Talking with Korean Movie Star Jan Dong-gun

Note: This article orginally appeared in the April 2005 issue of Venice Magazine. It was an odd interview experience, although not unpleasant. Jang Dong-gun was quite nice, but I interviewed him in his hotel suite surrounded by approximately 8 of his entourage and handlers. None of them spoke other than he. None were introduced to me. They were just in the room when I got there. Some of them sat behind me. Some of them around him. Men and women. They all listened to every word he said. And then it was over and I quickly left.
Acting Typhoon Jang Dong-gun
by Terry Keefe

It's been the Spring of Jang Dong-gun these past few months in the United States, in which the South Korean movie star has seen two of his most spectacular cinematic works released here in rapid succession. A leading man for years now in his home country, the actor is finally in the middle of an arrival of sorts on these shores. The month of May saw the long-awaited opening of The Promise, in which Jang Dong-gun starred as the slave Kunlun in director Chen Kaige's martial arts epic, and this month brings the ominous approach of Typhoon, a big-budget action thriller which has the distinction of being the most expensive Korean film ever produced.

Directed by leading Korean director Kwak Kyung-taek, who Jang Dong-gun worked with previously in 2001 on Friend, Typhoon revolves around a grand terrorist scheme by Jang Dong-gun's Sin, a North Korean who, along with his family, was refused entry as a child into South Korea. Subsequently, his family were executed by the North Koreans, while Sin escaped into the country with his sister Choi Myung-ju (Lee Mi-yeon), who he was nonetheless quickly separated from. Filled with unquenchable rage, the now-adult Sin wishes to inflict utter destruction upon both Koreas by combining the devastating power of an approaching typhoon with that of biological warfare. The only one who stands between Sin and the loss of the North and South is Kang Se-jong (Lee Jung-jae), an elite naval lieutenant. If this sounds like the plot of the latest Jerry Bruckheimer spectacular, it could be, and it also looks the part, climaxing in a spectacular battle on board a freighter out in the middle of the storm. Typhoon is a big-budget Korean action spectacular that rivals the production values of similar Hollywood product, although its scale was a serious financial roll of the dice for the filmmakers. Explains Jang Dong-gun, " In general, the action movies in Korea cost a little more than the melodramas or romantic comedies. But this film, I can honestly say, cost 5 times that of a melodrama." However, the film with a huge budget also became a massive hit, raising the next question of whether the rest of the Korean film industry is going to have to start spending a lot more to compete with the likes of Typhoon. It's a concern shared by Jang Dong-gun, who says, "I personally support making this type of big-budget film, just as long as the smaller indie films also will have a chance to be seen. I really believe personally in maintaining our diversity in filmmaking. At the same time, Korea is the only Asian country which can produce this kind of big-budget film with domestic funding."

The role of Sin was a linguistically challenging one for Jang Dong-gun, as he had to also learn Russian and Thai for the role, as well as speak with a North Korean dialect. Comparably difficult was his work on the Chinese production of The Promise, where he had to do his entire performance in Mandarin. Says Jang Dong-gun of his experience on The Promise, in which he starred opposite both Chinese and Japanese actors, "It was my first time working in an arrangement with multinational casting. So I was very afraid before it started, but once the shooting began, I realized that most filmmaking environments are really quite similar, regardless of your nationality or cultural differences. And I found that things were more similar than they were different. I also realized that sharing feelings and emotions is more important than language itself when you act with a multinational cast. Plus, we were there to achieve the same goals and that made us become one."

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Ridley Scott: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker Sir Ridley Scott.


RIDLEY SCOTT:
CAESAR CINEMATICA MAXIMUS
by
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the May 2000 issue of Venice Magazine.

Ridley Scott has been one of the cinema's most successful commercial filmmakers, boasting one of the most distinctive visual styles in film history. Born November 30, 1937 in South Shields, England, he entered the BBC in the mid-60's as a set designer, and soon moved on to directing, turning out slick episodes for such series as Z Cars and The Informer. He then set up his own production company, Ridley Scott and Associates, through which he produced and directed television commercials that became noted for their technical superiority and visual dazzle. (Talent runs in the Scott family: brother Tony is a renowned director himself (Top Gun, True Romance, Crimson Tide) and son Jake made his directorial debut last year with Plunkett and McCleane.)

Scott brought that flair for sumptuous design to the big screen when he made his debut as a feature director in 1977: his adaptation of Joseph Conrad's The Duellists won the Camera D'Or at Cannes, for Best First Film. He hit paydirt with Alien in 1979. The box office smash about a monstrous stowaway aboard a space ship made a star of Sigourney Weaver, spawned three sequels and countless imitations. With Blade Runner (1983) Scott created what many feel is his signature film: a futuristic detective story starring Harrison Ford, bolstered by the most innovative production design in film history. Although many found the film's narrative muddy, due to a hastily re-shot ending and a tacked-on voice-over by Ford, Scott's Blade Runner: The Director's Cut was released in 1993, featuring Scott's original cut of the film, which many feel is far superior to the original. It also spawned the trend for "Director's Cuts" of every film under the sun being re-released in theaters, and on video and DVD.

Scott's next two films, the sumptuous fantasy Legend (1985) starring Tom Cruise, and the thriller Someone to Watch Over Me (1987) performed poorly at the box office, in spite of critical acclaim for the latter. Black Rain, a police thriller set mostly in Japan starring Michael Douglas, proved a big hit worldwide, putting Scott back on the A list map, and paving the way for Thelma and Louise (1991), an Oscar winner for Best Screenplay, following the exploits of two daring heroines (Susan Sarandon, Geena Davis) as they make a mad dash across the southwest.

Scott's next three films: the Christopher Columbus biopic 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), the sea-faring adventure White Squall (1996) starring Venice fave Jeff Bridges, and the military drama G.I. Jane (1997) starring Demi Moore, failed to garner much critical or box office kudos for Scott, although each film has its defenders, and all three boasted some spectacular moments.

