around and discussed. I think that the casting of the program was just so spot-on, that everyone has sort of brought their strengths to the program. It’s just been like a great big mixing board. A great big recipe in which everyone has just slung in their bit and it’s come out like a great, big cake that works.

After visiting the set of “Ugly Betty,” it occurred to me that working on this show could make one very paranoid about one’s own fashion sense.

That hasn’t happened to me yet [laughs]. No, I don’t think I can yet afford to get myself tied into knots about that. But because I play Christina the hopeful designer, I could definitely have a bad day, wandering around the streets, and people would be like, “Oh my god, she is so unfashionable!” [laughs] That could be embarrassing.

The new episodes of “Extras” are hilarious. And biting.

It’s a theatre of humiliation and cruelty, slightly, isn’t it? [laughs] It’s been quite fascinating how well it’s been received everywhere. I spoke to someone in Korea recently and they were talking about how well it’s gone down there too. We always talk about how a British sense of humor may not translate to other countries, but this really has. I think one of the reasons, apart from the fact that it’s so brilliantly written, is that everybody can relate to “Extras.” It’s just sort of a coincidence that they’re in the entertainment business. They could be anywhere. Maggie is a girl who doesn’t really have any career aspirations. She just really wants to fall in love. And Andy just wants to be noticed for being worthwhile at his job. Those are things we all can relate to as human beings. And we all make faux pas. And we all pretend that we don’t. To be honest, though, Maggie makes more than most. She spends half her life with her foot in her mouth [laughs].

What was your shooting schedule between the two shows?

In Britain, we only do six episodes and that’s a whole season. When I came over here after “Extras”, people always asked me, “Why did they just stop midway through the season?” But we only do six episodes in Britain. We shoot for eight weeks, do six episodes, and that’s a successful season [laughs]. So I finished “Extras” at the end of July, packed up my bags, and then came out to L.A. on my own, until my gentleman and my dog came out. That was a lonely time for the first two months. I think I sort of wandered around in a daze for awhile. Literally wandered around. Thinking, “I can walk [in L.A.]. It’s fine.” I got on the metro and ended up in downtown at dark [laughs]. I’m wandering around in like a little red and polka dot dress. I was thinking, “Okay, I’m not in Notting Hill anymore.” [laughs]

Do you know what you’re doing on the hiatus for “Betty”?

I’m staying in town. I’d love to do a film, something that is in complete contrast to what I’m doing on television. I’d also like to do an animated film, as a voice. I could play a great Scottish sheep. Or a hedgehog [laughs].

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FRANCIS VEBER: The Hollywood Interview

Alice Taglioni (left) and Gad Elmaleh (right) in The Valet, from writer-director Francis Veber (below).

Note: This originally appeared in the April 2007 issue of Venice Magazine. The Valet has just come out on DVD and is worth catching. Hilarious, stunningly beautiful photography of Paris, and the return of the ultimate put-upon everyman character, Francois Pignon. In person, Veber was as sweet as could be and full of great advice for a younger writer like myself. He's a comedic filmmaking genius and I feel privileged to have shared a meal with him. When we spoke last Spring, The Valet had been optioned by the Farrelly Brothers for an American remake. This isn't as odd a pairing as it might seem. The Farrellys are completely capable of keeping the sweet edge which makes the original so memorable. There's Something About Mary, a comedy obstensibly about four stalkers after the same girl, would never have been the success it was if you didn't relate to Ben Stiller's character, who had a lifetime of losing to overcome. Where the Farrelly style doesn't always fly is when you just get the gross-out set pieces without the charming characters to balance them out, as in Me, Myself, and Irene. I don't know what the status of the remake is, but here's hoping that Pete and Bobby bring their A-game to the table if it moves forward. Their Fever Pitch never found the audience it deserved. It was also the perfect vehicle to make Jimmy Fallon a star, playing to his everyman charms, but for whatever reason, Fallon hasn't made the crossover to features star, despite having comedic chops to kill for. Okay, enough Farrellys and Fallon. On to Mr. Veber.

Francis Veber: The King of Comedy Parks His Car in a New Hit with The Valet
By Terry Keefe

Forget film school. If you want to learn how to write comedy, study the screenplays and films of writer-director Francis Veber. Shakespeare said it and I repeat it: brevity is the soul of wit. And Veber’s scripts, as well as the films that follow, are marvels of economy. Water tight, with nary a word wasted, they move like the wind, rarely allowing the audience to catch the breath that might lead to boredom. His newest, The Valet, is 83 minutes long, and, The Dinner Game, one of his previous best, clocks in at a lean 81. He’s a master (and perhaps the best writer alive) at setting up a farcical scenario and then building it naturally, but unrelentingly. If writing and directing comedy is hard, farce can be torture to create, and watch, in the wrong hands. What’s perhaps most difficult about farce is making the coincidences and circumstances which drive it believable and unforced. This is where Veber’s deft touch is so welcome as an audience member. You believe every beat. He can bring you to hilarity just from his set-ups alone, without resorting to the fat suits and bodily function gags which serve as punch lines in American comedy today.

His newest to hit American screens, The Valet, was released previously in France as La Doublure. The car-parking hero of the title is Francois Pignon (Gad Elmaleh), who just happens to walk past billionaire businessman Pierre Levasseur (Daniel Auteuil) while he’s with his super model mistress Elena (Alice Taglioni), and a paparazzi snaps a photo. The picture appears in the local tabloids, angering Pierre’s wife Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas). Pierre covers himself by saying that he isn’t with Elena, who is, in fact, the girlfriend of Pignon. In order to sell the lie, Pierre tracks down Pignon and pays him to allow Elena to move into his apartment and pretend to be a couple. At the same time, Elena demands that Pierre give her several million dollars, which she vows to return if he actually goes through with his promise of divorcing his wife. More complications ensue because Pignon wishes to marry pretty book store owner Emilie (Virginie Ledoyen).

Fans of Veber will certainly know that Francois Pignon is a recurring character of sorts in Veber’s films. He’s often played by different actors though, and, as a character, is often different from film to film. Jacques Villeret in The Dinner Game, for example, played him as much more of a buffoon than Elmaleh’s lovable sad sack. What is common throughout the Pignons is that they are all likeable everymen.

The inevitable American remake of The Valet looms, with the Farrelly Brothers recently announcing their intentions to shoot it. Veber’s films have been frequently remade in America over the years and include Father’s Day, starring Billy Crystal and Robin Williams, from Veber’s Les Comperes; The Toy, starring Richard Pryor, from Veber’s Le Jouet; Buddy Buddy, the last film of Billy Wilder, from Veber’s L’Emmerdeur; and The Birdcage, from Veber’s screenplay adaptation of La Cage aux Folles. Where the remakes, with the exception of The Birdcage, have struggled is in matching the underlying sweetness in Veber’s films, even the ones with nasty characters, as well as the love he has for those characters.

What was the hardest part of The Valet script for you to nail during the writing process?

Francis Veber: That’s an interesting question, because when I was telling the story I was writing to friends here in America, people, and especially my assistant, were asking me, “Why does this girl, this supermodel, accept to get involved in such a thing?” And I had an explanation, which was an American explanation, that they were giving her millions of dollars. So, they were satisfied with that explanation that she was taking the money. Money is a god here. But when I came back to France, I told my French friends the story, and they said, “Why does she accept?” And I said, “Well, they’re giving her these millions of dollars.” And they said, “Then she’s a whore. She’s a slut.” And I understood that, because there’s a difference in mentality between over here and over there. It was then that I started to work, I don’t know how many weeks, to find a solution. Which was this: she says, “You give me the millions, and if you divorce [your wife], I’ll give you the money back.” Then, she’s sympathetic to the women in the audience, because she’s not stupid. This man has been lying to her for two years, saying “I’ll divorce my wife. I’ll marry you.” All this stuff. So she’s sort of blackmailing him, but it’s fun. So, that was one of the difficult things in writing the script. The other difficult part was that we had a hero like my little man living with a super model like that. It’s a small apartment. He’d try to see her in the shower and such. I thought, “How do I avoid that, so as not to be salacious?” But then I thought, “If he’s in love with a girl in the same league as he, a little girl, he would not be attracted to this other woman. She’s something else. She doesn’t belong to his world.” It was a very interesting screenplay to write. [In terms of production] another problem that I had was in finding an actress to play this super model, because in France, most of our actresses are small. Our Elena, Alice Taglioni, is 6 feet tall. Tall like a bird.

You also had to find a tall, super model-looking actress with good comedic timing.

I was so happy to have Alice. It was kind of a miracle. We looked at a lot of girls. She had acted before only in small parts. She’s so gorgeous. And she’s a very nice woman.

Gad Elmaleh, who is your Francois Pignon this time, has this great Buster Keaton face, sad but funny.

[laughs] It’s true. He hears that a lot. He’s a stand-up comedian in France. I think it was kind of tough for him to go from the comedy stage to a movie set. Because stand-up comedy is different. You play with the audience. Also, the guy who was performing as his best friend, Dany Boon, is an amazing actor. I think he’s one of the best in France. I’m going to direct him on the stage in August. You know, I started as a stage writer. I love directing for the stage. It’s very different work from film direction. And you know why? Because when you are directing a movie, the memory of the actors is temporary. It’s fugitive. They learn the line and then forget it. But when actors are doing a play, they have to learn the whole thing and ingest it.

What is the name of the play you’re doing with Dany Boon?

It’s “The Dinner Game”, which was a play first, for three years in Paris. I didn’t direct it then. But Jacques Villeret, who was the actor in the movie version playing Pignon [as well as the previous run of the play], died because he was drinking so much. Nobody can imagine how this man was drinking. His agent told me that on an 11-hour flight, he drank 7 bottles of white wine.

My God. He was so good in the film.

He was. On the play, we cancelled the show maybe 10 times during the three years because he was so drunk.

Do you like having a different actor play Pignon each time?

Well, Pierre Richard actually played him three times. Daniel Auteuil was Pignon in The Closet. But here, he’s the rich Pierre Levasseur. He was learning the lines of Pignon at first, and I said, “No, those aren’t your lines.” [laughs]

How similar are your scripts in terms of length to the finished film?

Very much the same. In the finished film, I sometimes lose one minute. It depends on the screenplay, you know. There are people who shoot 2 or 3 hours of material, and then they cut and cut and cut. That’s stupid, because they’ve lost money and time.

I imagine you do a lot of drafts to get the structure so tight though.

Yeah, a lot. As you Americans say, “Writing is rewriting.” It’s a very interesting process. I envy you to be young and want to write. When I was your age, it was fantastic to write. Because you’re fresh, you know. I have done 31 movies and 4 stage plays. And I start to think that maybe I’ve done my due.

Not at all. The Valet is hilarious, and as tight a script as I’ve ever seen. And I think that comedy is the hardest genre to write.

Ah, it’s terrible.

And you have to make it look effortless, while it’s anything but.

It’s difficult. You have to have a sense of comedy. I think it’s genetic. There are people who don’t understand humor at all. Which is sad.

Once you locked the script on The Valet and had the cast locked, what was your rehearsal process like?

You can’t rehearse much with actors in France. Because they are shooting too much. It’s very difficult to have them 2-3 weeks before, so sometimes you meet them on the set. It’s why you are obliged to do a lot of takes. I once did 45 takes with Depardieu. And 37 takes with Auteuil. They’re exhausted at the end of that. When I started directing, I realized how tough acting was. Before I was directing, I usually hated actors. I thought they were lazy, working for 12 weeks, making more money than I, who was working for a year. But I learned it was a tough job. You’re scared all the time, you’re insecure. With Auteuil, after I did 37 takes with him, I took him by the hand to show him that the last take was good. His hand was ice cold and wet. The effort had been so big. So now, I admire actors.

When you’re writing a farce like The Valet, do you start with the core idea of the inciting incident and then sort of develop elements to play off of it? Or do you start at the beginning and move forward linearly from there?

No, you’re obligated to structure the whole thing. When I was younger, I made the mistake of not structuring. I thought I would write and the characters would give me the story. But now I structure the whole thing first. It’s the most painful process. Because you don’t always know where you’re going. There’s a line in front of you but you’re not sure where it leads.

I’d imagine that the scene where the paparazzi take the picture of Pignon on the street was one of your first ideas though.

Sure, it was one of the first ideas. It creates the problem of the film. There’s a funny story about the making of The Valet, in that the restaurant where Pignon works is a set.

Really? I never would have suspected that. It looks like the greatest restaurant ever.

Behind it is the Museum of Modern Art and there’s nothing, just the terrace. But it was so well done, that we had Japanese tourists making reservations all day long. Party of two [laughs].

You’ve said that you do a lot of takes, but at the same time, your finished films are extremely tight. In the editing room, how much back and forth do you go through when deciding what takes to use?

It’s always about the performance. On the set, the dialogue is the same. It’s just the way you say the lines. One little change [in the way an actor says a] word makes all the difference. It’s like music. It’s a fascinating thing to direct the music of what you have written. As a writer, my advice is that as soon as you have the possibility of directing something that you have written, do it. Otherwise, giving your baby to someone who doesn’t understand him, or doesn’t treat him well, it’s very sad. I did that for 18 movies as a screenwriter.

How long was it before you thought you knew what you were doing as a director?

I still don’t know [laughs]. Because I’m a writer who directs, which is just not exactly the same as a director. There are directors who love images. For me, what I’m trying to do is be as truthful as possible to what I’ve written. So I don’t need to have my camera out running around. Whenever possible, writer-directors are usually more interested in their stories, than in being an acrobat with the camera.

Billy Wilder comes to mind also when you say that. He was rarely showy with the camera, allowing his stories to drive the film.

But he also directed very well. I just saw Sunset Blvd. again and it’s so great. When William Holden is at the New Year’s party with the young Hollywood people, the way he moves the camera through the party is already very modern. He knew his job.

And the Wilder film Buddy Buddy was a remake of your script for L’Emmerdeur.

It’s such a bad film, and I’m sad, because it was his last film. I once met him for croissants and coffee right here in Beverly Hills. So we started to talk and he started to tell me stories about his life, which were fascinating. And he knew my little films, about which I was surprised. And there was an old lady sitting at the next table, and she got up and told us, “I’ve been listening to you for the last half hour, and it was very interesting. Thank you.” Then she went away [laughs]. It was cute.

It’s been announced that there’s going to be an American remake of The Valet.

They’re going to do it. I’ve had 7 remakes here.

And some of them you’ve been involved with, and others, not?

Most of them I was not involved with. I understood that when I arrived in Los Angeles for my first remake, The Toy, and I called Ray Stark, the producer, and I talked with his assistant, and I said, “I’m the French writer of The Toy, and if you need me, I’d be delighted to work with your writers here.” They never called me [chuckles].

I’d think The Valet might translate very well into an American version.

It depends on the writers. The only thing that is maybe not American is the mistress problem. In France, it’s normal. Here, that’s not a comedy. It’s a tragedy.

Yeah, we’re definitely more uptight about that type of thing here.

And I don’t know why. Because, like in France, a lot of men have mistresses. It reminds me of an Italian story, which Fellini once told. It’s about a Man who is going to the opera with his Wife. And he’s had the bad luck of having his Mistress seated on the other side of him at the theater. He doesn’t know what to say to his Wife, so he says, “Here, in Italy, having a mistress is a sign of success. Here, look, over there is Mr. Ferrari, the car constructor. The woman to the right is his wife and the blonde girl is his mistress.” His Wife looks at Ferrari’s Mistress and then at her own Husband’s Mistress and says, “Ours is better.” I love that story. In Europe, that’s comedy.

What are you working on next?

I’m writing a screenplay now, with Pignon again.

It must be nice as a writer to have Pignon to go back to.

It’s like a new meeting. I am always happy when I meet him. There is actually an association of real people with the name of Francois Pignon that have gathered. And they wanted me to stop writing with that name. My first film with Pignon was called The Pain in the Ass. The second was The Closet, where the guy was supposed to be gay. And the third was The Dinner Game, where he was an idiot. So I received a letter from a guy who asked me to stop writing with his name. So I did something out of Stranger Than Fiction, and I called him. I said, “Hello, may I speak to Francois Pignon?” And he said, “This is he.” And I said, “This is Francis Veber.” And he said, “Bastard!” [laughs] So we started to talk, and he said, “Okay, if you’re going to keep going, then send me two seats to your next film.” And I did, I invited him to the premiere.

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KEVIN SPACEY: The Hollywood Interview - Part II

KEVIN SPACEY: BEYOND ALL EXPECTATIONS
BY TERRY KEEFE

Note: This article originally appeared in the November 2004 issue of Venice Magazine.

A lot has happened in the world of Kevin Spacey since he last graced our cover back in December of 2001. Spacey was already a two-time Oscar winner, which would certainly seem to have earned him a resting-on- his-laurels break. But he sounded determined to do exactly the opposite. Said Kevin, "I've become uncomfortable with how successful I've become. I don't deserve it. So I keep working hard at it. I keep trying to find new things." You might have thought he was just talking about trying some different types of roles, which he has certainly done. His newest film, Beyond the Sea, a musical biopic about the life of singer-actor Bobby Darin which Spacey also directs, reveals musical talents that most of his fans likely never knew he had. But during the past three years, Spacey also launched TriggerStreet.com, a virtual film festival online which has the sole purpose of helping undiscovered screenwriters and filmmakers break into the industry. And if that weren't enough, he recently took on the job of Artistic Direc- tor of the historic Old Vic Theatre in London, determined to revitalize it to its former glory when the likes of Sir John Gielgud and Richard Burton trod its boards. This is not a guy who has any intention of slowing down. In fact, he seems to have taken on the philosophy that if he slows down for a minute, he'll gather a year's worth of rust. And that's an attitude that Kevin Spacey would have shared with the man he plays in Beyond the Sea, Bobby Darin.

As long as I'm singing/Then the world's all right and everything's swingin'/Long as I'm singing my song.
-"As Long As I'm Singing, " Bobby Darin

It's been said that singing is what kept Bobby Darin alive. Rheumatic fever during childhood severely damaged his heart, and he wasn't supposed to live past age fifteen. It would be at the age of 37 when he finally passed away following open heart surgery, but he packed enough accomplishments into those years for a few lifetimes: Hit records ("Splish Splash," "Mack the Knife," "Dream Lover," and, of course, "Beyond the Sea," amongst many others), Grammys, and an Oscar nomination in 1964 for Captain Newman, M.D.

Spacey infuses Beyond the Sea with the same "Gotta dance!" mindset that drove Darin every day. We meet Darin as a child when he was known as Walden Robert Cassotto (charmingly played by William Ullrich). In an effort to give Little Bobby something to think of other than illness, his mother Polly (Brenda Blethyn) introduces him to music. Not just singing, but the piano, drums, and guitar, as well. From there, Bobby is off and not only running, but literlly dancing down the street, with all of his neighbors dancing behind him in a scene straight out of a '505 Technicolor musical. Doesn't sound like your usual musician biopic? It isn't. Spacey has wisely chosen to break with reality on a number of occasions and add full-on musical numbers in which he not only proves his chops as a musical talent. but also adds a true sense of glee to a story which could have become fairly standard and dour. Of course, we also see Spacey perform many of Darin's songs on night club stages in a realistic fashion, but it is in the more fantasy-based musical sequences where we really get a sense of how much joy Darin felt when he was performing. Who has time for a heart attack when your feet just have to move? The musical numbers are also a great story-telling device, just in terms of moving the plot along. The scene where Bobby courts his future bride, actress Sandra Dee (Kate Bosworth), by singing her "Beyond the Sea" in a charged musical montage, is infinitely more captivating than a dialogue-driven version of the same scene could ever be.

Spacey has been equally wise to surround himself with top acting talent. In addition to Blethyn and Bosworth, the cast is rounded out by John Goodman as Bobby's best-friend-turned-manager, Steve Blauner, Caroline Aaron as Bobby's sister, Nina, and Bob Hoskins as Nina's husband, Chartie. Aaron, in particular, deserves special recognition. as her part calls for a cathartic revelation at the end of the film which is extremely affecting. Those familiar with Darin's life story can probably guess what that revelation is, but it would be unfair to reveal it here to everyone else. This is Spacey's second time helming a feature, his first being 1996's Albino Alligator, a relatively small-scale story of a robbery gone awry which Spacey himself did not appear in. This time around, not only has he taken on the challenging task of directing himself, but the scope of the film is also far grander.

There will be those who quibble that Spacey is too old to play Darin, particularly in the scenes when Darin is a younger man of 20. But as evidenced by the musical numbers, Beyond the Sea is never intended to be a note-for-note recreation of reality. What Spacey is playing is the essence of Darin, and towards that end, he succeeds on all counts, likely putting him on the short list for Oscar nominations once again this year. The actor-director certainly knew he'd be taking some heat by playing the lead and works a knowing answer to his critics into the dialogue during the part of the plot which revolves around a movie that Darin is making of his life. When someone mentions to him that he's too old to play the part, Darin replies. "I was born to play this part!" By the end of the first song. you'd be hard pressed to argue. Few would have ever suspected that the man who played The Usual Suspects' pretzel-legged Verbal Kint, alias Keyser Soze, was a deft song-and-dance man, but that's what he is. Spacey sings all of the songs in the film himself, many of which he recorded at the famed Abbey Road Studios with producer Phil Ramone. Much like the rest of the film, Spacey's renditions of the Darin hits capture the singer's essence without imitating him outright.

After Beyond the Sea, the next place you'll be able to see Spacey perform will be onstage at the Old Vic Theatre in London, where he has recently begun his term as Artistic Director. The actor had his first experience with this legendary venue when he was just a child and attended a performance there with his parents. In 1998, he would return once again to the Old Vic, this time as an actor, electrifying audiences in the role of Hickey in Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh." Today, the Old Vic is essentially his show. Spacey is ardently determined to return the Old Vic to its former glory as the crown jewel of London theaters, but he's also clearly decided that this can't happen without taking a few risks. For his first production as Artistic Director, the safe route would have been to choose a classic work by the likes of Shakespeare. Instead, Spacey picked "Cloaca," by an unknown Dutch writer named Maria Goos, revolving around a group of 40-something friends who reunite. Spacey directed the play, although he chose not to appear in it. The critics have been pretty rough on the production, but the box office has been quite good, so it appears that he's onto something. In the months to come, Spacey will take the stage again for two different productions. Also in the upcoming season, no less a stage luminary than Sir Ian McKellen will be taking on the role of Window Twankey in "Aladdin."

While he's running an actual theater in London, Spacey is also running a virtual the- ater online. TriggerStreet.com was launched in November, 2002 by Spacey and business partner Dana Brunetti, as an offshoot of Spacey's production company Trigger Street Productions. Said Spacey at the time, "I feel that if you have done well in whatever business you are in, it is your duty to send the elevator back down and try to help bring up the next generation of undiscovered talent." As you can imagine, the line to get on that elevator became long very quickly. Anyone with a short film or screenplay can load their works up on TriggerStreet.com and have them critiqued, and also rated, by the community of 150,000 registered users, most of whom are also aspiring writers and filmrnakers. The most highly rated films and scripts move to the top of the site's charts, where they have a good shot at getting noticed by the industry's movers and shakers. Case in point, the top ten short film finalists were given a coveted screening at last year's Sundance Film Festival. There is no charge to upload your material onto the site, but in order to have your work reviewed, you must first review the work of a few other members. Thus, only the most committed to the process have a shot at moving forward. For anyone who has ever applied to film festivals or screenwriting competitions, and paid the large fees required simply to have your project looked at, the TriggerStreet.com model is refreshing and, unfortunately, entirely unique. Meanwhile, Trigger Street Productions itself has a whole host of projects in the pipeline. Last spring, Paramount Classics released their production The United States of Leland, which Spacey also acted in. They got on board with two documentaries: Uncle Frank and America Rebuilds: A Year at Ground Zero (narrated by Spacey). And they'll next go into production on two features: Minis First Time (with Nikki Reed and Alec Baldwin) and 21, the story of a group of MIT students who learned how to count cards and took Vegas for millions.

It's all a long way from the early part of Spacey's career, when, despite stage triumphs, he was regarded as more of a supporting character-type in Hollywood. You might have caught him at the tail end of the '80s as Mel Profitt on the television series "Wiseguy, " or when he played a slimy businessman who tried to take advantage of Melanie Griffith in Working Girl (1988). More notable work followed in Henry & June (1990) and "Darrow" (1991), where he played famed attorney Clarence Darrow. But it was 1992 when he really proved what he was capable of, more than holding his own with the likes of Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Ed Harris, Alec Baldwin, and Alan Arkin in Glengarry Glen Ross. And then came 1995 and the triple-whammy of Swimming with Sharks, The Usual Suspects, and Se7en. To many moviegoers, it was like he had appeared out of nowhere, but they eagerly embraced him nonetheless. A run of successes followed including L.A. Confidential (1997), The Negotiator (1998), American Beauty (1999), for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, The Shipping News (2001), and The Life of David Gale (2003). Spacey today is a movie star, but also one of the most respected actors in the world. That's a rare club to be in. His fans include filmgoers who wouldn't be caught dead at an art house, as well as people who won't go anywhere else.

Kevin Spacey reached us by phone from London on an early Saturday evening. A touch of a British accent has started to seep into his famous voice, although that quickly dissipates as we talk.

What is your first memory of Bobby Darin, whether in image or song?

Kevin Spacey: "Beyond the Sea" was the first song of his that I ever heard, and that was because my parents had a great record collection.

Was Bobby's story something you always knew you wanted to tell, or was there something you learned about his story that really sparked the interest for you?

I didn't know much about his story until was in my twenties. Then I read a few books that had been written about him and I was really struck by all those things I didn't know. I thought it would be a really interesting story. Then I later learned that they were going to try to make a movie of his life, and I thought, "Well, that's the part for me!" But it took a little more than 10 years to make that happen. Originally, the movie was at Warner Bros., for about 14 years in development. I had nothing to do with the project when it was at Warner Bros., but I eventually started doing movies for Warner Bros. in the mid-'90s and began a relationship with the people who had the rights. It took about five years to negotiate those rights out, which I finally got in the year 2000.

Did you develop the script a lot from that point on or did you shoot it pretty much as it was?

No, there was no script. There were a lot of drafts of scripts that I bought out of Warner Bros. But when I took on the project from Warner Bros., it became an entirely brand-new, from scratch, screenplay. And I'm waiting for the Writers Guild to make their determination as to who will end up with the writing credits. I wrote an enormous amount of it.

What was the biggest obstacle in getting Beyond the Sea off the ground?

Trying to raise the money.

Did it help when Chicago became a big hit?

It didn't help. You'd think that it would have. But the view about Chicago was tha1 it was an anomaly. There is a resistance that I don't quite understand to films that are both perceived as biopics, although that was not what I was setting out to do traditionally, and films that are driven by music. And it doesn't matter how many times you cite All That Jazz, or Moulin Rouge! , or Fame, or Chicago, or any of the other films that are driven by music. There still is a resistance to it, and I think, at the end of the day, it's a marketing resistance. It has to do with the fact that there is a prejudice in certain mind-sets that the only reason audiences would come to see a movie about somebody who actually lived is if they already know everything about that person's life. And my argument was, "Well, if that's true, then why do audiences come in droves to movies about fictional characters that they've never heard of?" So I kind of wanted to make this a movie that would be enjoyable to any audience, whether they had ever heard of Bobby Darin or not.

And was that the impetus behind adding elements that are non-traditional to a biopic, such as the big musical numbers?

Yeah, and also the movie-within-the-movie concept. Because I didn't want an audience to come in and feel like they had to pass a litmus test of predisposition in order to enjoy the film.

Did you spend any time with Sandra Dee while doing your research?

I have never met Ms. Dee. I have spoken to her, but I've never met her. My dealings were directly with Dodd Darin, who is their son, and Steve Blauner, who is the character that John Goodman plays in the movie. I have had every single ounce of support from the Darin family, and from Steve Blauner, that I could have ever hoped to have. Including what I think was the greatest gift the film received: before we went to record all of the numbers in the film, they went into Bobby's archives and found all of his original arrangements and charts, and sent them to me. That's what we laid down at Abbey Road.

What were their reactions to seeing the film?

Over the moon. They were exceedingly happy. And Dodd feels that maybe, because of the film, his father will finally get the recognition that was denied him because he died so young.

Had you always planned on singing the songs yourself?

To some degree, yeah. I used to do musicals a lot as a kid, so singing has always been a part of my life and has sort of been second nature to me. But it was always a question of, "Could I get the music right?" and "Could I get my voice to the place where it could reasonably facsimilate what Bobby did?" I would preface that by saying that I am nowhere near the singer that Bobby is. But I had a lot of help from people who worked with Bobby. With Phil Ramone. With Roger Kellaway. And, ultimately, with John Wilson and the orchestra that did the tracks. We'd been working on the music since 1999.

At what point in the rehearsal process did you feet you had finally nailed the singing?

I never actually did. There was a moment about three years ago when we went into Capitol Records and we laid down about 20 songs, just as rehearsal tracks. And I listen to those songs now and I just cringe. But it never got better than it did at Abbey Road. And I guess all that preparation toward the recording of the songs in the movie finally paid off. Phil Ramone says he knows the moments when I stopped trying to do an imitation of Bobby and sort of became "a Bobby," but I can't tell you when that was. I just know that it evolved and it was organic.

You make reference in the dialogue to the idea that some people will consider you too old to play Darin. Was that issue something which gave you pause and did you ever consider hiring another actor to play Bobby, with you participating as a director only?

Well, I actually didn't want to direct it at first. I went after other directors and tried very hard to get someone else to direct it. But it turned out that, with people's schedules, if I had gone with another director I couldn't have made the movie for another year and a half. And I knew that if I didn't make the movie this past year, I probably wouldn't ever make it. In regards to the difference in my age versus Bobby's, it was never that big an issue with me. It was becoming an issue in some journalistic circles, and I thought, "Well, maybe it's better to identify the elephant in the room and get it over with. Let people realize that I know it too, but that I'm not setting out to tell a linear story here." So, hopefully, it won't matter. We're warping time, and I hope people can just enjoy the movie and relax about that.

Did you study any of Bobby's old films to get his mannerisms down, or was that something that didn't concern you as much?

I was concerned with finding his energy and style and spirit. But didn't want to be beholden to doing a kind of tiresome imitation. I did watch an enormous amount of his work and obviously listened to an enormous amount of his work, in order to try to capture his essence. That's what I was going for.

The film is a balance of reality and and hyper-reality, such as the musical num- bers. You also acknowledge in the dialogue that things depicted in the film may not be exactly as they happened. But was there any place you really drew the line with that philosophy and said that a certain scene has to be played exactly as it really occurred?

No. I gave myself a lot of freedom in being able to have characters in places where they weren't in real life. I just didn't feel hampered by having to be exact, with the exception of the music being authentic, and wanting to tell the story of a romance, which I think was a very real romance, between Bobby and Sandy.

As depicted in the film, Bobby tried to become a folk singer with a political conscience late in his career, but the audiences wouldn't accept him in that new role. A successful actor such as yourself can also become typecast. Was that part of his story something you related to particularly?

I think Bobby, without question, faced the same dilemma that a lot of artists face, which is the conflict between professional expectations and personal freedom. He chose personal freedom, sometimes at the expense of his career. And I suppose that in the last five years, I've experienced a little bit of people not wanting me to do the things that I wanted to do. But you have to live for yourself. You can't live for your critics.

Film audiences haven't seen you singing and dancing until now. Many of your fans probably have no idea you can do this. Was there always a burning desire to show people that you could perform a musical as well as you obviously can?

I've always loved musicals. God knows I wish I could have done a musical between my days in the musical theater and now. But it just never came up. So, for me, it's been worth the wait. I love the form, and again, in wanting to reinvent myself, it just seemed like the perfect time to do it.

Are there any other musicals you're looking to tackle next, either onscreen or on stage?

[wryly] I've got a few up my sleeve.

Okay, I guess we'll just have to wait and be surprised. But next you're going to be doing a tour singing Bobby's music.

We're going to go out on the road. promoting the movie by celebrating the music of Bobby Darin. That'll happen in December. We're going to do 9-10 cities. I'm starting rehearsals for it in November.

Cool. How different was your mindset going into Beyond the Sea, as opposed to Albino Alligator? Did you feel a lot more confident as a director?

You know, by the time you get to the first day of shooting, you'd better feel relatively confident about what you're about to do. In our case, we had 12 weeks of pre-production. I'd been dreaming about doing the movie for more than 10 years. I'd been working on it for five years. But it's still quite nerve-wracking, and you still hope that you're going to be able to succeed in directing the actors. And I was concerned that, because I'd be directing myself, that I'd be paying attention to the things that were important and that it wouldn't become a vanity production.

Let's talk about your job as Artistic Director of the Old Vic Theatre. You could have played it safe for your first production and done something very conventional. But you chose not to with "Cloaca."

What I wanted to do in this first season was present work that was fresh, not that well known, or hadn't been done in London for a long time, as well as work that I thought would be popular with the public. So the first play that we chose is by an unknown writer who has written a lovely play that we are incredibly proud to have presented. And despite the critical drubbing that we've taken, the box office is booming and people are coming into the theater in droves, exactly as we had hoped. So our objective is working.

What do you love most about the actual Old Vic Theatre, structurally or otherwise?

Well, it is just one of the great theaters in the world. Because of the shape of the theater, the design of the theater, it's one of the easiest theaters for actors to play on. It's been standing there since 1818. It has a remarkable history. And I've always wanted to run a theater my entire life. So these two dreams are coming true for me in the same year. I could die now. [laughs]

A Bobby Darin song could be playing in the background.

Yes!

Let's talk a bit about your production company, Trigger Street. Is it true that was the name of the street you grew up on?

No, I didn't grow up on it. I lived near it, but one of my best friends did live on it. And we had always dreamed about building a theater on Trigger Street. We were going to call it the Trigger Street Theatre. So when it was time to name my company, I thought back to those days and Trigger Street was born.

Many successful actors and directors start their own production companies. What made you create one which also reaches into the community of struggling filmmakers to offer a helping hand?

Because I don't know what the hell else I'm supposed to do with success...except share it.

How active are you on the website? Do you read a lot of the scripts and watch the shorts, or do you leave that up to the community members?

Well, the great thing about it is that it's community-run, You know, we're not making the choices. The community is. But I absolutely see a lot of the films. And certainly. our Top 10 films, I've seen all of them.

You've mentioned in the past that working with Jack Lemmon as a young actor on "Long Day's Journey Into Night" changed your life. Could you expand on that a bit?

Without question, it was observing how Jack dealt with his success. How Jack dealt with other people. How Jack dedicated himself to the work. How he never let Hollywood glory go to his head. It was a great lesson for someone who was trying to climb his way up in the industry. I mean, he was just a great man. He was one of the funniest people I ever spent time with, and he was a generous person. He became something of a father figure to me, and I miss him.

On the set of Edison, you were recently reunited with Morgan Freeman, whom you appeared with in Se7en back in 1995. What was that experience like?

It was great. We had a blast. First of all, after Beyond the Sea, it was nice to be able to just show up and only have to know my lines. [laughs] But, also, I admire Morgan a lot, and we had a great time working together. And Justin Timberlake plays his first dramatic role in the movie, and he was very serious about it and focused and did a terrific job. We also had a very nice time with David Burke, who was my old writer from the 'Wiseguy" days. He wrote the script and was also at the helm.

Your next acting gig will be a return to the theater.

At the Old Vic, I'll be back up on stage doing a play called "National Anthems," starting in February. Then we're doing "The Philadelphia Story" right after that. in which I'll be playing the Gary Grant role from the movie. So I'm doing two plays back-to-back. I'll be a theater rat for a little while. But the stories of my quitting acting in movies are false.

Well, that's good to hear.

I don't know where they get this stuff. You know, I'll say in a sentence that I've always preferred the theater over film, as an actor, because it's more organic. And suddenly there's a headline that says I'm quitting movies! So, go figure. At the moment, my dedication is to getting the Old Vic up and running, but I suspect I'll find a movie to do after I'm done with this first season, which ends sometime in the spring.

One final question. Our "Inside the Actors Studio" moment. How do you want to be remembered as an actor?

That I did my best ~

Read more!

LUC BESSON: The Hollywood Interview

An in-depth interview with the director on Angel-A, Arthur and the Invisibles, and why Jean Reno better not use a cell phone on his set.

Besson is Back in the Director's Chair with Angel-A
(…..although he doesn't exactly believe in director's chairs.)

By Terry Keefe
Note: This article originally appeared in the April 2007 issue of Venice Magazine.

Fans of Luc Besson have had to wait since The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc in 1999 for him to step back into directing, although he's had his hands on an almost innumerable amount of projects as both a producer and a writer since that Milla Jovovich-starring epic. In fact, he's had so many credits in the intervening years that it might be easier to list the films Besson hasn't been involved with. Through his company Europa Corp, he's been a producer or executive producer on at least 20 different features during the last two years alone and has also received a writing credit on many others since The Messenger, including The Transporter and Bandidas. He's also become the author of a successful series of children's books, based around the character named "Arthur," with the series selling over a million copies worldwide thus far. The first feature film based on the "Arthur" series, Arthur and the Invisibles, a combination of live-action and animation, was released theatrically on these shores late last year, and it was written, directed, and produced by Besson. And now his directorial feature Angel-A, which was actually distributed in France prior to Arthur, in 2005, is finally getting its domestic release in the United States. So, whether you want to mark the return of Besson the director with Angel-A or Arthur, one of the most colorful and original filmmakers (and best interviews) around is back at the helm.

Angel-A is a poetic little two-hander about a hustler named Andre (Jamel Debbouze), who meets the supermodel-beautiful Angela (Rie Rasmussen, in a starmaking lead performance), when they are both attempting to commit suicide off a bridge over the Seine in Paris. It turns out that the appropriately-named Angela is an angel who has been sent with the mission of teaching Andre a few lessons. The actor and character-driven Angel-A is on the other side of the filmmaking coin from the spectacle of Besson's The Fifth Element and The Professional, but although the scale is smaller, Besson still crafts a visually dazzling film, with gorgeous black and white photography that makes Paris the third lead of the piece. The city is just waiting for Andre to embrace it, like a spurned lover, but although its beauty surrounds him always, he cannot see it.

How long did it take you to feel comfortable directing again, once you started production on Angel-A?
Luc Besson: Even if you don't brush your teeth for a few days, you still know how to do it [laughs]. I mean, I started when I was 17, so I've sort of had the feeling that I've been doing this all my life. But, you know, after doing Joan of Arc, I started working on Arthur for about five years. So I didn't get the feeling that I had stopped [directing] really. Because making the storyboards for Arthur took nine months, to do the references for the film took nine months, and then I did this film for the government to promote Paris for the games, and I worked on that for seven months. And I was doing Angel-A at the same time, so I've kept pretty busy.