Scott's latest should put him back on the critical and box office map where he belongs. Gladiator tells the story of Rome's greatest general Maximus (Russell Crowe), the favorite of ailing Emperor Marcus Aurelius (Richard Harris). When the emperor lets it be known that Maximus will be his successor, passing over son Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), Commodus tries to have Maximus assassinated. With being too much a spoiler, let's just say that Maximus is reborn a gladiator, eventually making his way to the Coliseum in Rome, where he and Commodus meet for a final show-down! Great writing, characters, direction, cinematography, and performances from the entire cast, which also includes Connie Nielsen, Djimon Hounsou, and the great Oliver Reed in his final role, make this winner the one to beat this summer. The Dreamworks release hits theaters on May 5.

Ridley Scott sat down over a fine Cuban cigar with Venice to discuss his latest cinematic opus, the genius of Oliver Reed, and what really happened with Blade Runner.

Was there trepidation on your part making a gladiator picture in the shadow of a classic like Spartacus?
No, the only film that I was worried about was Airplane! Remember the scene when Peter Graves asked the little boy if he liked "gladiator pictures"? (laughs) But seriously, no. I mean, you could never hope to duplicate Spartacus, or any great film for that matter. I saw Gladiator as a historical epic that was character-driven. All the characters in it have a great deal of humanity, especially Russell's character, Maxiumus.

Tell us about working with Russell Crowe. There's no doubt after seeing this film that he's going to be a huge star.
Russell's a collaborator. He brings a great deal to the table when he takes on a role, really gives it his all and has a lot of ideas. As soon as we cast him as Maximus, he started reading Marcus Arrelius' writings and familiarizing himself with the history of the Roman Empire. He's very well read on a lot of other subjects, as well.

The battle scenes were tremendous. They really put you in the middle of the action. Were they difficult to shoot logistically?
Not at all. Originally we went to Germany to shoot the opening scenes, then relocated to the UK when we discovered that a section of forest near Galway airport was going to be razed for construction. The owners of the land said it would be cheaper if we burned it down that if they cut it down, so they said "come in and do what you like." We were able to shoot a lot of the film there, and did the entire opening in just three weeks. Any time you change locations, you're costing yourself a great deal of time and money, so it helps if you can contain it.

Oliver Reed gives his last performance in Gladiator. He was a legendary character.
Oliver was what I'd call a "charming scoundrel." He was a wonderful actor, incredibly intense. I knew for that role I needed a Robert Shaw-type actor who was tough as nails, but also had a sensitive side. There aren't too many actors like Shaw, or Reed around anymore. The only other two would be Richard Harris and David Hemmings, both of whom are in the film as well. Although, I think Russell has a lot in common with them. Very straightforward, no-nonsense sort of guys. Old school.

Didn't Reed still have scenes left to shoot when he died?
Yeah. He still had three weeks left. I had to shoot most of his scenes at the end of the film using his body double, then for the close-ups we superimposed Oliver's face onto the body double's. Eerie, eh? I also was able to use some shots from earlier scenes and outtakes. But thank God for digital technology...Oliver went out the way he would have wanted to, I should think: with a pint glass in his hand.

Let's talk about your background.
I was born in the north of England, near Newcastle where my father was in the shipbuilding business and also in the army. We lived all over Europe, in Germany for five years. That was a wonderful experience. I wanted to be an artist, so my dad encouraged me to pursue art school, which I did. Then I went to work for the BBC, started as a set dresser and enrolled in their production program. Then I started directing live television shows like Z Cars and a show not many people in America know called The Informer, which was created by a wonderful director by the name of Peter Collinson (The Italian Job).

Then you went on to become the top commercial director in Britain. Ridley Scott and Associates was the biggest firm of its kind, right?
Still is, actually. We employ over 50 directors at the moment. I loved doing commercials. It was a great training ground for me. But I couldn't wait to start making features.

When you were a kid, was there one film you saw that really grabbed you where you said "This is what I have to do?"
The Searchers (1956). I remember just being blown away by that film. I love westerns. I want to do a western some day. I don't think anyone else ever captured the west the way John Ford did. I actually went to the hotel in Monument Valley, where they used to stay. They have the "John Ford Room" there with all these production photographs that he took. Vistas, panoramas, that sort of thing. They're the most extraordinary photographs...As far as other films that influenced me, I'd have to say The Third Man (1949), and later on 2001 (1968).

I understand that with Alien, you never intended it to be thought of as a "horror film."
No, not at all. What we were after was sort of a variation on Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians set in space. We wanted it to be character-driven, and suspenseful, and not all about jumping out of your seat in fright. One of the things I'm most proud of about that film is Jerry Goldsmith's score. My God, what a score! I think it's one of the most-imitated film scores ever written, and for good reason. I just saw a sci-fi horror film the other day that had a score that was almost exactly like Jerry's score from Alien. I guess when you've got a good thing...

Why weren't you involved with the sequel, Aliens (1986), which James Cameron did?
Very simple: they didn't ask me! To this day I have no idea why. It hurt my feelings, really, because I thought we did quite a good job on the first one. I had an idea for a fifth installment in the series. It would be all about the aliens themselves: what their world and civilization are like. What made them tick. We always thought of that derelict spacecraft where they found all the eggs in the first one was a sort of aircraft carrier or bomber. They would drop the eggs on the planets they wanted to conquer, then come back a few years later after the landscape had been "cleared," so to speak.

Sounds like a great idea.
Yeah, but they still haven't asked me to do it! (laughs)

What happened with Blade Runner? Was it taken away from you and re-cut, then you released The Director's Cut 10 years later?
No, not at all. It wasn't taken away from me. The version that was The Director's Cut was in fact my original cut, and it tested badly. That simple. So we went and re-cut it, added in Harrison's narration and tried to play up the Raymond Chandler angle, which just didn't work. We never really nailed the Chandler feel in that narration. The last film that really did was Apocalypse Now (1979), where the narration was done brilliantly.

You could hear the disdain in Harrison Ford's voice in that narration.
Oh yeah, he was not happy about doing that at all. The funny thing was, looking back on the test scores, they really weren't all that bad, in the 60's I think.

Any advice for first-time directors?
Even when you feel like you don't know what you're doing, give a direction, give an order to the crew, then very calmly go into your trailer, sit down and say to yourself "What the fuck am I going to do?" (laughs) You can never know exactly what you're going to do at any given time during a shoot. You have to be open to changes, to accidents, many of which are happy ones. Just remember: even after you've been directing a long time, there are going to be days when you still feel like you don't know what you're doing! (laughs)

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John Schlesinger: The Hollywood Interview

Director John Schlesinger.