You had the idea for Angel-A over ten years ago. You weren't able to finish the script at that point though.

I wrote 15 pages, but I couldn't write the dialogue. I was too young. I knew what I wanted to say, but I couldn't say it. And then you wait for 10 years, and life makes you older [laughs], and you get some smacks in the face. You get some pains in your joints, and some truth. And 10 years later, you write the script in 2 weeks.

You sat down and it just came out?

I was surprised, but [whistles] boom. Like that, it came out. But let's take an example for comparison: when you're 17 and you want to tell a girl "I love you," [laughs] it takes forever. You prepare; you send flowers; you don't know her; finding the right time; it takes forever. Believe me, when you're 40, you know things. You know there's a moment when you feel you have to say it. You say, "Darling, I need to talk to you. You know, I love you." You're going to be more straight at 40. You know life. You know the words. You're going to say things differently.

10 years prior, did you know the beats of the story at least?

I knew the bones, the structure, yeah. It was just the dialogue I couldn't do.

When you were shooting Angel-A, you took the unusual step of keeping the beats of the story from much of the cast and crew, until you were ready to do those scenes.

I did that with some of the cast and crew. Some of them, I didn't want them to know [all the plot]. When it was useful, I [used this technique], but not to be mean or anything. So, for example, the guy who plays the villain [Gilbert Melki], he sees Jamel like a sheep at the beginning. And then the next time he sees Jamel, later in the movie - Jamel is so powerful. I didn't want him to know what happened to Jamel in between those scenes. We were shooting in order, and so he was very confident in the first scene with Jamel. And then suddenly, in their next scene together, he sees Jamel coming in and Jamel is totally different. Jamel's dialogue is very "in charge." So he's wondering, "What the fuck is going on?" Because he doesn't have a clue as to what happened to Jamel. He was frustrated when he shot it, but when he saw the film, he said, "I think you were right." Because he was totally confused as to what happened to this guy, just like his character would be. I did the same thing with the set designer, who I had worked with before. I knew that if I gave him the script, he would come back to me with ideas that I liked. But I said to him, "I'm not going to give you the script." He said, "How do you expect me to design things if I don't have the script?" I said, "Okay, I'm going to tell you. There are two bars, one toilet, one rest room, that's it." He said, "Guide me." I said, "No, just do what you want." And he came back with ideas that he would have never had if he read the script. Never.

The bathroom was incredible. Very Clockwork Orange Milk Bar-esque.

He never would have come up with that bathroom if he had read the script. Because he went at it with no references. If you have no references, you just come up with something interesting. That's what I wanted. Because if he had come up with something which wasn't so good, I could have just given him the script anyway. So, why not try this way?

What was your rehearsal process like with Jamel and Rie?

With Rie, it was very different than with Jamel. Because Rie didn't speak French. The biggest concern with her was being able to learn French and say the lines right in French. Jamel is a stand-up comedy guy, so he's used to playing with words, usually his own words, and reacting to things. But he's not used to doing a play, basically, and the idea that "this is the line." That you can't change the line. Because it's like ping-pong with Rie. If you change your line, she has to change her line. But she won't change her line, because she's from Norway. And you'll look stupid [laughs]. So he had to stick to the lines and learn them, and that was difficult for him. I really pissed him off, both of them actually, by making them learn all the lines by heart. I told them that I wouldn't be happy until I could say a line from anywhere in the script, at any moment of the day, and that they could cut right into the scene from there. Which I did. Sometimes we were out at dinner, and Jamel was laughing, and I would say a line, and he'd have to answer it, and start the scene right away from there.

And that memorization helped because you were shooting all over Paris with a small crew, and thus, if you found a great location on the fly, you could quickly shoot a scene.

Yeah. The fact was, I wanted them to get rid of the text. So that they knew it so much by heart, that when we're on location, and the sun was good, and the bridge is perfect, and we're kind of going guerilla with a Steadicam, with nobody knowing we were there….I could just go "Action!" and we'd go. Sometimes, we'd shoot for like 2 hours of the day and that would be it. In those 2 hours, we might do 10-12 pages of script. It was so fast.

And it's impressive that your crew was also able to keep up with that schedule.

Oh, they had to [laughs].

You've talked about shooting Angel-A guerilla-style. Did you know where most of your locations were going to be prior to shooting?

Yeah, except a few times. You know, for example, where he's by himself at night? We had no authorization at all to shoot then. We just got in a single truck, got the Steadicam, got out and all looked around, and said, "Okay, here!" Jamel is quite popular in France, and I am too, so if you started to put lights around on things, you'd have a crowd.

You achieved the affect of having virtually no pedestrians in the backgrounds of your exterior shots. Largely from having shot pretty early, I assume?

Yeah, from 7-10 AM in the summer. Everyone in Paris is on vacation. The tourists arrive around 11.

Was any lighting done when you shot outside at some of the famous Parisian monuments, or did you go guerilla at those places as well?

All natural light. It's just like shooting a sunset. You have to wait for the perfect time. Most of those scenes, we knew what time we had to be there to get it right.

The film feels like a visual love letter to Paris. Was that the intention right from the beginning?

[long pause, thinks] It's a little different when you're French, and it's your city. I'm living there, and I do care for Paris. And I always care that my locations are cool and nice. And I can understand the perspective of someone from America, or China, or…when people say, "Oh my god, Paris is…!" It's a little different for me though. Of course, I love Paris, but for me, it's more about the guy and the girl. I wanted to show this beautiful city, because I wanted to show that Jamel can't see beauty.

Right, towards the end, he says that he never realized how beautiful the city was.

We see it, but he can't. That's what I wanted. Someone who can't see it. She's telling him, "Breathe, look, it's so beautiful." And he's just like, "I don't know how to swim." [laughs] But the city could be Rome, or Venice, or another beautiful city.

Although I haven't seen Paris look this lovely and enticing since Bande a Parte.

Paris is such a pleasure to film. In contrast, New York is a nightmare. Everything there is vertical. In CinemaScope, it's a nightmare. You just can't put the thing in a bottle. Paris is like 3 or 4-level buildings. It's very flat. The monuments aren't very big, because they're a few centuries old. And everything goes into frame. It's perfect for shooting. In CinemaScope. And even the scenes by the river, all the bridges go into frame.

Had you always intended to shoot in black and white, or were there financial considerations that could have caused you to scrap that plan and go color?

Of course I heard some complaints from TV around the world. [does "obnoxious businessman voice"] "Are you sure you want to do it in black and white?" [his own voice] "Yep." [obnoxious businessman voice] "We might not be able to take it then." [his own voice] "Don't take it then." [obnoxious businessman voice] "Okay, we'll take it!" [laughs]

Did you and your cinematographer Thierry Arbogast do a lot of tests in preparation for the black and white shooting?

Oh yes. The blue, the yellow, and the red…they don't react the same in black and white. You have to look at the construction and setting and the clothes, everything. The funny thing is, this film didn't look good in color. On the set, it wasn't looking good at all. Especially the costumes.

Looks great in black and white. How did you discover Rie?

She came to me with a short film that she wanted to have produced. I said "No" a few times. But she kept coming with more scripts and more scripts. And so I said, "Okay, she's a serious girl." Then I produced her first film and she was lucky enough to get nominated for Cannes. And then a year after that, I said, "Oh, by the way, I'm going to do this new film. Do you want to be in it?" It was kind of unexpected for her.

Were you reading a lot of other girls other than Rie, or had you planned on using her from the beginning?

No, it was just her. But I pretended that we were talking to other girls [laughs].

This summer you're shooting the next two Arthur films back-to-back. How long do you anticipate production to take on those sequels?

The actual live-action shooting only takes 12-13 weeks. The rest of it takes four years [laughs].

Do you know what you're directing after the Arthur films?

No. Probably nothing. Those are going to take me 3-4 years anyway. We'll see where we are in three years [laughs].

You've knocked out a lot of screenplays recently. How fast are you?

I'm fast. As long as I have my structure. If I have my three pages in front of me, and I know all my sequences, and I know the story, I'm fast. But to get those three pages can take me five years. Ten years. Twenty years. If I have my three pages, it'll take me two weeks. It's like turning on the computer and hitting "Print." [laughs]

With all the projects you're producing through your company, how hands-on are you in terms of script notes, during production, and into post when dealing with other director's projects?

I think I'm very present before the shooting and after the shooting. But not during the shooting. During the shooting, there is one boat and one captain. I don't have any ego about that. When I write a script, and give it to a director, it's his film. It's like, "It's your baby. Do what you want." I will judge it as a moviegoer, not as a writer. We're shooting Taken with Liam Neeson. I went to see the director on the set last night. You know, I went to say hi, have coffee, and then I left. That's what I do. Because, not here, but when I'm in France, if I go on the set, all the technicians get so nervous [laughs]. They're like, "What is he doing here? Oh my god, what is going to happen?" On the set, I'm unpredictable. I love to have people on their toes, from the moment they come on the set, to the moment they leave the set. Otherwise, stay home! You're not going to have the time to sit. I don't have a seat with my name on it. Ever. I'm always standing. And I'm always looking for everything I can steal, bring, or change. You know, my senses are, like, extra-developed when I'm on the set. So you'd better not sleep when you're working with me. [laughs] I started to laugh because I just remembered this: my first assistant once came to me on the set and said, "Tell me when is a good time for me to pee." I said, "James, it's okay. Go pee." [laughs] I definitely put the pressure on people, because I'm under pressure too. And I want some help. I don't want to be by myself under pressure. I don't want people to be like, [does a pretentious voice, mimics actor talking on a cell phone] "Yeah, I'm on the set with Luc Besson." Don't come around me on the set with a cellular phone. I smash phones.

Good!

Jean Reno? I took the phone out of his hand in the middle of a conversation and I slammed it down. I said, "Are you kidding? We're prepping this film for months, and that's all you have to do – giggle around? You have nothing to prepare? You're sure you're the best? Get back to work. Otherwise, I'm going to phone my girlfriend during the take when you're speaking. I'm going to go, 'Yeah, I'm shooting with Jean Reno here, and…'" I hate that. Because shooting is so tough. You have to concentrate. I never go overtime. If we're shooting until 5, I'm done by 4:50 and say that's the end of the day. That's how I respect my cast and crew. I'm not here to have them exhausted and dead. But if we're working for six hours, I want you for six hours. Fully 100%. That's all. Give me your best.

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DIANE KEATON: The Hollywood Interview

FALLING IN LOVE AGAIN WITH DIANE KEATON
by Terry Keefe
This article originally appeared in the Dec/Jan 2003 issue of Venice Magazine.

Diane Keaton's new movie Something's Gotta Give reminds us of why we fell in love with her in the first place. And if you're a younger moviegoer who is new to her work, you'll understand immediately why she became a star some three decades ago. The film provides Keaton with her best starring role in recent memory, but it's more than that, as this particular part fits the actor so well that it's a little magical. Writer/director Nancy Meyers created the role of Erica Barry with Keaton in mind, and it shows. The role is a virtual playground for the acting pleasures of Keaton, who is at once hilarious, charming, neurotic, and touching as a successful, divorced playwright who finds her true love at middle-age with the eternal roving bachelor Harry Sanborn, played to perfection by Jack Nicholson. Erica has essentially given up on the prospect of love at this point in her life, and when her young daughter Marin (Amanda Peet) brings the womanizing Harry to Erica's house in the Hamptons, she certainly doesn't anticipate that her life is about to change. But Nicholson's Harry isn't as nimble in the bedroom as he used to be, and he has a heart attack prior to a romp with Peet, requiring him to stay with Erica until he is able to travel. The sparks fly as Erica and Harry, who never in a million years thought that they could want each other, find themselves drawn together.

The film is being marketed with a poster of Keaton and Nicholson accompanied by the title "Jack & Diane." Without having seen the film, this might just look like a clever promotion, tying in the names of the cast to a famous rock song. But the "Jack & Diane" who are being marketed here have such chemistry together that their sum is even greater than their already great parts, and selling them as a pair is thus very apt. Not only is this the hottest middle-aged romance ever put on screen, but it's one of the hottest romances in romantic comedy history, period. The sparks escalating between Keaton and Nicholson are so tangible that they transcend the already strong dialogue and story to create something far more profound than you usually get from a movie. Specifically, Something's Gotta Give takes you on a journey that reminds you very much what it is like to fall in love in the real world, outside of the three-act structure of Hollywood. Keaton and Nicholson build their relationship to a high boil very slowly. They blunder about, occasionally flirting, occasionally arguing, and then, boom! Before either one of them realizes it, they're there.

If Something's Gotta Give had a spiritual godfather, it would have to be the great writer/director Preston Sturges (The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels). Like the best Sturges films, Something's Gotta Give is a comedy where everyone sounds like people you know, only a lot wittier and smarter. At the same time, beneath the gags is a tenderness and humanity that most comedies never even bother to reach for. A prime example of where these paths cross is the first bedroom scene between Keaton and Nicholson, in which Nicholson's Harry starts to have heart palpitations and Keaton makes him check his blood pressure. This all goes down in the middle of a romantic moment which manages to not only stay romantic, but build to an even sexier level after the gags are over.

Like Nicholson, Keaton is now in the enviable position of doing some of the best work of her career many years into it, and will quite probably, and deservedly, receive an Oscar nomination for her performance. There is a whole younger generation of moviegoers who are going to be introduced to her via Something's Gotta Give, so now might be a good time to recap her career before launching into the interview proper.

Keaton was born in Los Angeles and moved to New York to study at Sanford Meisner's Neighborhood Playhouse. She would appear on Broadway in "Hair" and then be cast opposite future collaborator Woody Allen in his show, "Play it Again, Sam," a role that she would reprise in the film version in 1972. That would also be the year in which her Kaye Adams met Al Pacino's Michael Corleone in The Godfather. Kaye was introduced to "the family" very much at the same pace the audience was, starting at the wedding party and ending with the dark scene in which Michael lies boldfacedly to Kaye about his role in the murders of the heads of the Five Families. The last shot of The Godfather is of Kaye's face as Michael closes the door on her, and at that concluding moment it becomes very much her story. She would once again play Kaye in The Godfather: Part II in 1974, and by then her character, like the audience, is devoid of any illusions that her husband can be redeemed.

Woody Allen would cast her as his comedic foil and romantic interest in a string of wacky comedies— Sleeper (1973) and Love and Death (1975), but it would be with Annie Hall in 1977 that their partnership would bear its most intoxicating fruit. The film followed the roller coaster relationship between Allen's famed New York comedian Alvy Singer and Keaton's Annie, who comes to Manhattan as sort of a country bumpkin but quickly develops big city neuroses as varied as those of Allen's character. It was one of the first American romantic comedies where the characters almost lived happily ever after together, but not quite. The film also broke the mold in terms of its fractured narrative and skillful interweaving of different types of comedy. Keaton won a Best Actress Academy Award for her work as Annie. She then appeared in a far darker look at modern romance in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), and would close out the decade with two more Woody Allen classics, Interiors (1978) and Manhattan (1979).
A lengthy shoot followed on the epic Reds (1981), where she played writer Louise Bryant opposite director/star Warren Beatty, as well as future co-star Jack Nicholson, who appeared in a supporting role. The film garnered her a second Academy Award nomination, as well as a Golden Globe nomination. More Golden Globe nominations followed in Shoot the Moon (1982), Mrs. Soffel (1984), the Nancy Meyers-scripted and produced Baby Boom (1987), Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), and the television film "Amelia Earhart: The Final Flight" (1994). Amongst her many other films are The Little Drummer Girl (1984), Crimes of the Heart (1986), Radio Days (1987), and The Godfather: Part III (1990). She appeared in a string of commercial successes in the early to mid-nineties with Father of the Bride (1991), Father of the Bride: Part II (1995), and The First Wives Club (1996). She earned a third Academy Award nomination for Marvin's Room in 1996. Keaton has also had success as a director, most notably with the theatrical features Unstrung Heroes (1995) and Hanging Up (2000), which she also starred in opposite Lisa Kudrow and Meg Ryan. In addition to her filmmaking endeavors, she's very involved with the Los Angeles Conservancy, a group which fights to preserve many of the historical buildings in town.

Did you speak frequently with Nancy Meyers as she was writing the script for Something's Gotta Give?

Diane Keaton: Not really. When she was sort of finished with an outline, she talked to me about it, and then again when she had a first draft, she spoke to me about it. She told me the idea and asked me what I thought. What could I think but that it was a golden opportunity for me? My only question was, would it really realize itself? That was all. Otherwise, what? Of course, I wanted to do it. And I know Nancy and I know what her work is like. She always wanted to do it with Jack, and the opportunity to work with Jack again was thrilling. Besides the fact that I was terrified, I was thrilled. [laughs]

You were terrified to work with Jack again?

Yeah, I mean I hadn't seen Jack, besides passing him like twice in 25 years. [laughs] So I didn't know what he would be like. Because in that span of time, you know, Jack became larger than legendary. He became a national treasure, which has not exactly happened to me. You know, I would see him on television peripherally at a Lakers game or read about him on the cover of Time Magazine or see him at an awards show. I didn't know who he was.

Has his style of working changed much since you did Reds?

Yes, I do think so. When I worked with him in Reds, he was kind of Warren's friend. Warren had this huge burden, which was the making of Reds, which was really very difficult for him. He was so invested in that movie. It was the passion of his life. He had a lot of difficulties with it, because it was such a massive undertaking. So Jack came in, as his best friend, and gave him a tremendous amount of support, and relief, and added humor on the set. Jack was like a hero— he was a hero to all of us, in a way. I only had a few scenes with him, but they were some of the most enjoyable scenes I did on Reds, because they were free of the burden of the responsibility of this movie, something that was being carried about on Warren's back. So Jack was really Warren's hero and my hero. He was sort of the relief that came in, that just lifted up the day for us. So in that regard, he wasn't carrying the burden of the leading role in this movie. He would come in and be fabulous, like he is, and help everybody and leave. And I felt at the time that he was the most generous actor I'd ever been with on-screen, by far. He was always right there with you and he was always helpful and he would never let you down. Because of the technique that I come from, which is the Sandy Meisner technique, you're only as good as the person you're acting with. And it's really kind of a more reactive type of acting. Like I take from what you give me and that colors my performance. As opposed to going it on my own and forging my path to create a wonderful performance without the help of anyone. I always need the help of everyone! [laughs] He changed in that time, because we all change in 25 years. And because in this movie, he carries it. So it was a more real relationship. Sort of like in the movie, it's how you get to know somebody in all their complexities and their great aspects and their stubbornness, or their curiosity. Because the thing about Jack is that he lives with questions. And I don't like to question things on the set, you know? I just like to go there and do my work. But Jack is just filled with ideas and questions and details and specifics. And you're thinking that this guy can wear you out because that energy which he has to explore and be curious is singular, and it never stops. You're always being challenged when you're with Jack, that's the way I see it. And that's also a very enlivening thing when you're acting. So I'd have to say that it was a very profound experience for me, this one.

The film is obviously tightly scripted, because the comedy hits its marks constantly. At the same time, it felt very loose, almost as if it were improvised.

And yet every single one of those words is Nancy's. I never had a shot at improvising or junking up a sentence. I don't consider myself a great improviser, but I do like to junk up sentences and sort of like change the rhythm and just add a little here and... [laughs] ...make it all awful. And in a certain sense, to someone like Nancy, who's sort of a purist with words, it must be a living hell to listen to me destroy a sentence. If you notice, I don't have a lot of jokes. But Nancy knows I talk fast and she's just on you, she's watching you like a hawk and making sure that you're really delivering the message that you want to say. At the same time, she loves that loose look and loose feel of it. I think that's just about trusting the other actors and being appreciated by the director, and Nancy's really one of the best listeners that I've ever been around. And I like the fact that she pays so much attention to me, because I can frequently just get away with it. No director's going to come up and say that much to me anymore, and I don't think they even have that much interest. But Nancy really cares, because, basically, I'm playing Nancy in a way.

You and Jack did some really great long takes, particularly that one on the beach, where the acting just flowed and it was never cut away from.

That was fabulous. I love a two-shot. I'll always love that. Woody did that a lot as well. And as a director I appreciate that also. I just like a long walk and talk, with no cuts.

Do you find that a lot of actors can do those types of shots or is it rare?

I think a lot of actors can do it. I think it's just a question of what is the genre that you're working in? With romantic comedy, I think it's essential that you can be able to do that. I think it's part of the craft of doing a romantic comedy that you have to be able to handle a two-shot that goes on and on.

Another thing that really worked perfectly about the film was that all of the lead actors were very much on the same page, tonally and comedy-wise. You, Jack, Keanu Reeves, Amanda Peet, and Frances McDormand all blended so well.

And they all have very different styles. I don't know how that happens. Jack has a very different style than I have and Keanu has a totally different style from Amanda, and of course, Frances is also totally different.

How was that tonal balance found? In rehearsal?

We didn't have any rehearsal, really. I think we had a couple of days before we started. I liked that; I don't like to rehearse.

Is that because rehearsal can mean doing the material to death?

Yeah, to me it's the death. The death of my performance. [laughs] I don't like having some sort of marker in the back of my head telling me, "You should do it like this. You were supposed " It's so delicate for me anyway. If I feel an audience is going to give me something, I'll repeat it instead of going on my own journey. So I don't like that.

One of the best scenes is the first bedroom scene between you and Jack. It had so many great comedic moments. But it was also a very sexy, hot scene.

In between takes, we were continually worried about how many kisses were we actually going to have to perform in front of everyone. [laughs] But it was heaven to perform. Once the camera goes, you can just let those inhibitions go and you just enjoy it. I had a fabulous time. He was wonderful, but it was hard to get there, that's all. Sometimes it's kind of difficult when you're doing these intimate scenes, as you can imagine. Think about it. You stay focused on that script and this beautiful actor. It's all about "action" and "cut." In between is when it's really the best, but after and before, it's so humiliating. [laughs]

And in this particular scene, you not only had to be sexy, you also had to be very funny! Did you and Jack try different ways of doing your scenes?

Oh, we had a lot of takes and we tried different ways all the time. Jack wouldn't like to do a lot of takes. But I always like to do many, many takes, because I always feel like my performance is more dependent on riding an impulse that I can't really be sure where it's going to take me. I'm sort of flailing about. But he's more grounded and rooted in the idea of what he wants to do with the scene. I'm like a moving target. I like to move all the time. [moves back and forth] And I feel as though this is saving me in some regard. I believe that some people would think of that as "mannerisms." That I'm guilty of many mannerisms. [laughs] And I think that both Jack and Nancy helped me on that particular front with this movie. He would sometimes say, "Look me in the eye here, and slow down." [laughs] And Nancy, who was my total support system, would just do it over and over, until she felt that I actually sort of landed. But she wouldn't inhibit my impulses, for which I have to say, "Hats off to you." Because it's so easy to inhibit an actor's impulses, but she didn't. She accepted the fact that I would get it if we did it enough.

Had you always planned on doing the nude scene the way it appears in the film?

Uh-huh. Don't I have to do it? This woman becomes lost in the love affair of her life and she's this age, might as well as show it and say this is still here and it's great to be this woman in love. At any age. It's fun, it's a dream come true. Falling in love is rare. To have to play this for the first time, when you're age 55 is like, "Wow! That's a lot." Can I go back there and revisit the exquisite beauty of falling in love with somebody and getting lost in their face? Getting lost in their being. God, that's heaven. That is the human experience and that's why this is such a great role, the idea of playing someone in love.

Let's go back a bit. Your first major role was on Broadway in "Hair." What was that experience like?

I was just in the chorus. I was the understudy to Lynn Kellogg, and then I took the part over when she left. I didn't even know what that show was until after I saw it. Can you believe that? I was in that show for quite a while. I never saw it. I thought it was an excellent show. And I had had no real respect for the show at all. I was just doing my job, I didn't know what the hell it was. I liked the music, I thought the music was really good. But I didn't have a concept of what that show was. It was fantastic! See, this is why it's really good to see what you're doing sometimes. [laughs] To go away from yourself, your own little stupid, selfish thoughts, and see it as a whole. It was just like a revelation! It was an excellent show.

And then you played opposite Woody Allen in "Play it Again, Sam." How was he to act with on stage?

Hilarious. You know what I think I am? I'm a good audience. I really am. I'll go the distance for somebody who is that funny. I really loved Woody because he was so incredible to be around and so funny. It was like a great big treat.

Was the shooting atmosphere on the two wacky comedies you and Woody did together, Sleeper and Love and Death, as loose as the comedy would have you believe, or was it more formal than that?

It was loose, and I didn't understand it. He has never been a formal filmmaker. He's just like [quickly], "Okay, here we are, we're going, let's go." It just threw me off in the beginning. I didn't know what the hell was going on, at all. It just didn't seem like this was what my idea of making a movie was. Because I had done The Godfather, which was more formal. Woody was just going so fast. I just didn't understand his technique at that point.

Did you just sort of follow his lead then?

He'd just throw you in there. Some people spend time in preparation, but Woody has no respect for the actor's dilemma. [laughs] He just goes! "It's fine, don't worry about it, let's go!" He's always been that way.

Had his working method changed when you shot Manhattan Murder Mystery with him years later?

No. [laughs] He has no patience. None. And if you do more than like six takes, he's just bored out of his mind and has to rewrite the scene. And he's a genius editor on the set. He just gets rid of anything he hates right there. He thinks on his feet. He watches it, hates it, tears it apart, makes cuts, and then we shoot it again.

I know he always incorporates a lot of re-shooting into his production process.

Yeah, but even on the day itself, when he's not re-shooting, he did that. Especially on Manhattan Murder Mystery, because we had these four-page scenes, and that was his hand-held period. We had a four-page scene, all dialogue, and he'd just run around with that camera. We were just sitting there endlessly talking, no cuts. Then he'd take a look at it, slash that thing in half, get rid of it, boom! A whole new scene and we'd shoot that, all the way through. It was the most fun I'd ever had. C'mon, talk about giving me a chance to really move! [laughs] I was happy! No one was telling me to slow down. Give me a hand-held camera any day, as an actor. I love it. Instead of stepping into a static close-up. That's the hardest thing for me to do.

And I imagine that The Godfather must have been very much like that. A lot of static shots, right?

It was so formal. They [the three Godfather films] were all formal. [Director of Photography] Gordon Willis had a real approach to filmmaking that dominated the film visually. The first time Woody Allen worked with Gordon, he was consumed with anxiety over whether he should hire him or not, because he had heard that he was tough, and he didn't know if he could work with that, didn't know if he wanted to work with it. Because he's never looking for a real emotional connection on any of these movies, with anybody. It was the best decision he ever made because he learned more from Gordon Willis than he ever learned from anybody.

What was your first experience on The Godfather shoot?

We started with the party scene, and I didn't understand at all what was going on. People were really drinking. They were out of their minds. And I just didn't get any of it. We'd be sitting there for days, without doing anything. Al Pacino and I were just sitting off to the corner, because we were the outcasts. Finally they came around and shot us. Really, I was in another zone. I didn't experience The Godfather. Not once. It was too overwhelming to me. I was so scared. I was just 23 and I was an unself-possessed 23.

What was the most difficult scene that you and Al Pacino had to shoot over the course of the three Godfather films?

The most difficult and my favorite was in the hotel room [in The Godfather: Part II], the abortion scene [where Kaye tells Michael she has aborted his baby]. We had to stop. We didn't even shoot for a whole day because we had to rewrite the scene. It was so intense and so hard, because nobody knew where they were going. And, finally, it got set and then it was a really good scene. We rehearsed it a lot. There was a lot of tension though. I'd never done that before, when you just stop and don't work all that day. Except for with Jack and Nancy. [laughs] They like to talk.

How did it feel to step back into those roles again many years later for The Godfather: Part III?

Strange. Very strange. We started with a party again, right? But the party was so dour. It was the scariest party in Part III. There was no life to that party. And I thought, "Okay, either this is the masterwork of all time, because he has captured the essence of what happens to a person when they become a Mafioso boss, or it's really boring." One or the other, because the life had been sucked out of the party. I thought that was very interesting, because I didn't know whether it was going to work or not. So the movie felt very different. But still very formal, by the way. That same goddamn approach [laughs] where he's in a bed like 45 feet away, and I'm here having an intimate scene, talking with him. That's so hard for me to make that work, because I want to move. I want to touch him.

Did you know that the final shot of The Godfather would be on your face?

Not for a second.

When you read Annie Hall for the first time, were you aware of how very unique it was?

Yeah, I knew that it was fantastic. I couldn't wait to do it. Woody had a lot of worries about it. He thought it was going to be a "Mary Tyler Moore" episode. He was just consumed with worry about the situational aspects of it. He didn't trust it. It was a real leap for him. It was a big moment for Woody and he had to be scared. It makes sense. But I wasn't. I was an actress. I saw the part, I got it. Sometimes your instincts, you just know. It was like Nancy's movie, I just knew that this was a good one for me.

Annie transforms quite a bit over the course of that story. Was your performance based on anyone you knew?

Oh, I just knew that part. I owned that part. Because I got everything about it. It was easy. It was the easiest part for me to play. Maybe with the exception of the singing. That was the hardest part of the movie for me. Because Woody just refuses to make a big deal out of anything. [laughs] You just sing. I felt like I needed more time. He was like, "No, three takes. It's fine. Moving on." That was the one part in the film that I was really worried about. Because I wanted to be good. I had already had such a lifelong ambition to be a singer.

Really? I wasn't aware of that.

Oh yeah, I had a nightclub act, going around singing. At Reno Sweeny's, this place in New York. But in my fantasy, I did not compute what that life was actually like. The nightclub circuit.

I watched Annie Hall again last night. I had forgotten how many filmmaking concepts he pioneered with that film.

He had so many beautiful ideas in that. It was just the beginning of his ability to try all these different storytelling techniques. His imagination is just astonishing.

Was directing something you always wanted to do?

No, it wasn't. But I was interested in photography and I did a couple of books. And I thought from there that I would do a music video. I did a documentary about my sister. Then I did an "After School Special." It just really came out of a need to express myself in a visual way, where I was telling the story and I was responsible for what we were looking at. Because I was intrigued by that. I've always been intrigued by that, and it was a way also out of constantly "me and my performing and my career." It was just a great relief, and a way of looking out, as opposed to looking in. It really is an actor's dilemma. It's always going to be a problem for all actors, that you're just going to sit with yourself too much. So this was a great opportunity to expand. And I was really only too happy to do it in a very gradual way.

Unstrung Heroes is a great film. Did you search for the right script for a long time, to make your theatrical feature debut with?

No, not at all. The producers came to me and I auditioned. I just told them what I wanted to do, and what I thought the point of view should be, and they hired me.

Such a great cast. Michael Richards, Andie MacDowell, John Turturro, Maury Chakin.

[The casting] was a very difficult part of Unstrung Heroes, because we were never going to make that movie unless we got somebody really famous. And Michael Richards' name came up. I had an experience with him earlier, because I was supposed to do a film called Pet People for Steven Spielberg, which fell apart. We were after him, offering him everything, and he would not commit to Pet People. So they said, "Okay, you've got to give this part to Michael Richards." And I was like, 'He's not going to do it. He can't make a decision.' But he made the decision like that. [snaps her fingers] He wanted that part so badly. He was the kind of guy on the set who was very emotionally involved in that part. He's very serious and very intent on creating this world for himself as a character. He made that movie happen. Without Michael Richards, there would be no Unstrung Heroes. So go figure, right?

How was working with Walter Matthau when you directed and acted in Hanging Up?

My favorite. My absolute favorite. I loved him so much. Walter is really the original authentic man. The only really authentic man who is a superstar... and Jack, too. Jack reminds me of Walter, not in their acting styles, but as people. Because they are so unique. They are so authentic. And they've earned that authenticity the hard way. They go their own way. They don't follow. They make their own rules. I love Walter, I wish he were still here. I can't bear that he is not here.

Are you preparing to direct anything now?

I'm working on a couple of projects and a couple of books that I own. I want to do something darker as a director. I feel comfortable with that.

I wanted to close by talking a little bit about your work with the Los Angeles Conservancy.

I'm a member of the board. We're fighting to save the Ambassador Hotel from demolition. It's owned by the Los Angeles Unified School District, and we really feel that the history of this building is too important to disappear from the landscape of Los Angeles. We're planning outreach programs to educate all of the citizens of Los Angeles to somehow take more pride in our incredible cultural history. We want to involve the film community with saving its own past, in the form of those picture palaces on Broadway (in downtown Los Angeles). We have this hopeful idea that each studio will adopt a theater on Broadway. And this is something we're going to try and approach some of these very powerful men and women with, and see if we can really engage them in servicing their own legacy, and the legacy of the 20th Century, in honor of the great art form that emerged in the 20th Century. I believe that the more people know, the more they'll take pride. We want to make Broadway as incredible and exciting as it once was, even comparing to a place like Soho in New York. Downtown L.A. is incredible, and now with the addition of the Disney Hall, right near MOCA, right near City Hall. This is an opportunity for all of us to seize the moment and really protect our treasures, our historic treasures in the form of these irreplaceable buildings which make L.A. this enriched place that it really is.

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Morgan Freeman Interview: THE BUCKET LIST, GONE BABY GONE, Jack, and a whole lot more!

Morgan Freeman (w/Jack Nicholson) in The Bucket List.

MORGAN FREEMAN: HOLLYWOOD’S WORTHY SAGE
By Alex Simon

If Orson Welles was everyone’s idea of the voice of God during his life, Morgan Freeman has most likely assumed that mantle for the next generation of filmgoers. With his stentorian voice and Zen-like presence, Morgan Freeman has appeared in nearly 80 films and TV productions, since making his debut in a bit part in Sidney Lumet’s classic The Pawnbroker, in 1964.

Since then, Morgan has won an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor (for Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby), along with another 32 award wins and 27 nominations. 2007 has proven to be a banner year for an actor who just seems to be getting busier, and better, with each passing year. After beginning the year playing (appropriately) God in the comedy Evan Almighty, he has also appeared in Ben Affleck’s critically-acclaimed directing debut Gone Baby Gone, Robert Benton’s Feast of Love, and Rob Reiner’s The Bucket List, in which he co-stars with another American treasure, Jack Nicholson. The two play terminally-ill men who write up their “bucket lists,” a list of things they want to do before they kick the bucket.

Mr. Freeman sat down recently with us over breakfast at The Four Seasons, dispensing equal parts, humor, truth and wisdom. Here’s what transpired:

I just saw Gone Baby Gone last night…

Morgan Freeman: It’s surprising to me that that movie is doing as well as it is.

Why?

I just didn’t expect it: little movie, terrific performances. It was a solid script. The story’s different, very different story. I really think if you give people something different, off the beaten path, they’ll want to hear what you have to say. And I think this is a case in point.

I really like the fact that Ben Affleck had the courage to be so bleak.

Yeah. Again, that’s what made it so different from most of what’s out there right now.

I got the feeling he watched a lot of movies from the ‘70s before shooting it. It had that gritty, neo-realist feel that so many of the great films from that era had.

I don’t know if he watched a lot of those films, or if that’s just his sensibility. I’m not contradicting what you’re saying, but we didn’t really discuss that. It would be interesting to ask him if he’d done a lot of boning up beforehand. But it was a great choice. And Amy Ryan, who played the girl’s mother, boy, was she outstanding.

She was so convincing that at first, I thought she was a local that Ben Affleck had discovered.

No, she was so believable. Just amazing. It will be interesting to see what Ben comes up with next.

Working with Ben, was it a different experience working with a director who’s also an actor?

It’s different, but everybody is different. Everybody has their own approach to things. You want to think that because an actor is now directing that their approach would now be more “on your side,” so to speak. I’m more of a hands-off person and Ben is very hands-on. But the proof is in the pudding, no matter what.

Well, it had an amazing cast of actors. And for Casey Affleck, this is really his breakout year.

Well, I just watched The Assassination of Jesse James, and was just blown away.

I thought that was maybe the best movie of the year.

Yeah, in fact, I had to keep rewinding it and watching it over because I felt I was missing things, it was so rich.

Didn’t it remind you of early Terrence Malick, or Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller, the way it just sort of washed over you?

Yes, very much. Casey was great, and I thought Brad (Pitt) did a great job. Just kept it very low.
I loved how everyone just looked so grimy, and had bad teeth. They all looked like they hadn’t washed in a few weeks, and you’d guess that life was like that back then.

Yeah, everything, down to the tiniest detail was right there.

Whereas in the old movies, like Henry King’s film Jesse James, Tyrone Power had perfect teeth and it looked like all his shirts had creases in them from the dry cleaners!

(laughs) Yeah, guys slept in their clothes all winter, out in fields…

Maybe once a month had a bath.

Maybe. If there was a woman somewhere. (laughs) Although if you don’t sweat much, you’re not going to smell bad, but you do shed skin every day.

I know that all my friends who’ve been in the service say it gets pretty ripe out in the field if you’re in close quarters with your boys.

Yeah, it’s not like a gym. I remember when I was first in the service, they’d drop you out in the middle of nowhere during basic training, and force you to get down in the mud and crawl around. It was nasty.

Where’d you do your basic?

Outside of San Antonio. Long time ago…(laughs)

You got to work with one of my heroes this year, Robert Benton, in Feast of Love.

Sweet man. Now there’s a guy who’s been in this business for a long time. He’s as quiet as can be. Quiet. And that’s how he directs. Just quiet. If he wants you to shift your performance slightly in this direction or that direction, that’s what he’ll ask you to do: “I want you to try something in this direction. See what happens…” Smart man. Uses a very unusual paint brush. I loved him. Loved working with him.

Well, if you look at his filmography, it says it all. He started out writing Bonnie & Clyde, for God’s sake.

Bob wrote Bonnie & Clyde?

Yeah, with David Newman. He started as a screenwriter.

I didn’t know that. I also didn’t know Jack Nicholson was a screenwriter.

Sure. Got started with Roger Corman in the ‘60s.

All these things go by me…(laughs)

He actually directed a really interesting picture in the early ‘70s called Drive He Said, about college basketball players and student radicals.

Yeah, I remember the title.

Bruce Dern played the coach and Robert Towne played a professor. Towne was a hell of a good actor, actually.

Well, acting is not all that difficult to do if you’ve got some modicum of intelligence. If you’ve got that, it’s fairly easy.

Let’s get back to Feast of Love. It was a very sweet movie.

Yeah it was, although I read a review from somebody who called it “saccharine.”

I thought it maybe treaded the line, but never crossed it.

I didn’t think so, either. When I saw it, I kept watching it to see Bob’s hand in it, just to see how the picture came together. I thought he did a really wonderful job.