JOHN SCHLESINGER:
HIS BEST NEXT THING
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the March 2000 issue of Venice Magazine.

John Schlesinger is celebrated for his ability to elicit sensitive performances from his actors, a skill which draws on his own experience on the British stage in the 1950s. His style is also influenced by techniques he developed while directing TV documentaries—a period of his career characterized by extensive location shooting, tight production schedules and an emphasis on the role of editing in shaping narrative structure.

Schlesinger was born in London February 16, 1926, the son of a pediatrician. He first became interested in film at the age of 11, when he received a 9.5 mm movie camera as a gift. While serving with the Royal Engineers during WWII he made an amateur film, Horrors, and performed as a magician in the Combined Services Entertainment Unit. When he resumed his education in 1945 he immersed himself in the theater, joining the Oxford University Dramatic Society and soon becoming president of the Oxford Experimental Theater Company. (He would continue to direct for the stage, in between movie assignments, throughout the 1960s and 70s.)

From 1952 to 1957 Schlesinger worked in England, Australia and New Zealand, appearing in five feature films, acting in nearly 20 plays with various repertory companies and performing on TV and radio. During this period, a chance meeting with director/producer Roy Boulting catalyzed his interest in photography and filmmaking and led to the creation, with theatrical agent Basil Appleby, of a 15-minute documentary, Sunday in the Park (1956). The film brought Schlesinger a series of documentary assignments for the BBC. After a stint as a second-unit director, he was commissioned to make an industrial documentary of daily life in London's Waterloo Station. The poignant result, Terminus (1961), achieved nationwide commercial distribution and earned him a Venice Festival Gold Lion and a British Academy Award.

Motivated in part by the festival success of Terminus, producer Joseph Janni offered Schlesinger his first shot at a feature film with A Kind of Loving (1962). The result was a critical and financial success which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Festival and propelled its director into the front rank of young British filmmakers. In Billy Liar (1963), Schlesinger continued to examine the themes of inarticulate ambition and frustrated tenderness he had explored in A Kind of Loving. Both films showed the influence of the British Free Cinema (or "kitchen sink drama") movement, with its emphasis on the constraints and restrictions of working-class life. Schlesinger then moved into very different terrain with Darling (1965), a flashy satire of "swinging London" that certified its lead actress, Julie Christie, as an international star when she won the Academy Award for best actress. Schlesinger followed this with a sweeping adaptation of Thomas Hardy's classic Far From the Maddening Crowd (1967) starring Christie again, and Terrence Stamp.

Midnight Cowboy (1969) was perhaps Schlesinger's greatest success commercially and critically, winning Oscars for best picture and best director and launching a long but rather turbulent Hollywood career for Schlesinger. Films such as the bi-sexual love triangle drama Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), the vastly underrated adaptation of Nathanael West's Hollywood novel The Day of the Locust (1975) and the classic thriller Marathon Man (1976) all bear witness to Schlesinger's remarkable ability to weave meticulously observed, realistic backgrounds into his complex studies of human relationships.

Schlesinger's later films have included The Believers(1987), a gripping contemporary horror story starring Martin Sheen and Helen Shaver, Madame Sousatzka (1988), about an eccentric London piano teacher (Shirley MacLaine) and her gifted young student, the thrillers Pacific Heights (1990), The Innocent (1993), and An Eye for An Eye (1995). Schlesigner most recently helmed a delightful adaptation of Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm (1996) starring Kate Beckinsale and Ian McKellen.

Schlesinger's latest effort is the comedy-drama The Next Best Thing, starring Madonna, Rupert Everett and Benjamin Bratt. Madonna plays a yoga instructor who is devastated after a nasty break-up with her boyfriend. When her gay best friend (Everett) accidentally gets her pregnant, she decides to have the child, and the three as a happy, if unconventional, family. Several years later, when Madonna falls in love with überhunk Benjamin Bratt, complications ensue when she and Bratt decide to marry, and move the boy with them to New York. John Schlesinger sat down with Venice recently to reflect on his remarkable career.

The Next Best Thing is an unusual film, in that it starts out as a comedy, then turns very serious toward the end. What are some of the things you hope people will take away from this story?
I hope they realize that a family can be made up of all sorts of elements that are not necessarily conventional. I hope they'll understand the issues of biology versus commitment to being a parent, because I think Rupert's character is dedicated to being a father...and his commitment to this child is very strong and powerful, and not the accepted thing from a gay man, necessarily. It also addresses the fact that being gay is all things to all people. It isn't just a limp-wristed fag going to the gym all the time. I hope they'll accept that. It's all there, for anyone who wants to see it.

Many of your films have featured up-and-coming talent. Can you tell us about working with Benjamin Bratt?
We took our time (casting the role). I had seen him in Law & Order and thought he was rather serious, never smiled, rather mournful at times. But he came out and read absolutely brilliantly for us. The light side of the character was there. It was very obvious that all our preconceived notions went out the window, which is what happens in casting quite often, and one of the delights of making movies. Jon Voight, for example, was all wrong for me as Joe Buck initially, then he just came round to it from tests, and things like that.

This isn't the first film you've done that dealt with gay relationships. Midnight Cowboy, and particularly Sunday Bloody Sunday, very honestly portrayed homosexuals. Do you think society has become more accepting of the gay lifestyle in the 30 years since those films?
Yes, I think it has. I still think there's an awful lot of prejudice and I think that AIDS, seen by many as a "gay disease" even though it clearly isn't, has not helped at all. I hope this film will bring some understanding of that, as well, since we address the issue.

Tell us about your background.
My father was a pediatrician. I suppose I was always drawn towards the arts. It was encouraged in the family. My father met my mother in a children's orchestra. He played the cello and my mother was a violinist. So musically, the family was encouraged. I was the eldest of five and we all played instruments. During the second World War, my father was in the army in India, and we'd send him records that we'd all made, to show how our music was progressing. They gave us a very good musical upbringing, taking us to opera, festivals, and so forth. So I was very privileged in that way to have parents who were that committed to the arts. It was a happy childhood, really.

When did your fascination with film begin?
I suppose when I was in school. I was very interested in film and theater. I never thought I was going to get involved the way I have done, but I made various amateur films when I was at university (Oxford). During my vacations, we made movies which got some attention critically and the opportunity to go to work for Ealing Studios presented, then taken away because they didn't really have a vacancy. It was a long time before I really got into (making films) professionally. I became a researcher and assistant director on a British documentary about cheese! (laughs) It was one of my first professional jobs. Then I got the opportunity to go to the BBC and make documentaries for magazine programs. I worked on a documentary series about Winston Churchill and interviewed all these high-ranking members of the military brass who were just incredible prima donnas! (laughs) Then I bummed around in the profession for years before I settled. I never would have been a good corporation man at the Beeb (BBC). Never would have been able to adapt to that corporate attitude.

Was there one film you saw as a young man that inspired you to become a filmmaker?
No, it wasn't like that. There are dozens of famous films I've never seen. Then you have someone like Marty Scorsese who's devoted his life to seeing every film imaginable. He'll call me up and say "I just saw this amazing film with Rex Ingram!" (laughs) I could never be like that. There are other things I enjoy far too much, like opera, like ballet, like music. I want different experiences because they all inform each other.

A Kind of Loving was your first feature.
Yes, it was a great success. Won the Golden Bear at Berlin and started an association I had with a wonderful producer called Joe Janni. He's dead now, but we made six films together and it was wonderful at the time. I was fond of that film, but Billy Liar, my second film, far eclipsed it.

That film introduced both Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie.
Yes, it was. I had made a documentary called Monitor for the BBC about the Central School of Acting in London. Julie was in one of the classes. She wasn't in the film, but we noted her. She was very striking. When we came to cast Billy Liar, there we were in Joe Janni's office, and there was a magazine which Julie was on the cover of. I pointed at it and said 'Someone like her,' not recognizing her. She came in and tested, twice, and we turned her down. I didn't think she was "earth mother" enough. The other girl who we cast got ill during the first week of shooting and had to drop out. So we went back to the tests and saw Julie, and thought 'My God, we're mad! Why didn't we cast Julie?' So we put her in and that's how it happened.

Since we're talking about Julie Christie, let's talk about Darling.
The genesis of that was a conversation we had with a journalist called Godfrey Winn, who played the man in Billy Liar who played all the records on Housewives' Choice. He was quite a character. He told me a story about a syndicate of show biz people who'd rented a flat for a kind of call girl to live in, to whom they all had access, and how she eventually threw herself off the balcony, in Park Lane. We thought that was an interesting premise, but we veered very far away from it. Freddie Raphael came on board to write his script and it was total fantasy. Joe Janni said, 'I know a girl who I'd like you to spend time with and follow around, who's the perfect type for this movie.' So we spent a lot of time with this girl, and finally a script based to a certain extent on her life, was produced by Freddie, which was much closer to the mark. And we went ahead and made it.

Dirk Bogarde, who died last year, was also wonderful in that film. He was also an accomplished author, painter, a real renaissance man. Tell us about him.
He was wonderful and was very nice to Julie during the shoot. He became rather a bitter older man, I don't know why. But he was very embittered. We rather fell out as friends, which is sad, but it happens. Julie still remains a good friend of mine. As was Laurence Harvey, who died far too young.

Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy (1969).

Tell us about how Midnight Cowboy came about.
A friend of mine, an American painter living in London, had read the book and suggested that I look at it. I read it and thought 'If I'm going to make a film in America, then this is the one that I want to do.' David Picker of United Artists had issued a kind of blanket invitation, saying "When you find something you want to do, do bring it to us." So Jerry Hellman, who was a producer I knew, and I brought the book to David, who agreed to do it if we could keep the budget low enough.

Parts of it were improvised, right? Like Hoffman's famous "I'm walkin' here!" bit.
I don't know that that was improvised. I think we got an extra inside a cab and did it. I can't swear to the fact that it was in the script or not, but I don't think that was improvised.

Waldo Salt, who did the screenplay for Midnight Cowboy, was a fascinating character. Talk about a man who could have been embittered (from the Blacklist).
He never was. Never was. He chose to be amused by the memories of it all. He was great to work with and I loved him dearly. He also did Day of the Locust for us.

Let's talk about Day of the Locust, which is a wonderful, very underrated film.
Thank you. It's one of my favorites, as well. I was fortunate to have wonderful designers. We got Richard MacDonald out here to do it. Driving from the airport to his hotel, he did a little tour. He said, "I'll tell you what my impression of L.A. is: it's tied together by telegraph wires with bizarre architecture." He did a marvelous job, with Ann Roth doing the costumes...the final scene, the riot, took about 10 days to shoot. We used three stages at Paramount, linked together with black plastic. The fumes from the cars was one of the problems. But it was very exciting to do.

Marathon Man is one of my favorite films. It had a wonderful sense of foreboding. Was Hitchcock an influence on that film?
Well, I can't say I was imitating him, although I'm accused of it. You can't help but be influenced by his mixture of humor and suspense. I hadn't done a thriller up to that point, and I loved doing it. I got very hooked on making suspense pieces after that. It's a game you play with the audience that's unlike any other kind of filmmaking.

Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier in the notorious "Is it safe?" sequence from Marathon Man (1976).

There are all the legends of Olivier and Hoffman clashing. How much is truth, and how much is legend?
I think that Olivier didn't want to improvise and Hoffman did. And it's true, Olivier's line "Why doesn't he just act?" that he said to me, not Hoffman, happened, because Hoffman was trying various acting techniques to appear out-of-it during the dental scenes. When I looked at the dailies I realized there was no reaction from Hoffman's eyes, so I had to completely reshoot all the close-ups. That's when Olivier said to me "Why doesn't he just try acting?" (laughs)

Any advice for first-time directors?
Never take 'no' for an answer. It's a long business getting something off the ground and it takes very great determination. That's the only advice I can really offer.

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John Frankenheimer: The Hollywood Interview

Director John Frankenheimer.


JOHN FRANKENHEIMER:
RENAISSANCE AUTEUR
By
Alex Simon

This article originally appeared in the October 1998 issue of Venice Magazine.