You can tell it was made by a mature filmmaker, because you don’t notice he’s there.

Thank you! Please don’t show yourself.

Right, keep the camera still, get your actors in the frame, in focus, and shoot. The Clint Eastwood approach.

(laughs) Right! Right. I love Clint for that. He’s one of my favorites of all the directors I’ve worked with. He knows what he wants. He arrives prepared, and he leaves prepared. When he’s got what he wants, he’s gone. I love that. I’ve worked with him now twice, and am gearing up to work with him again on a story about Nelson Mandela, The Human Factor. It’s about a moment in his life during the 1995 World Cup championships in South Africa. It was early in his Presidency, and a very clarifying moment in South African history, when they really felt like they were going to make it, when it all looked like it was coming together. We have this terrific script, written from this guy's terrific book.

Have you met Mandela?

Oh, many times.

What were your impressions?

I can’t tell you anything you don’t know about him. His life is pretty much an open book, but he’s…have you ever met Bill Clinton?

Yes, briefly.

He’s like that. When he’s in your presence, you’re in his presence. When he’s talking to you, he’s talking only to you. It’s completely disarming. When I first met him, I was meeting him as the ex-President of a country. And I’d never met the leader of a country before, except for Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. I didn’t clam up on him, because you don’t want to be in that position and have nothing to say—even when the fact is you don’t know what to say sometimes, unless you’ve got a bone to pick!

Or you meet the person, and they have nothing to say.

Right, and I prefer to be with people who have something to say, which makes it easier for you to have something to say. I met the Imam, the sheik of Dubai. He’s a fascinating guy. He’s the leader of this state, not a country, because the United Arab Emirates are what comprise the country. Dubai is one of seven states in the Emirates. He’s got the idea that you have to build, build, build because eventually, the oil is going to run out. If the oil doesn’t run out, the price is going to go down so low eventually, that it might as well run out. I’m talking wishful thinking now, that eventually this country’s leaders are going to understand that it isn’t about money. It’s about sustainability. Right now, if you mention alternative forms of energy to anyone in the government, all they’ll want to talk about is what it will cost, which is stupid. It’s going to cost you more to establish it, than it’s going to cost you to run it. But we have to do it. Of course right now there are a lot of politicians who are in, or come from, the oil business, and the unions, and so on. So if you ask the oil industry and the auto industry to start re-cranking, and come up with a car that gets 40 miles to the gallon, or that will burn something other than oil and gasoline, you’ll get an argument about what it will cost to develop that. If you have a car that can run on E-85, which is 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline, do you know what the savings is on that in terms of using fossil fuels?

I can only imagine.

Just one day, one day, just look up in any major city in the world, and just look at the cars. Don’t think about the airplanes, or the trains, the boats, just the cars, running up and down the road, burning gasoline and diesel fuels. With biodiesel, you can make diesel fuel out of bacon grease, for God’s sake! So why aren’t we doing that? They say “the cost.” It’s got nothing to do with the cost. It’s “the cost” that’s going to kill us.

And they neglect to take the most expensive factor in that equation, which is the human factor, which is a more expensive factor than money.

And we say “they,” and that’s a vague term just in the process of talking about it. And I prefer to use the word “we,” really.

Sure. Who puts the politicians in office?

Right. We do.

The question is, why do we put the politicians in office? Where do our priorities lie?

Oh my God! Exactly.

And why do they run for office to begin with?

I know why you run for office. In politics, there is the come-on of making a change, getting things done. Unless you’re in politics, you don’t realize that you don’t get to go in and change things, and get things done. You go in and you play the game.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Right. Do you want to get something done? Why did your people vote you in? It ain’t about anything but money, on some level or other. What about something like health care? I’ll tell you what the response will be to questions about health care: numbers, numbers, numbers. You want to talk about the big political issue here? Let’s talk about children’s health care. Which children do you think we’re talking about here?

Poor people. Black people, brown people, recent immigrants.

Right, now let’s look at the numbers again.

Let’s talk about Hurricane Katrina.

Yes, let’s.

But you know what Katrina taught me? I think that racism, as we knew it in the ‘60s, is not the driving force behind discrimination anymore. Now it’s based on class.

Yes, been that way for years, since the early ‘80s.

Right. Most of the folks on the Gulf Coast that got hit, were poor whites. And they were treated as badly as the mostly-black population of the lower ninth ward in New Orleans. It said so much.

Right, we’ve got to stop talking about race. It’s not race. It’s money.

I don’t know that this country has ever cared about poor people. I don’t mean certain leaders haven’t cared, I mean we as a country have never truly cared about those who have less than we do.

No, for the simple reason that the country is pretty much based on the freedom to pursue your dreams. In India, if you’re born into a certain caste, that’s where you stay. Great Britain, same thing. Not here.

No. Here you can buy your way out.

Here you can buy your way out. You can come up with an idea that will allow you to become a king.

Well, look at you. You grew up poor, right?

Yeah, but let’s redefine “poor.” I think there are two kinds: there is a certain level of poverty where people tell their young: “This is where you are. This is where you are always going to be.” That’s a poverty of the mind, a poverty of the spirit. Then there’s another kind of poverty where you just don’t have a lot of money, but there’s a belief system in place. And in this country, it can work very well. We’ve tried to shut it down among the Mexican immigrants. That’s why they’re here. They view this as the place where you can transcend your position in life. I don’t think the country is ever really going to become socialist, however.

Of course not. This country is built on the bedrock of capitalism. For capitalism to exist, there has to be an underclass.

There must be. Right.

It will never change.

Not in our lifetime, anyway.

No, I mean it will never change.

Well, if it does change, we won’t be who we are.

It’s a free market economy. It’s not right. It’s not wrong. It just is.

Yeah, and it’s proven pretty much that it works.

When you mentioned that first kind of poverty, that’s what Gone Baby Gone was about, really.

Yeah, it’s a mind set. I say that as long as the Greyhound bus is in business, this is the best place in the world to be. “I’m never going to make it anywhere else. I can’t leave this little town.” Bullshit. You can leave this little town. But what life requires in a lot of cases, and particularly in this country, is courage. Get on the bus, Gus.

As always, we digress.

Yes, we do.

Let’s talk about The Bucket List.

Here was a situation where Morgan sort of gets to call the shots. It’s happened before in movies, and it’s such a thrill. I get a call from Rob Reiner about this story, which I’d read before. It was different before, and I’d turned it down. So Rob sends it to me and I read it, called him back and I really liked it, and loved the idea of being able to work with Rob. So I said I’d do it, but that I had someone in mind to play the other part: Jack Nicholson. So he said “Okay, we’ll get Jack.” Jack said “yes.” Rob told me that when Jack was approached to do it, Jack said “I’ll do it, but only if we can get Morgan Freeman for the other part.” (laughs) Jack, you see, was on my bucket list.

Ah, so you had your own drawn up.

You always do.

How’s your list coming? How far down are you?

Way down. Way down. There are still a few things…my dreams all come true. I wish for it, it seems to happen. I learned this years ago: if you want it, you’ll get it.

I’ve prayed at the temple of Jack Nicholson since I was eleven years-old and saw Cuckoo’s Nest for the first time. He’s one of my all-time heroes. Tell me about Jack.

Yeah, I’ve been a fan since Easy Rider, but the one that really did it for me was Five Easy Pieces. Oh, what a movie! He just knocked my socks off. So then I was like you, praying at the temple of Jack ever since. Then I had a chance to ride with him on the Warner Bros. plane with Clint, it must have been during Unforgiven. We were coming back to L.A. and he was hitching a ride. I got to jawing what a fan I was, and as actors will do, he expressed how he liked my work. Then we started talking about how if we ever get the chance…Then we started talking about not a remake, but a sequel, to The Last Detail, that would show those two sailors now, taking the same guy back to prison. But that didn’t pan out.

Would you say that you and Jack have a similar process?

Yeah: hit your mark, don’t bump into the furniture. (laughs)

James Cagney school of acting.

Spencer Tracy.

Fair enough.

Spencer was one of my idols as a kid. Spence, Bogie, Cagney, Robinson, Cooper. Loved Gary Cooper.

They were all less-is-more guys.

Mm-hmm.

It looked like you and Jack were having a lot of fun together.

I was literally wallowing in a dream come true! You don’t want to bore your fellow actor by saying ‘I’m so thrilled to be here with you.’ But every day, I wanted to say ‘Jack, I am so fucking thrilled…!’ (laughs)

What are some of the other things on your bucket list that you haven’t done yet?

I have a film company, called Revelations Entertainment, and a great partner who works her brains out there. I have put on my refrigerator door, a note that reads: “Academy Award nomination or award for Best Picture.” I don’t care if I ever win Best Actor, but Best Picture…there are so many great stories out there to tell.

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Josh Brolin: The Hollywood Interview

Josh Brolin in the Coen Brothers' No Country For Old Men.

JOSH BROLIN:
NEW RIDER OF THE PURPLE SAGE
By
Alex Simon

As an actor, Josh Brolin is one of those rare birds who hit the ground running, debuting in the now-classic Steven Spielberg/Richard Donner hit The Goonies in 1985. The eldest son of actor James Brolin, Josh hit the world stage February 12, 1968 in L.A., but was raised outside Hollywood in the more rural setting of Paso Robles, CA. Having worked continuously in both features and television since his debut, Josh carved a niche for himself as an actor of depth and range, playing everything from cowpokes to urbane sophisticates, and working with the likes of Woody Allen (Melinda and Melinda), Paul Verhoeven (The Hollow Man), and David O. Russell (Flirting With Disaster). In all of his work, Josh Brolin brings an old-school quality reminiscent of Gary Cooper, Robert Mitchum and Lee Marvin: a world-weariness appropriate of a guy who’s been riding on his worn saddle just a bit too long, but who loves what the end of the road might promise too much to get off his horse and settle down.

2007 could prove to be Josh’s banner year, with his name at the top of the credits in some of Hollywood’s highest-profile titles, beginning with Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror section of Grindhouse as a duplicitous doctor who gets his grisly comeuppance; Paul Haggis’ In the Valley of Elah, sharing the screen with Tommy Lee Jones and Charlize Theron; Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, as a corrupt breed of cop guaranteed to make your flesh crawl; and finally the Coen brothers’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, as a hapless Texas cowpoke who stumbles on a cache of drug money, and finds himself pursued by Mexican drug runners and, quite possibly, the Devil Himself (Javier Bardem). Best Supporting and Best Actor Oscar buzz is respectively surrounding Josh for his turns in the latter two titles.

Josh Brolin sat down with us recently to discuss life, film, and the genius of John Cassavetes.

One thing that struck me while watching No Country for Old Men was how reminiscent it was of the work of John Ford. Did the Coens discuss any of their influences with you?
Josh Brolin: No, not really, but it did have that wonderful stillness, and those breathtaking vista shots that Ford loved so much. They don’t really discuss those things, they just sort of do what they do. They don’t say things like “Okay, here we want to get a very cinema-verite feel of a John Cassavetes movie.” They say very little, actually.

Are you a fellow acolyte at the temple of Cassavetes?
Yeah man, I love Cassavetes. Woman Under the Influence has to be one of my top six films.

The first time you saw it, wasn’t it the first time you felt while watching a movie that you were eavesdropping on real life?
I did. And Gena Rowlands made me so uncomfortable, yet so familiar, with all the stuff she did at the dinner table. And it’s not even that all the movies are so great. Some are just pieces of life and are totally disconnected and you don’t really know what’s going on. But when it worked, it was just brilliant. One of my favorite films is Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky, which Cassavetes acted in, but didn’t direct. That scene when he’s looking for his friend in the street…I love that kind of filmmaking.

How long did it take you to figure out that Peter Falk was setting Cassavetes up?
The first time, a while. But I’ve seen it probably twenty times.

And you still don’t want to believe it every time you see it.
Right, because that’s the only person that Cassavetes has allowed himself to trust in the midst of this massive paranoia, but some of the paranoia feels very real, based on the hit man. I love those type of films. I just finished a short film myself that I wrote and directed that Robert Rodriguez gave me notes on. It was this very complicated morality play and it got to be so big and so complicated that finally I went ‘Fuck it, I can’t do this.’ So I pulled over my truck one day out of frustration and just wrote this three character piece that takes place out in the desert. It came to me so fast and so clearly that I said I wasn’t going to change any of it, except on the set. So we did 93 set ups in three days. We shot on 720p, and it looks really amazing. There was one condition: nobody could get paid, even if it meant losing the better person. Now when I look at it, I see the influence of Wim Wenders, the Coen brothers, Cassavetes’ influence. Hopefully there’s my own voice in there somewhere.

Are the Coens really hands-off directors?
Not completely. We talked a lot during the first week and a half about characters and during rehearsals. You go through the process of where you want to earn your character. They’re very laconic. There’s not a lot of talk, but there is a lot of body language, which you start to learn from them. Ethan’s greatest compliment he gave me was non-verbal, which I had no idea what it meant at first, but later learned it was the greatest compliment he could have given me. It was like “That was great. Are you happy with it? Is there more you’d like to do?” I think the reason they operate like that, and the reason they don’t give many interviews, is that they’re really shy, maybe the shiest people I’ve ever met. Joel said nothing during my entire audition. Just stared at me.

And there’s always at least one character in each of their movies that does that. Remember Peter Stormare in Fargo?
(laughs) That’s true. Who was like that in No Country?

I thought Javier was pretty close to that, even though he had dialogue. He was like a corpse talking, like a George A. Romero zombie come to life.
I like that: “A corpse talking.” He’s already dead. The grim reaper.

That’s who I thought he was actually. When I read the book a few years ago, that’s immediately what I thought the first time he appeared: the angel of death.
Yeah, and whether he’s real, or not real, or has a sort of mythological status.

The other movie I thought of was John Boorman’s Point Blank. I always felt that Lee Marvin’s character dies in the beginning and it’s his spirit that’s enacting revenge on those who killed him.
Right, because he was also very deadpan throughout that film. That’s cool. I don’t know that they consciously reference other movies in their films. If they do, they certainly didn’t mention it. Who knows what goes on in their heads? (laughs) I’m very close with Ethan now and close with Joel, but I still couldn’t tell you what makes them tick.

You’re in two movies with Tommy Lee right now: No Country and In the Valley of Elah, although you don’t have any scenes together in either.
No, I wish we had. We were actually talking about doing another movie together recently.

You did In the Valley of Elah with Paul Haggis. Tell us about him.
I’ve known Paul for a long time. I did a series a long time ago called Mr. Sterling that he came onto as a fix-it writer. He put down a script in front of me and said “I’ve had this for a while, please read it.” It was Crash. I thought it was a great script. I was attached for a while, but unfortunately I had no monetary value to my name, so it didn’t work out. Then Valley came to me because Tim McGraw had fallen out, and I said ‘Sure, I’d love to do it.’ I loved working with Paul. It was different, much more active than Joel and Ethan. Paul is finding his way, for sure. I think it’s tough to come right out of the gate and have an Academy Award-winning movie (Million Dollar Baby) and then the very next year, win with your directing debut. It’s never been done in history. So I loved that he chose to do In the Valley of Elah as his follow-up, instead of some easy, commercial thing.

I remember when I interviewed him for Crash and asked him what inspired the script, he said “Very simple: I didn’t want my tombstone to read ‘Paul Haggis: creator of Walker Texas Ranger.’”(both laugh) And it would have been easy for him to stay in that place. He was making a really good living, had a nice house, television had been good to him. But it’s a different deal now. He has more choices.

But if you’re an artist after a while, the money doesn’t mean shit.
Absolutely. You start to feel hollow. But you do the work, and you hope for the best. I’m very happy for Paul, and I hope for the best for him.

Tell us about Ridley Scott’s process. He’s one of the few directors who is both a brilliant shooter and a brilliant filmmaker.
You know what I’ve found with all these guys is they’re easy. They’re all easy. They don’t blow things out of proportion. They’re cool under pressure. They’re not about ego. They’re about the work. And that comes through. “Here’s what you and Denzel and Russell have to do. Figure out what it is you’re going to do, then I’ll hone it, and put it on film.” And that’s all there is to it.

With all three of these films, you’ve been surrounded by the cream of the crop both in front of and behind the camera. That can’t help but raise your game.
It raises your game, yeah, but at least my game I always go about the same way, whether I’m doing film or theater or television. In those cases, the manifestation of it just happened to turn out a lot better than a lot of these other movies I’ve done, where I watch them and I go ‘What the fuck?!’ (laughs) But I’ve always tried to be conscious about quality over quantity, like you were saying about the money. I’ve had agents who get me work that I pass on, who get so frustrated and say “Why do you hassle us about finding you work, then when we find you work, you turn it down?” That’s because I like working with good people, and doing good material. On my deathbed, maybe I won’t look back at having made $20 million a picture, but I’ll be able to say I’ve worked with the Coens, with Paul Haggis, with Woody Allen, with Ridley Scott, David O. Russell. Working with these people make you feel good about yourself when you go to sleep.

But it also seems like the people who are making $20 million a picture are oftentimes the most miserable.
Yeah, I guess. I can see how you could get caught up in it all, all the celebrity and doing your 50th interview for the week. Then you look at people like Sean Penn, and you say ‘I’m glad you’re doing what you’re doing. Keep doing it.’

It seems like Sean Penn has always behaved as himself. Don’t you think the trick to not being eaten alive in Hollywood is to have a strong sense of yourself going into it?
Yeah, and then they get bitter and start taking it out on themselves and other people. Sean came up to me the other night and brought up this movie I did called The Dead Girl, which nobody saw, and he said “Dude! That was such a great movie. You were great, and I love that director, would you please tell her I saw that movie and I loved it!” He was just so genuine, and there was none of that “cool” affectation or bullshit of “Hey. Saw the flick. Good stuff.” He was genuinely excited about my work, just as I’m always genuinely excited about his work, instead of looking at a movie and saying ‘Man, I should’ve been in that fuckin’ part. Fuck that guy!’ I would never, ever want to be that.

How did having an actor father shape your perspective on show business?
Well, we weren’t in Los Angeles. I grew up in Paso Robles, around country/western singers and would have people like Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash around the house. So I saw fame up close on that end. Tanya Tucker…wow! But the acting thing didn’t really permeate. For me it was more like, the old man leaves, works for a while, then comes back, except for when he did The Amityville Horror, because that was such a big deal, and it was an independent movie. I remember my mom putting posters up saying that it had grossed $100 million. We were all very proud of that.

When did you know you were an actor?
You know, I never wanted to be an actor. I wasn’t one of these kids that was running around doing scenes for people, until I took an elective in high school called “improvisation.” They told me to get up and create a character. So I got up on stage and created this middle-aged, balding man and just started riffing on it. I didn’t see the creative process. I thought it was easy. It took some time for me to realize that it’s a make or break thing, that completely works, or doesn’t work at all. There’s no “pretty good.” If you were pretty good, that means you probably weren’t very good. You’ve got to nail it. I’ve always loved storytelling. I was writing stories from probably seven or eight years-old on. I loved reading people like Ray Bradbury, whose imagination was just limitless. Then later, I saw how the two met, how acting was such an imaginative craft.

Then your first film was Steven Spielberg and Richard Donner’s The Goonies.
That was a great experience, maybe still the most amazing experience I’ve ever had. Now our kids are watching that movie, so I’m getting feedback from the next generation, which is amazing. Dick Donner was, is, the nicest guy in the world. Spielberg did this great thing. Donner was so overwhelmed, surrounded by kids for six months, non-stop. He was going to take a break, go to his house in Maui, just relax, maybe smoke a joint and sit on the beach, with no children. So what Spielberg did, he flew all of us kids to Maui, and got one of his assistants to get Dick out of his house. We took a bus to Dick’s house, proceeded to throw all our luggage and clothes everywhere. He came back from the store, or wherever, he dropped to his knees and screamed “What?! No!” with tears streaming down his face. It was a great joke.

Any memories of NFL great John “the Tooz” Matuszak from that picture?
Oh man, Tooz was just great. Here he was, this giant, and he was so sweet and gentle with all the kids. Sometimes he’d get drunk, but he’d just get very philosophical with all of us. We loved him. The only guy we were really scared of was Robert Davi. He was just scary, period. (laughs)

Yeah, but he played scary, while Tooz could really have been dangerous if he’d wanted to be.
Exactly, with Robert it was an act. Tooz in many ways was a big kid himself. It’s funny, I hadn’t seen him in many years, then I ran into him at a banquet at Universal, or someplace and I said hi. “Josh!” he screamed and picked me up in a big bear hug, nearly crushed me! Then a few days later, he was gone.

Was he one of those people we spoke of earlier, who maybe didn’t have a strong enough sense of himself?
It could be. I didn’t know him well enough to answer in that context. But you know what you got me thinking of? I just saw this documentary on HBO called “Gladiator,” about this multiple murderer in prison. They interviewed this guy, and he was the most charming, articulate person. You’d never guess in a million years that he was a killer. Then you actually see the murder he committed on tape. It was maybe the most unsettling thing I’ve ever seen. It’s stayed with me for months. It’s almost like we make a choice, consciously or unconsciously, where our evolution will take us.

Yeah, I just saw a piece on “60 Minutes” about the Supermax prison in Colorado, where they have the Unibomber, Richard Reed (the “shoe bomber), and Ramsey Usef, who plotted the ’93 World Trade Center attack. The former warden said Usef was the most dangerous man he’d ever met, simply because he was so charismatic, and so charming, he’s kept in isolation from the other prisoners, because his power over others is so great.
Right, and that can go either way. On the positive side, Bill Clinton is like that. When you meet him, you literally feel like you are the only person in the universe. He has that kind of power.

And I heard on the opposite side of the coin that Charles Manson and Hitler had the same quality.
Isn’t that interesting? It’s an amazing quality, and you either go to the dark side with it, or do amazing things with it.

Yeah, it gives one pause to think that maybe all these people are very evolved souls; they just evolved in opposite directions. Mother Theresa could have been Hannibal Lecter, and vice-versa.
Exactly.

We’re digressing a bit, so let’s get back to your work. Was your time spent on television’s The Young Riders a good way for a neophyte actor to cut his teeth?
It was. We basically took control of the whole thing, and were very inspired by being out in the desert. We did it for three years. I met some great people out of it, got to ride horses a lot, learned a lot about filmmaking and production. So yeah, it was a terrific learning experience. I was just in my 20s at the time, which is funny because my oldest son is nearly that age now. He’s in college.

So you were a young dad, then?
Yeah, very young. I literally don’t remember not having kids. For me having kids was the best thing that ever happened to me: humbly, selflessly, altruistically, it helped me to get over myself and made my life about something else. I know too many fathers who are like “Great, I have a kid. Have no clue what to do. See ya.” We never had a nanny, ever.

You got to work with Woody Allen, who’s one of my heroes. Tell us about the Woodman.
Javier just worked with Woody. He called me and asked about him. I said ‘Look, we just came off a Coen brothers film where there’s not a lot of petting going on, so you’re in the perfect place to work with Woody.’ I had heard all sorts of horror stories about how he doesn’t talk to actors and all that. I experienced the opposite. I found him to be extremely present, fun, funny. He didn’t talk a lot, but I got to work with Will Farrell and Radha Mitchell, and a lot of people I really liked…there was this one scene we were shooting on Long Island and we were sitting in this Rolls-Royce, and I was talking to Radha about how beautiful the sky was and it was almost starting to rain. After the sixth take, I said to Woody, ‘It’s really overcast out, man. I’m talking about these beautiful blue skies, and it’s raining out.’ There was this long pause, and Woody says “Well, just make it weather contingent.” (laughs) I had no idea what he meant, so I improvised, and I loved working with him.

I loved Grindhouse and couldn’t believe it wasn’t a huge hit.
I think the DVD sales of those two movies will be way bigger. I was very surprised. I thought it would be huge, but I guess it was just too geeky for the masses. The idea of doing a movie with no boundaries just sounded like so much fun, and we did have a blast. Robert and I had a great time. He’s an inspired person. I’ve never met anybody more energized and committed than he is. It inspired me to do my own stuff, including my short. Watching him, you say to yourself that there’s no reason for me to be walking around talking about how tired I am. There’s a whole intensity, a whole mania to what he’s doing. He’s incredibly prolific, painting all the time. We’d paint together, get 2-3 hours sleep, paint some more…finally I’d say ‘Robert, I’ve gotta go get some sleep.’ Love him, and loved working with him. I loved Sin City, thought it was great.

It sounds like you’d like to do more directing and writing?
Maybe. I think I’ll probably go the same route that Sean has, where if I find a story that I think is worth telling, then I’d love to tell it. That was the whole point of doing the short, to see where my strengths and weaknesses were. A lot of the people who’ve seen the short have said they think its voice is unique and its voice is mine. That wasn’t my intention. My intention actually was to not show it to anybody! I had a backyard screening at my house. The movie we showed was The Shining, and we showed the short first. Haggis was very complimentary and encouraging. A lot of my friends were in it. My daughter was in it, who’d never acted before and now probably never will again! (laughs)

That raises an interesting question: did you dad try to discourage you from entering the business?
He was really supportive, but he was very honest with me about the odds involved. Plus, with me as your dad, it’s going to be a whole other thing, because they won’t want to add to some kind of nepotistic thing, so it will be that much harder for you to get a job. But I liked the odds, and I did a completely different thing than my dad, which was lots of theater, then I got The Goonies, and then I did a movie called Thrashin’ that I was horrendous in, but that a lot of people seem to love. I watched myself in that movie and thought ‘Either figure it out, or do something else.’ It might’ve looked like me, but it wasn’t. Then I went to New York, started a theater company with an actor named Anthony Zerbe, and really turned my life around. We had four readers that read 700 plays a year, out of which they would pick 35. Anthony and I would read the 35, and then we’d pick three out of the 35, and we’d do three new American plays in rep. It was the best thing I’d ever done, for sure.

Who are some of your favorite playwrights?
There are so many, but I’d have to put Sam Shepard up at the top. I was lucky enough to do True West on Broadway. Sam is actually the one who turned me onto No Country and the writings of Cormac McCarthy. So I was turned onto it as a literary work of art first, before I viewed it as a potential part I could get.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Road.” Is he America’s greatest living writer?
I think Cormac is a true genius. He has no parallel, in my opinion. He’s always one step ahead of you. Right when you’re about to say ‘Okay, now I get it,’ he goes off into another direction. Great stuff.

It’s too bad that Sam Peckinpah isn’t around anymore. He’d have been the ideal director to adapt McCarthy’s work to the screen, since they explore similar themes, particularly how man’s “progress” often leads to an erosion of clarity in society and its rules.
You know what would be interesting to me? You take a movie like 3:10 to Yuma in its original version from the ‘50s, and now you have the updated version of it. I would love to see two or three versions of the same movie within four years of each other. After the Coens’ No Country, I’d love to see Clint Eastwood’s version, and then another filmmaker’s version. Just like in the theater, when you mount different productions of the same play. Each time, it would tell the same story, but be about something new.

Read more!

Sean Penn: The Hollywood Interview

Actor/writer/director and Oscar-winner Sean Penn.


I AM SEAN:
Sean Penn is the best American actor of his generation for one reason: He remains undeniably, defiantly, himself .
By Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the December/January 2001-02 issue of Venice Magazine

The year was 1983. Sean Penn’s glowering mug graced the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, emblazoned with the label: “Bad Boy Sean Penn: The Next James Dean.” Okay, there it was in black and white. Sean was a boy. He was bad. And he was heir apparent to the throne of the posthumous boy king of teen angst, Jimmy Dean. Rolling Stone said so. Therefore, it must be thus.

They say the worst fires in the world all started with one tiny spark, and that could well have been the spark that ignited the media frenzy that labeled, berated and often attacked Sean Penn during the paparazzi heyday of the 1980’s, eclipsing a talent that, unlike James Dean’s, has had the opportunity to grow, be seen and survive since that unfortunate decade ended.

Sean Penn was born into a show business family on August 17, 1960 in Burbank. Father Leo Penn, who succumbed to cancer in 1998, was a former actor and blacklist survivor who had gone on to become the top television director of his generation. Mother Eileen Ryan was also an actress with an impressive list of stage, screen and TV credits to her name. Spending his formative years in Malibu with older sibling Michael (now a successful composer/musician) and younger brother Chris (himself a well-known actor), Penn discovered acting towards the end of high school, acting in and directing super 8 movies with neighbor and classmate Emilio Estevez.
Deciding to forgo college and jump headfirst into acting, Penn made the move to New York in search of stage work. Not long after hitting the Big Apple, Penn landed the lead in a production that wound up on Broadway. It was this high-profile exposure that landed Penn his first film, Taps (1981), which also introduced Tom Cruise and Giancarlo Espisito. Stardom and icon status were reserved for one year later, however, when Fast Times at Ridgemont High filled every neighborhood multiplex during the summer of 1982. Penn’s now-legendary turn as ultimate surfer dude Jeff Spicoli, whose catch phrases “Hey bud, let’s party,” and “Awesome, totally awesome!” immediately became part of pop culture slang, turned him into a household name overnight.

Penn’s next film, Bad Boys (1983), had critics and public alike calling the 23 year-old the finest actor of his generation, with his portrait of a Chicago street tough who lands in a brutal juvenile prison, the polar opposite of the goofy, good-natured Spicoli. Although not all his films were box office champs, Penn’s work in a diverse series of intelligent, serious works, were clear indication that Sean Penn was about the work, not about the spotlight: the love struck kid bound for WW II in Racing With the Moon (1984); the drug addicted turncoat in The Falcon and the Snowman (1984); the son who refuses to follow in his murderous father’s footsteps in At Close Range (1986); the tough L.A. street cop in Dennis Hopper’s Colors (1988); the undercover cop in a crisis of conscience in State of Grace (1990); the overzealous attorney with a taste for danger in Carlito’s Way (1993); the death row inmate struggling to make peace with himself in Tim Robbins’ Dead Man Walking (1995, Penn’s first Oscar nomination); and most recently as the tough-minded but compassionate sergeant in Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998), and the loathsome jazz guitarist in Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown (1999, Penn’s second Oscar nomination).

While the comparisons to James Dean, Brando, and Nicholson still endure, Sean Penn’s talent, style and persona seem to embody an earlier breed of old school actor and raconteur: Robert Mitchum. Spencer Tracy. Lee Marvin. All of these giants of understatement might have shared a mantra that would have gone something like this: “First and foremost, I’m myself. I love my work. I bust my ass to do the best work I can. I’m not interested in being liked. I’m not interested in being pretty, or polite, nor do I care if I offend on occasion. If you don’t like me, that’s your privilege. If you get in my way or provoke me, we’re going to have a problem. Is there any of the preceding which you didn’t understand?” Old-world honesty combined with timeless talent has kept Sean Penn and his work fresh and interesting, while many of his generation have seemed happy to relegate themselves as packaged pieces of product instead of actors. Long after the former have vanished from memory, Sean Penn’s work will undoubtedly leave a legacy that survives.

Penn’s latest is the New Line release I Am Sam, in which he plays a mentally handicapped man caught up in a legal custody battle for his young daughter. Michelle Pfeiffer co-stars as the high-powered attorney who reluctantly represents Penn’s character, and finds salvation in the process. Both leads give Oscar-caliber performances in this powerful film, which also boasts a stellar turn by newcomer Dakota Fanning as Lucy, the daughter in question.
Sean Penn sat down with Venice recently to discuss his work, the genius of Jack Nicholson, and the liberation of being one’s self.

It’s always struck me that when an actor portrays a character with a physical or mental handicap that there’s a fine line between character and caricature. Is that a difficult line to tread?
Sean Penn: Well, you’re never going to cross that line if you’re part of an acting process that isn’t based on caricature in the first place. I think any performance can be caricature in terms of the criticism if that’s what it is. I’ve always looked on acting as this: you build a cage based on your sense of the truth and your sense of the aspects of the character that need to tell the story. If you’ve done your job right, which I’ve had varying degrees of success doing at different times in my life, if you’ve done your job right, then you’re able to function very freely within that cage. So I think if you’re editing yourself, you’re going to fall, and that’s what comes to mind when you use the word “caricature,” to me it says you’re avoiding something.

Did you have a chance to observe people who had the same handicaps that your character had?
Yeah, but I think what you find is what you’re going after, since there’s such a broad spectrum of conditions, many of which can overlap one another, what becomes most important is finding the personality of the character, like with any character. So I was trying to do that. Then you absorb things based on observation, or try to.

One thing that the film captured beautifully is how many so-called “mentally challenged” people are much sweeter and more “human” than supposedly “normal” human beings.
Absolutely. You can’t beat innocence as a sort of wellspring for kindness. Little kids have that, as well. I think that’s most of what we’re about at our best anyway, so it becomes a very human exchange.

Your scenes with Michelle Pfeiffer just cooked. The two of you really played off each other beautifully.
She’s just so great. Michelle is one of those actors who makes coming to the set every day a pleasure. She’s very honest, and working with honesty is what it’s all about.

Let’s talk about your background. Your parents both began as highly regarded actors and your father went on to become the top television director of his generation. Obviously a lot of that rubbed off on all three Penn boys. Did you “go to the office,” so to speak, with your dad a lot growing up?
I did, although not at a period of time when I thought I was going to go into that line of work. But from the time I was a little kid, I would spend a lot of time on sets, just watching.

What did you learn from your dad as a director?
Well it’s interesting, it’s hard to put into words because at a certain point everything you learn from a person or an experience all blends together. (pause) He was a very good storyteller. He talked a bit about directing with me, and looking back I wish I’d talked to him more about it. But again, you absorb things as opposed to learn things. Also, there was a general respect for drama and theater that he had which was definitely passed on to me.

Your dad was also a victim of the blacklist. Was that something that he ever recovered from emotionally?
Emotionally, oh yeah. Guys like my dad came back (from WW II) after risking their lives for this country, and then they weren’t able to work in the country they risked their lives for. He was a patriot. I think there were some individuals that he might have harbored some vague resentment toward, based on their cowardice at the time. But he was really someone who was very comfortable in his own skin.

How did the knowledge of what had happened to him inform you and your brothers growing up?
Again I don’t know. I wish I could speak to it better. I think there’s an acceptable level of sacrifice, or rather that sacrifice is an acceptable thing, and we grew up knowing that. He sacrificed for his beliefs, but in the end, he was very fulfilled.

You spent most of your formative years in Malibu, where your next-door neighbors included Martin Sheen and his family (Charlie Sheen, Emilio Estevez) and the Lowes (Rob and Chad).
I lived in Malibu from ’71 to ’78. I knew Emilio. Charlie was a friend of my younger brother Chris. But I didn’t know the Lowes. Most of those guys were 3-5 years younger than me.

When did you know you wanted to be an actor?
It was around the time I got to know Emilio, towards the end of high school. We started making super 8 movies together.

So it sounds like you wanted to direct originally.
That’s what I wanted to do and was doing, but there was a kind of absence of actors. (laughs) We’d shoot at night and people would, you know, go home, do their homework, so I started to act in these little films as well. I sort of wound up becoming obsessed with the whole process (of acting). So I went to acting school and joined a repertory company right out of high school.

You were also an assistant for Pat Hingle, a great actor, at this point.
Yeah, Pat was great. Great guy, and a wonderful actor. I was working at Lonnie Chapman’s repertory company and there were doing a production of “Toys in the Attic” and Pat was directing it. I got to be his assistant director. Pat was of my dad’s generation. They’d worked together before.

After high school you skipped college and went right into acting.
Yeah, what happened was, I stayed here in L.A. for a while and was doing a lot of equity waiver theater. But I wasn’t making a living. So I went to New York. When I got to New York, I did get a play. It was supposed to be off-off-Broadway, then it got cancelled. Then it was on again. Then it got cancelled again. Then the only theater available was a Broadway house. So they got some investors and we launched it there. So that was just kind of a lucky break where I was able to do something and be seen in something. That led to my getting my first movie, Taps.

Both Taps (which co-starred Timothy Hutton, Tom Cruise, Giancarlo Esposito) and Fast Times (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Eric Stoltz, Nicolas Cage, Anthony Edwards, Forest Whitaker, Phoebe Cates) were sort of the American Graffiti’s of the 80’s with all the new, young talent they introduced.
Yeah, it was an interesting time. From our point of view, there really weren’t a lot of movies being made with guys our age, until Tim Hutton did Ordinary People, won the Academy Award, and all that, and then all of the sudden movies were being made about young people again. Prior to that, there were guys like Richard Gere and John Travolta. So suddenly, there was employment to be had. (laughs)

Was Jeff Spicoli like a lot of the guys you’d grown up with in Malibu?
Oh yeah, and a big part of the excitement of playing that part is that I hadn’t seen any of those guys in a movie before. I felt as I was reading Cameron Crowe’s book, “Finally, they got one of these guys!” (laughs) It’s just as American a character as a New York cabbie.

Did you choose the part in Bad Boys as your next film largely because the part of Mick was so diametrically opposed to that of Spicoli in Fast Times, sort of like what Dustin Hoffman did by playing Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy immediately after The Graduate, so he’d avoid type-casting?
No. I’ll tell you something: I’ve never been a careerist. In fact, I might even be an anti-careerist. The first rule of Italian driving is you pull the rearview mirror off, because what’s behind you doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if I’m doing something that’s similar. If I haven’t moved on humanly, there’s no moving on anyway. It’s about doing things that are interesting to you at the moment.

After Bad Boys, Rolling Stone put you on its cover and tried to label you as “The Next James Dean,” which began almost a decade of the press trying to label, package and sometimes even harass you. I always thought it was admirable that you rebelled against being put in any sort of category.
I never felt I was rebelling against it. And it’s something that continues to this day. I don’t understand most of what’s said, to tell you the truth, about me or about the movie business in general. I feel like what I observe is not what I read about most of the time. So I felt a kind of disregard for what was said at that time. Later, it became a little more intrusive. It was one thing when people are talking about you this way in the press and you’re reading it, but it’s another when judges are reading from the bench things that have been written about you to validate the sentence they’re about to hand down! (laughs) So that’s when I became a little more annoyed. It’s a world that doesn’t suffer the complexity that any of us have, the world of the press. Whether you’re bright or not isn’t the point, and so they want to break everything down in a simple, simple way, and the second they do that, it is something that people can fall victim to. But, I’m still standing.

Right, but what I’m saying is that in face of it all, you’ve stayed yourself, whereas a lot of other actors of your generation have fallen into niches that others have carved for them.
I think that’s true of every period, and in every business. Very few people know who they are in the first place. So once they start to be given a character to play, they’ll take it. I think this is less a conversation about Hollywood than it is about parenting. (laughs) I had very good parents. Even as a young person, I felt pretty sure about who I was. Sure I made tons of mistakes, but I was always very clear about who I was.

That’s the greatest gift you can give your kids, isn’t it?
Yeah, it’s really the only gift, other than to let them know they’re loved. The rest they tend to build themselves.

The Falcon and the Snowman was a terrific movies by one of my favorite directors, John Schlesigner. What was it like working with him?
Difficult. I too had been an enormous fan of his. He made some great movies, no question, but we had a difficult time. Today, it would be unfair to John to try and articulate it the way I remember it, because I remember it with those eyes. The arguments that he continues to make on his side are those movies he made prior to that. We never found the center where we could talk about the picture. He made the movie very differently from what I had in my mind, so I always felt like I had to protect the character I was playing from the director. That’s not the most productive way to be working. You want to protect the character, but you want the director to be on your side while you’re doing so.

In Colors you worked with Dennis Hopper as your director. Do you find that when you work with someone like Hopper, or Tim Robbins (who helmed Dead Man Walking), both of whom are actors that also direct, that they’re informed about the whole process differently than someone who just directs?
Yes. And in the case of Dennis, he’s just a very creative person on every level. So you’re on a creative ride when you’re with Dennis. With Tim, he’d written (Dead Man Walking) also, and I think it’s even a more significant similarity (in terms of the process) for an actor to be working with a writer-director, as opposed to an actor working with an actor-director. The writer has taken all the steps of the character that you take as an actor. Just to be an actor-director doesn’t necessarily make the process better for the actor you’re dealing with. In Dennis’ case, he transcended that and his force is just a totally different, wonderful thing. But with a writer-director, that person has been sitting in a room alone, going through all those same steps of the character that you’re going to be taking.

For you when it comes to writing, do you find that’s the most creative process versus directing and acting? Or is it a combination of all three?
Yeah, I think writing, because it’s on your own time. There’s something about picking your moments of sharpness versus having your moments picked for you. When you’re a director you’re not going to think ‘Okay, we’ll start shooting when I feel the “oomph” kick in!’ (laughs) You can’t, or the money starts clickin’. Alone when you’re writing, yeah, that’s the place.

Do you tend to work quickly when you write?
I usually think about the story for a long time, then write fast.

You made your directing debut with The Indian Runner in 1991. What was it like for you finally stepping behind the camera?
I had a story I really wanted to tell so it was very easy, in a way. On the other hand, your first day on the set, you see all these trucks, all these people, and you say ‘Where are the adults? Who are they actually entrusting all this money to, me?! Uh-oh!’ (laughs) But I was pretty clear about the story I wanted to tell, so I’d say it was the first best experience I ever had.

All three of your films as a director are very compelling works. You seem to have a filmmaking sensibility that’s much more European than American.
I’ve heard that said. I, of course, take great pride in the Americanism of those pictures, but not in the American cinema (which they inhabit). I think that the American cinema went away, and is still away, for a while. My biggest inspiration isn’t European cinema, it’s the American cinema of the 70’s. But I think in the void of that, I’ve probably been influenced in some ways by some European cinema, but my primary influence would be that decade when I was between 10 and 20 years old. Every weekend I went to the movies, it was an event. An event that’s still remembered today.

So who specifically are some of your directing influences?
Terry Malick, Hal Ashby, John Cassavetes, Francis Coppola, Jerry Schatzberg, William Friedkin is a very visceral filmmaker…

His film Sorcerer is one of my favorites.
Great movie! In fact, Sorcerer established, I think, a visual sense that has been co-opted by advertising and every other form of media. It was just so dynamic, and one of the very, very influential movies of the 70’s, and still is today.

In Carlito’s Way you got to work with two giants of their craft: Brian De Palma and Al Pacino.
I had worked with Brian before and got on just fine, although we had tougher time on that one. Our sensibilities were just different. Al I loved working with. He’s one of those sort of bulletproof actors. There’s nothing in his game plan that will be fucked up by anything you do. He will go wherever you want to go. Working with him balanced that whole experience out.

Jack Nicholson is your favorite actor to work with as a director, obviously. Tell us about Jack.
I love this guy, in every way. (laughs) Just a great fuckin’ guy. Brilliant all the way around. He’s just the biggest blessing I’ve ever come across in the business. Just a gift. Collaborating with him becomes seamless after a point. We start early, a year early, talk it out, layer it out. I’ll go back to the drawing board on the script, hammer it out. He’ll come up with ideas and we’ll incorporate them. By the time we get going, it’s just effortless.

As a filmmaker, do you think it’s good to have bad examples along with good ones?
Every example is a valuable one. And sometimes I’ll work with a director just to be around that director. Oliver Stone was one of those. I think he’s very talented and I wanted to see how he came to his decisions. Terry Malick, who’s one of my favorite discussion topics, is another. I was as interested in being in that picture as I was in being an observer on the set, getting a front row seat. Terry is just an elegant gentleman and a wonderful poet.

Does he work very organically? His films have that quality.
I think he writes his movies three times: he writes the script, re-writes on the set, then re-writes in the editing room. So you don’t know necessarily what movie you’re doing. (laughs) So it was a very different process for me, sort of yielding to him that way. It was almost like acting in neutral. You’d let Terry decide on the character’s music, and whatever else he does. You don’t invent too many specifics in a film of his. That was my experience, anyway. It was just better to let Terry determine the ebb and flow of character, and the whole process took several weeks while we discovered how to do that. I wish Terry would make more films. He was going to start on another one, but it would have meant filming in an area that’s become a real hot zone, post-September 11.

Regarding September 11, do you think that the world has been shaken both physically and culturally to the extent that it will affect the kinds of films that are made?
I hope so. I think we all have to figure out what’s relevant. And for the audiences, I think they’ve suffered a great discomfort and they’ve been part of a country that, to the point of a disease, has needed and been addicted to comfort. And the level of this discomfort, tragedy, and sadness has, I hope, raised the bar so that instead of avoiding thoughtful things, perhaps they will seek them out.

Do you think that the basic cyclic nature of things will also take affect?
Of course. It’s all cyclical. Those films of the 70’s that we’ve discussed, that sort of movement will come back again. It has to.

In a way it already has, with independent film.
Yeah, to an extent, although very few so-called “independent films” really have reached the heights of those that we’ve discussed, I think. A lot of times those films wind up becoming their own sort of complex. I mean, what is an “independent film,” but a film by an independently minded filmmaker? It could be a $100 million film or a $10 film. A lot of the so-called “independents” I think are just as bad as everything else. But once in a while one comes through that becomes sort of a representation of a good movie, and you thank God for it. Maybe the acting is there, and the story is there, but they just didn’t get enough money to make it on the level that it needed to be made. I mean, you could make Cuckoo’s Nest today if you had those actors and that script. Let’s say in today’s world it would cost $45 million to do. If you only had $5 million, sure you could do it. But it would only be a representation of what we saw. It wouldn’t be the same. And I think that’s what a lot of independent films wind up as, representations. They’re charcoals, instead of oils.

Tell us about Woody Allen.
Love him. Flat out, love him. He writes great, period. From there, you have a guy who is unafraid to be absolutely direct and just tell you that something flat out sucks! (laughs) I like it direct! It’s liberating. Then I, as the actor can say, ‘Okay, let’s throw that out and try this.’ It’s much less taxing. Woody is a very civil moviemaker in that you’re not there all fucking day. He doesn’t do a lot of coverage and his films aren’t really dependent on that.

Any advice for first-time directors?
Always consider the possibility that everyone else is wrong. (laughs) Whether it’s on a set, whether it’s talking about the script with financiers and they want to change something…if you have an instinct, try to hold on to that instinct about why you wanted to make the piece in the first place. You won’t always be right, but there’s a chance you will be most of the time.

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Ian McKellen: The Hollywood Interview

Sir Ian McKellen.

SIR IAN MCKELLEN: A KNIGHT OUT IN L.A.
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the May 1997 issue of Venice Magazine.

When I was a freshman in high school, my English teacher showed our class a videotaped performance of a one-man show called Acting Shakespeare, which starred a young English actor named Ian McKellen. In it, the actor talked about his life, his love of the theater and how performing Shakespeare had become his singular passion in life. Then, after talking about it for while, he showed us.
Up until that day, I viewed Shakespeare as a dead guy who wrote insomnia-inducing plays, whose characters wore tights and talked funny, and whose plots were, to say the least, incomprehensible to a 14 year-old kid in Tempe, Arizona. Two hours with Ian McKellen changed all that. Acting Shakespeare demonstrated that the Bard and his works were every bit as funny as The Blues Brothers (this was 1981, remember), every bit as relevant and timely as the evening news, and every bit as riveting dramatically as The Godfather. In short, he made Shakespeare accessible for me, which in turn aided me immeasurably as a writer, as a lover of the theater, and as a person. It is a gift for which I will always be in Ian McKellen's debt.
Sir Ian McKellen was born in 1939 in the north of England. In 1961, he majored in English Literature at Cambridge University and became a professional actor without going to drama school. Throughout the 1960's he worked non-stop, on stages in London and all over the United Kingdom and starred in the BBC-TV production of David Copperfield. He made his Broadway debut in 1967 with The Promise, one of his West End hits.
The 1970's saw him continue to triumph in the world of the theater, culminating with his winning three Olivier Awards in a row for his work with the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Next, he conquered Broadway as Salieri in Peter Shaffer's Amadeus, winning every available award in the 1980-81 season and "loving every minute of it." On his return to London, he was the Royal Television Society's Performer of the Year as the mentally handicapped hero of Stephen Frears' Walter. He also garnered raves for his portrayal of disgraced British Cabinet Minister John Profumo in Michael Caton-Jones' Scandal in 1989.
After his award-winning Iago for the RSC, he starred in and produced the National Theater's world tour of Richard III, which ended at UCLA's Royce Hall in 1993. Sir Ian and the production were lauded for their innovative modern interpretation of Richard as a 1930's fascist dictator. His screenplay adaptation was filmed for MGM/UA and he was voted European Film Actor of the Year, with a Golden Globe nomination. Since then, he has acted exclusively for the screen in Six Degrees of Separation, And the Band Played On, Jack & Sarah, Restoration, Cold Comfort Farm, Bent, Amy Foster, and is currently filming Bryan (The Usual Suspects) Singer's Apt Pupil, for Mike Medavoy and Phoenix Pictures. In the Fall, Sir Ian returns to the London stage with the National Theater's new production of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People.
In 1990, Sir Ian was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to the performing arts and made international headlines by coming out as an openly gay man just before the knighthood was bestowed. He is co-founder of the Stonewall Group, which lobbies for the legal and social equality of lesbians and gay men in the UK. His new one man show, A Knight Out in Los Angeles, directed by Gregory Cooke and being staged at LATC, is an evening of chat, reminiscence and performance telling the story of two parallel journeys. Alone on-stage, Sir Ian recalls his childhood fascination with the theater and his experience of acting in London's West End, on Broadway, in Los Angeles, and beyond, as well as his early awareness of being gay and how that awareness affected him. All proceeds earned for the performances will be donated to: GLAAD, the Ian McKellen Scholarship in Acting at UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, Highways Performance Space and Gallery, The L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center Youth Services Department, and the Hobart Boulevard School Shakespeare Program.
Journeying up to Sir Ian's home in the Hollywood Hills, I felt a bit apprehensive. After all, I'd never met a knight before, much less an actor whom I've admired since childhood. Do I call him 'Sir,' 'Mister,' 'Ian,' 'Sir Ian,' maybe 'S.I.'? I was confused. That confusion was soon put to rest as Sir Ian, his hair dyed gray for his role in Apt Pupil, greeted me warmly at his door with "Hello, I'm Ian. What can I get for you? Coffee, tea, maybe some scrambled eggs?" I admitted that the prospect of having scrambled eggs prepared for me by a genuine British Knight did sound intriguing, so I happily accepted and so began our conversation. In addition to being a most gracious host, Sir Ian proved to be a delightful, witty and fascinating conversationalist. And besides, he makes the greatest scrambled eggs in the world!

Let's start at the beginning with your childhood...
SIR IAN MCKELLEN: I grew up in South Lancashire, a part of Northern England which we called "the dirty South," heavily industrial. My father was a civil engineer who worked for the local authority and was in charge of housing. And after the war you can imagine how many houses were being built. He was in charge of designing the houses and building them. He was in charge of all the roads in the town, all the sewers in the town, all the lights in the town, all the architecture of the town...it was a wonderful job because he could just mold what the place was going to look like twenty-five years down the road. But unfortunately he made a mess of it. Like a lot of people of that era, he was very excited about high-rises and did away with most of the lovely old architecture that did exist there.

Any siblings?
I've got a sister, who's five years older than me. She's married, has a family, kids. She just retired. She was a teacher. But my family's not a big part of my life, which I touch on in the show. I went off to Cambridge to study English and I've not really been back (to South Lancashire).

So how does a boy from 'the dirty south' fall in love with the theater?
Easily! In the town where I grew up there were five theaters for 150,000 people. There were movie theaters and also a repertory company, which means a group of actors who stay together for a year and do a different play every week. Under-rehearsed. Dreadful. But my parents and I used to go to that regularly. The two other theaters, one took touring companies in and stayed for a week, ballet companies, opera companies...again, not first rate, but the B tour rather than the A tour. But next door to that was the Grand Theater which really was the one that made the most impression on me. It had variety acts, vaudeville, stand-up comics, soloists, dog acts, armless man shaving himself with his feet acts...(laughs). And my father knew the man who owned the Grand and I was allowed to go backstage. So by the time I was 10, 11, 12 I was mad about the theater, not as a performer, but as part of the audience. That's probably been one of my saving graces as an actor is that I initially didn't do it for ego's sake but because I was fascinated by the process and wanted to see how it was done. And I suppose what it was, was when I went backstage and saw them all getting ready to go on, nervous, or angry with each other...but when they stepped out on the stage, they were different people entirely. The line in the wings between reality and the entertainment itself was a sort of magic area, and I still feel it backstage. So that really hooked me and then I started acting in school and then the clincher as far as being a professional actor was when I was at school there was a headmaster who thought it was perfectly appropriate for boys to do theater or whatever else they wanted. So I got a lot of encouragement there, as well. Then I met a group of people at Cambridge who were as mad about the theater as I was. That group included Sir Derek Jacobi, Trevor Nunn, Peter Cook, most of the Monty Python troupe, David Frost...Funny story about David, during final exams he stumbled into my room, borrowed all my notes, of which he had none, went back and took his purple hearts, or whatever it was they took in those days to stay awake. Then with my notes, took his final exams and got the same degree that I did. I've never really forgiven him for that! There should be some sort of recompense, don't you think?(laughs) But there is no drama program at Cambridge. You just have students putting on amateur productions. And in those days you had national critics coming down to see our productions. And by the time I left, I had been in 21 productions and had a clutch of very good reviews. So I could go into a work situation and present this evidence and drama school didn't really seem necessary. (pause) That was a really long answer, wasn't it? (laughs)

I know that part of A Knight Out deals with the fact that you're an openly gay man and you talk about that experience. Did you always know you were gay?
Yes. I think as soon as you start being sexually aware at four, five, six it just keeps coming into your life. Then one day you put it all together, your experience, and give it a name. Most people, being straight, don't have to give it a name because they just think of themselves as going through what everybody else is going through...and family and society and everything else is set up to encourage them to think this way and what they're going through is normal and that everything's going to work out all right, which eventually it won't if you're gay. And not only do you usually not have any support from your family, but society at large is telling you that what you are and what you think and what you feel about other people is wrong. I think it explains why, from such an early age, I clung to this hobby of theater-going and then turned it into a passion and then an obsession and then an absolute way of life. Then the most important thing in my life. And I was only really released from the stranglehold of my career over me when I came out...but the first erotic images I ever remember seeing in books, magazines, film was always the male. I went through a little heterosexual phase, but I grew out of it! (laughs)

You've played a number of very dark, disturbing characters: MacBeth, Richard III and now the Nazi war criminal Dussander in Apt Pupil. Do you ever find yourself taking your work home with you when have to go into these dark places?
I take my work home with me in the sense that I worry about it. I'm a dreadful friend when I'm working, especially the closer I get to opening night. But no, if you're playing MacBeth or Richard III or Iago, you don't say to yourself 'Okay, here I am. I'm playing a really evil man, so now I have to be evil as well.' On the contrary, you stick up for your characters. You look for the humanity in the character. MacBeth's ambition. Well, we can all relate to that. He just takes ambition too far. You really shouldn't kill to get the job. I'm sure everyone in America is taught to kill to get the job, but you musn't take that literally. (laughs) And (MacBeth) is puzzling away because he knows what's right and wrong, and he can't quite understand why he keeps doing what he knows is wrong. He's terribly self-aware. But he has a lot of humanity in him, as well. He has a wonderful sense of humor, as Iago has as well, of course. Iago's inner troubles, I think, are sexually based. He's got a marriage he finds unsatisfactory and is clearly sexually jealous of Othello's happy marriage. He says "I don't like him because I think he may have fucked my wife." A man who can say that out loud to an audience has got real problems, and then he does dreadful things. So the darkness you take home with you is of a man who's unhappy and what you're going into and discovering in yourself are those humane things like "I can't relate to my wife any longer." "I'm jealous because that man got what should have been my job." Richard III the same. Another ambitious man who's trying to overcompensate for a physical handicap. So we're talking about very ordinary people, really. And that's what's so wonderful about Shakespeare.

The thing that characters like MacBeth, Richard III, Iago and Salieri (from Amadeus) all have in common is the main fear that we all have, especially artists, and that is that they're mediocre, and not special. Do you think that's what taps into so many people and what's kept these plays alive for so many years, that universal feeling we all have?
Could be. I think the plays that are popular, if you're talking about the classics, differ from generation to generation. They go in and out of fashion. The Merchant of Venice, for example, hasn't been done for quite some time, especially in this country. At times people have enjoyed Richard III as a one man show. Now people are starting to do the full text again, realizing it's not just about one man, it's about an extraordinary, charismatic man who is very typical of the group that he lives amongst, who are all ambitious, angry politicians who are related to each other by blood. And he's one of them. And I think that's what's we get interested in now, it's a play about politics. And we can look at our own politics and politicians in the likes of Richard III and get a bit nervous. But in years past, I don't think people were particularly interested in that. For some people Hamlet has to be the prince, he has to be about nobility. I don't think many Hamlets these days think of him like that. I think they think of him as a troubled teenager. The plays were about so many things really.

I watched Richard III again last night. The thing that struck me about it was, I had just seen the re-release of The Godfather a few days before, and how many parallels there are between the two stories.
There are, aren't there? When I was trying to raise money for Richard in Hollywood, I went to Sam Goldwyn and he said "It's too dark, Ian. The public wants Pollyanna Shakespeare." He had just produced Much Ado About Nothing, which is a much darker play than that film really is. I said 'Well you're right, it is dark, but it's about the same things that The Godfather is about.' It's about a group of people who detach themselves from society and then try to run society. They're people who are full of energy and will and all those things that we'd like to have control of ourselves. You'd have to say, of course that The Godfather is like Richard III, and not the other way around. (laughs)

If you look at the characters of Richard III and Michael Corleone, they're both men who are really dying to be loved, but wind up destroying everyone and everything that could have loved them.
Yes. Yes. Absolutely right. "Since I cannot prove a lover, I am determined to prove a villain." That's about it. Nobody loves me. Therefore, I'm going to hate.

And therein monsters are created, right?
Well...I hate it when people say things like "McKellen is the embodiment of all evil." That's really not a good analysis. It won't do to say someone is evil full stop as a sort of pat answer to the problem. "The man who blew up that building in Oklahoma is mad full stop." Well yes, he may be deranged in some way, but where does that derangement come from and why did it have this particular expression? You have to work it out to stop it from happening in the future. It's not enough to say Hitler was evil. Or Satan. Or the "evil empire" of Russia. How can you stop relating to evil? You have to start relating to humanity, to people who are doing evil things. The people themselves. They're human beings.

It's about gray areas. Things are not black and white. It's all gray.
Exactly. And if I take any message from Shakespeare it's that all the world's a stage, all its men and women merely players. We all act many parts. Good, bad, all at the same time. We're all confused. We're all mixed up. We're all capable of doing anything.

Do you have a preference for working on stage as opposed to working on film?
I've done a lot more theater than film and I've always been aware of that. I used to think I preferred the theater to film, but then I realized that it was because I understood the theater, I felt very comfortable there and it was something I was good at doing. And film, I didn't know much about. And this past six years, since Richard III closed at UCLA, I decided I was going to devote this period of my life to becoming a film actor. Which meant that I've done all sorts of odd jobs. Small parts. Odd parts. Working abroad. A western! So now, six years later, asking which I prefer is like asking me whether I'd like to have a holiday in Florence or Miami.

I know how I'd answer that one!
(laughs) I really like them both. The crucial difference, of course, is that in the theater you have to project your performance whereas on film, you just have to be your character. Deep down at the bottom they are the same. You have to use your imagination, your playfulness. Like when we're kids playing cowboys & Indians and cops & robbers. Human beings are wonderful actors. It's what separates us from the animals. Animals don't disguise themselves. You look at a dog, it's always in character. It's always itself. It's just: dog. But human beings...put on costumes every day. 'What am I going to wear today? What disguise am I going to put on? What side of my personality am I going to express today?' That's what the entire fashion industry is about, people being actors. We all act and behave differently depending on the people we're around. The way you cope with pressure and day-to-day life, acting. Not showing what we feel. That's why people are so fascinated by actors and acting, because they're actors themselves! It's all part of our nature and Shakespeare is really up on that.

What's your opinion on some of the other recent Shakespeare films?
How I judge other people's Shakespeare is, have they genuinely done the translation. Of course they can adapt to their heart's content. I have no problem with people taking a Shakespeare text and using it for their own purposes. That's what Shakespeare did with other people's stories. But if you're really going to try to do Shakespeare on film, you can do it the (Kenneth) Branagh way, which is 'I am going to do every word of Hamlet and make it very clear and very available and not get in the way.' But I'd much rather go for the current Romeo and Juliet, for example...

Did you like that?
Oh, I loved it. Well...not all of it, but I loved the intention of it. It was deliberately cinematic and not in a crude way of saying 'Oh, I don't trust this play.' (The director) just found what he wanted in the play and made it cinematic. You know when Romeo goes back into the garden to find Juliet when she appears up on the balcony, my heart sank. I thought 'Here we go again, another bloody balcony scene.' Shakespeare never mentions the word 'balcony.' It's just a device that some theater director chanced upon and everyone's been doing it ever since. Why?! Why is she up there? There's nothing in the text to say that! But then of course in the film she didn't stay on the balcony, she came out of the house. But then you've got a problem because they can't touch. That's the point of the scene. They want to have sex but they can't because she won't. And then the two of them went into the pool, started swimming and could quite touch...I thought it was a wonderful metaphor, wonderful. What's really encouraging is the number of young people I've met who think it's the best movie they've ever seen. I wish they'd seen Richard III. (laughs)

Let's talk about Richard some more. How did you come up with the conception of Richard as a Fascist dictator in the 1930's?
That came from the director, Richard Eyre, and the designer Bob Crowley. We all met over a period of months and talked together, and as very often happens when you do that when you're going to release the characters and understand them you talk about them in modern terms. But what really is the historical period of that play, is it the period that Richard lived in or the period that Shakespeare lived in? I think it serves the characters to have the play take place in as modern a setting as possible...I tend to always want to perform Shakespeare somewhere in the last hundred years, so we can relate. You don't want to get bogged down with making it all fit in some particular period, that wasn't the point. I think we were borrowing the 1930's and its social attitudes to explain the sort of people that they were and what was at stake.

Tell me about the experience of playing a real modern figure, John Profumo, in Scandal.
I did that because I had just publicly come out. It was a film at a time when I wasn't doing any films and the only thing anybody knows about John Profumo is that he was a raging heterosexual. The assumption is when you've come out that you'll never be able to play anything but gay characters again. So, I thought that was a nice message to the world that a gay actor could play a straight man. That's why I did it. It still makes me smile a bit that nobody objected to it.

Tell me about the experience of being knighted.
You'll have to come and see the show, because I talk all about it there. For me, there were two things about being knighted. In America you really don't have anything to compare it to, although most countries do. It's not like an Oscar, for example, which are just given to people in the world of film. Knighthoods are given to all sorts of people from various walks of life. I rather like the idea of a nation saying to somebody 'Thank you.' But I was openly gay. And there had only been one man before who was openly gay before he was knighted, Angus Wilson. So I knew that it would be taken as a symbolic thing by many people, and indeed that was true. Some people, some gay activists, (the late director) Derek Jarman in particular, thought I was doing absolutely the wrong thing by accepting any prize from a homophobic government. Of course he was right, it was a homophobic government. But I think that for most people, gay and straight alike, it was a genuinely hopeful sign that if an openly gay man could be invited to the palace and knighted by the Queen, then that was the establishment at last having to accept that there were in their midst people on the Queen's staff, running the Queen's army, running the Queen's government, certainly in the Queen's National Theater, gay men and women who were valued members of society as much as anybody else. And that there should be no barriers to their careers or what contributions they could make it they chose to come out and say that they were gay. And also as an activist in class-conscious Britain, it's very useful to have that handle on your name. It opens doors that otherwise wouldn't be opened for you. It gets you invited places. You are utterly respectable. They can't deny you exist. So I've been able to use (the title) to help people who've been trying to get into through these doors that they've been banging on for years.

What was your inspiration for creating A Knight Out?
I was asked to do a show at the Gay Games in New York three years ago to raise money for the games and a couple other organizations. I thought if I were going to do a show on Broadway, I'd do it about being in the theater and about being gay. I know from the questions that people ask me, they all want to know what it feels like to be an actor and what it feels like to be a gay man. And since then I've done it several times, but always as a benefit. I never take any of the profits for myself. Most excitingly, I did it in South Africa at a time when they were trying to ensure that in the equality clause in the permanent constitution sexuality was listed along with gender and race and religion...as grounds on which you could not discriminate. And there was a gay organization set up to lobby for that happen, and I helped to raise money for their campaign. I got to meet Mandella and talk with him about gay issues. That was a really remarkable moment! And here I am doing it here. I looked in my schedule when I was back in London and saw that May was free and there's a lot of theater in this town and it gets neglected sometimes. And among the other charities I'm raising money for are a scholarship in my name at UCLA, as well as a school in Koreatown I go to that has little 9, 10, and 11 year-olds who do Shakespeare after school. It's a really amazing teacher and class. On Shakespeare's birthday recently I went down and cut a cake for them, watched them perform some of A Winter's Tale ...it was wonderful because each of them understood every single word they were speaking.

Let's talk about Apt Pupil and your role as Nazi war criminal Kurt Dussander.
Well I took that because it's a big, terrific part in a big Hollywood movie. I had seen Usual Suspects and admired Bryan Singer's work a lot. It seems to be the fate of middle aged English actors to get stuck playing Nazis, but I've really enjoyed working on the film. It's a pleasure going to work every day. It's a wonderful thriller and I think it'll be a really good film, as well.

Tell me about the Stonewall Group.
At the time I came out, the Thatcher government was introducing an initiative that I'm afraid was based on an American law in some states that it would be illegal to spend any public money on the promotion of homosexuality. And out of the experience of trying to stop that law, which we didn't succeed in doing, we realized there was a need, rather late in the day, for a permanent, professional, set-up lobby group. I suppose our model was Human Rights Campaign Fund to a certain extent. We've had huge successes with our group. We've turned the British media around. I mean, you don't hear any anti-gay stories any more in the straight press, or a prejudiced story. When we get covered in the mainstream press, which we didn't ten years ago, we are on the political agenda now. More and more people are coming out, and I think Stonewall has helped with that. London is now the gay capital of Europe. The country is really waking up. The only people who're behind the times are the politicians because they don't know what's going on. To raise money for the group I put on a variety show every year at the Royal Albert Hall in London, with big stars...Melissa Ethridge, Richard Gere, Antonia Banderas and Melanie Griffith came up, Elton John often does it for me, the Pet Shop Boys, Sting...it's like a political rally with lots of entertainment! That's probably the most important job I do each year. It's doing what I know best, the theater. It's a sort of variety show like the shows I used to see at the Grand Theater in Bolton, but it's made of awareness of what it is to be gay. So it's an utterly fulfilling job for me, really because both sides of my life come together. A Knight Out is the solo version of it, really.

Any final thoughts?
Well I'm thrilled to be in L.A. at the point when Ellen DeGeneres comes out. And Anne Heche (Volcano), her girlfriend. It's probably more significant in the history of gay awareness not that a famous comedian comes out, because solo artists have always found it easier, K.D. Lang, Elton, because they're their own people. But an actor like Anne Heche, she's just a working actress and like all actors depends on being employed, which is dependent on other people's attitudes. Producers. Directors. Advertisers. And the fact that she's come out, when she's got more than a burgeoning career, it'll be more interesting to see what happens to her career. Ellen can always go out on her own on the stage as a comedian and continue making a living. It's a bit more difficult for a regular actor. But it's terrific being here with the whole nation talking about it...this is big stuff, it's great. And reverberations for the world. It's a great time to be alive as a gay person.

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Kevin Spacey: The Hollywood Interview

Actor Kevin Spacey.



KEVIN SPACEY:
HOLLYWOOD'S CHAMELEON
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the September 1997 issue of Venice Magazine.

In a relatively short amount of time, Kevin Spacey has moved to the forefront of American actors. A brief list of his credits include starring roles in A Time to Kill, Looking for Richard, Seven, Swimming With Sharks, Outbreak, The Ref, Glengarry Glen Ross, Consenting Adults and The Usual Suspects, for which he won the 1995 Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. In addition, The National Board of Review, New York Film Critics, Chicago Film Critics, Seattle Film Festival and the MTV Awards honored him for his role as the crippled and deceitful criminal Verbal Kint in director Bryan Singer's dual Oscar winning thriller.
Kevin Spacey was born July 26, 1959 in South Orange, New Jersey. He grew up in the San Fernando Valley area of California, becoming active in high school dramatics. After doing the round of local comedy clubs following high school graduation and community college, Spacey was accepted to the prestigious Julliard drama school in New York, where he studied for two years. He soon made his stage debut as a messenger in Joseph Papp's 1981 Central Park production of Henry IV, Part I. A year later, he made his Broadway debut as Oswald opposite Liv Ullmann in Ibsen's Ghosts. He was an understudy in Mike Nichols' production of Hurlyburly on Broadway and co-starred opposite Colleen Dewhurst in the Kennedy Center production of Chekov's The Seagull. Other theatrical work includes Barbarians, Right Behind the Flag, Real Dreams, and As It Is In Heaven.
His breakthrough came as Jamie Tyrone in Jonathan Milller's 1986 Broadway and London production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night with Jack Lemmon and Peter Gallagher. He most recently premiered Athol Fugard's Playland at the Manhattan Theater Club, directed by the author.
Television audiences know Kevin as Mel Profitt on the CBS series Wiseguy, and for his performance as Clarence Darrow in the American Playhouse production of Darrow, directed by John Coles.
Kevin also recently made his directorial debut with Albino Alligator, starring Matt Dillon, Gary Sinise and Faye Dunaway in a claustrophobic tale of two bank robbers who hole up in a dingy New Orleans bar.
Upcoming projects include F. Gary Gray's The Negotiator, with Samuel L. Jackson, and then repeating his stage role of Mickey in the film version of David Rabe's Hurlyburly with Sean Penn, Holly Hunter and Robin Wright Penn. He will also play Hickey in the Howard Davies production of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh at the Almeida Theatre in London next Spring.
Kevin just wrapped the film adaptation of the best seller Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, directed by Clint Eastwood, and his upcoming film, the adaptation of James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential, directed by Curtis Hanson. With his masterful performance in Confidential, Spacey has possibly earned himself another Oscar, and at the very least a nomination, for his role as the opportunistic, fame-chasing cop Jack Vincennes. In his relatively short time on American screens, Kevin Spacey has become the sort of actor that most people thought died out with the likes of Henry Fonda, Spencer Tracy and James Stewart: a brilliant character actor who seems to morph and disappear into every role that he plays. A character actor who has also become a movie star.
Kevin, who lives in New York City full time, took some time recently over lunch in L.A. to talk about his past, present and future as an actor, director and Hollywood chameleon.

You seem to be a consummate artist quite naturally. Did you come from an artistic family?
Kevin Spacey: My father was a technical procedure writer, which means that if you were building the F-16, my father would've written the manual to tell you how to do it. Very technical work, work I suspect that was not all that interesting for a man who really fancied himself a creative writer and really wanted to be a novelist and spent most of his private time working on a variety of stories and novels and things I really only discovered after he died. My mother was a private secretary for quite a while. But we moved around a lot and without being a Navy brat, I almost felt like one.

Any siblings?
I have an older brother and sister.

Were you always fascinated with things creative from the time you were a kid?
I think probably my earliest recollections are sneaking downstairs while my parents were asleep and watching the late show, or the late, late show and seeing a lot of great black and white films. So before I ever started going to the movies, my introduction to film were the movies of Tracy and Fonda and Bogart and Stanley Kramer and that kind of style. Then when I actually started going to movie theaters...there was a theater in Thousand Oaks called The Melody, which some told me was just demolished...I remembered being really frightened initially by my early experiences in the theater itself. I remember my mother taking me to some really bizarre films...Peckinpah's Straw Dogs sticks out, and Blade of Grass as two that really disturbed me. Later on in junior high and high school we'd go to the film festival here in Century City and for years and years the Nuart was my home away from home. I'd go there and watch Eraserhead, or Peter Brooks' King Lear. I remember once a friend and I got really angry because the prints at the Nuart were so bad. Scratched and cut and jumping all over the place...We went to the manager's office, knocked on the door, said 'hi,' and very calmly suggested that instead of calling the theater the 'Nuart' they should change the name to 'Oldart.' He told us to get the fuck out (laughs).

Did you start acting in high school?
I sort of fell into it when I was in junior high, although my parents would say I'd been doing it in the living room for years. One of the first things I ever did was a pantomime and just that reaction that I got in my class of twenty people, was a pretty impressive feeling...so I just found myself falling right into it and embracing it in a major way and within a couple years I was directing scenes and acting in plays and writing plays, doing drama festivals. There were these festivals that they used to have at Northridge College where they chose the three best representatives of high school plays throughout southern California, although now I think much of the funding that paid for these sorts of things has been cut...So on a weekend these schools would have workshops, then on a Saturday and Sunday these schools would re-mount their plays. We were fortunate enough to be chosen, doing a production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons. The day before we went on, Chatsworth High School did The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie with Mare Winningham and Val Kilmer in the lead roles! I remember sitting out in the audience and thinking "Who the fuck are these actors?! They're so good!" And at that point I was somewhat frustrated by the opportunities I'd been getting at my school, so I thought I'd really like to go to Chatsworth because those are the sorts of people I'd like to fall in with and I wound up transferring to Chatsworth the following year and we all ended up doing our plays together. Val wound up going to Julliard two years before I did and was enormously encouraging to me that I should audition and come out there if I was really serious about it. I took his advice and did it. So we ended up spending his last two years and my first two years together, then we wound up doing our first play together, playing spear carriers or something in a Joe Papp production of Shakespeare in the Park. It was the greatest way to spend a summer in New York, just the coolest. We'd take a rowboat out to the middle of the lake and have lunch before the show. It was a really priceless experience. Mandy Patinkin and John Goodman were in the show as well. There was actually a whole troupe of us in the chorus who went on to make lives for ourselves. A pretty great summer. 1981.

I heard you did the comedy club circuit for a while. Were you the class clown?
I only did that just at the tail end of high school. I wanted to see what it was like and had really admired comedians, but had no idea what stand-up was like, other than what I'd seen on The Tonight Show. But I was a bit of the kid in the back of the room, making voices, getting other people in trouble, then acting my way out of going to the principal's office, or actually acting my way out of the principal's office that it was all a terrible misunderstanding between me and the math teacher or English teacher. But as an experience, stand-up was a challenge but...when it doesn't go well, it really doesn't go well.

Were you good?
I was good at impressions. That was the thing that I found myself falling into. I was doing Johnny Carson, Jimmy Stewart, and watching in those clubs Robin Williams, Jay Leno, all those guys who've gone on to bigger things. I was such a little punk and I'd get up on amateur night. I was doing other venues as well, like bowling alleys. They'd have talent contests at the Canoga Bowl at midnight, and you slowly realized as you were standing there, hearing nothing but the noise of bowling pins being knocked over, that people who are in bowling alleys at midnight don't watch Johnny Carson (laughs).

You truly had humble beginnings, it sounds like.
That and working at the shoe store to try and get enough gas money to go around to these different clubs...it's just a tough life. Somewhere there is a tape of a pilot of a potential ABC stand-up show where comedians got up one after the other. It was based on a British series that never aired. We did a pilot and I sort of hosted it. I was about 19, I think, but never got a tape of it and never saw it. So maybe if someone out there reading this has a copy, they'll be nice enough to send it to me! Boy, that seems like a long time ago...

Tell me about Julliard.
First of all, New York City hits you like a wave of steel. Julliard was an extraordinarily intense, competitive place. It's an experience I'm enormously grateful for because it taught me so much. Many of the people there I'm still close with and many of my teachers there still work with me. I have this sort of long relationship with the school that's continued. But, I was very anxious to work. And I decided in the middle of my second year that I wasn't sure if I was going to stick out the full four years, and I ultimately chose not to, although I'm convinced that had I chosen to stay, they would've thrown me out the door anyway.

Why is that?
I didn't fit into a certain idea of the program. I was making a lot of choices that were creating some degree of tension. I mean I wasn't being a bastard and I wasn't obstructing anything, I was making choices a bout which classes I'd go to. Instead of going to class sometimes I'd rehearse plays. Whatever it was I felt that I'd gone there to learn, I somehow felt that I had. I felt it was time to move on, even though I had no agent, no money, no prospects and I was now a Julliard drop-out. It didn't take too long to get that job in the park. There have been many times in my life when I've made a decision to leave someplace, even though it's a risk, it just feels right. It's been a real pattern in my life where I'll get to place and just...go! And I enjoy it because it keeps giving me new stuff to live off and new experiences and new people to come in contact with and allows me to keep re-defining myself and my world. The downside is you take a risk and some things suffer when you make choice like that. Some people don't understand those kinds of choices.