John Frankenheimer is responsible for some of the hallmark productions of American cinema and television. An innovator in both fields, he helped pave the way for later generations of filmmakers to express their social, political and artistic points of view in bold and breathtaking ways. Consider this:

BEFORE THERE WAS STEVEN SPIELBERG, THERE WAS JOHN FRANKENHEIMER. Frankenheimer was the original wünderkind, having directed over 150 TV plays during the days of live television in the 1950’s while still in his 20’s, including many of the celebrated Playhouse 90 series. His landmark productions of Rod Serling's "The Comedian" and J.P. Miller's "Days of Wine and Roses" catapulted him to the top of the new medium of television. By the time he was 30 years old in 1960, Frankenheimer was firmly established as the top television director in the country. By the time he was 34, he had been at the helm of the most important political films of the 1960’s, which brings us to our next point:

BEFORE THERE WAS OLIVER STONE (OR COSTA-GAVRAS), THERE WAS JOHN FRANKENHEIMER. Frankenheimer’s trilogy of Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May(1964) explored American political life, thinking and philosophy like no other filmmaker has done before or since. All three films were bold indictments of the paranoia, corruption and dehumanization that the political process (and politically-motivated institutions) can bring down upon the common man. Plus, he did them in exciting and breathtaking ways, bending the cinematic form into a gritty, visually intoxicating canvas. Which brings us to our next point:

BEFORE THERE WAS JOHN WOO, JAN DE BONT, RICHARD DONNER OR (INSERT THE NAME OF ANY OTHER ACTION MOVIE DIRECTOR HERE________), THERE WAS JOHN FRANKENHEIMER. Frankenheimer redefined the way action and suspense were portrayed on-screen, taking cues from his idols Alfred Hitchcock, Carol Reed and George Stevens (as well as French master Jean-Pierre Melville), using not only action, but character to build suspense. The Manchurian Candidate, the World War II thrillerThe Train (1964), the science-fiction/realism masterpiece Seconds (1966), and the landmark racing epic Grand Prix (1966) which gave the viewer a front seat perspective for what it felt like to travel at speeds that make the corners of your mouth bend and leave bugs firmly planted in your teeth, all redefined the action film in their own way, while remaining true to Frankenheimer’s own vision, and very plainly carrying his distinctive filmmaking stamp.

Frankenheimer kept his love of politics and action alive in later films as well, including the dynamite sequel French Connection II (1975);Black Sunday (1977), in which the late, great Robert Shaw must stop Black September terrorists (led by Bruce Dern, in a brilliant performance) from blowing up the Super Bowl; Dead Bang (1989) in which cop Don Johnson takes on neo-Nazis in the midwest; The Fourth War (1990), an end of the cold war thriller; and Year of the Gun (1991), which dramatized the true kidnapping and murder of Italian Premier Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades terrorist group in the late 1970’s. Frankenheimer has continued his innovative work in television as well, with a series of made-for-cable films that have tackled subjects that many of the big studios thought too hot to handle, including Against the Wall, a dramatization of the 1971 prison riot at Attica, New York; The Burning Season in 1994, which marked the final performance of the great Raul Julia and won three Golden Globe Awards and two cable ACE Awards. “Andersonville,” a Civil War mini-series for Turner Network Television, which earned Frankenheimer his third consecutive Emmy. The following year, Frankenheimer helmed the critically lauded “George Wallace,” with Gary Sinise in the title role. It won the Golden Globe for Best Film for Television along with the George Foster Peabody Award. Frankenheimer also received another Emmy nomination. In 1996, the American Cinema Editors honored Frankenheimer with the ACE Golden Eddie Filmmaker of the Year Award, celebrating his lifetime achievement as a filmmaker.

Frankenheimer’s latest ranks with the finest work of his career. “Ronin” tells the story of a disparate group of freelance covert operatives, led by Robert De Niro, who must retrieve a briefcase, the contents of which are a mystery, for an unknown client. The film is one of the best of the year, having all the great qualities of the thrillers of the 60’s and 70’s (intelligence and nail-biting suspense), along with what this writer feels is the finest car chase ever put onto celluloid and some other truly breathtaking action sequences. This is one that keeps you guessing what’s going to happen next right up to the closing credits, after which you find yourself begging for more. Its stellar supporting cast includes Natascha McElhone, Jean Reno, Stellan Skarsgård, Sean Bean and Jonathan Pryce. In other words, run, don’t walk to see “Ronin” when it opens in October from MGM/UA.

A true renaissance man, Mr. Frankenheimer is an accomplished chef, having studied at the legendary Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris, as well as an accomplished race car driver and tennis player, a sport in which he excelled during his years at Williams College. Mr. Frankenheimer sat down recently to reflect on his truly rich and remarkable life.

Most of your films seem to have either political themes or socio-political overtones. Where does this fascination with politics come from?
JOHN FRANKENHEIMER: It stems from the fact that when I was in high school, I started disagreeing a lot with my father on politics, because he was really very conservative. He really wanted the status quo, and I didn’t want the status quo. The whole racial question really, really bothered me. I came from New York, and one of my first girlfriends was an African-American dancer. And this caused a furor of sorts within my family. And the more furor it caused, the more I realized that this was something I wanted. Then I got a lot of exposure to a lot of actors, dancers and writers at a very young age, and I got really involved in that kind of cause. Then when I got into live television, there was the whole business of McCarthy, which was...you can’t imagine how terrible that was. That really galvanized me into a political arena. And of course in live television it was very hard to do political stuff because there was the blacklist. You could do anything psychological, but nothing sociological. So I couldn’t wait to really be able to do that, which is what I think what attracted me to “Birdman of Alcatraz,” which is a very political picture...then there was this tremendous involvement with Robert Kennedy. We were very, very close friends and I did all the film and television for his campaign. He stayed with me and I drove him to the Ambassador Hotel the night he was shot. All his clothes were in my house...and I really had a nervous breakdown after that. That’s when I went to France, and that’s when I went to the (Cordon Bleu), because I just had to do something else with my life, and I really couldn’t go near politics for a long time after that. Then little by little, I came back to it. It was really the cable movies that got me back into it, “Against the Wall,” for instance, then “The Burning Season,” and then really plunging right back into it with “George Wallace,” which is something that goes way back to my younger days. Then when (“Ronin”) presented itself...I love that kind of story, where things are never as they seem to be.