You did extensive theater work in the 80's, both on Broadway and regionally. Tell me what the best experience was and the worst experience was.
I think one of the best experiences I remember from regional theater was going to the Williamstown (PA.) Theater Festival one summer and doing this brand new play by Trevor Griffiths called Real Dreams, about the SDS student movement in the U.S. in 1969. The entire cast found this house in Williamstown and lived this sort of commune life together. Trevor came over from England and directed the play. It was the last play I did on the road, after three years of doing various plays all over, before deciding it was time to go back to New York. This was the one that made me feel I was ready to play in the leagues I wanted to play in. I just remember that summer as being a really creative, argumentative, stimulating, time. Even the play was stimulating. In Williamstown there's American flags on every other porch and many people there perceived it as being an anti-American play, which of course it wasn't. So it became the best of thinking man's theater. There were huge arguments between people in the lobby during intermission...and you just sort of went 'Wow! This is fucking intense!" It was a wonderful experience. A great group of people. And Trevor was very into Tai-Chi. And Trevor would start every morning by doing Tai-Chi with all 16 actors on the front lawn of the house we were living in. Everyone thought we were just nuts! Just bananas. Next to Barrie Keefe, Trevor is one of the most extraordinary writers. The worst...was when I was understudying an actor in a play at the Kennedy Center and just hating it. Never got to go on. Was grateful to have the work, but it was frustrating and I was just thinking "What the fuck am I doing with my life?!" But, that's all part of the journey, you know? I just remember being very depressed and very lonely, very vulnerable and feeling like I had no future (laughs).

Then Mike Nichols gave you your first big break in New York.
Right. I had actually been back in New York for three months, auditioning non-stop and landed an off-Broadway play that I ultimately didn't stay with. There was something that told me that wasn't the play to come back to New York with. So I asked to be let go of it and within that same two week period, I went in and auditioned for the national tour of The Real Thing, by Tom Stoppard. Nichols was going to take it on the road with Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons. And I'll never forget this. It was at the Plymouth Theater and Mike Nichols came down to the edge of the stage and called me over and said "What's your name again?" I had just gotten done auditioning. "That was very interesting. I'm going to suggest a very odd thing: have you seen a play called Hurlyburly? I've directed that as well and I'd like you to go see that play and next week, I'd like you to audition for that play because I'm in the process of replacing actors, getting understudies, and so on." So I went to the play, which was by David Rabe, and had Bill Hurt, Harvey Keitel, Chris Walken, Judith Ivey and Sigourney Weaver in the cast. I watched the play and I thought, "Who in the hell could he possibly want me to play?" I was considerably younger than anyone else in the play at that time. Then I got this message that they wanted me to audition for Phil, who was being played by Keitel. Now Phil, in the play, is an out of work actor who is kind of like a thug. This guy's got to look like he can beat the shit out of anyone on stage. And at that point I was very sort of tenuous about my ability to be able to do that. But Nichols was insistent and I auditioned and he offered me the opportunity to either do the national tour of The Real Thing, or stay in New York and stand-by or understudy in Hurlyburly. So I decided to stay in New York and I started rehearsing and literally got thrown up on stage one night when someone wasn't available...eventually Ron Silver, who was playing the role of Mickey by this time, left the show to do a miniseries in Canada. And one night Mr. Nichols was at the show, came back stage, and said to me "That was really good. How soon could you learn Mickey?" I said "What?" He said "You were really, really good as Phil, but I think you'd be really good as Mickey." So then I found myself playing Mickey, which I played longer than any other role, and later on I played Eddie (the other male lead)! I mean I became like the pinch hitter! If he could've gotten me to play any of the women, I know he probably would have! I was understudying all the men in the play and, I kid you not, it would happen that I'd show up on a Friday night and play Phil and on a Saturday night play Mickey. It's a dialogue-heavy play. There's a huge party scene that starts off the second act. Very often when there would be a pause, and I wouldn't know if it was me or not who was supposed to be speaking, I'd think "Who am I playing?" I'd have to look at my costume and say "Oh, I'm Phil today! It must be me. Where are we?" But for me, it was the greatest training to get thrown up on a Broadway stage, not having your name out there. It was a great way to come back to New York. And it was after that, just toward the end of the run, that I got a phone call from Mr. Nichols, and he said "What are you doing this summer?" And I said "Let me run through my imaginary calendar of events and see. Oh, I'm free!" "Well, I'm going to do a little film and I thought maybe you should come and read for it." "Well what is it?" "Well I'm just doing this little movie with Meryl and Jack." And I'm thinking, he doesn't mean that Meryl and that Jack, does he? And so he cast me and I played this mugger on a subway. On my first day of shooting my first film, it was on my birthday and I was absolutely terrified. It was shot on the subway at 42nd street. It sweltering hot and I had to wink at Meryl Streep and I couldn't do it! Mike was like "Just calm down. Just relax." We had a great experience. He's a real force in my life and a real mentor and we became friends and I hope to work with him again some day. He's a truly extraordinary man.

He's one of my favorite directors, also. In school, I took a class where we intensively studied Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Do you know the story about Virginia Woolf? Mike was doing one of the first early screenings of the film for friends, and Henry Fonda was there. At the end of the movie, Fonda comes up to him and says "That was the most extraordinary thing I've ever seen. They never give me th ese kinds of parts." Nichols' jaw dropped and he said "Are you kidding? I offered you this part for a year and your agent said you turned it down." And apparently Fonda went directly to a pay phone and called his agents, who were MCA at the time, and fired them right there over the phone! I love that story.

You have a real chameleon quality in your work. There are movies I watch where I completely forget I'm watching Kevin Spacey, whereas with conventional "movie stars," they always seem to be playing themselves continuously.
Well that's the point. You look at guys like Fonda, Stewart and Tracy, they had this incredible range, despite the fact...that Jimmy Stewart was Jimmy Stewart. I always have had the feeling that, probably because this was the way I was raised from my first beginnings as an actor, I'd read a play and say "God this is an incredible play! This part, this character is so amazing! I would love to be that person! This is a person I'm not. I wish I had that degree of courage, that degree of intelligence, I wish I was that complex!" So the idea always form early on was to serve that. That's the job. Take that idea as a sort of vessel, or spy, your job is to get that information across the border. That's why doing L.A. Confidential was, for me, a first step in a direction where I'm going to do many, many different kinds of things.

Let's talk about L.A. Confidential. I think it's some of your best work ever.
Thank you. The thing that attracted me to it was that it was really all about character. These three amazing characters. We didn't want the look of the film, or the costumes or the recreation of the time to be the main focus of the film, which is what a lot of recent films set in the past have really wound up doing. This film was really about these three people. And Jack Vincennes was this guy who was not bad, but kind of shady. And not necessarily involved in something evil, but the stuff is a little dicey. And slowly you start to realize that this guy is not particularly comfortable with where he's at. The great twist is that he actually turns out to have a conscience. But I think that the film is really going to catapault Russell Crowe, Guy Pierce, and Curtis Hanson to the fame that they all deserve. Curtis and I have been trying to do something together for 12 years. He's a tremendously talented guy, a brilliant director and I think L.A. Confidential will prove that to the rest of the world, as well.

Let's talk about The Usual Suspects. Did you guys have any idea that it was going to be the phenomenon that it was?
I guess not. I was a little bit more in the dark maybe than most of the actors, because I didn't go to dailies. (Director) Bryan (Singer) and I decided early on that it would be better for him and for me not to start second-guessing what was coming across because there were too many levels of subtlety and if I started going to dailies and thinking "Oh, that didn't work" I might start pushing it in another way...and skewer the organic nature of how we were going. That was the first time I stopped going to dailies and other than my own film (Albino Alligator) I haven't gone since. I think it's dangerous because you wind up falling in love with moments that might wind up not being in the movie, and who wants to go through that frustration. So I was really protected by that process and put myself completely in Bryan's hands...I was at a place where I'd played a series of slightly more bombastic characters. And I felt that I needed, as an actor, to play something quieter. Because when they first approached me with the script, they didn't tell me what part they wanted me to do, although they'd written Verbal with me in mind, because they knew that I don't like to know that going in. I just want to focus on the story. Then if there's one particular character that I respond to, I'll let them know that and make the embarrassing mistake of choosing the character that, they tell me, Tom Hanks is playing (laughs). But no, there was no way to know. I was confused by it, but I thought it was the most brilliant screenplay. Then when I went and saw it...I was absolutely dazzled. And to give you an idea that none of us really knew what we had, Gabriel Byrne came to that screening convinced he was Kyser Söse! (laughs) I remember at the end of the screening seeing Gabriel and Bryan over in a corner having this heated argument! To me, that was what was going to make it a lasting film. It doesn't hand you anything on a silver platter. It makes you work. I feel that way about L.A. Confidential, too. So, I want to do another film with Bryan...if we can find something that really motivates both of us. He is, without question, someone who's going to be around at the top of his profession for a very long time.

Tell me about Swimming With Sharks. A lot of people view that as a training film that should be watched by all college grads heading for Hollywood.
I read that script when I was in London, working on Looking for Richard. I fell off the bed in my hotel room, while I was reading it. It was so brilliant. It's really an examination of ambition in our society. The most memorable screening I went to of that was when I took it to Washington D.C. and showed it to the White House staff, congressional aides, and senator's assistants. And there was this massive pouring of people coming at me after that screening saying "You don't understand, I work for Senator So-and-So and this is my fucking life!" (laughs) And several high-level people said to me that after seeing it they'd never treat their assistants the same again. So I'm glad we had a global effect with it (laughs). I'm very proud of that film, not only because it's so potent, but because we made it for $950,000 in 18 days, and it doesn't necessarily look that way. So, it can be done.

How was it working on Glengarry Glen Ross with all those powerhouse actors?
It was really because of Al Pacino that I got that part. He'd seen me in this play in New York...We treated the rehearsal process very much like a play. We rehearsed for three weeks...and it was funny how we all started to take on the characteristics of our parts during the filming. I was thinking that I had no right to be there, that I was a stooge, that I was going to be found out at any moment, definitely going to be fired because, you know, there were all these fuckin' guys--Pacino, Ed Harris, Jack Lemmon, Alan Arkin--and I'm the guy they all hate! And let me tell you, it's really convincing when actors of that caliber call you a "pussy." (laughs) I was so depressed! It's such a great piece and a great story. But sometimes when you're doing a really int ense piece, it helps to have some levity on the set, so we were all playing jokes on each other. The one that was played on me, I don't know if you remember the scene where I storm out of my office and yell at Arkin to go to lunch? It was finally time for my close-up. And little did I know that Pacino had arranged for everyone in the cast and crew to, once I had gone back in my office and shut the door, leave the set! And only the camera was there rolling alone. So I storm out of the door yelling "Will you go...to..." to just total emptiness! And I yelled "You assholes!" And there was laughter just echoing from everywhere and everyone!

Walk me through Oscar night through the eyes of a nominee and then a winner.
You go through a lot of emotions. I went through a lot having to do with my family and the fact that my father had passed away very recently, before that night. My mother was able to be there with me, because without them, without my mother in particular, I don't think I would've amounted to much. There's so many things you go through because you grow up watching the Oscars, so you have a perception about it, then suddenly you find yourself on the other side of it. I remember when I did my very first talk show, and it was Johnny Carson and I did it with Johnny. And I used to go to The Tonight Show almost every night, five nights a week when I could get tickets. And watching him live every night. And then years later when I was promoting a TV movie I was doing, he had me on and then suddenly there I was, feeling...reversed! I was always used to looking at Johnny on the right, then suddenly here I was looking at him on the left! And there was this audience and these lights and much smaller than I thought. So it was a little like that, driving in a limo on the way to the ceremony, watching the pre-Oscar show on a TV in the limo and I remember saying to my mom "We used to watch this at home!"

It's a little like being Alice on the other side of the looking glass?
Completely. And just not wanting to fall down the hole! So the evening is just sort of fraught with memories and it's history, so you think "What am I doing here?!" And like on the set of Glengarry, "When are they going to discover I'm a complete fraud and escort me out of here?!" (laughs) I hadn't started to think about what I would say until the night before. I had been working on Albino every day and the night before I came up with something...then when you actually hear your name called the next night, your mind just goes completely blank. You have no memory of what you say, at all. It's a very emotional moment. Then you go out and face a phalanx of photographers and reporters and then I went right back to work the next day. I was back on the dubbing stage at 9:30 a.m. with Per Hallberg, who'd also won that night for sound design with Braveheart. We brought our Oscars, set them on the console, intimidated the mixers and said "Let's get to work." And we worked a long day that day. And that was the best way to do it.

Tell me a little about working with Mr. Eastwood.
(Imitating him) Mr. Zen Director? He is very careful about not over-intellectualizing. So there's not very much conversation about the work. There's a great deal of conversation about other things. He makes you feel like you know more about the part than he does. Any idea or feeling you have about the part, he's open to. I think he's smart enough to always leave himself room to get out if the idea doesn't work. It's the most relaxed, fast, easygoing set I've ever been on. Nobody's yelling "Quiet!" "Action!" "Cut!" "Shut up!" He doesn't say "Action!" He doesn't say "Cut!" He says "Stop" sometimes, which cracks me up. You very often don't know if you're rolling or not, which is very interesting. I think his way of making a film is very collaborative in an unannounced way. He makes every department be responsible for itself, including the actors. He fills you with confidence. He only does a few takes usually, so you'd better be ready, and that's in every department.

Albino Alligator was your first directorial effort. What's your advice for first-time directors?
There is no job and there is no book and there is nobody who can prepare you for what it will be like, I suspect because every experience is different. I was fortunate to have worked with enough directors, some of them first-timers, where I was able to observe. We have this unusual job, as actors, where we get to watch other people do what we do. And that includes if you have aspirations to direct, you get to watch directors. So I watched on a lot of film sets and took notes and observed...made notes about the kind of environment I wanted, how I wanted to treat people, how I wanted people to treat each other and the work. And I also had the opportunity to call directors that I admired who would actually take my phone calls. Sidney Lumet was one of the first calls I made. I thought "Well, here's a man whose first film took place in one room, 12 Angry Men." And we talked about differen
t ways to establish claustrophobia cinematically. He was a huge help. Gave me lots of great pointers. I wanted to start my first experience as a director on something that was small and action-driven. I had a wonderful time and was blessed with a great cast and crew. It did very well overseas, much better than it did here.

What I really liked about it was that you shot it in a very straightforward way, without pumping it up with fancy shots. I have to say I'm getting burned out on the whole MTV style of filmmaking.
I feel the same way with a lot of the films I see. I went into Albino knowing on a certain level that a lot of people might go see it because I directed it. But at a certain point, I wanted the audience to forget who directed and wanted my hands to just sort of lay off. Often I go to a film and can feel a director's hands all over it, and maybe not trusting the story or the actors. I just wanted to see as an experiment for myself if I could lay back. I'm pretty pleased because I feel that I kind of disappeared a little bit with that film.

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Sidney Lumet: The Hollywood Interview

Director Sidney Lumet.



SIDNEY LUMET: THE MASTER SPEAKS
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the May 1997 issue of Venice Magazine.

Regarded by many as the finest motion picture director of his generation, Sidney Lumet's films have been nominated for over fifty Academy Awards. Born in Philadelphia in 1924 to parents who were veteran performers in the Yiddish theater, Lumet initially took to the stage as a child actor, making his debut on radio at age four and stage debut at the Yiddish Art Theater at five. He went on to appear in many Broadway plays, including "Dead End." He made his only film appearance at 15 in One Third of a Nation (1939). When WW II broke out, Lumet's career was put on hold as he did his U.S. Army service in India and Burma as a radar repairman from 1942-46.
Upon his return to the States, he organized an off-Broadway actors' group and became its director. During this time, he also directed in summer stock and taught acting at the High School of Professional Arts. In 1950, he joined CBS, where he soon won recognition as a gifted director of TV drama ("You are There," "Omnibus," "Best of Broadway," "Alcoa Theater," and "Goodyear Playhouse," among others). He was given his first chance to direct a motion picture with 12 Angry Men in 1957 when the film's producer and star, Henry Fonda, took a shine to the young director and his TV work. Thanks to his TV experience, Lumet was able to complete the tightly structured courtroom drama in 19 days on a budget of $343,000. With the help of cameraman Boris Kaufman, Lumet used the space restrictions of the cramped setting to advantage, generating uncommon tension from the claustrophobic confines of the jury room. The film and its director were nominated for Academy Awards. Lumet won the Director's Guild Award and the film was widely praised by critics. It would lay the groundwork for territory that Lumet would explore in many of his future films: humanity attempting to prevail amid cynicism and corruption in an urban, political setting with a righteous protagonist standing alone in this harsh world in which he is attacked from all sides, sometimes by those he loves and trusts the most.
Lumet received another nod from the DGA for his handling of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), on which he applied a masterful mix of static and dynamic camerawork, turning the play into a distinctly cinematic work with a classic performance from Katharine Hepburn in the lead.
Lumet's growing reputation was further enhanced by his intelligent handling of the Cold War thriller Fail Safe (1964), and his compassionate treatment of a complex psychological theme in The Pawnbroker (1965), the profoundly disturbing story of a Holocaust survivor's anguished existence in New York's Harlem amidst his burning memories of the concentration camps. After generating a powerful drama of the wretched life in a British military prison in The Hill (1965), the first of his four collaborations with star Sean Connery, which also included Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and the little-seen masterpiece The Offense (1973), Lumet's next big commercial splash came with Serpico (1973), the riveting true-life police thriller starring Al Pacino about an honest cop trying to expose widespread corruption within the NYPD. Lumet followed this classic with the equally-lauded Dog Day Afternoon (1975), again with Pacino in the lead in a story ripped from current headlines about a young Brooklyn man who robs a bank to pay for his lover's sex change operation. This was followed by another classic of the 70's, Network (1976), his greatest commercial triumph. Although the film, which was written by Paddy Chayefsky, was denounced by broadcasters and many critics as preposterously false, it was a huge moneymaker earned several Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. It won four Oscars in the writing and acting categories. Lumet next shared an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay of Prince of the City (1981), another true story of police corruption in New York. His subsequent films in the 80's received mixed notices, with the notable exceptions of the riveting The Verdict (1982) and Running on Empty (1988). In 1995, Lumet wrote the best-selling book Making Movies which is now in its seventh printing.
Lumet's 40th film, being released this month, is Night Falls on Manhattan, which Lumet adapted for the screen from Robert Daley's novel Tainted Evidence. The film explores familiar Lumet territory of political corruption, tough cops, and the mean streets of New York in telling the tale of one Sean Casey (Andy Garcia) an Irish-Puerto Rican former cop and wet-behind the-ears assistant D.A. who is thrust into the limelight after being chosen to prosecute a high profile, headline making case. As he moves deeper into the criminal justice system, Casey's world is torn apart, as he experiences personal and professional betrayal after discovering a crime and cover-up among those closest to him. Richard Dreyfuss, Lena Olin, Ron Leibman and Ian Holm give fine support in the large, emsemble cast. The film is a riveting drama, and ranks among Lumet's best work to date.
Although now in his early 70's, Sidney Lumet looks at least ten years younger and carries himself with the countenance and boundless energy of a man in his mid-20's. Mr. Lumet sat down recently in a plush suite at the Four Seasons Hotel to reflect on his prolific and distinguished career, and to talk about Night Falls On Manhattan.

How did someone who seemed to have a bright future as an actor, suddenly fall in love with directing?
SIDNEY LUMET: You know one of the things in everybody's life, and people always seem to think I'm kidding when I say this, luck has a tremendous amount to do with it. It's stunning to me how big a part luck plays in your life. I'd been an actor, and I was making a decent living, not great, but decent, and I was teaching--I'd set up the drama course at the High School for the Performing Arts--and a friend of mine, Yul Brynner, was directing for television at that time, and a wonderful director by the way. And Yul said (imitating him)'Come on over! Nobody knows what they're doing. It's great fun! You'll make good living!' And so I went into CBS as Yul's a.d., his assistant director. And then when Yul left to do "The King and I" on Broadway, I took over the show, which was a melodrama called "Danger." It was a half hour show every Tuesday. So I really just fell into it. I did that for some months. Then I started doing more shows from there.

Henry Fonda was apparently instrumental in bringing you onto 12 Angry Men. How did the two of you hook up originally?
Again, luck. I had worked with Reggie Rose, who wrote the script, on "Danger." We had done some of Reggie's first scripts. He always liked what I did with his work. So when the movie came up--I had not done the original television show--Reggie wanted me to do it. Before I began directing, I and another group of actors had formed a workshop off-Broadway. And we'd be there doing exercises, vocal exercises, physical exercises, and work on scenes. And I had done some directing there, that's actually where I started directing. There wasn't an official director in the group, but somebody had to say 'You go over here,' 'You do this,' So I started doing it...and at the end of every year, we tried to find a new American play that we would mount in a workshop format...now, we're talking about luck again. One of the actors in the workshop, a guy named Joe Bernard, was also in "Mister Roberts" at the time on Broadway...when it came to the year end project, Fonda came down to see him. Two or three years later, Reggie brought (Fonda) 12 Angry Men and mentioned my name to direct, and Fonda said "Oh yeah, I remember him. I saw something he did down in the Village two or three years ago that was extraordinary! Yeah, I think he could do it." And that was it. Again, talk about luck!

How did you build and then maintain the tension in 12 Angry Men since you were working in such a confined space on such a tight schedule. Was it what you did with the actors, was it camerawork...
A combination of both. Technically it's an enormously complicated movie. You'd think that shooting in a tight space would be the easiest thing in the world, when in fact the easiest thing to shoot is a cattle round-up! Just put six cameras on it and all the footage will be so marvelous you won't know what to choose because the action is so terrific. Here, through the slow intensification of performance, and then also through a very subtle use of the camera: use of lenses, use of lighting...not trying to avoid the claustrophobia, but trying to take advantage of it. Make it more claustrophobic. Make the ceiling feel lower, make it seem as if the walls are closing in on them. We weren't kidding anybody. We were going to be in one room. Let's use it dramatically!

With Night Falls on Manhattan, I noticed that you return to some familiar themes in many of your films: the lone protagonist fighting and exposing corruption, and so on. Is there something specific that occurred in your life that interests you in these themes?
Nothing that I know of. It's an age-old interest. What I find interesting about Night Falls on Manhattan is that (Andy Garcia's character) doesn't pursue anything, it pursues him. And slowly the world that he's living in keeps closing in, and closing in with a complexity he never thought possible, and what he always thought was simple. And suddenly it becomes like peeling an onion, layer after layer, until there's no bottom to it. It just never stops. So that circumstances kind of overtake him, and it's a question of what he does in those circumstances. So in that sense it's different, but it's in the same area. For want of a better word, we'll call them 'The Justice Movies.' (laughs)

Is that what drew you to the book Tainted Evidence initially, those same themes?
The book is actually quite different from the screenplay. Both begin with the same incident--which really happened. It may not have happened exactly that way, but it certainly happened. That was the kickoff, that if this story was true, that a bunch of cops had gone up to knock off the biggest drug dealer in Harlem, and that he had took out four of them and escaped anyway, and the defense that was offered in the real trial was that (the cops and the dealer) were in business together, and that this was self-defense because he knew they were coming up there to execute him, and that if that is so, since that is so ass-over-tea kettle to begin with, such a reversal from what you normally think would happen, all of a sudden it's 'Wait a minute, where am I. None of this makes sense.' I thought, okay, now let's take the prosecutor, the prosecutor's office, all those people, and what happens afterwards. How do they cope?

So that part of the screenplay was all original?
Everything (in the film) from the trial on was original.

I know you've only written two of your other films prior to this, Prince of the City (with Jay Presson Allen) andQ & A. How do you find writing and directing as opposed to just directing?
I love the writing process. It's fairly new to me. And I don't consider myself a full-fledged writer yet. A full-fledged writer is really someone who can invent people, who can get that individual sound of people. So far, I have been, again, very lucky in the sense that, because of my interests, I wind up dealing with cops, so I know how they sound. I've spent so much time with them--thirty years. And the three pictures I've written, the first one in a sense was even easier. The protagonist in that, who was based on a guy named Bob Lucie, I had all his tapes, because he was wearing a wire all those years. So we just transcribed exactly what was said into a lot of the scenes. With Q & A I branched out a little bit more, with Night Falls branched out a little more and who knows, maybe one day I'll be a writer. We'll see. (laughs)

It's a great life.
It's wonderful way, isn't it? And I'm not an egotist, so when we're in rehearsal and the actor says 'Sidney, this line doesn't feel right,' or two actors may say 'Sidney, this scene isn't going anywhere,' we'll talk it out and I'll go home and re-write it and sometimes it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to do it through a writer! (laughs)

I read in your book that a lot of the dialogue in Dog Day Afternoon was improvised. Do you encourage improvisation from your actors?
No I don't. I'm not a believer in improvisation, although I like it as a rehearsal process, but not for shooting. I find most improvisations wind up being rather self-indulgent, and what takes seven minutes to say in an improv could actually be said in a minute or thirty seconds. And time is precious on the screen. But Dog Day presented a unique problem: in its style...the first obligation of that picture was to let the audience know that it really happened. And as a result, the style of that picture isn't even realistic, it's naturalistic. I wanted it to feel like a documentary, and as part of that, I told the actors 'Look, as long as you don't change the meaning of anything, or shift the scene to another direction, use your own words. ' And by the way I did this with the complete approval of the writer, Frank Pierson, who was there and wrote a wonderful screenplay. And we never changed the structure of anything...much of what we used were Frank's words. But he saw the advantage of that. And what we would then do, we wouldn't just leave it as an improvisation. I brought my sound man in and the boom operator, and we recorded the improvisations and that night a bunch of secretaries would sit down and type them up, then Frank and I would sit down...and by the time we began shooting, we had the shooting script with dialogue composed of the improvisations. Only two of the scenes in the film are actually improvised on camera: Pacino's scenes with Charlie Durning and Pacino's yelling 'Attica' at the cops outside the bank.

You seem to experiment with a great deal of styles in your films. How do you respond to critics who accuse you of not having a distinctive personal style?
They're not wrong in the sense that I think that my job is to serve the material. When I'm doing Murder On the Orient Express, I don't want that to look like or feel like Dog Day Afternoon. I shift styles by picture and by subject matter, and by subject matter I mean not only the genre the picture's in, but what the picture's about emotionally. And the only thing is, I do it with great subtlety. To me, a bad shot is a shot that you notice.

Who are some present day filmmakers whose work you admire?
Gee, there's a lot...I love Zemeckis' work. I think Spielberg has become a great director. And I'm not using the word 'great' like Variety uses the word 'great,' I mean of all-time. I think two of the greatest American movies every made are E.T. and Schindler's List. Those are two great movies in the classic sense of the word. E.T., even though it's very different kind of movie in that it's not 'serious,' is one of the most beautiful, perfectly-made movies I've ever seen. An extraordinary piece of work. Nobody knows who hasn't tried it, how hard it is to make a fantasy work. Film is a very literal medium...and when that group of bicycles took off, my heart just leapt, as did the whole audience the night I saw it. The whole place just screamed and cheered and applauded...the sense of emotional release that you had from that, the sense that they were going to win--that's great moviemaking!

Any other names that come to mind?
Well the bad thing about a question like this is that I run the risk of offending those that I leave out, either intentionally or not. There's so many...I love Jonathan Demme. I love Ron Howard's work. He's a wonderful director.

What do you think about the independent film movement?
Well...I'm not sure there is an independent film movement. I hope there is, but Miramax belongs to Disney and Harvey Weinstein is getting himself up to 30 and 40 million dollar budgets, a far cry from where he began. New Line belongs to Turner, so their Fine Line budgets are going up, up, up...The history of independents, by which we really mean in this country, is independent financing of movies--we don't mean 'independent movies.' John Sayles, for example, still makes independent movies. And he's another director I love. There have always been the John Sayles', the individuals who get it done. But the history of independent movies in this country seems to indicate that the independents eventually all get swallowed up by the majors: Dino di Laurentiis, Lorimar...and I think that'll happen more and more as the problems with distribution, I guess I should say the stranglehold on distribution, gets more complete.

Since so many independent-minded films did well at the Oscars this year, do you see those types of films coming back into vogue, like in the late 60's and 70's?
I don't think so. I think you're going to see a big backlash next year! (laughs) I think you're going to see the most expensive movie from every studio nominated next year. I'm probably wrong, but what can I say? I'm a cynical old man! (laughs)

Read more!

FRANCIS COPPOLA INTERVIEW!

(Francis Coppola on the set of Youth Without Youth.)


FRANCIS COPPOLA GOES BACK TO BASICS
by Alex Simon

Perhaps more than any other filmmaker in history, Francis Coppola has tasted the fruits of phenomenal success, and also suffered the tortures of the damned. After becoming arguably the most successful director of the 1970s with his quartet of films that are regarded as the pinnacle of American filmmaking (The Godfather I & II, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now won a cumulative 11 Academy Awards), Coppola’s life in the 1980s was met with a series of professional disappointments and personal tragedy: a series of ambitious films from his Zoetrope Studios were financial and critical disasters. In 1986, his eldest son, Gian-Carlo, was killed in a boating accident.

In the interim, Coppola never stopped working, with more than 30 films to his credit as director, nearly 70 as producer, and 25 as screenwriter (Coppola won a Best Screenplay Oscar in 1970 for Patton). In addition, the Coppola family has joined the ranks of the Fondas and Hustons in the number of talented progeny they have sired over several generations: Coppola’s sister Talia Shire is an Academy-Award nominated actress; his late father Carmine Coppola was an Oscar-winning film composer; daughter Sofia is an Oscar-winning screenwriter and the first woman to be nominated for an Oscar as Best Director; and nephew Nicolas Cage (real last name Coppola) is an Oscar-winning actor and has been a renowned international star for nearly 20 years. Son Roman is also a successful filmmaker and producer.

After a ten year hiatus from directing, his last feature being the 1997 John Grisham adaptation of The Rainmaker, Francis Coppola returns to his avant-garde roots that began in the mid-60s with films like You’re a Big Boy Now and The Rain People. Youth Without Youth stars Tim Roth as Dominic Matei, an elderly Romanian man in 1938 who, just before he is about to commit suicide, is struck by lightning and miraculously survives. Not only does he survive, but he finds that his body has begun aging in reverse, making him a young man again during the rise of Fascism in Europe of the late 1930s. Gifted not only with a second chance at life, but also renewed youth, Dominic finds that he has the rare gift of having the body of a young man, but the wisdom of an aged one. He re-expereinces a first great love affair, and a series of moral choices that dictate the course of his second life. Based on the writings of religious and philosophical scholar Mircea Eliade, Youth Without Youth offers some of the most stunning imagery (equal parts beautiful and repellent) put onto film in recent memory, and refreshingly asks more questions than it answers. Not for every taste, to be sure, and in no danger of being set up for sequel to be helmed by Michael Bay, Francis Coppola seems to have come full-circle with this fascinating, and challenging cinematic work.

I sat down with Mr. Coppola recently, during a short respite before he was off traveling the world once again, this time to Argentina, where he is in pre-production on his next film, Tetro.

This is one of those films that has many different layers to it, both conscious and unconscious. Was it the complexity of the story that drew you to it?

Francis Coppola: Absolutely, but I’m not sure that it’s such a complex story. My feeling was always that, like Hamlet, we all know what’s going on here: a guy’s father is murdered and the guy plots revenge. That’s what Hamlet is on the surface. The story of Youth Without Youth is exotic and certainly a lot of crazy things happen, not unlike an episode of "The Twilight Zone" in some ways, but it’s not difficult to understand what it’s about.

But it’s really more about the subtext than the context.

Well, the subtext is a different story, and what I think is the real fun of it. You can think about it and relate to it in terms of where you are in your own life, maybe see it again at different times in your life and each time it will take on a new meaning. That’s what’s fun for me.

I feel like I might have to see it a couple more times to really feel as though I’ve seen the film.

But I would argue that you didn’t miss any of the story the first time you saw it. What you missed perhaps, were some of the implications, but you’re supposed to miss them. Again, not that this is Hamlet, but you could enjoy that play simply on the level of a murder mystery, and you should. You shouldn’t feel that you can’t enjoy it because it’s somehow over your head. It’s not over your head. It’s over everybody’s head. It’s meant to be a positive thing that the story can always be changing and taking on new meaning for you as your life changes and things take on new meanings. We live in a time of dramatized criminology where we have to have all the clues and have all the questions be answered in sixty minutes, or less. But this is not that kind of a story. Some of the mysteries here have to do with the nature of existence and who could pinpoint that? You could get into a long conversation about why you can’t, and that’s something that I enjoy doing.

This is a return to avant-garde filmmaking for you.

Well, that would be a privilege…

Your early films: You’re a Big Boy Now, and The Rain People were certainly avant-garde, as was The Conversation and Rumble Fish. Plus, if you look throughout your body of work, there are avant-garde elements in virtually all of your films. Obviously it’s an artistic movement which had a profound effect on you. Were those the elements of Youth Without Youth that made you want to step back behind a camera again, after ten years?

Those first three you mentioned were original screenplays, which is what I want to get back to doing. A lot of directors have a hiatus between films, usually about three years, especially if you’re writing your own stuff, because it takes two years to write something. So I don’t think it’s that unusual for a director to be absent for a while, unless you’re talking about someone who’s just a big director, who’s got three or four scripts being developed for him all the time, and he just keeps working because he wants to work every year. In my case, I was searching for what my little niche would be. I didn’t want to be a “big director” directing big, complicated movies with big stars for big studios. You know, the sort of movie that’s going to have a lot of producers and notes, and that kind of thing. You look at a movie today, and you’ve got a dozen producers listed. I also didn’t necessarily want to do a film just because I thought it would be a hit, and make me a lot of money, because I’ve got plenty of money. What I really was looking for was some kind of personal fulfillment, so I was trying to write this ambitious screenplay called Megalopolis, which was about utopia, which sort of got tough after 9/11, and I didn’t know how to deal with that story, which was set in New York, without somehow incorporating the tragedy of the Twin Towers. So I was sort of trapped, and a little depressed, and then ultimately a friend of mine who I had given my script to and was an associate of Eliade, suggested I read some of his work. Because even in Megalopolis, there were a lot of inquiry into the nature of consciousness and time, and she said “You have to read some Eliade,” and when I read Youth Without Youth it was like I had been hit by lightning, and I thought ‘Gee, I could just go off and make this. I could fly off to Romania, use my own money, and the kind of technology that I had done when I was young and made films like The Rain People, and just have all the equipment in a truck and ship it there.’ And although this is a big picture, I approached the production in such a logical way, that I could afford to make it exactly as I wanted to. In the process, I was able to fix this part of my life that was so frustrating.

So in many ways, there were parallels between your own life and that of the Tim Roth character.

Yes, and I realized that. I thought it was good that I was making a movie about something that I was going through at the time. I felt that when I was young, I was catapulted into an old man’s career with The Godfather, which I made when I was about 30. I wanted to be a young filmmaker, but here I was, a big Hollywood filmmaker. So I thought, why not at 67, try to have a young, student filmmaker experience. That’s why I tried to hire young people: my cinematographer was barely 28, and try to make a movie with young eyes.

A few months back, I interviewed William Friedkin, who’s going through the exact same thing in terms of going back to his roots, as are many directors of your generation. His latest film, Bug, primarily takes place on a single set with two characters. Throughout our talk, Billy kept commenting on how if he were in his 20s today, he probably wouldn’t be in the movie business, simply because the kinds of stories that he likes to tell aren’t being funded by studios anymore.

What would he be doing now?

We didn’t get into that, but I know for the past decade he’s been directing operas. So maybe he’d be focusing more on the stage, or on writing.

Well, I think filmmaking is the most exciting art form there is. First of all, it’s young, which means it’s going to continue to evolve, and it also encompasses so many other art forms. What Billy says is certainly true. It’s a tough time because the studios which used to owned by showmen and wacky guys like Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck who really loved movies are now owned by big communications czars who are more interested in the stock price of their companies than they are in movies, so it’s tough. There’s not a big variety of filmmaking happening anymore. Everything has got to be a big-budget blockbuster, because that’s the only way they can support what they’ve got going. I understand that it’s tough to even get a drama made today. But it was always tough, even when Billy and I started.

I think Billy’s point was, and Peter Bogdanovich made this same point when we spoke a few years ago, when you guys started out in the mid-60s, the guys who ran the studios were interested in telling the same stories that you were. Today, that simply isn’t the case.

They’re not even interested in telling stories anymore. They’re just interested in making money, which they always were, but with a difference: if Sam Goldwyn could do a picture like The Best Years of Our Lives, he was proud to do this beautiful drama, and to have it make money. But success today is defined differently, I think. The prize is the big stock price, and the G5 jet, and whatever it is. They’re not show people so much. They’re business people. I mean, Zanuck was a writer for many years, and Warner and Goldwyn had come out of the early days of exhibition, so they were coming at it from a different mind set. Harvey (Weinstein) is like that. Harvey is the most like the old guys: he’s tough and vulgar and it might be a nightmare to work with him, although I never have, but still he loves movies and he wants to have the best movie of the year, every year.

So when your kids Roman and Sofia expressed interest in entering the business, you didn’t discourage them at all?

No, I disagree with Billy on that. I think it’s still the most exciting art form in the world, and I don’t think kids should be discouraged from anything they want to do. I mean, what’s the point of life, to see who dies with the most toys? My answer would be to die with the best memories.

I agree with you, but I don’t think a lot of the power structure of Hollywood does.

No? What about somebody like Mark Cuban? He seems like he likes his toys.

He’s also got good taste. He’s put his name on some interesting pictures.

Yeah, that’s true.

Let’s get back to Youth Without Youth. It’s a picture with an epic scope. Was shooting in Eastern Europe with a crew from that region make it a different experience than shooting in the U.S. with Americans?

The crew was amazing but the primary thing that made it different was the fact that it was a masterpiece of production: because I put up my own money, I was able to eliminate a lot of the waste that comes through banking arrangements and completion bonds and various studio affiliations…you’d be surprised how much creative financing goes on. So the trick was I said ‘We’re going, and they money is there,’ and because of that, we didn’t have to jump through other people’s hoops. And the crews there also work for far less than the crews here. We made it with a 100% Romanian crew, with the exception of hair and makeup because I knew that would be important and I wanted the very best. Those two people for hair and makeup wound up costing me almost as much as the entire rest of the crew! In terms of everything else, it all becomes fewer: the number of people you have to have on-set, the number of people making decisions. It was really wonderful.

Tell us about how you like to work with actors. I’ve been a fan of Tim Roth for years, and he does terrific work in this.

Tim is one of those actors who’s always done good work, but has never had his day in the sun, where they say “Wow! Look at what he can do.” They did it with Nicolas (Cage) finally, after Leaving Las Vegas. And Tim gives a tremendous performance. He had to be 24 and he had to be 94 and every age in between. Plus, he had to have a heartbreaking love story, whereas he’s largely played villains before. Plus, his head is wrapped in gauze during a big chunk of the film, so he’s just acting with his eyes.

You’re known for giving actors a great deal of latitude. Is your philosophy to cast well, and then get out of the way?

Well, it’s more complicated than that. I always do a couple weeks of rehearsal and I have a theory that during the early phase of the movie, one-by-one the actors find their character. Once they find their characters, then they are the person. For example, if I said to you ‘Alex, I want you to go down the hall and slap the press lady,’ and you said “Well, okay. If I have to.” You would do it as Alex would do it. But if you’re Tim Roth and after two or three weeks you’ve arrived at who your character is, whatever I ask you to do, you’re going to do it in character. You’ll know the character better than I do. So in that sense, I do give the actors a lot of leeway because I want the best for them, and I want their characters to come alive. But I do lots of things to put you in the context. I love using props, and laying them on actors, in a way making very narrow the path that you’re going to go through. So if you Alex are going to play Dominic, I’m going to surround you with Dominic props and Dominic stimulus and give you a Dominic labyrinth to go through. So you’ll be acting in a very free way, but you’re also in a route that’s been made for you that can’t miss.

And sometimes you do that on the spur of the moment. I heard that you’re the one who dropped that cat into Brando’s lap during the opening scene of The Godfather to help him get into character.

Yeah, and it was a cat that just happened to be wandering around the soundstage. It helped Marlon to focus. He was talking to the other person in the scene, but he was also focusing on petting and playing with the cat that was on his lap. It put him in the moment.

So do you block during your rehearsals?

No, we do more improvisations and games and odd things that I think of or other things that people suggest that might lead the actor to click into who they are. I’ll tell you a Billy Friedkin story. On The French Connection, Gene Hackman was playing the part of Popeye Doyle. He said in the first few weeks, he had no idea who he was. He said “I put on this funny porkpie hat, and was talking fast…and at one point in the morning, it was cold and I went to craft service and got a cup of coffee and a donut and I dunked the donut in the coffee, took one bite of the donut and then I tossed the donut in the street. Then I heard a voice say ‘That’s him! That’s Popeye.’” And it was Friedkin, who had watched the whole thing. So sometimes, some little moment can give you the key to the entire character.

Now that DVDs have become the new cinematheque, and you’ve recorded commentary tracks for some of your most famous films, is it easier for you to watch your work with some time behind it?

I don’t watch my work, really. Once in a while I’ll be in a hotel room, and I’ll notice they’re playing one of my films on TV. Last I was in Lima, Peru and they were playing Jack, with Robin Williams. And I liked it, and remembered liked working with those kids. When they ask me to do a commentary, they sit me in front of a screen and I usually haven’t seen the film, as with Dracula most recently, and then I just say whatever I think while I’m watching it. Once I finish a film, I’m usually done with it. I’m much more interested in the new one than I am in the old one. Although sometimes it’s a very pleasant experience. One of my films that’s one of my favorites is Rumble Fish, made in the period when I supposedly wasn’t making good movies, but I think Rumble Fish is as good as any movie I’ve ever made.

But oftentimes artists are their own worst critics. I’ve interviewed many filmmakers who have gone back to their work that was excoriated at the time of its release and they think that it’s actually pretty good. I’ve also spoken with others who’ve had the opposite experience.

Yeah, I don’t agree with what a lot of the critics have said about my work. Certainly, The Outsiders would fall under that category and the version we put out on DVD with the extra footage I think is really terrific. Even Jack, which I watched last week, I realize that nobody liked it, but I must say it was a production where I was a director-for-hire, I thought it was a very sweet movie. And Big, which was essentially the same idea, which was my first objection as to why anyone would want to make Jack, with a film as good as Big already out there. I think Big is certainly the better film of the two, because it was the first time that idea was done, and maybe Robin wasn’t the best for that kind of mawkish character. He can be absolutely brilliant, but maybe I let him be a bit too sentimental in Jack. People seemed to resent the fact that a guy like me, who is supposedly a more intellectual, avant-garde filmmaker, would make a film like Jack.

Yeah, that was the reaction that I remembered. When people see a Francis Coppola picture, they’re raising the bar higher than they would for most other filmmakers, and they want something more serious, or at least something that’s perhaps somewhat elevated from the rest of the pack.

But there are all kinds of movies…

I agree with you. But human beings, especially critics and scholars, like to pigeonhole people.

Definitely. And from the artist’s point of view, that can be very frustrating, and hurtful.

I know a lot of your work has been heavily influenced by the Italian neo-realists: Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti, Pasolini. Who are some of your other influences?

I love Fellini’s films, both the pre-La Dolce Vita films, which was a revelation and the films he did after that. I love Kurosawa because he just made so many great films. He was a case where his new film was as great as anything he’d done before. I don’t know how he was able to do it. I loved the French New Wave and Truffaut, and Antonioni, and Rossellini was like the father to them all…Visconti with Rocco and His Brothers…

One of my favorite films.

That’s the kind of movie I’m making in Argentina next. It’s the story of brothers.

I read somewhere that the banquet scene at the end of Visconti’s The Leopard was what influenced the wedding scene at the opening of The Godfather.

No, on the third Godfather I looked at The Leopard a lot, but on the first one, I based it on my family weddings. (laughs) I quite loved Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds which is quite possibly one of the greatest films ever made. I love G.W. Pabst. I love the silent films: Murnau’s Sunrise.

Did you study Murnau’s Nosferatu before doing Dracula?

Not really. I looked much more at Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr, which is quite different. Nosferatu is quite obviously the greatest vampire story ever made. I couldn’t get 100% with Bergman, but there are some Bergman films I adore, like Smiles of a Summer Night, Wild Strawberries…there have been such great movies made in the hundred years of their existence, even in the first thirty years. But G.W. Pabst was always one of my favorites. Eisenstein is another one.

I know you got an early break working for the legendary Roger Corman. What was that like?

It wasn’t so much a break, as it was a real job. I had never worked so hard for such a small amount of money in my life. The thrill of it was, you really were learning the reality of production and how to really get out there and make movies for a little money and how not to waste money. Roger clearly was a businessman. He was a Stanford engineer, a good guy, and he was doing it because he was smart. I treasure the years I worked for him. I started out as his assistant, and he was a wonderful character.

Tell us about the new picture you’re doing in Argentina.

It’s a very personal film made on a similar scale of Youth Without Youth, although not quite as big. I have Matt Dillon, Javier Bardem, Klaus Maria Brandauer. It’s a story of brothers and fathers, sort of like a Greek myth, or so people have told me. A lot of it is taken from my own memories. I’m consciously going into my Tennessee Williams period, which I’ve always wanted to do. I’m praying for the ghost of Elia Kazan to come and occupy me, because there’s no greater director of actors that ever lived.

Yeah, I also think he was one of the great blenders of cinema-verite style realism and pure cinematic filmmaking.

Yeah, he made so many great movies, but look at Baby Doll, and how striking it still is, 50 years later. What’s the one he did with Lee Remick and Andy Griffith about the radio personality?

A Face in the Crowd.

A Face in the Crowd! Splendor in the Grass, which was one of the most heartbreaking love stories you could ever tell.

He was also one of the great discoverers of screen talent. You’ve also always had an eye for discovering new faces.

I’ve been lucky enough to have some wonderful associates. Fred Roos, who helped me with the casting of The Godfather, and we still work together. Listen, it’s such a privilege to be able to make films, and I’m so grateful that I got wealthy through some surprise of fate that allowed me to finance them. Speaking of, Billy could finance his own movies. He’s rich. He should.

Which brings us back to the beginning of our conversation: how so many of the so-called “Easy Riders and Raging Bulls” are returning to their roots as filmmakers.

There’s no question. For so long, there were filmmakers like the late Michael Ritchie, Fielder Cook, Hal Ashby, there was just such a great heritage of filmmakers who were once out there. Now, speaking for myself, I just want to make personal films and the phrase that you keep using, which I’m going to steal, which is “avant-garde” films, that’s what I want to do. I want to make films you haven’t seen before. I’m so tired of going to a movie theater and seeing a story I’ve seen before. Even if it’s an important director like a Michael Mann, they’re clearly in it to be a part of the studio mill. I know there are a lot of my colleagues who feel the same way I do, and want to make personal films. Maybe a lot of them have been married a lot of times, and can’t quite afford to do what I’m doing. If you’re supporting five families, it’s hard to stop making a lot of money. Look at someone like Brian De Palma. He just keeps making movies, and finds ways to get the money from a variety of sources. I wish George Lucas would take some of his fortune now and make some personal art films, because he’s a very talented filmmaker. No one even knows what George is truly capable of.

It seems like he’s focused more on developing the technological side of his business.

It’s this kind of silly blockbuster competition of who has more billions of dollars. But George is a fabulous avant-garde filmmaker, and the day he just walks out there and takes three 16mm cameras…it’s just one of the greatest wastes of talent that he keeps making Star Wars over and over again. Star Wars was a stunning achievement but now, I wish George would show us the other side of him.

It seems like Spielberg is someone who does do that. It’s like a “one for them” and “one for me” philosophy.

Yeah, Spielberg did Empire of the Sun, which was one of the better films of that period and also discovered Christian Bale as a child. Even Munich I thought was the best film of that year. He took some flack for it, but to have the guts to say the unsayable that maybe everyone in that whole conflict is partly to blame, and he tried to do that. I have nothing but admiration for Steven, and for all filmmakers who make personal films. That’s why we got into this in the first place. That’s why we’re here.

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Tommy Lee Jones: The Hollywood Interview

Tommy Lee Jones: Director, star, co-writer of The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.

TOMMY LEE JONES DIGS DEEP
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally was published in the December/January 2005-06 issue of Venice Magazine.

Tommy Lee Jones first brought his trademark intensity to the box office hit Love Story, in 1970, playing the small, albeit memorable role of Ryan O’Neal’s roommate, a Harvard football player. Appropriately enough, Jones himself was a real-life star of the Harvard gridiron, and graduated with a degree in English Literature just two years prior to Love Story’s release. Born in San Saba, Texas September 15, 1946, Jones was raised in the Midland area of west Texas, and spent his formative high school years at the exclusive St. Mark’s Academy in Dallas. After years perfecting his craft on the stage and in smaller films, Jones first garnered attention with his portrait of Howard Hughes in the 1977 television film The Amazing Howard Hughes, a turn that many consider the definitive portrait of Hughes by an actor to this day. Jones became a household name with his complex portrait of Doolittle Lynn, the ambitious husband of country singer Loretta Lynn (Oscar-winner Sissy Spacek) in Michael Apted’s 1980 classic Coal Miner’s Daughter. From that point on, Jones’ career has moved forward with a momentum that hasn’t ceased.
Tommy Lee Jones, who won a 1993 Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrait of the Javert-like U.S. Marshall who relentlessly pursues Harrison Ford’s Dr. Richard Kimble in The Fugitive, has now added the position of auteur to his already impressive resume. Co-written with Guillermo Arriaga (Amores Perros, 21 Grams), although Jones receives no credit, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada tells the picaresque story of a Texas rancher (Jones) who sets out to avenge the shooting death of his friend at the hands of a callow Deputy Sheriff (Barry Pepper). An existentialist western road trip worthy of the best films by masters such as Sam Peckinpah, Jerry Schatzberg, and Anthony Mann, Three Burials takes the viewer on a harrowing journey that you simply can’t shake off once the credits have rolled. In his feature directing debut (he helmed the television film The Good Old Boys for Turner Network Television in 1995), Jones shows that he is every bit as gifted behind the camera as before it (Jones’ acting chops earned him a Best Actor award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival). The Sony Pictures Classics release hits screens December 22 in limited release and goes wide February 3, 2006.
Tommy Lee Jones spoke with Venice over a beer during a recent stay in Los Angeles. Here’s what transpired:

This film reminded me of the great, existentialist road pictures of the 70s. Are you a Peckinpah fan?
Tommy Lee Jones: Yes, I am. Not for the clichéd reasons of violence and male bondage, but mainly for color and rhythm. It’s interesting you mention him and existentialism, because alienation is a theme of this movie, and we look at if from more than one perspective. Everyone’s an alien.

How was the film born?
Guillermo Arriaga and I thought it up together. This is the movie we wanted to make. I came up with a narrative form, which was basically an old, classical narrative form and we both liked the place and the issues there. With a classical form you can take those issues and raise even more, bigger issues, like alienation.

I like the fact that you took your time with it: the long takes, the emphasis on character. You let the characters be who they were, which you don’t see much in film anymore.
They’re all real. I would stand around the camera and say ‘You know guys, everyone in this movie’s an idiot.’ And they would say “What?!” They didn’t want to hear that because they felt they had a hierarchy of villains and heroes worked out. Eventually they caught on to what I meant, which was they were all human beings.

That’s something else Peckinpah was good at: painting shades of gray. There was no black and white in his films.
Yeah, he made very interesting characters. You just reminded me of the two killers in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. They were very interesting killers, sort of Southern California suave.

Yeah, and they were both gay.
(laughs) Yeah, right.

So it was a completely different take on a familiar theme. Then you had Warren Oates, who was one of our greatest actors. He could say more with a raised eyebrow than he could with a soliloquy.
Yeah, I think so, too. You loved him that movie, but he was a sleazebag. But he was also a hero, and likable, and troubled. Peckinpah had an interest in humanity and a respect for real human character that was admirable.

Let’s talk about your character in the film, who is very much composed of grays. Tell us how you saw him.
When Guillermo and I made this character up, Guillermo wrote the screenplay in Spanish and I translated it, and how did I see it…? We just built him. I didn’t spend a lot of time working on the character once we were filming because I’d already created him. He emerged through the process of Guillermo’s writing and my re-writing and his criticism and this process went on through eleven drafts.

You directed one other film prior to this, The Good Old Boys. What was it like putting on the director’s hat for the first time?
Those were the happiest days of my creative life at that point. It’s a very happy occasion for me to be producer/writer/director/actor, very happy. My motivation, of course, is lust for creative control. I want everybody’s job! I don’t have time for craft service, but I would do it if I had time.

Did you not direct again during the past decade because you didn’t come across any material you were passionate enough about?
Well, those jobs are hard to get. I was busy acting, and I didn’t really aggressively solicit work, because I don’t have to direct movies for a living. My only motivation for directing a movie is complete control. Not everybody’s willing to give that away to a director. Not everybody’s willing to let a director direct. In many situations it seems that a director is expected to take direction.

Did you find that when you directed that first film you had a different take on the filmmaking process because you were already a seasoned actor?
I would think that was a help, it really is. It was an advantage to have been there. I’ve known a lot of directors who are afraid of actors, who hold them in contempt, or pretend to because they are afraid. Or regard them with both fear and contempt, and loathing. Some directors also hold actors in awe somehow, as they would a wizard who is possessed of some incomprehensible magic power or skill. I’m very comfortable with actors. (laughs)

Since you do have that comfort factor with actors, are you the type of director who “casts well,” then gets out of the way, once the cameras roll, or does it depend on the actor?
Of course it depends on the actor! The first thing we look for when we cast is the ability to read. In this screenplay, you can look at the pages and look at the words on them, and it will look pretty simple. You need someone who can read to find out exactly what’s going on there, because most of the action, whether it be emotional or physical, is certainly not in the dialogue.

The great thing about this cast was that while some of the faces were slightly familiar, there were no big stars with the baggage that iconic status entails. This really allowed them to disappear into their characters.
Yeah, wasn’t that wonderful? The thing they all had in common was they were really in love with the story and the idea of doing this, and as a result, were very highly motivated, and considered that reward and motivation enough, because we didn’t have any money.

What was your budget?
Not very much.

But you shot on 35mm, right?
Super 35. It’s easier to tweak and come up with that so-called “anamorphic format,” without using anamorphic lenses, which is a big savings, at least until you get into post-production. (laughs)

You grew up in Texas. Did you spend a lot of time south of the border growing up?
Well, west Texas is a bi-cultural society, so you’re going to be exposed to the Spanish language, culture, food. I started studying Spanish academically in the seventh grade and continued until halfway through college: a total of eight and a half years of academic Spanish. I’ve traveled a great deal in Mexico, Spain, Argentina and I’ve worked with a lot of people who don’t speak English, and I live in San Antonio, actually north of San Antonio, about 165 miles.

You have a working cattle ranch there.
Yeah, it works the hell out of me.

Did you feel an affinity with Latin culture growing up?
I lived in one. There are a lot of ethnocentric people who won’t admit to west Texas culture being bi-cultural…actually there’s only one culture there, and some of those people would deny that it’s of Hispanic character. I hope they see the film. (laughs)

You went from Midland to Dallas for high school, attending an exclusive school called St. Mark’s. What was that like for you?
It was a hell of a culture shock. I wasn’t used to doing any homework. It was a common thing in Midland to settle your differences with other people through violence, and I had to change those two things very quickly, in order to survive.

The gridiron was a place of refuge for you initially, both in high school and in college. Did you discover athletics concurrently with drama?
No. If you’re a kid in west Texas, you’re raised to play football. I had a great desire to play that game as a kid. It was a way for many kids to define achievement, manhood. It was a burning desire of mine from very early on.

When did you know you were an actor?
Well, I still haven’t decided what to do when I grow up. I’ve always thought acting was a lot of fun, and I haven’t had to quit it yet. I stumbled into it first when I was in prep school and stumbled into the little theater they had there and saw a rehearsal going on, and I’d done school plays and had fun, but that was really the first time it caught my eye. I did play Sneezy in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in second grade, and having played the lead in Baby Bear’s Birthday Party in the third grade, I was already a seasoned actor by then. But I’d never really seen people moving through light in a communal effort to bring literature to life, until I got to St. Mark’s. When I saw that, I found it very attractive and I haven’t stopped acting since.

From there you studied English Literature at Harvard, and continued to excel at both dramatics and football. Your roommate was Al Gore. You also played in the famous “tie” game between Harvard and Yale in 1968.
Yeah, the 29-29 tie. That’s a very famous football game. We scored 16 points in the last 42 seconds of the game to tie Yale for the Ivy League championship. It was an exciting game. I played offensive guard.

I know you did a lot of theater at Harvard. Is that how you were discovered for Love Story?
No. I did do a lot of theater at Harvard when I wasn’t playing football. It became my summer job. During the summer I would join repertory companies. I’d done a lot of plays and inexpensive movies by the time I graduated and went to New York. I was there for a while, working in theater. I did not have a Screen Actor’s Guild union card, but I had been trying to get parts in movies, by going to open calls and agents. When they asked if I was a member of the union, I would slap my pockets and pretend to have left my wallet at home. I was able to insinuate myself into some interviews with casting directors. I went to see the casting director for Paramount, who casting roles for this upcoming movie called Love Story. It was for the role of a Harvard football player. I thought this might be a chance to do a couple day’s work and get a union card. So I went to the Paramount office and waited for a long time, and was finally admitted to see the casting director. As I opened the door, she glanced up at me and said “You’re not right.” I said ‘Well…,’ she said “No! You might pass for a football player, but these are special football players. Thank you very much.”

So how did you get cast?
I called an old Harvard guy, who was a friend of her boss’, boss’ boss. The next day they called me back and asked if I’d like to read for the director, Arthur Hiller. I did and I got the job and a union card.

The first film I remember seeing you in was The Amazing Howard Hughes. What did you learn about Mr. Hughes during the time you prepared for and played that role?
I did a lot of work on that, because I was very happy to have that part. I read every magazine and newspaper article that had ever been written about him. I had him profiled, a psychological profile, by a company in Connecticut. So I had a complete dossier on him, as well as every frame of film that had been shot of him, and all the recorded interviews. When it came time to shoot his testimony before the senate, we matched it pretty close. I tried to match his breathing patterns. That would be an interesting exercise: to look at the actual footage, shot I think by RKO News, and compare that to what you see in the film. I found a guy who wrote the December, 1946 Time Magazine story about Howard. He was an old guy, worn out, retired, living in one of those little houses at the bottom of Laurel Canyon, on the right side. He was happy to have the company, so I came and talked to him for about an hour, and he said “Come with me. I want to show you something.” We went down to his basement, and he wiped cobwebs out of the way, and moved boxes aside, and finally he found an old filling cabinet and pulled out all the notes that he’d made when he’d interviewed Howard—all of them! And there was the original manuscript of his article, complete with his editors’ red lines, of what they wanted to cut. So I got to read what Time wouldn’t print. That was really invaluable. Howard had a lot of things to say about his father that were not published in his lifetime, but could have been. I’m certain they thought it would have been too dangerous to print at that time.

Do you think a lot of Hughes’ personal psychology was based on his relationship with his father?
Absolutely. In the article he referred to his father as “a plenty tough son of a bitch.” Howard Sr. was a notorious character in the early days of the oil fields. History has changed him from “a plenty tough son of a bitch” to a swashbuckler. He was very hard on that kid. Very hard.

Do you think that horrible plane crash in Beverly Hills that almost killed him aggravated his psychosis?
Absolutely. It broke every bone in his body, damn near, and began his addictions. And it opened up the floodgates with those insecurities. It created a phobia of being invaded: by germs, by people coming through the door, by listening devices in the lamps, snakes under the carpet. Who knows where they are, or what they’re doing? You have to be ever vigilant…

Coal Miner’s Daughter was the film that really put you on the map in the film world. Did you spend a lot of time with your real-life counterpart, Doolittle Lynn?
Sure did. He taught me how to drive a bulldozer, the old kind, which has no real steering. You steer with the brakes. First of all, it has a decelerator instead of an accelerator. If you want it to run at an idle, you step on the pedal, which shuts the throttle down. If you want to go faster and open the throttle, you let the pedal up. It’s the exact opposite of what happens in your car. There’s no way to steer it other than by braking one of the tracks. You know, before that movie was made, the only way audiences had experienced people from those mountains was on The Beverly Hillbillies or Ma and Pa Kettle. It was a very good feeling to take part in something that had a chance of eroding the hillbilly stereotype.

You did three movies with Oliver Stone (Natural Born Killers, JFK, Heaven and Earth). Tell us about him.
He’s very bright, very smart and very talented, and very bold, and everybody knows that. He’s a friend. I just happen to like Oliver a great deal. He expects people to be prepared, rehearses a little bit, then shoots. He doesn’t waste time. He’s very unobtrusive.

Arguably Clay Shaw, in terms of the real people you’ve played, was your most mysterious character. What were your impressions of him?
He had an assistant who worked with him, and that assistant happened to be dying. His son interviewed his dying father on the subject of Clay Shaw, and I was able to acquire those interviews, and get really very close, about as close as you could to a dead man. This was a long-time employee who had no reason to lie, or distort. I also interviewed Jim Garrison three or four times specifically on Shaw, and of course the screenplay was pretty good. Shaw was a strange duck, to be sure. A desperate fellow, in some ways.

Andrew Davis is a terrific director, largely unheralded, that you’ve also done three pictures with (The Package, Under Seige, The Fugitive). He guided you to an Oscar on the last one, The Fugitive. What’s his process like?
Andy’s a good pal, also. He’s quite liberal, and very healthy in a sort of Chicago way. He’s a child of the theater, both his parents are actors. He’s also very bold. He’ll start shooting a movie before he’s got a completed script. Often working with Andy is a continual process of coming up with desperate, last minute solutions to impossible problems.

Some of that involves trusting his actors, too. Some of your best lines from all three of those films were improvised by you, right?
I don’t improvise, at all. I have written a few lines here and there, out of necessity. Sometimes that’s a good thing, to come up with your own dialogue, but not always. Ideally, you want a finished, shootable script before you start. That’s the way I prefer to approach thing. I don’t like writing or rewriting the day’s work at 7:00 in the morning, 45 minutes before we turn the damn cameras on.

You got to work with one of my heroes, Tony Richardson, on his last film Blue Sky. Tell us about that.
Oh, he was wonderful. He was a very elegant man of the theater, which is not to say that he wore fancy clothes, but he was very well prepared, very subtle. Totally disinterested in gimmicks or tricks. Or fads, or trends. I remember watching him review a script one time. I was just walking by, and he was in an isolated place but I could see him, and he was just going through the script, page-by-page, completely focused. It impressed me.

You worked with Clint Eastwood on Space Cowboys.
Another great one. He’s a hero. He’s iconic. He’s a hell of a lot of fun to be around. With those three guys: Sutherland, Jim Garner and Clint, I thought I’d heard every old actor joke there was, but they took me to school and kept me laughing every day. I had a hell of a lot of fun with them. It was so much fun to experience Clint’s work ethic. I’d heard about it, and admired what I’d heard. Then with the first movie I directed tried to follow what I’d heard second hand, but then to spend an entire shooting schedule with Clint, to watch him work and be part of the process was gratifying, of course, and educational to some degree. He was teaching me what I already knew.

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Shane Black: The Hollywood Interview

Writer/director Shane Black.



BACK IN BLACK
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the October 2005 issue of Venice Magazine.

Shane Black created one of modern cinema’s most enduring genres at the tender age of 22, when he sold his first screenplay, Lethal Weapon, to producer Joel Silver. The film series that resulted, teaming odd couple cops Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in four slam-bang action films punctuated by large dollops of black humor, dominated the box office in the late 80s and 1990s. Black followed the success of Weapon with The Last Boy Scout in 1991, which sold for a then-staggering $1.75 million, and was turned into a box office hit starring Bruce Willis, helmed by Tony Scott. Shane followed this with a re-write on 1993’s The Last Action Hero. In 1996, Shane sold his spec script, The Long Kiss Goodnight, for a record $4 million, raising the expectations, and in some cases the ire, of the Hollywood community. After Long Kiss tanked at the box office, Shane Black, once the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood, seemed to vanish like one of the mysterious characters that populated his neo-noir stories.
But fear not, gentle readers, Shane Black is back, making his directing debut with the romantic comedy/film noir hybrid Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. Starring Robert Downey, Jr. as a petty thief who finds himself embroiled in a Hollywood murder mystery, it marks a welcome return to form for Black who, at 43, has matured gracefully, slipping easily into his auteur shoes as a writer/director. Kiss Kiss features the usual stellar work by Downey, one of our best and most under-used actors, as well as a terrific turn by Val Kilmer as a gay private eye who reluctantly takes Downey under his wing. Lovely Michelle Monaghan scores a slam dunk putting a modern spin on Nora Charles to Downey’s Nick, as the two prowl the bowels of Hollywood, searching for a killer and the path to each others’ hearts. The Warner Bros. release hits theaters in limited release October 21, and goes wide November 10.
Shane Black sat down with Venice recently in his magnificent house located in LA’s historic Freemont Place. Here’s what transpired:

Do you know the history of your house?
Shane Black: I don’t know a lot about the architect, but it was built in 1929. Freemont Place was sort of old Hollywood before Beverly Hills. Although the only Hollywood guy who ever owned this place wasn’t old Hollywood: Ed Weinberger, who produced Taxi and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, along with Jim Brooks. It was the third house built here. I have pictures when the trees out front were like little shrubs. It’s about 75 years old, and probably haunted. I don’t know what history would lead to it being haunted, but a great many people who’ve stayed here have been like “I think I saw something…” They tend to point to the same places consistently. I worry not so much about ghosts’ ability to physically harm me, but more their ability to subtly, psychologically impose a kind of malaise or depression.

Writers don’t need any help with that.
No, it’s the last thing I need! (laughs)

You mentioned Jim Brooks. He’s a mentor of yours, right?
Yeah, he’s one of the spiritual fathers of this film, the one who got me started writing it, after a bit of a pause in my career. He was very encouraging. After he got me to write it, Joel Silver was the only guy in town who understood it, and wanted to make it. Basically, this movie is the bastard child of those two fathers. It’s half romantic comedy and half thriller, so it kind of fits.

I’m a big Raymond Chandler fan, so I loved the way you paid homage to The Master throughout the film.
I was so happy. It’s stupid, but when I can do Lady In the Lake and The Little Sister in the same story, I was like a kid at Christmas. (laughs) The story is so completely convoluted…

I really enjoyed it, though. It’s filled with memorable dialogue, my favorite of which is the line about the East Coast being held upside down and all the crazy women tumbling down to California.
(laughs) Yeah.

I also liked how you didn’t dwell on the violence, even though it was definitely there, and kept the focus on the characters.
Yeah, I wanted to keep it realistic enough to have an impact, but I thought it was important for the film to have kind of an old fashioned feel. When you’re carting bodies around in the middle of the night, it’s kind of like a caper picture, like Mickey Spillane, even, but it would have been very shocking and much too modern to have people’s heads explode with gunfire, and stuff. In fact, he does shoot someone in the head at one point, but you don’t see chunks of flesh flying. It’s important that you’re paying attention to the beats of the story, not to the body count.

Tell us some more about how this story was born. Has it been fermenting for a while?
After Y2K didn’t shut down our way of life, I had been desperately trying to get back in the business, and felt like I was slipping way too far off the map. I was trying to be James Brooks, because he’d been kind enough to give me an office. He said “Look, I think you have a block going on, but I also think you have some talent,” and he asked for no proprietary claims, he just wanted to give me a place to write. There might be some kind of ulterior motive there, but I really don’t see one. He was just a good guy about it. And so I went to his office, and started typing. I’d show it to him, from time to time, and he’d like bits and pieces of it. I kept banging my head up against the wall, trying to do this romantic comedy stuff. We had lunch one day, he and I, and he said “Look, you’re trying to be me in a sense, but I’ve always pictured you writing something more like Chinatown, which has all the great characters and interpersonal stuff. It doesn’t have to be an action film, it could be a mystery.” It suddenly hit me at that moment: I could do both. I could do my romantic comedy, but would be so much more comfortable doing it as a murder mystery. Instead of taking a giant step, I took a baby step. I wasn’t going to write Lethal Weapon, but I wasn’t going to write Steel Magnolias, either. Let’s do a film that’s half James Brooks, and half Joel Silver, essentially. And from that lunch, evolved the script that became Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang. I took it to every place in town, and all the doors were shut. It was very humbling for me, because when I was writing back in the mid-90s, I had the weird ability where my agent would put out a script, and my agent would say: “You have to respond by the end of the day, or you’re out of the bidding.” And people would drop what they were doing, and read the script. So here I came with a brand new spec script in 2003, and no one wanted to even read it. At best, they’d call back two weeks later and say “It was okay, but we didn’t really like it,” or “It feels too much like a period piece,” which I still don’t understand. I’d get all these comments, many of which clearly revealed that the person hadn’t even read it, or just skimmed it, or had coverage done. And I thought ‘Wow! Am I humbled by that!’ They don’t give a shit about me anymore. All these executives, they’re all ten years old, they’ve never even heard my name.

Do you think also that perhaps there was a great deal of resentment towards you because you had such huge success at such a young age?
There may have been in the 90s, but I think the doors shutting had more to do with the turnover in the industry that had occurred. “Oh yeah, Lethal Weapon. I saw that when I was a kid.” Executives literally saw it when they were about 11, 12. So, they don’t give a shit about me, anymore than if Arthur Penn (Bonnie & Clyde, 1967) walked in the room and wanted to direct a movie. “Who’s Arthur Penn?”

You know the famous story about Fred Zinnemann (From Here to Eternity, 1953; High Noon, 1952)?
No! What?

In the early 80s, Zinnemann walks into one of the major studios for a meeting with that week’s development exec of the moment. Zinnemann is sitting across from this kid in his mid 20s, slick as all hell with his Armani suit and Wharton MBA, and the kid says “So Fred, tell me about yourself.” Without missing a beat, Zinnemann says “You first, sonny. It’ll be shorter.”(laughs) Yeah, those kinds of comebacks are, to me, what makes the filmmaker. I just love that fuckin’ stuff. In my case, I had to find someone in that environment who, during my lapse into obscurity, still got my work. And the one unmutable constant in the ever-changing world of Hollywood has been Joel Silver: he always looks the same, talks the same, makes the same kinds of movies. He’s just Joel, and he’s the only one who got the script. He said “Let’s make it. I can’t get you a lot of money, but I can get you enough.” As it turns out, he got me about $15 million, which is what this movie costs. It got me back in the game, for which I’m infinitely grateful to him. In addition, he stayed on the production from start to finish as a hands-on guide, who helped shape the entire process. I think I’ve also helped him a bit with this. I don’t think it’s going to be a terrible thing, that he made this movie. So now I just want another job, that’s really it. After having a glimpse of what it’s like to be completely on the outs, I’m happy if someone just gives me a job.

You’re in a rare position for a writer who was in a slump, though. You were in a slump career-wise, but you still had financial solvency. That must be a really weird dichotomy.
Yeah, it’s hard to be hungry when you don’t have to be. People who write from desperation or absolute necessity are obviously going to be more prolific than someone who has the luxury of screwing off, going to parties, hanging out with friends. Pretty much, squandering time, which I did a bit of, before I got back to it. I had money and I’d go out with my friends on weekends, and we really were like the guys in the movie Swingers. Three carloads of us, and we all thought we were really cool, going to the great parties, and our lives were a waste! They were a fuckin’ waste! We’d talk about movies, but none of us would actually do anything.

Is this during the infamous “Pad O’ Guys” days?
No, no. This is post Pad O’ Guys. Pad O’ Guys went off and got married. They went off and left me. They abandoned me. They betrayed me. We used to have a sign in the window: “Open 24 Hours.” There was always someone at that house. You’d drive by at four in the morning. The lights were on. The sign was lit. Someone was in there making a short film, or having an argument about Preston Sturges, or whatever. But now, they all went off and had the unmitigated gall to have wives and disappear from the Pad O’ Guys. So now I’m the only one left with the “24 Hours Open” sign. I run this little hotel here where people come in and out of town to stay, otherwise I’m alone here with my dogs. But yes, I had financial solvency. But in a way, I wish I hadn’t. There was a bit of resentment engendered for having made such a large sum of money, for an action script (The Long Kiss Goodnight,1996) number one, which people almost universally disdain, but secondly, one that bombed and everyone had a chance to go “Ah, ha, ha, ha, ha!” I didn’t mind that part as much, but the anger that people felt when I sold that script for that amount of money. Even my good friend Peter Bart, who runs Variety, wrote a full page column on what a schmuck I was, and how horrible it was that I sold this script for that amount. I had never seen people made quite that angry before.

Did you ever ask one of them what they wanted you to do with the money?
Yeah! Say you wrote this idea on a napkin and someone said they’d give you a million dollars for it. Would you say “No, no. I insist on being paid five dollars for this napkin.” Anybody would take the money! But in addition to making people pissed and resentful towards me—I lost more than one friend because of it—it made me less hungry and made me procrastinate more. So for that reason, I wish I hadn’t done quite so well, because I needed to get back to work about three years before I actually did. I would give anything to get those three years back, as I enter midlife crisis anyhow. (laughs) I found myself panicking a bit, but this movie has calmed me. It’s not the greatest movie ever made, but it’s a solid piece of work, and it’s gotten my foot back in the door. I also learned some things and met some challenges that I’d never faced. So all-in-all, I think it’s been good.

Yeah but wisdom never comes easily, right? The old wise man with the long gray beard on the mountaintop whom everyone consults didn’t get there because he was born that way. He got there because he fucked up a lot.
(laughs) Yeah, that’s true.

What was directing like for you?
I’d love to say that it was incredibly difficult and murderous, but it was a snap. If you’ve done your preparation, including storyboarding the more complex sequences, ultimately your only job on the set is to execute your preparation and be flexible enough and social enough to go beyond it in places and hopefully get something better, and change things according to the order of the day, like if the actors come up with something better. I would watch movies all night to prepare. I can almost give you shot-for-shot on Panic Room (2002) just because I watched it so many times. I would go to the set for as long as I could to just sit there, and look around, then you have all the possibilities in your head. Then you take your cinematographer with you, and you ask him about all the possibilities. So when you walk in, you’ve already covered all your bases, even if you want to throw it all out and do something different.

What were some of the other movies you studied?
The Exorcist (1973). I love that movie. A lot of David Fincher’s stuff: Fight Club (1999), Seven (1995). I knew that there was a very raw, desaturated look to those films that were very appealing. I’d point at things to my D.P. and I’d say ‘Why do I like that?’ Jaws (1975) I watched a bunch of times. There were so many. Now that you’re asking, I’m blanking. Also, the commentaries on the DVDs. I listened to Jim Brooks’ commentaries on his movies. It really is a blessed time to get these movies with all these extra features on DVD. You watch and listen and pretty soon you get the flavor of what it’s like to do this. Also I read books, lots of books.

How did you work with your actors?
I would write memos to them a lot. I find that I’m much better at expressing complex ideas on paper than I am in stating them. So I’d go home and generate these memos about the sense of the film, and I’d just keep shoving paper at these actors. I don’t know if they liked the notes, but they read them, and we talked about them. So they finally said “Okay, we get it! We know who you are now! We’ve read your fuckin’ life story!” (laughs) It was good.

You got two of the best actors of their generation with Robert Downey and Val Kilmer. The only other name I’d put up there is Sean Penn.
I don’t think anybody at the time felt that either one of them were box office draws. But after seeing the movie, a lot of people have said “Why didn’t anyone think of putting these guys together before?” Somehow by teaming these two actors, both of whom are acknowledged as being so good, the pairing of them became kind of an event status. The fact that these two are in a movie together excites me as much as if I found out Harrison Ford has a new movie coming out. So I’m happy we didn’t go with a big name like Ford, or Mel Gibson. Who knows what would have happened then? I remember when Val was trying out his different gay voices. He’d start out very broad and then we’d sort of pull him back. Like he’d start at a 7 or an 8, on a scale of 10. But then he’d bring him down to 4, with just the slightest inflection, so it’s not an obvious gay characterization. He could go up and down until he was giving you exactly what you wanted, and not a penny more. It was amazing to watch his process.

What was Downey’s process like?
Downey is a very hands-on guy. He loves to talk about things, get them on their feet. His process pretty much is once we rehearse, and once he’s got in his head what he’s going to do, he would just practice kung-fu with his trainer, to stay focused. You’d see Val pedaling around on the little bicycle that he brought. They became friends. Robert said something, that he and Val were very strange people, in different ways. Somehow their respective strangeness complimented each other.

Let’s talk about your background. You were born and raised in Pittsburgh.
Yeah, my dad was in the printing business: doing graphics and desktop publishing and all that. He printed business forms, basically. If you fill out a form in a hospital or a police report, he might have designed it. My mother joined him in the business, as did my brother, and it became a family business, until he died three years ago. I’ve got two older brothers, and a younger sister. All great people. She just had her first kid, my niece, actually the first kid any of us have had. I had a very normal childhood: public school education. I came out here for two years of high school, and then went to UCLA. It was such a Mickey Mouse time then. I studied theater and the classes were so simple. It’s so different than if you would go to the south campus where all the math majors were. That’s hard shit. But here I am painting scenery, or pretending to be a rock. It was too easy.