It really reminded me a lot of one of my favorite movies, “The Third Man” (1949).
I’m so glad you said that because whenever anyone asks me about “Ronin,” I always say that the film that I want it to remind them of is “The Third Man.” Carol Reed influenced me more than any other director with “Odd Man Out” (1947), “The Fallen Idol” (1948), “The Man Between” (1953)...I have two biographies of Carol Reed that I use as my bibles.

Frankenheimer on the Paris set of Ronin, with Robert De Niro (1998).

The look of “Ronin” was reminiscent of “The Third Man” as well, with its emphasis on light and dark, sharp camera angles, and the way you made all those old buildings around Paris into characters of their own.
Well the whole business of depth of focus, which I use a great deal, goes back to my days in live TV, because we were able to use a big, big stop there, like F-11. We didn’t have instant access to video cassettes or film stock the way young filmmakers do today. So the first time I ever saw “Citizen Kane” (1941), which was after I’d already become a director and was doing all that stuff myself, and saw that Welles did it too so much earlier was great vindication for me. And I discovered Carol Reed earlier than that, because I always went to see foreign films. Hitchcock also, and George Stevens really helped to form me.

I thought “Ronin” had a lot of Hitchcockian overtones, in terms of all the deceptions, double-crosses and twists. How did you come to the script initially?
What happened was I read a script that I really loved that was owned by MGM/UA and the producer was Frank Mancuso, Jr. I really wanted to do this picture...I felt that I got along with Frank terribly well, but they seemed to be ambivalent about doing this movie. So I came home after being away for the weekend, and there was this script, Ronin, that my agent had sent me. He said “Look, they really loved meeting with you, and the fact that you lived in France and speak French, they think you’d be perfect for this movie.” So I read it and I was very ambivalent about wanting to do it, because I was very passionate about the other one. But I really liked Frank. He’s the best producer I’ve ever worked with, along with Fred Coe, and that’s crucial. You’ve got to get along with management, or you can be sunk. So I thought about it, and I’d always wanted to shoot a picture like this. I got a brilliant cameraman, Robert Fraisse, most of my crew I had worked with on “French Connection II,”...then we were lucky enough to get DeNiro. After that, the rest of the cast just fell into place.

I thought the film hearkened back to the best thrillers of the 60’s and 70’s that had action, but were also smart.
Well you have to be smart, and you have to have style. All the great action films that we love when you look at them, they all have this terrific style to them, like “The Third Man.” I just think that’s part of the genre.

I find most of the action movies today frustrating because they’re all style and no substance.
The action has to come out of character, it can’t come out of technology. We didn’t use any of that computer shit in the picture. Everything you see, we really did it. And I think you can tell the difference.

As a director you obviously learn a lot from your actors. What did you learn from De Niro?
I learned that you can have a lot of fun, and still do good work. DeNiro’s done 50 movies. I’ve done 35, plus 150 live television shows, so neither one of us had a whole hell of a lot to prove. We both knew that the other knew what they were doing. The other thing I learned from DeNiro which validated something I’ve always known, is that the good thing about experience is that it enables you to know that no matter how bad a situation might be and how much you might not know the answer to something, that you will find your way out of it. You’ll find the solution. You’ll find a way to do it. Whereas when you’re first beginning, you tend to panic. Just trust your instincts, which is what DeNiro does. He trusts himself, and I’m learning to do that. The other thing he does well is listen, as do all the actors in this film.

That’s something else I’ve noticed about your films. You shoot in such a way where the actors just communicate physically, often with very minimal dialogue, another thing lacking in film today. It's almost like the newer filmmakers don't trust the actors or the material.
You have to keep in mind, though, that many of the new filmmakers haven't had the experience. Again, I directed over 150 live television shows, which really let me work with how to stage scenes, with how to let an actor express themselves. I also had great material, written by Rod Serling, Reginald Rose, J.P. Miller, Clifford Odets...and what it enabled you to do was trust the material. And when you trusted the material, you trusted the actors and then used the camera to help that, you don't use the camera to intrude, to just constantly cut, cut, cut, cut. You try and stage the scene in such a way that movement tells you something. George Stevens was brilliant at that. So was William Wyler. So was Carol Reed. And so was Hitchcock. If you look you can really see the influence of George Stevens in my work, especially my TV work, with all the triple and quadruple dissolves. "A Place in the Sun" (1951) I think, is the greatest movie ever made.

Let's talk about your beginnings. It sounds like you were a middle class kid?
Yeah, my father was a stockbroker, then he retired and lost a lot of money. My dad was Jewish and my mother was Irish-Catholic, which was never an issue because my father was never a practicing Jew. He's the one who drove us to (Catholic) Sunday school. I went to a Catholic military academy for high school. I had wanted to be a priest. I didn't really find out I was half-Jewish until I went to college, when my father told me I'd never get into a fraternity if people knew that. So I left that out on the questionnaire. It wasn't a lie, just an omission. So I did get into a fraternity, and then they found out about it, and I was absolutely ostracized. This was at Williams College, which was interesting because it forced me to go to the theater, and that's the reason I'm here talking to you. I always liked the theater. In prep school I always felt more comfortable being in school plays. I was a very shy kid and my father made me study public speaking and play tennis at a very early age to sort of bring me out of my shell. So theater was just kind of a natural outlet for me.

Were you a good actor?
I don't think so. I thought I was at the time, but looking back I don't think I worked at it hard enough. But I always loved the movies, as well, was always going from the time I was a little kid.

Was there one movie you saw as a kid that made you say "This is it. This is what I have to do?"
No, because at that time I didn't equate movies with something I wanted to do professionally. I just loved to go. I do remember the film that had the most influence on me as an actor, because it made me start smoking, and that was "Sunset Boulevard." I was cast at 19 years old in this play as a 35 year-old, very sophisticated New York guy, and I knew that I couldn't do this. My hands just felt like two dumbbells. Then I went to see "Sunset Boulevard" and there was Bill Holden looking very cool with his cigarette...so the next day I walk on stage with a cigarette, looking very cool, and I trip over the foot of the leading lady! (laughs) The director said "I don't care if you smoke, just learn how to do it!" So I spent many nights alone in my room practicing smoking, which I got very good at, but on opening night, I still stunk in the play.