So you started out wanting to act?
Yeah, it was a kid thing. The sad thing is, I finally know how to act, but I don’t want to do it anymore. You get all the teaching and go “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” then five or ten years later it all clicks. “Oh! I get it!” So that’s the way it happens, but now I’m not acting anymore.

When did you discover screenwriting and fall in love with film?
When I was still in college, through the Pad O’ Guys, and two of my roommates: Fred Dekker and Ed Solomon. Ed wrote for the last season of Laverne & Shirley, long after they’d jumped the shark and become silly. But it was amazing, because he had a job writing for TV! Ed helped Fred get an agent, and Fred’s stuff was really sharp, and I started reading it one day, his feature scripts. I remember being so entertained by them, and thinking ‘Hey, there’s no formula here. No rules, really.’ I thought screenwriting was something so difficult, such a lofty proposition, that screenplays were these things that floated out of the ether and magically appeared on the screen. But it never occurred to me that they were easier to write than a novel. I found that within that format, I could do whatever I wanted. I think why my initial scripts got me so many meetings is that nobody had taught me what you’re supposed to do when you write a screenplay. I just assumed there were no rules, and went ahead and did it. So the supposedly “unique style” that I had wasn’t born out of any need to show off or be bratty, it was just me having fun. And I ended up selling a bunch of scripts, but still found it very unsatisfying because the process of writing was so tortuous, and then you send the script off into the world for someone else to bring it to life. Meanwhile, I have to sit down and go back to the typewriter all over again. What I didn’t realize at the time, is that directing can be the reward for writing. And that’s the part I never thought of back then.

You just said that writing is both fun and tortuous. Is the tortuous part also cathartic for you in some way?
Well yeah, when it gets cooking, there’s no feeling like writing a script and feeling it click. But it doesn’t happen a lot. A lot of it is struggling for ideas. ‘God, what comes next? Please, let me think of something!’ It’s just murderous. You have to do it in the same way you have to climb Everest. It’s just not easy, that’s all. But then again, if you want to be strong, you have to go to the gym and lift weights. Yes, it’s gonna hurt, but if you keep doing it, after a year, you’re strong. Writing hurts. It’s miserable. But then when it’s done, it can really be an accomplishment, if you actually allow something of yourself to transfer to the paper, I think it’s one of the most amazing things a person can do.

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Samuel L. Jackson: The Hollywood Interview

Samuel L. Jackson in John Boorman's In My Country.


SAMUEL L. JACKSON: B.M.F.!
BY
ALEX SIMON

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the March 2005 issue of Venice Magazine.

No actor since Michael Caine has had as diverse, or as numerous, a body of work as Samuel L. Jackson. With 84 film credits since making his big screen debut as “Gang Member No. 2” in Ragtime (1981), Jackson has played everything from philosophical hitmen to Jedi masters during his remarkable career. His commitment to working consistently and his instinct for choosing quality work earned him a rare distinction in January of this year: Samuel L. Jackson is now the highest-grossing actor in film history, with his films earning over $3 billion worldwide in box office receipts, surpassing the previous record held by Harrison Ford. Not bad for a kid born into poverty in Washington D.C. December 21, 1948, as Samuel Leroy Jackson. Raised by his maternal grandparents (and later his mother) in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Jackson was a child of the 60s, discovering his social conscience early by taking active part in the civil rights movement while still in high school. After graduating from Atlanta’s Moorehouse College with a degree in drama in 1970, Jackson toiled for years in New York as a stage actor, gradually establishing a reputation as one of his generation’s finest actors, but still doing jobs like working as Bill Cosby’s stand-in on TV’s The Cosby Show to pay the bills.
As the 80s progressed, Jackson became a more familiar face on the big screen, with bit parts in films such as Coming to America, but it was Spike Lee who really gave Jackson his big break in 1987’s School Daze, followed by scene-stealing turns in his classic Do the Right Thing (1989), Mo Better Blues (1990) and finally in Jungle Fever (1991), playing a crack addict (just weeks after getting out of rehab himself for a long-time drug and alcohol addiction). The role earned Jackson the Best Supporting Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival, the first time a supporting acting award was ever given at the legendary fete. Finally, in his early 40s, Jackson found Hollywood calling him for work. Jackson has averaged 4-5 films per year ever since. As his career as a character actor took of with supporting roles in hits such as Goodfellas, Patriot Games, Jurassic Park, True Romance, Menace II Society, Fresh, and Against the Wall, stardom was just around the corner.
Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 landmark Pulp Fiction not only was the seminal film of the 1990s and the most influential film since 1967’s Bonnie & Clyde, it also earned Samuel L. Jackson a Best Supporting Actor nomination, and international stardom with his portrait of hitman/philosopher Jules Winfield. Since that time, Jackson has seemed to appear on movie screens everywhere. While there is no doubt that some of the films have been better than others, Jackson’s undeniable talent and screen presence have been a consistent factor throughout. This year alone, Jackson has five films hitting cinemas around the world: Coach Carter, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, XXX: State of the Union, The Man, and John Boorman’s In My Country, in which Jackson portrays an American reporter covering the truth and reconciliation trials in South Africa. Co-starring the luminous Juliette Binoche, Brendan Gleeson, and Menzi Ngubane, the Sony Pictures Classics release hits American screens March 11.
Samuel L. Jackson sat down with Venice recently, wearing his trademark Kangol cap, to discuss life, politics and his love of cinema. Here’s what transpired:


In My Country deals with post-Apartheid South Africa and the Truth and Reconciliation hearings that the new government held. Tell us about what drew you to the project.
Samuel L. Jackson: I was drawn to it because when I was in college in the 60s I had classmates who were from South Africa. And we would talk about their country, about Apartheid, how they got away from it and what it was like for them to be in the United States during the Civil Rights movement. As I got in the world, I met more and more people from South Africa, people like Hugh Masekela, and I kept up with what was going on there, particularly during the truth and reconciliation trials, which was like page eight news in this country. I also kept in touch with many friends who went back to South Africa after Apartheid ended, who would tell me all about the changes happening in the country. I just felt like this was a very important story to tell, because it’s one many Americans don’t know about. We know that Apartheid ended and that Nelson Mandella was released from prison, but for most of us, it stops there. We believe in vengeance. They believe in reconciliation and forgiveness. It’s a tough concept for Americans to understand, I think.

You shot the film on location in Cape Town, South Africa. Was this your first trip there?
No, I’ve been there several times before, doing promotional tours and things for my films. I also have some relatives who live there.

What have been your impressions of the country during your visits there?
Well you see, I’d never been to Cape Town. Joburg is kind of like the wild, wild west. As soon as I got off the plane, I was surrounded by five bodyguards: great, big Boer guys. The leader was like “I’ll always be in front of you. This man will always be behind you. This man will be to your left because he draws from the left. This man will be to your right because he draws from the right. The guy behind you will always be watching our backs. If we try to take you down, just let us take you down.” I was like “Uh, okay…Where am I?” (laughs) I just got off the plane. Nobody said “hello.” We got in the car and they were doing evasive maneuvers the whole way, it was crazy. I wanted to go visit Soweto, and they said no. They said if they took me there, I might have to watch them do what they really do, and they didn’t want that. They would screen people who came to my room. It was bizarre. Cape Town is totally different. It’s like a resort. I could walk around, had no bodyguards. It’s a totally relaxed atmosphere. There’s shantytowns everywhere, but there’s not much crime to speak of. The biggest tension there is between the Africans, the blacks, and “the coloreds,” who are the mixed people. The black people came in (after Apartheid) and started to do all the menial labor, and the colored people lost their place. They never had to have pass cards and could come and go as they pleased. Now they don’t know where they belong. It’s very strange.

Tell us about working with the great John Boorman.
I had been reading this script for a couple years, and they kept trying to find a director. When John came on board and started talking about it, it was the first time it made sense to me in terms of where I thought the film could go. John’s got such an amazing body of work, particularly in dealing with the intricacies of relationships, he was able to make the film about much more than the truth and reconciliation hearings. He made it about two people who had to discover their own truth, and reconcile their lives. John brought a great deal of humanity to the film, I think.

Tell us about Miss Binoche, who I love.
Yeah, me too! (laughs) She is so passionate and so driven, that it was hard to believe some days that she wasn’t South African. She really absorbed herself in the country and culture. She did intricate research. Being with her in a scene is pretty incredible. She gives of her whole self the whole time. She’s very attentive to detail. We really enjoyed being together. There was a time when a scene was over, and we needed to laugh, to relieve the tension, and we were able to do that quite easily. There were a lot of people in the film who were part of the truth and reconciliation hearings and survived Apartheid, so it wasn’t uncommon for people to break down after a scene was over. So having some laughter in there was very healthy.

Your body of work, nearly 90 films since 1981, is varied but has one common thread, and that is a tremendous social conscience. What are the roots of that, do you think?
I grew up with segregation, in Tennessee, so all my life I felt a disparity for inequity, and how I saw people treated, especially my grandparents. I used to go to work a lot with my grandfather. He was a maintenance man for a real estate company and worked in a hotel. My grandfather always looked like an “older person” to me, although he was only in his mid-50s at the time. All the (white) guys who worked in the office would call him “Ed” or “Edgar.” Whenever white people would come to our house, they would call my grandmother “Pearl,” and she would call them “Mr. Smith,” “Mr. Venable,” and so on. That was confusing to me for a very long time, because I was always told that younger people addressed older people as “Sir,” “Ma’am,” or “Mr.” and “Miss.” That never happened with them, no matter where they went if the people were white. If they didn’t know their names, they would call them “boy,” or whatever. Then there were places I couldn’t go. Things I couldn’t do. There were white kids who would ride the bus to school every day while we walked that would unscrew the lightbulbs from inside and throw them at us, yelling “Nigger!” And there wasn’t shit we could do because they were on a moving bus! (laughs) So I lived with that for a very long time. When the sit-ins started in the early 60s, I took part in them. I didn’t tell anyone at home about it. But I would participate, sit at the lunch counter, and when the police would show up, I would just run! I didn’t want to go to jail, either. I reached a point when I got to high school, I would read a lot more than the people I hung out with, and was pretty worldly about politics, because that was one thing I always knew in my heart: that I was not going to spend my life in Chattanooga, Tennessee, so everything I did was geared towards escape! I even applied to colleges that were so far away from home, like University of Alaska, that my mother said “You must be out of your mind, if you think you’re going there!” (laughs)

Then you went to Morehouse College in the mid-60s.
Yeah, 1966, at the height of the black power movement. It was so bizarre, because there were some older guys, in their early 20s, who were part of my freshman class. They were Vietnam vets, going to school on the G.I. Bill. We’d be up all night, drinking, raising hell, and these older guys would come in, really pissed because they were trying to study. They said “You guys need to study, pay attention and get serious! There’s a war going on. We just came from it.” We were like “What fuckin’ war?” “Vietnam?” “Where’s that? Let’s get the map. There’s no place called Vietnam on this map!” “Right there, Indochina. That’s Vietnam. We’re in a war over there. My friends are dying there. Your relatives are going to be dying there!” Sure enough, a month and a half later, my cousin was killed in Vietnam. He’d just joined the army, shipped out, and was killed almost immediately. So that really woke me up, and started reading up on it, and thinking “Wait a minute, the French were there all that time and got their asses kicked. What makes us think we can win this war?” “Well, we’re the United States.” “No, they fight guerilla style, kind of like what the Indians did using the terrain and nature to fight back against the French and the English when they came over here.” So it was a very “fight the system” mentality where we learned to question everything our government was doing, something that’s really missing in younger people now, I think. These kids today have no idea what they’re going to inherit once all this bullshit’s over.

Yeah, it’s very disconcerting. They should be raging against the machine, but if anything, they’re bigger conformists than even my generation, Generation X was, at their age.
It’s comfort, man. Playstation, hip-hop, there’s so much alcohol out there right now that I’ve never even heard of! It sure wasn’t around when I was still drinking. It’s like “What? You drink something called Hypnotic?!” (laughs)

You have a daughter that age who just graduated from Vassar. What do you guys talk about when these issues come up?
Well she has a very strong social conscience. When I was on my way to South Africa to make the film, she was in England and taking part in all the anti-war demonstrations that were going on. So she inherited that same political awareness of what’s going on in the world, that if they don’t do something, everything’s going to get out of hand. The 22 year-olds, for the next 20 years it’s going to be their generation that’s going to have to run things. Believe me, we’ve entered into something that we weren’t a part of before, but now we’re going to be a part of forever, because when you look at history, anyone who gets involved with a war against Islam, winds up fighting them forever. Their attitude is “You killed my great, great, great, great grandfather in 1503, so now I have to do something because my family honor is at stake!” To which I say “No, motherfucker! You weren’t there!” There’s no reasoning with people who think that way. So we have to figure out a way to rationalize with them in a way they can understand. The problem is, we’re not fighting for the right cause. We’re fighting for profit, profit which doesn’t trickle down to the ordinary American citizen.

I really think, though, on the one hand that Bush and his cronies really do believe in what they’re doing, which is empire building. They’re brining white, Christian, “democratic” values to the pagans of the Middle East.
Only because they keep saying it, over and over again. I think they really know what their raison d’etre is.

Chaney, Rice and the rest of the Hitler youth, maybe. But I think Dubya really believes in what he espouses.
(laughs) You know what, I think he has fooled all of us into believing he’s this sort of dim-witted puppet. The biggest trick the devil ever pulled was making the world believe he didn’t exist. This is no fool. He’s been playing the fool for so long, that we bought into it. You can’t come from the background that he does, with his dad being the biggest drug dealer in the world when he ran the CIA, and not have some of that rub off.

Let’s get back to your film work. Probably the most socially conscious filmmaker you’ve worked with is Spike Lee, whom you worked with three times. In fact, the first film I remember seeing you in was School Daze.
Spike was like our savior when we were all struggling actors in New York. Every summer we knew we were going to go to Spike Lee’s summer film camp, and make enough money to get us through to Christmas. He had a great core group of people and we’d make a film. Being in those situations with those people, there was a strong sense of family. And because all the actors had worked together so much in the theater, we had a way of coming in and taking what Spike had on the page and giving it a different kind of life than what he gets out of his films now. We had been connected for a very long time. Me, Fish, Giancarlo, Bill Nunn, Ossie and Ruby, who brought a wealth of experience and whom we respected so deeply.

Tell us about Mr. Davis, who recently passed.
Working with him on Do the Right Thing was a fascinating experience because I was always in that radio station, watching him through that was. I grew up in a very similar neighborhood in Chattanooga, and knew what the neighborhood drunk was all about. Ossie really embodied all those things in playing that role. He also was like the heart, soul and conscience of that community in being there. We were all pretty crazy during that time, and Ossie was sort of our balance. It was also pretty dangerous shooting in Bed-Stuy at that time, because we’d wiped out all these crack houses to shoot there, and the dealers and users were pissed off. They were always trying to reclaim the territory at night or intimidate during the day. There were some guys they could intimidate, but there were others of us that were like “You know, I just happen to be an actor, but I used to be the same kind of guy you are, so when you talk about fuckin’ me up, you think I’m just gonna stand there and let you fuck me up? That’s not gonna happen.” So Ossie was just sort of a calming influence during all that and he really helped to keep things cool.

Speaking of that, you were just a few weeks sober when you played Ossie’s junkie son in Jungle Fever.
I was two weeks out of rehab. It was great that I had Ossie and Ruby there, especially during the scene when Ossie shoots me. When my character died, it was almost like I was killing off that part of my life. It was very cathartic. As soon as I wrapped that movie, I suddenly started getting all these other jobs. I ran into Spike about three days before he took the film to Cannes. He was like “Probably gonna get an award at Cannes.” I said “They don’t give supporting awards at Cannes. But, I’d still love to go with you. Are you gonna take me?” “No, no. John’s going and Annabella and Wesley…” And then they called me to tell me I had won Best Supporting Actor, the first year they gave the award out. Boy was I pissed he didn’t take me! (laughs) And it took me almost a year to get the award from Spike! One day not long after, I called my agent and I’d always joke with her, asking ‘So, did Hollywood call today?’ And she said “You what Sam, amazingly, they did!” And that’s when I got White Sands, which was my entrée into Hollywood.

You made it as a working, supporting actor in your early 40s. But you didn’t become a bonafide star, playing leads, until your mid 40s. What helped you keep the faith during the lean years?
Interestingly enough, I used to have this idea about how acting jobs worked. When I was going to college getting my theater degree and learning all this stuff, I would go to New York and jump into this huge actor pool, and I figured that theater was like the mail room. I’d toil in there for a while, then I’d get a TV job, which would be like getting my own desk, hanging around in the office. Then I’d get big in the TV world, which would be like becoming a supervisor. Then I’d get discovered and start doing movies, which would be like being at the top of the food chain! (laughs) That’s how I thought it worked. Then the more I did work, the more I realized it was about breaks and timing. As I started to do more and more plays with different directors of greater and greater magnitude, with directors who would challenge me more, I got so caught up with that and the audience’s appreciation every night, that I forgot all about that other stuff and it became for me, all about the craft and becoming a better and better actor. I was so happy with what I was doing, I forgot all about being a movie star. By the time I did go into rehab, I had absorbed all those lessons already. When I came out and did Jungle Fever all those things I had done just crystallized in that particular moment. Rather than playing Gator as an “addict,” I played him as a family manipulator, because that’s what I was. I used up all my friendships, in a whole lot of ways. I had so many people tell me how cathartic it was to see that film because, it seemed, everyone had a crackhead in their family. When I was in rehab, I remember doubting if I could be an actor without using drugs, because I’d never done anything without drugs or alcohol before. That was the first thing I’d done substance-free. So it never occurred to me that it was going to happen, but I knew that I just couldn’t give up on the acting thing, because it’s just who I was, and who I am. I still have lots of friends in New York doing plays, making a living. And if I hadn’t had the breaks that I’ve had, I’d probably be back there with them.

You really hit paydirt with Pulp Fiction, earning an Oscar nomination as Jules Winfield, the philosophical hitman. You’ve gone on to work with Quentin Tarantino 1 ½ more times (Jackie Brown and a bit in Kill Bill). Tell us about the universe of Q.T.
There’s so much to say about Quentin: the passion, the knowledge, the joy and enthusiasm while he’s working, the sheer cinematic encyclopedia that he is, is just joyful. The poetry of his words is infectious. I love speaking his dialogue. It’s so much fun being on his sets. It’s all about the collaboration. He makes us go to dinner together, to form relationships. He has big beer busts for the crew on Friday. He has film nights where he’ll show some quirky films he wants everyone to see. He’s also open to suggestions all the time. I’d walk through fire for Quentin.

How did you feel when a lot of the black community in Hollywood got upset by Quentin’s frequent use of the “n word” in his films?
To me it was total bullshit. Even the Hughes brothers came to me with that shit. I was like, ‘Wait a minute. I was in Menace II Society. I know how many times you said “nigger.” So it’s okay for you to say that, but Quentin can’t?’ That doesn’t fly with me. We’re talking about art here. We’re not talking about censorship. For Spike to say it, that his wife ran out because she was offended, probably right after I said that six nigger sentence in Jackie Brown, then he turns around and does Bamboozled, and in the first eight minutes, he said “nigger” like, 80 times! So you can’t have it both ways. If you use it in the proper context and you know what you’re doing, then I don’t see the problem. Quentin grew up watching blaxsploitation movies because this black guy who lived downstairs took care of him, so he knew what he was talking about. So they have to know that Quentin uses the word not for the excitement or titillation of it, but for the reality of what’s going on, especially a character like Ordell. I probably added the word about 30 more times than Quentin wrote it. I did what I had to do to make the character real. I grew up with people like him and grew up being him to a large extent.

You got to work with the late John Frankenheimer on his comeback movie, Against the Wall.
To actually meet somebody like John and be part of his resurgence in film was a real honor. He was a real actor’s director. He would place the camera after he watched us rehearse, and made sure it wasn’t in our way instead of framing the shot first, and then putting the actors in it, like a lot of directors do. They just put you on a spot, and you have to act on that spot. He offered a lot of creative freedom for us and what he was able to capture on film. The results were a lot more dynamic than what most ordinary directors were able to get. I think coming from live television like he did, he really appreciated what actors brought to the table, as opposed to what he was bringing. He felt it was his job to capture our work, instead of the other way around.

Another great you got to work with was Martin Scorsese in the classic Goodfellas, along with De Niro, Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta.
That was an interesting shoot. I was frankly the only person of color around there and we were shooting in some sort of mob connected neighborhoods and there would be guys hanging around the set who actually knew Stacks Edwards, my character, and gave me a lot of insight into who he was. They would kind of stash me in people’s houses that I would use as my dressing room. I would spend a lot of time with these Italian families in Queens, eating dinner with them, watching TV, and hanging out. I didn’t get to talk to De Niro at all during the shoot because my character didn’t interact with him. Bobby didn’t really deal with people he didn’t have to deal with. We got to be friends later, on Jackie Brown, though. Joe and Ray were the guys who talked to me the most on set. My part was essentially an improv, even the morning Joe came to kill me. We kind of made up that whole dialogue and tried to come up with ways Joe could kill me. Marty got concerned about the blood spatter and kept saying “No, no. More, more!” So I took about eight showers that day while Marty kept upping the amount of blood and brains he wanted flying across the room. (laughs)

A few years later you worked with another legend: Steven Spielberg, on Jurassic Park.
That was an interesting way to watch a guy work. I actually auditioned before they had a script, so I read from a book. He would say “Faster.” And I’d read it faster. Then he’d say “Faster” again, and I’d do it faster, and he did this a few times. When I left there I was like, ‘Gee, I’m not sure if I got that part, or what that was all about.’ But when I did get it, it was only the second time I was working on a studio lot, the first being Patriot Games. Steven had what I thought was a comic book, but it was really a shot list. And sometimes he’d even get behind the camera and operate. He was meticulously prepared. He’s both a technical director and an actor’s director, which is a rare combination.

What was it like working with P.T. Anderson on his first feature Hard Eight AKA Sydney.
Paul was kind of brand new at the time, and I really liked the script because it was very gritty and my character had a lot of issues. Gwyneth (Paltrow) I knew from doing some Shakespeare stuff in New York, plus I knew her mom. And John C. Reilly I knew from before, so it was a cool group, our small ensemble. We went to Reno and had a great time. Paul is sort of a degenerate gambler and we’d hang out at the tables and spend our per diem!

How’d you do?
Really well! I actually won a lot of money while we were shooting that film. Paul had a great sense of what he wanted to do and how he wanted to do it. It was cool to help out a young director like that, who hasn’t hired me since, I might add! (laughs)

I heard that he wanted you for Boogie Nights but you weren’t available.
Yeah, that’s true. And that’s the last time he called me.

He’s still a young man. I’m sure there’s another job in your future there.
Okay, I hope so. (laughs)

Now we have to talk about George Lucas and being part of the legendary Star Wars family.
Wow, it all started so long ago. I was in the first audience the first day Star Wars opened in New York, back in ’77. I remember being totally caught up in it, wondering where the auditions were held for this, and how to get into it, since I was so far away from it at that point. Eventually I ended up on a talk show somewhere in London, and the host asked me if there were any directors that I still wanted to work with, and I said ‘George Lucas. I’d love to be in Star Wars.’ Somebody who worked for George saw it and told him about it. I went back to Sonoma, where I was shooting Sphere, and I got a call and went over to Skywalker Ranch and met with George, and I said I didn’t care what I had to do. I was willing to be a Storm Trooper and wear one of those white helmets just to walk across the screen and be in it! George was surprised that I wanted to be in it, based on my past work, but said he’d think about something for me if I really wanted to do it. So a few months went by, and I got a call saying that George wrote a part for me, and that I should come to London to start work. I said ‘I’ll be there.’ Mind you, I hadn’t seen any script pages, and didn’t know what sort of character I was playing. So I went to London, and the first thing I did was go to a costume fitting. And they brought in these boots, and this tunic and big brown robe. And I was like ‘Wait a minute, that’s a Jedi costume! I’m gonna be a Jedi?’ Then some guys open up a Halliburton case, and there’s three light sabers there, and they tell me to pick one! I’m about ready to pass out now, okay? (laughs) So the next day they give me some pages, and my first scene is with Yoda at this funeral, and I was like ‘Oh my God, I’m talking to Yoda!’ (laughs) That’s when I knew it was official: I was part of it and it was working out. Being part of the Star Wars family is a very cool thing. George creates a very familial atmosphere and is very open to suggestions, like my suggesting the purple light saber that my character has. He’s not as close-minded as people would have you believe. It’s a very important and kind of inspiring feeling to know that when I’m gone, I’ll have that as part of my filmography.

Is it true that the prop department carved the initials “B.M.F.” (a homage to his character’s wallet in Pulp Fiction that read “Bad Motherfucker”) into the handle of your light saber?
Yeah! Isn’t that cool? They did that after episode III wrapped and they gave it to me.

Was it tough doing all the green and blue screen acting in the Star Wars films?
No, not at all. For me, it was like going back to my childhood. I was an only child, and I spent a lot of time fighting imaginary monsters and things in my room when I was growing up. So it was really an extension of that.

You made an interesting comment a few years ago about rappers-turned-actors that may, or may not have been, misinterpreted by the press. Would you care to comment or clarify that statement now?
They only wrote that part. Here’s what I said: I know there are young actors out there doing what I did every day: trudging, pounding the pavement, studying. And if you take someone from another venue, and just hand them that job, and then say to me “act with them,” and I have credentials and people respect the things I do, then I’m condoning the fact that they allow this to happen. If I do that, I invalidate all the things I did and all the things these young actors are doing, and I just refuse to do that.

Let me follow that up with another question, then. I have a very close friend who’s a brilliant, classically trained actor, who is very frustrated by the fact that he’s always losing parts to people like LL Cool J, Ice Cube and Mos Def. What would you say to him, and to other young actors who are in the same spot?
I’d say to keep doing the things they’re doing. Your work and focusing on the craft is more important than that particular job. You’ll start to work when it’s your time to work. I had that same feeling when all the stand-up comedians were getting the jobs. They were hiring athletes, occasionally there’d be someone from the music world. The same thing happens over and over again. Stop focusing on the goal, and focus on the craft.

Any final thoughts before we wrap?
I think that the world of cinema is changing in a very healthy and interesting way. The fact that Jamie (Foxx) and all these other people were nominated for Oscars this year, the fact that we’re doing stories now about African tragedies, that people are watching movies like House of Flying Daggers and Hero means that audiences are expanding their interests. That’s the world we need to be a part of, not the cold world it’s always been. The studios have to embrace a new way of thinking in terms of who the audiences are, and what they can appreciate. I think that’s a great thing. Diversity is always good.

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Robert Towne: The Hollywood Interview

Writer/director Robert Towne.


ROBERT TOWNE DUSTS OFF A CLASSIC
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the March 2006 issue of Venice Magazine.

When Robert Towne won the 1974 Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Chinatown, he could have easily hung up his Underwood and spent his days in comfort, resting on the sizable laurels of having crafted what many feel is the greatest movie script of all-time. Towne, possessing the intellectual restlessness that drives most creative spirits, kept writing, penning classics such as Shampoo (co-written with Warren Beatty, 1975), and becoming Hollywood’s top “script doctor,” doing uncredited re-writes on some of filmdom’s greatest titles (Bonnie & Clyde, The Godfather, The Parallax View, Heaven Can Wait, to name a few).
Born November 23, 1934, Towne grew up in the port city of San Pedro, where his father owned and operated a women’s clothing shop. After attending Pomona College, Towne cut his screenwriting teeth working for legendary producer/director Roger Corman, penning the script for 1965’s The Tomb of Ligeia, viewed by many film scholars as the best of Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations. Towne made his directing debut in 1982 with the powerful, controversial Personal Best, about the lives and loves of female Olympic hopefuls. He went on to helm the nifty noir love triangle Tequila Sunrise (1988) starring Mel Gibson, Kurt Russell, and Michelle Pfeiffer, and the story of legendary runner Steve Prefontaine in Without Limits (1998). During this period, Towne penned a diverse slate of films, including Days of Thunder (1990), The Two Jakes (1990), The Firm (1993), Love Affair (1994), Mission Impossible (1995) and MI:2 (2000).
Towne’s latest puts him behind the camera and the pen once again, with his long-awaited adaptation of John Fante’s classic novel Ask the Dust. Set in 1930s Los Angeles, the story follows aspiring writer Arturo Bandini (Colin Farrell, in his best performance to date) as he searches for inspiration in the form of an unlikely muse: a tempestuous, beautiful waitress from a Bunker Hill greasy spoon (Salma Hayek, also her best turn to date). Like the novel on which it is based, Ask the Dust is an elegiac, poetic masterpiece: a triumph of mood, performance and especially production design (Capetown, South Africa has been meticulously transformed into 1930s L.A. Production designer Dennis Gassner should be remembered at next year’s Oscars). The Paramount Classics release, which also stars Donald Sutherland, hits screens March 10. Don’t miss it!
Ask the Dust had its world premiere at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival on February 2, at the city’s historic Arlington Theater. Robert Towne sat down with Venice the following day to discuss his latest labor of love, and his remarkable career. Here’s what was said:

It was amazing to see Ask the Dust premiere at a theater like The Arlington, which was built in 1931.
Robert Towne: The irony of it is that as that theater was being built, John Fante was in L.A., struggling and beginning to think of this novel.

The novel is autobiographical, right?
Very much so. The psychodynamic of that character, his manic-depressive nature, I think was congruent with John. Probably much more so when he was younger than the time when I first met him. But an awful lot of the story is autobiographical. In a way, I took more from his life in the second half of the movie than the book did. The book, basically, is very much like the movie, dealing with Bandini’s obsession with Camilla—and it was one-sided. In the book, Camilla is not obsessed with Bandini. Because the internal life of the character was so strong in the book, I didn’t think that an audience would put up with such a masochistic hero, because just being a writer is masochistic enough. So I decided to make their love more mutual. Also, to make the racial theme of it work, you needed to have it cut both ways: both wanted the same things from society, but the person that each of them loved stood in the way of that, and each needed to overcome their respective prejudices. I felt that was an inherently much more dramatic dynamic for the story, and a better way to dramatize the racism.

The book is so rich in terms of its themes. It’s one of those books I re-read every five years or so, and it’s always about something new to me each time I pick it up, much in the way The Great Gatsby is.
When did you first read it?

In college.
I was a little older when I first read it, probably about 30.

What’s interesting is that when I was younger, I identified strongly with Bandini, just as I related to Gatsby. We all knew we were Jay Gatsby as young men. But as we get older, we realize that we’ve been Nick Carraway all along, just as during my last reading of Dust, I realized I related much more to Camilla now.
That’s interesting. Yeah, I can see how that would happen. Funny story about the ’74 film version of Gatsby: I turned it down to write Chinatown. I remember well being on Robert Evans’ tennis court, as Evans was trying to talk Jack Nicholson into playing Nick Carraway. And Jack said “Sure, I’d be happy to—as long as you re-title the movie Nick & Jay. (laughs)

Tell us some more about when you first read the novel, what it was about it that spoke to you so deeply.
I was doing research for Chinatown, and was scrambling around searching for something that would put me in the past. This was in the 70s, and I wanted to read about the 1930s, and also see if I could find one book that was set in Los Angeles in the 30s, and had dialogue that felt like it had authenticity to it. You couldn’t get that from Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Nathaniel West, or even Steinbeck, who was from northern California. So I heard about this book and checked it out from the local library and immediately found myself drawn back into the past. It was like these people were alive in some alternative universe, right then and there. I said to myself ‘This is the way it was.’ It also jogged my own memories of Los Angeles in the 40s. That’s close enough to remember. When you hear the title Ask the Dust, you might think that sounds rather affected and pretentious, but the truth is, L.A. doesn’t look today like it did then. Then, it was much starker. All the foliage that had been imported all over the world hadn’t grown yet. There was still a sense of it being a desert, and all the little bungalows and houses that had been built Spanish-style after the 1915 World’s Fair, the sun just burned off that white stucco. The sky was bleach blue. The roofs were red tile, and there was dust in the air, because it wasn’t held down. So all those memories of my childhood came flooding back, and as we know from great writers like Proust, you jog somebody’s memory, it’s a very powerful thing to want to recapture. So in a sense, it’s a longing to recapture your own past. And then there’s the characters, all of whom are so vivid. Look, I grew up in San Pedro, and my earliest memories of girls were Mexican girls. I’ll tell you, if a girl didn’t have a cross around her neck, it wasn’t a girl! (laughs) They were so sexy, and just drove me crazy: their vitality, their humor, I’ve always been drawn to them, and always sensed and felt the injustice of their lot in California. We were so cruel and stupid to them. California was Mexican, and we stole it during the Mexican war. I agree with Profirio Diaz, who said “Pity poor Mexico: so far from God, so close to the United States.” There was a sense of that in Fante’s writing, and I pushed it, maybe even more so.

You got to know Fante towards the end of his life.
Yes. (laughs) I’ll never forget our first meeting: “Who the hell are you, and what makes you think you know anything about writing, anyway? What have you written?” ‘Well…uh, nothing Mr. Fante, but…’ “Well then, what are you doing here?!” Then Joyce, his wife, a blue-eyed blonde from a Brahmin family in northern California, Stanford graduate and a poet in her own right, whose parents were appalled that she was marrying this Italian, calmed him down and said “Give the boy a chance.” So the next time I came to dinner, John was on his best behavior, and (laughs) we were making small talk, and I asked him a question about his neighbor. And you could just see John struggling, and he said “I don’t like her much, Bob.” (laughs) Then I asked him about Camilla. He said “She was a dyke, Bob” I said ‘Oh God, please don’t destroy it for me, John!’ But he actually did live with her and the two of them had quite an affair. And he had her name, Maria, tattooed on his shoulder. So when Colin and Salma finally met Joyce in my kitchen, Joyce looked at Colin and said “You are so perfect for John.” John, as a young man, was very handsome. Then she took one look at Salma, and said “I don’t like you!” And she meant it, too. She was jealous of Maria up to that day, because he had that tattoo on his shoulder.

Did you ever mention to John that you wanted to make Ask the Dust into a movie?
Yeah, we talked about it. He gave me the rights, and a first edition, which he signed “To Bob Towne, in the hope he will take it to far places,” and I ended up taking it to Capetown, South Africa. He died in 1983, ten years before I finished the screenplay, but Joyce read it, and she had been his editor and was a part of his writing process, she said “Not only do I love it, but I think John would have been proud of it.” I don’t know about that, because John was such a curmudgeon, that even if he had liked it, he would have had to have something negative to say.

So this has taken more than ten years to go from page to screen.
Elaine May once wrote a line in her script for Heaven Can Wait: “The virulence with which people oppose an idea is a sure indication that there’s some merit to it.” Like every other profession, ours is one that is filled with stories of the ugly duckling variety: he’s different, and nobody wants anything to do with him, but that’s the swan.

Look at the Best Picture nominees this year: nearly all of them had to fight for years to get made.
Yes, absolutely. “You talk too fast. Can you slow down, Mr. Cagney?” And “Mr. Stewart, can’t you speed it up a little bit?” “Mr. Brando, could you stop mumbling?” All of these things that make artists distinctive, are the very things that get the hackles up of the executives who want everything homogenous. They’re in the position of forever being like chateau generals: who are always fighting the last war, and not the next one. It’s just amazing. It’s something that simply that never changes, and I don’t know why. Dust was no different. Years and years ago, when I was doing work on The Godfather, I approached Pacino with it, and we had lunch about it. I think he would’ve been wonderful. Peter Sellers, who was then a friend, was going to play Hellfrick (played by Donald Sutherland in the film), and then that got lost when I got busy doing Chinatown and Shampoo and so on. Eventually John allowed the book to be optioned by Mel Brooks. Then Mel and I met, and he said “Look, if you’ll write it on spec, I’ll make sure you can direct it,” which was a good deal for me. So I wrote it, he loved it, but something happened where he let the option lapse, and the problem there became that the script had been circulating enough that people had been talking about it, and Irving Azoff grabbed the option out from under Mel. Then Irving couldn’t get the movie made, and I talked to the Fantes and went around everywhere trying to get it made—and got turned down everywhere, including Warner Bros., which was my home at the time. Over the years, I went to many actors, and many different studios, and it got to the point where if my mother could have turned me down, I think she would have. It wasn’t just that the powers-that-be didn’t like the characters. They didn’t. Plus the story was viewed as racist, depressing, a period piece, and it just went on and on. Finally, about four or five years ago, Josh Lieberman called and said “I got a kid whose right for the script. He read it and he likes it!” Nobody had ever heard of this kid, and up to my door popped this young kid, wearing a t-shirt and cowboy. He came in, and there was a family gathering going on. He says in a lovely Irish brogue “Ya got a fuckin’ beer?” And twelve hours, and many beers later, he was still there. I was crazy about him and we were crazy about each other. That’s how I met Colin Farrell. He had the right amount of arrogance and humor, and he looked enough like a young John Fante to make it perfect casting. You could just see how magnetic he was. And then we still couldn’t get it made! So things sort of lay fallow for a while. Years before I’d approached Salma, and she read the script and said “Robert, I love this script, but I just can’t play this character—a Mexican waitress.” She was struggling against the very prejudices that are addressed in the story. Subsequently I cast someone else, who I realized was not going to work. Then, not knowing who to cast, because I wanted to cast a Mexican actress, my friend Warren Beatty said “What’s wrong with Salma?” ‘She turned me down, man.’ So Warren offered to talk with her, and talked her into reading it again. She said “I don’t know why I turned this down. I absolutely love it.” Meanwhile, time was passing, and Colin became a movie star, and that was enough to get it made, although our financing was cobbled together very haphazardly.

So the whole thing was a huge act of faith on everyone’s part, it sounds like.
Yes, it was just remarkable. Colin even came down to the location in South Africa before everything was finalized. Paula Wagner and Tom Cruise put their own money into it, as did I. Our entire budget was only $15.5 million and we shot it in 50 days, which is not a lot on either end. It was tough, but we had to make this film. That’s all there is to it.