Did you start directing in college?
I did one play in college, Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest." It was done in the round and it was a disaster! It started out with the leading man tripping over the legs of the head of the English department! (laughs) Then I did a lot of summer stock when I was in college. We re-did the University Players, that whole group that was Joshua Logan, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart...all these students from Ivy League colleges. We formed the theater in Cape Cod, and it was a great experience. Then the Korean War started, and I had a commission in the Air Force after being in a Catholic military school. I got stationed in Washington D.C. with the aeronautical chart and information service, through which a stroke of absolute luck, they combined with the Air Pictorial Service and formed the Aerial Photographic Unit, and I got assigned out here, in Burbank to make training films. It was great, and I really learned a lot.

Frankenheimer as an assistant director in the early days of live TV (1953).

How many films did you direct during that period?
Well, that's the other thing. The Air Force didn't know what to do with all these guys out here, and the Air Force (brass) didn't even know that they had this unit, so there was nothing for them to do! So the Major in charge took me aside when I arrived, I was a lieutenant, and said "Look, my men are all going AWOL, going into Hollywood and bouncing checks and picking up prostitutes...I want my men kept busy!" Now this was at the Burbank Airport. So nearby was this asphalt plant. The Major said "I want you to take all these men, go to the asphalt plant and make a film about asphalt." And I didn't have the faintest idea how to do this! So we get there, and this tough guy, a former taxi driver in New York named Kizumplik, he says "You don't really expect us to make this stupid goddamn movie about asphalt, do you Lieutenant?" They wanted to go to Hollywood, and I wasn't about to say 'no' to him. So they all left and it was just me and this young black guy, and we stayed and read the manual about how to operate the camera, and made this film about asphalt. When we finished it was all under-exposed, because we didn't know what we were doing, but we kept at it, and we learned. Then I did some training films, and my introduction to television was doing a piece about registered cattle over in Northridge! (laughs) This guy had a weekly television show called "Harvey Howard's Ranch Round-up." He said "Lieutenant, do you write?" I said "I sure do." "I just fired my writer. You're my new writer." So I wrote for Harvey Howard for about 18 weeks. It was a country western show where I'd write the introduction for Harvey, he'd come out and sell his cows, and he'd introduce the country-western numbers. The FCC finally came to us and said "Gentlemen, on an hour show you're allowed to have 12 minutes of commercials and 48 minutes of show. You have 12 minutes of show and 48 minutes of commercials. You're off the air!" (laughs)

24 year-old John Frankenheimer directing a live television broadcast (1954).

How did you go from there to live TV in New York?
This was about 1952, and I had decided then that I really wanted to get into film. I heard a phrase from Fred Coe once. He said "Talent is doing easily what other people find difficult." And working with the camera was very easy for me. I'm not going to tell you it's enough, but it was very easy for me. I was born with that. I had an aunt who lived out here, retired in Palm Desert, and she knew a bunch of old-time film actors. One of them, a woman named Sally O'Neil, had been a silent film star. She knew John Ford and through her, I got an introduction. John was about to do "The Thin Gray Line," about West Point. Since I had been to military school, he promised me a job as his sort of assistant/gofer and technical advisor. Then he wound up in the hospital for a cataract operation. He called me in and said "Look John, I don't know when I'm gonna get out of here. If I were you, I'd consider getting into television. But, I'm not going to help you because you have to do it yourself." So I took his advice and went here to NBC and they offered me a job as a pageboy. I went to CBS and they offered me a job as a parking lot attendant. There were guys with PhD's in that job, why not me? ABC didn't really exist as a network at that time, they just had a series of stations, but they offered me a job as a scenery construction coordinator. So I got my mustering out pay from the Air Force and went back to New York where some guys and girls I had done theater with were now working in television. And they were all very glad to see me until they found out what I wanted, which was a job. So I did the rounds, and through a stroke of luck got into see the guy at CBS who hired assistant directors. It turned out that he had been in the same Air Force outfit that I'd been in, only he'd been in during WW II. So we had a lot in common. And he looked at me, then looked at this pile of resumes and said "Why should I hire you, with your limited Air Force experience, over one of these people who've had years of experience in theater and the movies?" I was 23 years old, and you're brave at 23, and I said "Well, I won't have to unlearn any bad habits because I don't have any bad habits yet." He laughed and said "You know what, I have a feeling that you wouldn't get lost. I'll call you when I have something." So I went to this fleabag hotel over on the west side, and they didn't have any sort of message service back then, and every morning I'd buy a sandwich, then sit by the phone during CBS office hours and wait for it to ring. I started to get pretty goddamn depressed after about three weeks, but then he called. He said "I've got a temporary position for an associate director. Are you interested?" So I took it and learned on the job, and it was all about camera. I started out on the "Gary Moore Show," then "Edward R. Murrow's Person to Person," then to "You are There," which was Sidney Lumet and I became Sidney's associate director. He was great to me. I learned a lot from Sidney, the way he worked with actors and everything else, and he became my mentor. Then in 1954, he left the show and I got to direct. And that's what happened.

Tell us about what it felt like working in live TV.
I'll start out by saying this: from 1954 to 1960 when I was working in live TV, I look back on that as the highlight of my life. It was a time when this amazing group of actors, writers and directors was able to get together and do some fine work. Just look at some of the actors there: Paul Newman, Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, Steve McQueen, Eva Marie Saint. The directors: George Roy Hill, Franklin Schaffner, Arthur Penn, Bob Mulligan, Sidney Lumet...just a tremendous talent pool and we all knew each other and were all friends and really liked each other, which is completely different than it is today. And we're still all friends today. It was a combination of theater and film, because you rehearsed as a play, then had to put it on camera, the difference being that with live TV you only had one night, and with a play, if you were successful, you went on. Sidney Blackmer, who I worked with, once described live TV as "Summer stock in an iron lung." (laughs) Which was pretty apt, because the pressure was just tremendous...You were always rehearsing one show, and working on two or three other scripts simultaneously. You would finish a show on a Thursday night, then the next day on Friday, would begin a production meeting for the next one. It was a constant turnover.

The Young Stranger was your first feature in 1957. How did you find the change from TV to film?
I didn't like it. The film was based on a play that I'd done on TV, also with James MacArthur (Dan-O on "Hawaii Five-O") in the lead. I felt the crew had no interest in the quality of the movie. I didn't get along with the cameraman, who didn't want to shoot the movie the way I wanted it shot...I like the kinescope version better, honestly. So I went back to "Playhouse 90" after that and stayed another three years.