This is your second picture with Donald Sutherland.
I don’t know what to say about Donald, other than I so love him. We had one hell of a time on Without Limits, for a while. I didn’t want to cast him originally, so there was some animosity there. We were going to shoot the scene one night where he was going to tell them that the Israeli athletes had been killed during the ’72 Olympics. And I said “Donald, you look like Dracula going into suck their blood!” He blew up and said “You didn’t want me in the first place!” I said “Donald, why do you say that like it’s a surprise? You know I twisted in the wind to avoid having you in this movie, and hardly because you’re a bad actor. You’re a brilliant actor, but you have made a living for so many years playing tortured souls in the most spectacularly interesting manner. But (University of Oregon track coach) Bill Bowerman is not a tortured soul. He tortures other people!” (laughs) So we aired our differences then, and the next day we did this scene where he was talking about what the Olympics meant, and he got it. Then he just unfolded and transformed himself, and nobody could have been better. Against my own worst instincts I had cast the very best person for the part. So we’re now very good friends. With this, I said ‘Donald, unfortunately given our budget constraints, it’s not as big a role as I’d like for you, but I’d love you to do it.’ So he flew down, showed up, and did it. I didn’t really say anything, it was all Donald: “This is who the character is. This is what he’s wearing. This is his make-up.” I just watched and said “Wow. Thank you.”

Shampoo was on cable recently and I watched it from start to finish. It’s one of the great political pictures of the 70s, juxtaposing the national politics of 1968 with the sexual politics and changing mores of the denizens of Beverly Hills. One of the things that struck me were the socio-political parallels between ’68 and our last Presidential election, in 2004.
Yes, it’s true. All things considered, I’d rather have Nixon in office than Bush! (laughs) I mean, Christ, is it possible that I now long for the days of Richard Nixon? I certainly don’t feel he got a bum rap, but he was bright, but the fact that he was hopelessly filled with self-loathing and desperately needed to maintain a political constituency, all his instincts were good: whether it was about China, his initial take on the drug war, which was that there’s no way that enforcement is going to take care of this problem. It has to be re-education, treating people. It has to be all of these things. He wanted to do this, but politically it seemed unwise at the time, so he didn’t pursue it. But he was a bright man.

The irony between that administration and the present one is that a lot of the players are the same: many of the young Turks in Nixon’s White House are the elder statesmen of Bush II. The difference is, Bush II is a puppet, and the guys pulling the strings are people like Cheney and Rumsfeld. Nixon was always too paranoid to ever yield that much power to anyone.
That’s true. And there wasn’t this religious component that was part of his political constituency, which is perhaps the most dangerous single aspect of it. Having managed to divide our country this way, which is the first time this has happened in my memory, which is what he’s done, is unconscionable.

Look at where we were the day after 9/11: the entire world was behind us, including countries that had always hated us. In a matter of weeks, that position took a 180.
We had an opportunity then and there to change the world. And we didn’t. To change everything. Talk about being able to put an end to terror, we certainly could have put a big dent in it, had we approached in differently. Not to mention Bush’s environmental stance: what global warming? It’s an administration that will go down in history as probably our worst, and we’ll be feeling the ramifications for decades. So yes, Shampoo has become prescient again, but I wish to God it wasn’t.

Many people probably aren’t aware that Chinatown was originally planned as the first part of a trilogy.
Right. After The Two Jakes there was going to be a final chapter, Gittes vs. Gittes, which dealt with the new concept of no-fault divorce in the 1950s.

And we’ll never see this, correct?
Correct.

Can you tell us why?
Well, in the interest of maintaining my friendships with Jack Nicholson and Robert Evans, I’d rather not go into it, but let’s just say The Two Jakes wasn’t a pleasant experience for any of us. But, we’re all still friends, and that’s what matters most.

Ask the Dust is a story that would be best described as bittersweet. A common thread I’ve noticed in all your films, both as writer and director, is that you have a tragedian’s view of love. Would you agree with that?
Yeah, I think that love stories, if they’re love stories, are almost by definition tragic. Love stories are stories that are more religious, and if they have one purpose for people it’s to convince us of the importance of, and the actual existence of love. And the only way we can be truly affected by it, is if the lovers will give everything they have to be with one another. It’s that cliché “Honey, I feel like I’d die without you.” So when it ends with the loss of the lovers from each other, the love they’ve generated that held them in its grip, still feels like it’s a real thing, like it’s still there. It makes us feel hopeful that perhaps such a thing could exist for us, as well.

The longing that one feels in love is one of the most incredible feelings you can have.
There’s a reason for the analogy of Cupid’s arrow: the first thing you feel is a twinge of pain, because you feel “Uh oh, I’ve got something that could really hurt me if I don’t have it fulfilled.” There’s a wonderful old song that Sir Walter Raleigh wrote: “What is love? Love is a gentle, pleasing pain. Love is a sunshine mixed with rain. Love is a no, that would full thane.” That’s love.

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Robert Evans: The Hollywood Interview

Producer Robert Evans, circa 1970s, in the documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture.

ROBERT EVANS: “THE KID” IS ALRIGHT
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the July 2002 issue of Venice Magazine.

It’s a widely-held belief that the years 1967-76 represent the “golden age” of American cinema. Just look at a few of these titles: Rosemary’s Baby, Medium Cool, Romeo and Juliet, True Grit, Catch-22, Love Story, The Godfather I & II, Don’t Look Now, Harold and Maude, Chinatown, Shampoo, Marathon Man, to name a few. These films, as well as others from the era, helped reshape our world, redefine us as people, and remain timeless touchstones to which millions born and unborn will return probably for as long as man continues to inhabit this crazy mess of a planet. If you were asked, “Who’s responsible for giving life to these masterpieces?” most would respond: “Uh, well, let’s see there’s Roman Polanski, Haskell Wexler, Franco Zeffirelli, Francis Ford Coppola…” Whoah. Slow down there, Shell Answer Man. You’re leaving one guy out. One guy who was responsible for giving all those titles life. One guy who refused to play by the rules. One guy who picked up the dice, had the prettiest dame in the room give them a lucky breath of air, and let them fly, outcome be damned. Hell, he knew it was gonna come up 7. His friends, both real and those who think they are, still call him “The Kid,” a moniker bestowed upon him by the legendary Darryl F. Zanuck. Civilians know him as Robert Evans.
Robert Evans was born Robert J. Shapera on June 29, 1930 in New York City, the second son of a dentist who had the first integrated practice in Harlem. The family later adopted the last name Evans as a tribute to their paternal grandmother, whose maiden name was Evan. Young Bobby Evans had a comfortable middle class upbringing, being bitten by the acting bug at an early age, finding work as a radio actor in his early adolescence, already blessed with a distinctive, adult-sounding voice. Forgoing college, Evans joined his older brother Charles in running the elder Evans’ highly-successful women’s clothing label Evan-Picone, making Robert Evans a millionaire before his 25th birthday.
While visiting the west coast to open Evan-Picone boutiques, Evans was discovered poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel by Norma Shearer, a silent, and early talkie, screen star and widow of the legendary boy mogul Irving Thalberg. Thinking him perfect to portray her late husband in Fox’s Lon Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), Evans suddenly found himself playing opposite his childhood idol James Cagney, and voted “Most Promising Newcomer” by Photoplay magazine. His next role, as bullfighter Pedro Romero in the screen adaptation of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1957), earned Evans his ubiquitous nickname. So incensed were most of the cast and crew that this young upstart was cast in a pivotal role, a telegram was sent to studio head Darryl F. Zanuck demanding that Evans be replaced. It was signed by Hemingway, Ava Gardner, Tyrone Power and Eddie Albert. Furious, Zanuck flew down to Mexico. Arriving on the set the day a bullfighting scene was being shot, Evans displayed such panache in the sequence, Zanuck, all 5 foot 4 of him, stood up gripping a bullhorn, and intoned: “The kid stays in the picture, and anyone who doesn’t like it can quit!” At that moment, Evans realized it was Darryl Zanuck, as opposed to James Cagney, that he wanted to emulate. Thus a moniker, and a legend, was born.
A fair to middling actor by his own admission, Evans’ career as a thespian fizzled out as quickly as it started. Evans returned to “being in women’s pants,” as he likes to joke, running Evan-Picone with brother Charles, but he longed to try his hand at producing movies. In the mid-60’s, he saw his chance, optioning a novel by Roderick Thorpe called “The Detective,” attaching Frank Sinatra to play the lead. This led to a multi-picture development deal at 20th Century Fox. Evans was getting ink again on the entertainment page, most notably, a piece in the New York Times by a young scribe named Peter Bart. The piece caught the eye of Gulf + Western chairman Charles Bluhdorn. Impressed by Evans’ moxie, Bluhdorn summoned “the kid” to Gulf + Western’s New York offices, offering Evans the position of head of European production for Paramount Pictures, one of G+W’s subsidiaries. Paramount, which at that time was “ranked 9th out of 8 studios in town,” was in dire straits, most of its investors pressuring the board to sell the lot for a tidy sum to the Jewish cemetery that bordered it. Bluhdorn refused to let this happen, quickly recognizing Evans’ solid-gold instincts, and promoting him to head of production back in LA. Evans just as quickly hired Bart to be his right hand man. This was 1966. By 1972, Evans had taken Paramount from the basement to the penthouse: the top studio in town.
Evans other legacy has been his propensity for surrounding himself with the world’s most glamorous and desired women, a list of names that would make Hugh Hefner green with envy. His male friends included Hollywood stalwarts Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, statesmen like Henry Kissinger, and behind-the-scenes powerbrokers, like the legendary and secretive Sidney Korshak. Married and divorced five times (his exes including Ali MacGraw, and former Miss America Phyllis George), Evans personified the glamorous movie mogul of the 70’s: blessed with the looks and wardrobe of a male model, architect of some of the most groundbreaking movies in history, his Beverly Hills estate, Woodland, the site of glamorous parties, precedent-setting business deals, and storybook romances. By the end of the decade, Robert Evans was approaching the sort of Hollywood omnipotence that people like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas achieved a decade later.
In 1980, however, everything came crashing down. Implicated in a high-profile cocaine bust (even though he was 3,000 miles away when it occurred), Evans name was tarnished almost beyond repair, in spite of never being formally charged with any crime. In addition to a worsening cocaine problem, Evans’ biggest professional debacle was the ill-fated film The Cotton Club (1984) a labor of love for Evans, which turned into a literal nightmare. To add insult to injury, the murder of Roy Radin, an acquaintance Evans met as a potential investor in the film, was dubbed “The Cotton Club Murder Case” by the press, further tarnishing his once-spotless image. By the end of the decade, Evans was virtually destitute, a pariah in the town he loved, and the business that he helped shape.
Deciding to pull himself up by the bootstraps in 1990, Evans embarked on what would be his comeback project. “The Kid Stays in the Picture” was Evans’ life story, a Hollywood memoir that not only became an international best-seller, but also became required reading for a new generation of filmmakers and studio execs. The audio version of the warts-and-all tale became even more legendary, with Evans himself reading from the book, and acting out his life. Soon the phone started ringing again. Old pal Stanley Jaffe, now head of production at Paramount, offered Evans a place back at his old home, setting up a production deal. “The Kid” was back in the picture…with another hurdle around the corner.
In 1997, while hosting a party for filmmaker Wes Craven at Woodland, Evans rose to toast his guest, then dropped to the floor, the victim of a massive stroke. Once hospitalized, two more strokes followed, paralyzing the right side of Evans’ body. Doctors told him he would be wheelchair-bound for the rest of his life, if he were lucky. Determined to prove them wrong, Evans spent the next two years undergoing painful physical and speech therapy, rebuilding himself and his life.
Meanwhile, the book and audio of “The Kid Stays in the Picture” just kept growing in popularity. Approached by old pal Graydon Carter, Editor of Vanity Fair, Carter suggested turning “Kid” into a film, a self-narrated documentary about Evans’ surreal, rollercoaster of a life. The result: Nanette Burnstein and Brett Morgen’s documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture. A huge hit at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Kid the movie is a fascinating, sad, hilarious, thrilling self-portrait of a man who refuses to be anyone but himself. The Focus Films release is currently playing in LA and New York, with a wider release planned for late Summer and early Fall. As Evans himself said, “I got to have a third act, and it’s been the greatest of my life.”
Robert Evans sat down with Venice recently in the screening room at Woodland, a place where more Hollywood history has been made than all the boardrooms at Paramount, telling the tale of how he has managed to stay Hollywood’s version of the mythical bird the Phoenix, rising up from the ashes that surround him, to be reborn.



What precipitated your writing the book The Kid Stays In the Picture?
Robert Evans: I wrote this book not knowing if it would be published or not. I could have cared less. I didn't care if anyone even read it, just one person: my son, Josh. From the time Josh was seven years old until he was 17, his old man went from royalty to infamy. And kids can be very cruel. Unfortunately, royalty fades and infamy stays. The day Josh graduated from high school, the headline on the front page of the L.A. Times read: “Robert Evans Involved in Murder.” There all the kids were, dressed in their caps and gowns. Bob Daly was there. Terry Semel was there. Both their kids were graduating as well. And in spite of everything I accomplished in my life, I felt so low. Josh came up to me, hugged and kissed me, and I was just crying. Afterwards we all went to lunch, just me, Josh, and his mom, Ali MacGraw. Then I went home by myself and just cried some more, thinking “Why should Josh have to go through all this shit because of me and my mistakes?” So I wanted to write a book that would tell Josh who his old man really is. You can’t lie to a kid. You have to tell the truth. So I disappeared for four years while I wrote this book. And it wasn't cathartic at all. It was painful to write about your fuck-ups, because then you’ve got to rewrite them and rewrite them and rewrite them. This book was the only legacy I could leave to him. I had no money. I lost my house. It was the most humble, purest endeavor of my life.

One could also argue that it's been the most successful endeavor of your life.
Absolutely, more so than any film I ever produced. When I was finished with the book, every publisher wanted it, and it became an international bestseller. It also got me the best reviews of my life. Then when I did the audio version, it became a bestseller as well. One day (Vanity Fair Publisher) Graydon Carter came to me and said he wanted to make a film of it. I said ‘Graydon, you can’t make a film of an audio recording.’ (laughs) ‘I don't want actors playing all these real people from my life. I don't want George Hamilton playing me!’ (laughs) He said “We’ll figure a way of doing it.” Graydon spent two-and-a-half years getting releases from people who we never thought we’d get releases from: Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, Warren Beatty...out of 256 releases which we needed, we got 255! So it took two and a half years to make the picture. When I went to the screening at Sundance earlier this year, it was the first time I saw it all put together. It was a hallucinatory experience for me because it hurt. It hurt bad. When the picture was over, I got a 15 minutes standing ovation. I'd never had a two-minute standing ovation in my life. All this from a book I wrote for my kid. And the interesting thing is we've never discussed the book. We've never discussed the audio. We've never discussed the movie. He knows and I know and he's the closest friend I have.

There’s a very touching note you wrote to Josh that’s in the book.
Yeah. Would you like me to read it?

Sure.
(Reading from the book) “Hey Runt! Spent over three years writing this. It hurt. Hurt bad. Reliving your fuckups ain't easy. Then writing ‘em and rewriting ‘em, that’s the killer. Did it for you. Yeah you, you little runt. You deserve it! I wouldn't be today if it weren’t for you. I know it. You know it. Fuck it! I ain’t ashamed. Why keep it a secret? Knew the pain you were goin’ through, too. Showed all over your face. Them pimples you thought of squeezin’? That's how many sleeping pills I thought of takin’. You pulled one hell of a hat trick, kid. That tightrope, you balanced it like a pro. Your strength stopped my fall. We've never talked about it, so I'm writin’ it. Set the record straight. Talkin’ disappears. That's why it's on paper. For better or worse, at least you’ll know who your ole man really is. How much he loves you. It’s all that matters. Pop.”

That’s a beautiful letter.
Well. I wanted to show him my life, warts and all. This is my legacy to him. And by doing that, it opened up doors that changed my entire life. It's funny, not long ago I was completely washed up. Then to make matters worse, I had a stroke. I was half paralyzed. I had to learn how to walk again, talk again, hold a fork again. My right side was paralyzed, including half my tongue. But for some reason, the guy upstairs gave me a second pass. I heard the fat lady sing, literally. I heard Ella Fitzgerald singing “It’s a Wonderful World.” I saw the white light, then I passed out. When I woke up in the hospital, I thought I was in heaven at first. But when I really regained consciousness, I found myself more like Quasimodo than myself. I really felt like a freak. I took speech therapy for three years to learn how to use my tongue again. The real pain was the physical therapy, though. I used to be a pretty damn good tennis player, and I couldn’t even hold onto a ball. It was tough, but I did it because I wanted to prove them doctors wrong! I’ve never lived by the rules. I ain’t corporate. I’m not a good executive and I’m a lousy businessman, and I’ve never kept the hours that other studio heads did. I learned t his from Zanuck: when he ran 20th Century Fox, he showed up to the studio at 2 o'clock and left at midnight. So when I ran Paramount, I never had breakfast meetings. I can’t help it. I’m just not good in the morning. I'd show up at 11:30 and work until midnight. Everyone resented it, the idea being that you have to show up at 9. I'm not a 9-to-5 guy.

You always did most of your business from home, right?
More Hollywood history was made in my screening room during the late 60’s and 70’s than anywhere else. Chinatown was born here. The Godfather was born here. Francis Coppola and I practically fought WW III here during that time. Dustin Hoffman and Larry Olivier both lived here during Marathon Man. Olivier lived here for six months. Larry Olivier couldn't get a job at the time, because he had cancer and no one would insure him. He was destitute. He couldn't afford to send his son to college. Through my good friends David Niven and Merle Oberon, I was able to go before the House of Lords, and persuade them to get insurance for the greatest actor of our time through Lloyd's of London. Olivier threw his arms around when it was over and said “You saved my life, old boy.” Not long after that, his cancer went into remission and he was able to live his last 13 years doing some of the most brilliant work of his career. That's one of the proudest moments my life. It’s funny, I’ve led a very blessed and a very cursed life.

I think you’ve had more extreme ups and downs than almost anyone in Hollywood history.
I’ve touched magic as much as anyone, and I've been scandalous as much as anyone. And the strange thing is, all my “scandals” were non-truths. I've done a lot of wrong things in my life, but the two things that really brought me infamy: the coke bust and the so-called “Cotton Club murder” of Roy Raydin, I had nothing to do with. How can I get busted for something when I'm 3000 miles away? My nose ain't that long. (laughs) But, I get ink. If you live by the sword, you die by the sword. People made careers over my carcass. I’m afraid to walk past the Hustler store on Sunset, forget about going in it! Someone takes a picture, boom! There I am on the front page: “Bob Evans, porn fiend!” (laughs) That’s why I rarely leave my house anymore. I’d get in too much trouble! (laughs)

Yeah, but you were fodder for the scandal sheets way before your tenure at Paramount.
Oh yeah, going back to when I was dating Ava Gardner and Lana Turner at the same time, in the mid '50s. I was getting headlines before most of today's studio executives were even born. I have clippings of me with Terry Moore while she was secretly dating Howard Hughes.

Not bad!
In my teens, I was being kept by four women. I always had a knack for getting myself in trouble! I guess you could say that I’ve been leading a high profile, sometimes notorious existence for a long time. That’s what Jack Nicholson said I should call my book: “Notorious”! (laughs)

You’ve worked with many amazing directors in your career. In 1977, you produced Black Sunday, which was directed by John Frankenheimer, who recently passed. What are your memories of working with him?
John, to me, is one of the best directors I ever worked with. He’s very unappreciated, too, I think. John went through a very bad period of alcoholism, which made him more than a few enemies. But I loved working with him, thought he was a terrific guy. Black Sunday turned out to be a terrific picture, but one of the big disappointments of my life. When that picture came out, they thought it would do more business than Jaws, that's how big they thought it would be. I turned down an offer of $6.6 million to buy my points in it. I owned 57% of the film. You know how much business it wound up doing? Nothing. It tanked, due to a lot of factors. First, Arab groups claimed we were anti-Arab because the villains in the piece were Arab terrorists. Jewish groups claimed we were anti-Semitic because we tried to explain why someone would join a movement like Black September. I wound up spending a fortune of my own money to hire private security to protect myself because I was receiving death threats. Then, a few months before the film came out, Universal released Two Minute Warning, a film about a sniper in the LA Coliseum during a football game. Even though Two Minute Warning got awful reviews and Black Sunday got raves, and the two films couldn’t have been more different, people associated the two and stayed away. You just never know.

In almost every show business biography and autobiography I’ve read, their subjects are portrayed having one amazing success after another, almost to the point of omnipotence, only to self-destruct just when things seem like they’re perfect. What causes that tendency, do you think?
Gambling. Most successful filmmakers and producers are gamblers at heart. I mean, literally. Darryl Zanuck had such a bad problem he had to borrow money from Howard Hughes. And let’s face it: what’s a bigger risk in life than making films? And when you gamble, you don’t always win. David O. Selznick died broke. I wanted to be Selznick, that’s why I did The Cotton Club, and wanted to own it. But I wasn’t as smart as he was.

You write so well, it’s surprising that you didn’t have a career as a writer at one time.
Well, I co-wrote more scripts than you can possibly imagine, although I never took credit for them and didn’t want to.

But you are working on a sequel to The Kid Stays in the Picture.
Yes, it’s called The Fat Lady Sang. I open it with my stroke, when I was hosting a party for Wes Craven. I’m about halfway through it now. It’s about my life post-Kid, post-stroke, told in flashbacks, also a lot of things from my earlier life that weren’t covered in Kid. It’s all about the third act of my life that I didn’t have before. I’ll tell you, I can’t believe I’m here talking with you now. I should be dead. The guy upstairs is keeping me here a little longer to do something else. I’ve also got a new picture in production, called How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, starring Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey. It’s shooting in New York and Toronto.

You seem to be completely recovered from the stroke. If I didn’t know what had happened, I’d never have guessed.
I had three, actually. One here and two in the hospital. I’m about 90% recovered, I’d say. The three most important things in my life before the stroke were the three S’s: sun, sex and sports. I can’t take the sun anymore because of all the pills I’ve got to take. I used to be a good tennis player. Now I’m in the paraplegic league, but I can play. Sex wise, let’s just say I’m not as dexterous as I was before, but I’ve got my libido at least. Sex will always be important to me. It always has been. That's why none of my marriages lasted. (laughs)

I think any man who was in your position would have had a hard time being monogamous.
I haven’t been since I was 17. That's why Frank Sinatra wanted to meet me so badly, when he saw me with Lana and Ava at the same time! He was very curious, to say the least. I actually didn’t dig Lana that much because she was a terrible alcoholic, in public places, too. She was a very unhappy lady, as was Ava. Terrible alcoholic. Very unhappy with her life. In fact, most actresses I’ve known are very unhappy with their lives.

Let's talk about your days at Paramount. You came there at such a unique time. You even convinced the board to give you complete autonomy in running the studio.
Yeah, but that didn't happen right away. I thought I was about to be fired. So I had Mike Nichols shoot this 40 minute film for me, which I presented to the unsmiling, 18 member board of Gulf and Western (Paramount’s then-owner) in New York, convincing them at Paramount would be the No. 1 studio in town after the release of Love Story and The Godfather. I signed resignation papers when I arrived in the office, saying they could keep the $300,000 it would cost them to buy out the rest of my contract if they’d just watch this 40 minute film. They agreed. After I screened it, Charlie Bluhdorn, my boss, called me into his office and told me to go back to work. I said “But Charlie, I resigned.” He said "Whaddya want, more money?" I said "I don't want another dime from you. What I want is to be in a position were not a single one of those 18 motherfuckers can come on my lot, interfere with my films, or bother me in any way. I want complete control.” He says “Evans, are you crazy? I can’t do that? It’s against all corporate rules.” I said "OK, I'm going. Goodbye." He said "Get back here!" So Charlie goes back in before the board. After an hour, he comes back. “Okay Evans, you got what you want. It's your shop. You better have a lotta mazel, Evans! Now get to work!” So that’s how I got my autonomy. I wasn't a fence straddler. I gambled with my 300 Gs and that’s what took Paramount to 140 nominations and that’s what made history. What do you think most studios would have said to me if I went to them and said “I want to make the story of 18-year-old boy who falls in love with an 80-year-old woman, to be directed by an acid head (Hal Ashby) and written by a guy who cleans swimming pools (Colin Higgins)”? They’d throw it out the window! (laughs) And that’s how we touched magic.

That’s one of my favorite films, Harold and Maude.
I show it every Valentine’s Day! It’s such a romantic film.

Tell us about Hal Ashby.
I loved Hal. A sweet, sweet man, and a great director. He died way too early. He was a brilliant film editor and had a good reputation for that, but his first picture (The Landlord) hadn’t even come out yet when we were prepping Harold and Maude. Colin Higgins worked for (producer) Eddie Lewis as a pool boy! I think it’s a classic that’ll last forever. Every film that the so-called “suits” didn’t want to make were all hits, and the pictures that they did want to make were all flops. No one wanted to make The Godfather. With Chinatown, they begged me “It’s Chinese, nobody’ll understand it!” They didn’t want to release it. They didn’t understand it. Then after it came out, after all the accolades, suddenly they understood it.

You mentioned how much the studio world has changed since you began in the mid-60s. Could Bob Evans happen today, or was it great timing: the right man for the job at the right time?
It could happen. I've always been fortunate enough to meet people who have been mentors me. Some people didn't. Some people did. Fortunately, most people who did were at the top. I think it could be done again. Joe Roth has done it, very successfully. I didn't much earlier age, though. I’m a huge gambler. My attitude always was if I get fired, I get fired. Big deal. So I took chances. I did things people said couldn't be done. If someone came into my office and said “I've got a great idea for this picture. It’ll be so commercial and everyone will love it!” I’d say “Get outta here!” But if someone came in my office and said “I've got a really weird story to tell you. It may not work, but I think it's really terrific and I'm in love with it.” That’s what happened with a film called Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973). Nic Roeg went to everyone in town. No one wanted to make it. I did. Now it’s regarded as a classic. If you pick one hit out of three, you doing great. If a ballplayer bats one in three, he’s a star. If you hit a homer or two, you’re a big star. I always went by the percentages. With Roman Polanski, everybody told me I was crazy to hire this weird Polack to direct this high-profile movie (Rosemary’s Baby). I said “That’s why I’m doing it: it’s crazy!” You’ve got to risk to do something different, something original. If you don’t do what’s original, all you care about is keeping your job. Rules were made to be broken. Break them!

That’s one thing about this new generation of directors that’ve been pulled from commercials and music videos: they’re not in the filmmaking business, they’re in the advertising business and at the end of the day: they turn in these $150 million mouthwash ads.
Exactly. Everything is MTV-ized. There’s no scenes. There’s no texture. It’s cut, cut, cut! No one has the patience to sit and listen. You gotta have boom, boom, boom! Gotta have shoot ‘em up! Gotta have a happy ending! Know what? I don’t believe in happy endings! I think they ruin things. I don’t believe in the boy getting the girl in the end. I believe in unrequited love. There’s nothing more mesmerizing than unrequited love. And real. Waterloo Bridge, Love Story, Chinatown.

Best last line of a movie ever, in Chinatown!
“Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.” Yeah, it’s a great one.

One thing that your book and the film really drive home is how mercurial relationships in Hollywood are. It would drive most people mad. How do you keep your sanity in that environment?
I’ll tell you how: I keep my circle very small: Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Sumner Redstone, Peter Bart, a few others. When I was at my lowest, I didn’t lose my friendships.

Now you’ve become a hero and mentor to a new generation of young actors and filmmakers. Track record aside, I think it must be your candor that draws them to you.
People ask me “What’s the most important thing in your life.” I always answer “It has nothing to do with morality, it’s always telling the truth. Because then you never have to remember what you’ve said.” That way I can walk into any room at any time, and just tell it like it is. People may not like you for it, but there’s an asterisk to it: omission ain’t lying. (laughs)

The most fascinating character in your book was your late attorney and mentor Sidney Korshak.
I’m working with Billy Friedkin right now on the Korshak story. He was the ultimate power, my godfather. I spent every day with him for 40 years. A big bear of a guy, six foot five, former boxer. He was totally legitimate, never had a misdemeanor against him, but was the most powerful man I ever met. Seymour Hersh spent three years writing an article for The New York Times on Sidney and in three years, could find nothing out about him! Nothing!

And there was the secret of his power: anonymity. Prior to reading your book, I’d never heard of him.
Exactly.

Do you think your opposite profile, a very high one, is what made you such an easy target?
Yeah, absolutely.

Another lesson I learned in the book is to not be shy about approaching people, if you want to be in show biz.
And the bigger the person, the more approachable they are! I could reach George W. Bush easier on the phone than I could a junior agent at William Morris.

It sounds like The Cotton Club was the biggest professional disappointment of your life.
It was the worst single mistake I ever made in my life. I wanted it to be The Godfather with music. It took up six years of my life. I did more research on that than any picture I’ve ever done. Originally I was going to produce and direct it, and dedicate it to my late father, who had the first integrated dental practice in Harlem: “For you Pop, wherever you are. Your son, Bobby.” We even had a great poster drawn up for it. It read: “Its violence started the nation. Its music startled the world.” It was the single worst experience of my entire life. In 1979, when I began work on the project, I was worth $11 million. In 1989, I was worth $37.00. That was the 80’s for me. Not a fun time.

I’ve heard rumors that a longer version was going to be released.
It should be. Eleven musical numbers were cut out. I think it was done on purpose. All those guys that put the money up lost a fortune. I put my house up, too. But no, no, I doubt it. I think Francis had a score to settle with me after The Godfather. He was resentful, feeling I took too much credit for the film.

You’d think he’d be grateful to you.
No. No. (long pause) Francis is the most charming, seductive man I’ve ever met. I think he’s a direct descendent of Prince Machiavelli. Once you leave his kitchen, you’re enamored by him. (laughs) He’s so talented, so brilliant, and a dreamer. And I think rather self-destructive. We’ve only spoken once since that time, at the 25th anniversary screening of The Godfather. We all went down to the front of the theater afterwards, to tremendous applause. Francis started to pass me. Then he stopped, put his arms around me and whispered in my ear “We did something right.” That about sums it up.

How do you keep rising from the ashes like the Phoenix? What’s your secret?
Very simple: I wanna stay in the picture, because once you’re outta the picture, you’re out.

Read more!

Paul Haggis: The Hollywood Interview

Writer/director Paul Haggis confers with actor Don Cheadle on the set of Crash.


PAUL HAGGIS: CRASH COURSE
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the December/January 2005-06 issue of Venice Magazine.

Paul Haggis is the living definition of a writer who has paid his dues. After arriving in Hollywood from his native Canada while still in his 20s to pursue his dream of being a screenwriter, Haggis initially found work at the bottom of the television barrel: writing for Saturday morning kids’ shows like Scooby-Doo. After working his way up the food chain, penning scripts for 70s stalwarts like One Day at a Time, The Love Boat, Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life, Paul Haggis’ talent was recognized and he soon found himself one of TV’s top “prestige” writers, working on upscale titles such as Thirtysomething, and L.A. Law. In 1993, he created the Chuck Norris hit Walker Texas Ranger, which ran for eight seasons, all the while working as a writer-for-hire on other television series of varying quality.
In 2000, at age 47, Haggis had a revelation: that he “didn’t want the epitaph on his tombstone to read: ‘Creator of Walker Texas Ranger.’” A lifelong movie buff who had always dreamed of writing and directing features, Haggis walked from his very lucrative position in the world of television, and decided to write two scripts “on spec” (for no pay): Crash (co-written with Bobby Moresco) and Million Dollar Baby (adapted from two short stories in F.X. Toole’s book Rope Burns: Stories From the Corner). Baby, of course, swept last year’s Academy Awards (although Haggis lost in a very tough race to Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor for Sideways) and Crash, a Picaresque story of racism and life in contemporary L.A., is creating strong Oscar buzz of its own. He most recently finished the screenplay for Eastwood’s latest film: the WW II drama Flags of Our Fathers.
Paul Haggis sat down in his Santa Monica home (one of the shooting locations for Crash: it was Brendan Fraser and Sandra Bullock’s house. “We couldn’t afford to rent a real house,” Haggis says with a smile) to speak with us about his new, very successful career shift.

I’m very jealous that you’ve now gotten to work twice with Clint Eastwood. I got to spend a day on the Million Dollar Baby set last year, and I learned more in that day than I did in four years at USC.
Paul Haggis: Isn’t it amazing to watch him work? I actually finished shooting Crash before they began work on Million Dollar Baby, and so unfortunately I didn’t get to learn those same lessons until afterwards. But the next thing I directed was this TV pilot I recently finished which I also wrote, with Bobby Moresco in 1996. NBC suddenly decided they wanted it, which was great. I took a lot of those lessons I learned from that set: I shot in shorter days, got better performances, and it was an easier, quieter set because of it.

What were those lessons that you took away?
Well, Clint’s been working with the same people for years, and while I haven’t had the opportunity to do that yet, I was able to work with James Muro for the second time, who was my D.P. on Crash. I earned his trust, so he immediately came to mind, but once you have a rapport with someone it’s much easier to have that kind of shorthand. Jimmy’s such an artist with the camera. So I would definitely like to have a “team” in place like Clint does, that I can work with consistently.

One thing I liked about Crash was that I didn’t notice you or the D.P. until the third time I saw it.
Good! Thank you for saying that. It’s funny, I love cranes, and love crane shots, and movement, and there was one great crane shot I had at the end of the film. It started at the skyline, then it came down to Don Cheadle, then it came up and around and back and forth…it was just a breathtakingly beautiful shot. Then I looked at it and said ‘Ah, it’s too fancy.’ So I used the beginning and end of it, but the rest of the time, I stayed on Don’s close-up. My editor--Hughes Winborne, a great editor--and I finished cutting the whole movie, and he turned to me and said “You made a huge mistake: you have to put that shot back in. It’s just too fuckin’ beautiful, man.” I said “Fine.” So we put it back in, and we cut the negative. Now on a low budget film like this one, we had $6.5 million, so we didn’t have anything to cut other than the negative. So when you do that, you destroy frames. When I saw the entire crane shot put back in the film I said ‘I can’t do that. I have to put the close up back in.’ Hughes said “You destroyed the negative! You cut it out!” I said ‘I know,’ so we went back in and digitally created those frames, which you can do now, and we put Don’s close-up back in, because that told the story, and didn’t scream “Look at me, I’m a director!”

You directed television prior to this, but never a feature. Is television as fluid a medium as film for a director?
No, not at all. You have a great freedom in film, especially independent film, to express things the way you want. There are a lot of great directors in television, and I got to work with many of them, and you soak in so much watching them work as writers or directors. In fact, if you look at a lot of the work on television today, it’s fabulous filmmaking. It feels more like you’re watching a film, instead of watching television.

Tell us about how Crash was born.
There were several jumping off points, one being when I was carjacked back in 1991. I was coming home with my then-wife after the opening of Silence of the Lambs. We were film junkies and one film was never enough, so we stopped off at the video store to get something else. We went to the video store and got some obscure Finnish movie we’d never seen. We were coming out to where we parked my first new, expensive car: a white Porsche, and suddenly two men with guns walk up. “We’ll take the car.” I said ‘Absolutely,’ and told Diane to get out of the car. Then they told us to walk towards this dark alley that was behind us. I thought that was a poor choice so I stood in front of my wife, shielding her, and pushed her towards Wilshire Boulevard. We got about 25 feet and I heard “Stop!” And I hear running behind me, and I feel a gun in my back. The guy reached down, and grabbed the video that was in Diane’s hand, turned around, hopped in the car, and they drove off. So the cops come, very quickly. I described the young men, the car and all the information. Then I decide to give them my theory of the crime. I said ‘I think those fellows have been here quite often. I get that feeling. I think they were here looking for that video. They’ve been here several times, and it was never in. They saw us coming out with it, felt it was too much to take, and they took the car to make their getaway.’ (laughs) Of course the cops are just staring at me as if I’m in shock, which of course I am. They were nice enough to drive us home. Then we called a locksmith, because they had our housekeys, and our address, and our locks got changed at 2:00 in the morning. Over the next ten years, I thought about those two kids a lot, and they wouldn’t let me alone. They kept popping up in my head, mostly late at night: who would do that? What did they think of themselves? Did they think of themselves as criminals? Were they best friends? What did they do with the car? 10-12 years later, I woke up in the middle of night again, thinking about them again. I went ‘Fuck!’ So I finally decided to sit down, and write about it. But I decided to use them as my protagonists, rather than my villains, and tell the story from their point of view. I recently had become intrigued by how we affect strangers. You and I, driving down the streets, I yell at you, you flip me the finger, you go right, I go left. What happens to you? Do you go home and do the emotions that the incident has caused you to carry cause you to have a tiff with your wife? Or do you stop two or three blocks later and save someone’s life? But we judge people so quickly, based on so little evidence. So I asked myself those same questions: What did we do after we had the encounter with those two young guys? We went home and changed the locks. Then I asked myself, how would I have felt if that kid had come to change the locks at two in the morning? What if he was Hispanic? What if he had buzzed hair and what looked like gang or prison tattoos. Would I have felt safe? Being a liberal guy, you’re always spouting off on these things, would you have felt safe in that situation? ‘Fuck! I hate that! I hate asking that question!’ So I decided to put Sandra Bullock’s character in that position of having to admit it. But then wait, what happens to that kid who comes to change the locks? So I followed him. And by ten in the morning, I had the whole story completed, with all these characters who’d come to me over the years.

At first you tried to do it as a TV series, right?
Yeah, and the networks weren’t particularly interested. Then I went off to write Million Dollar Baby, after I got the rights from F.X. Toole, and I wrote it on spec, so when I was finished, I was still unemployed. I decided to take a pass on television for a while, called my friend Bobby Moresco and said ‘I’ve got these pages here, and I think it’s a movie. I also know two things: no one’s going to pay us and once it’s done, it’s probably never going to get made.’ He said “Sounds cool.” So we got together and wrote the script in two weeks. It just flew out of us, unlike Million Dollar Baby, which I struggled with for eight months.

Why was it so much harder to adapt Million Dollar Baby?
Well, it was culled from two short stories from Toole’s book, Rope Burns: “Million Dollar Baby,” which was just about the relationship between Maggie (Hilary Swank) and Frankie (Clint Eastwood), there was no Scrap (Morgan Freeman) character, no priest, no deep belief in Catholicism, no estranged daughter and nothing he was haunted by. It was just Frankie and Maggie, and him trying to train her. The other story was called “Frozen Water.” So I had to take those beautiful short stories and somehow surround them with a world and find a way to tell it. I knew I had to have narration, but I usually hate narration, because it’s such an easy tool. I knew I had to come up with some emotional way to justify it. I had a situation when I went through a very long, painful divorce and I was estranged from my youngest daughter for some time. It was horrible. So I took those feelings and experiences I had and put them in the story as something that maybe Frankie couldn’t forgive himself for. I decided on not telling the audience what that was, so that’s when I said “Ah ha!” and I got the hook, and was able to write it. It’s always an emotional reason that you get the story’s hook, never an intellectual one. If there’s not an emotional reason for an element to be in a script, then it doesn’t belong there.

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