An original poster for Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1962).

In watching "The Manchurian Candidate" again, it struck me by how contemporary it felt. At the time (1962), did you realize how innovative it was?
No. I loved the book (by Richard Condon). I loved George Axelrod's script. I had a great crew and we just went ahead and made the movie. It's funny that you should ask that question. I was in a meeting yesterday with a producer, discussing this movie that I'm going to do, and the producer said "You know, we've got to approach this like we've got a real shot at the Academy Award." And I said "Everytime I've approached something with the idea that I have a real shot at being nominated for the Academy Award or the Emmy, I haven't been," because you start to take yourself much too seriously, and that makes you much more restricted in what you do. The thing I remember most about "The Manchurian Candidate" is what a wonderful time we all had making it. And I think it shows. "Ronin" was the same way. Both films mark very good points in my life.

Frankenheimer on the set of The Train (1964).

You worked with Rod Serling both on "The Comedian" and "Seven Days in May." Tell us about him.
The second show I ever did was with Rod. It was in 1954, called "A Knife in the Dark." It was a prison drama, with Paul Newman in the lead, which he did for $300. I got $250 for directing it and Rod got $200 for writing it. That was the start of our relationship and I did seven other Serling shows. I hired him to do "Seven Days in May." We were very, very good friends. He was a terrific writer, never believed totally in himself, and never thought he could write a love scene. I did a "Playhouse 90" once where we were in really bad, bad trouble with the script. Nothing was working. And Serling had another show coming up the next week called "The Velvet Alley," which Schaffner directed and he was staying up at the Bel Air Hotel, so I went to see him. Told him what the problem was, especially with this love scene. He asked a lot of questions about the scene, about what it was about, and he'd never read the script, mind you...and in a matter of hours, the new scene was ready and it worked beautifully. Rod was a genuinely good man and he died much, much too young.

Senator Robert F. Kennedy during his 1968 presidential campaign. Frankenheimer was in charge of his publicity. The two men became close, and it was JF who drove RFK to the Ambassador Hotel the night he was assassinated.

Tell us how your association with Robert Kennedy began.
In 1960 I was probably the best-known television director around. And I was approached to do some work for John Kennedy. And I don't know...I was 30 years old. I was going through a divorce, and I just didn't want to deal with it, so I said no. Then when we were in pre-production on "The Manchurian Candidate" a couple years later, there was a great deal of concern that JFK wouldn't like it because of its subject matter. So Sinatra, who was great friends with him, flew up to Hyannis Port and told Kennedy he was doing the film, to which Kennedy replied "I love 'The Manchurian Candidate.'Who's going to play the mother?" (laughs) So Kennedy loved the movie, and then when we were getting ready to do "Seven Days in May" and wanted to shoot in the White House, I'd gotten to know Pierre Salinger. Salinger went to the President to see if it was okay, and the President said "Absolutely, if it's John Frankenheimer. I want to meet him." So I met him, went to a press conference with him. He was wonderful to me. He said "So you want to shoot this riot in front of the White House?" I said "Yes sir." He said "Fine. I'll be gone to Hyannis Port for the weekend. You just be sure you're done by 6:30 on Sunday when I get back." (laughs) Then he was killed, and I'd always felt guilty about not having done that work for him early on. So then when his brother declared his candidacy in '68, I immediately called Pierre Salinger and said "Pierre, I want to be part of this." He said "Well, the candidate is going to be over at the Sportsman's Lodge tonight at 6:00 if you want to come over and meet him." So we met, and it was all very nice. The next day, Salinger called me and said "John, the candidate has to go to Gary, Indiana tonight to do a debate with high school students and after that he has to record a speech. Would you come and do it?" So I took about one second, and I said 'Yes.' So I flew to Chicago, rented a car, and drove to Gary. I got there and it came time to do the speech. And Bobby said "I've only got about ten minutes to do this, I'm in a hurry." And I said "It's going to take more than ten minutes, senator." "Well I don't have more than ten minutes." "Then why did you send for me all the way from California? Why didn't you just get some flunky local director to put the camera on you?" He said "Let's just do it." Fine, so he did it, and his people said "What do you think?" And I said "I think it's terrible. He looked cold. He looked angry. He looked hostile. Awful." So Kennedy said "Well, thank you very much." And I said "Well guys, thanks." And I left and got a call later from Richard Goodwin (one of RFK's staff), who asked if I could come tell the senator what I just told them. So I went to see him and he said "What?!" And I said "Well Senator, I don't think that's the Robert Kennedy that people are going to want to vote for. You seemed very ill at ease and when you're ill at ease you have a tendency to withdraw." "Well how do you propose to fix it?" I said "Well Senator, I don't know if I can fix it, but I think if we sat down and took our time, and talked about it, the worst that could happen is that you wasted an hour and a half of your time and you just wind up with what you already had. The best that could happen is that we could do something really good. I think you really need help in television because people have this opinion of you as being arrogant and cold and you don't need that." So we sat and we talked and we got to know each other a little bit, and said 'Okay, let's just do it.' And we ran the tape, and I said "Just do it to me." So he did it, and it was much better. We did it again, and it was really good. And I said "That's it!" So he was very pleased and thanked me, and I headed out to my car. Then Goodwin and Ethel Kennedy came out and said "We don't know what your plans are, but he really liked you a lot and you really made him good. We have to go to Michigan. Would you consider canceling whatever it is that you're doing and coming with us?" So to make a long story very, very short, I never left him. I was there with him for 102 days.

If Bobby Kennedy were in the room with us right now, what would I feel? What would my impression be?
Well I think you'd be very impressed. I think you'd see a man who was totally dedicated to everything he believed in. He was funny. He was shy. He listened beautifully. And he got to the point (of what he was saying) extremely quickly. I think if what happened had not happened, I think he would've won the Democratic nomination. I think it would've been tight, but he would've won. I think he would've been elected President and I think a lot of the bad things that happened in this country after 1968 would not have happened.

How do you think the country would be different?
I don't think we'd have the racial problems that we have. I don't think there would be this terrible line of delineation between the poor and the rich. I think we would have had a great more deal national pride. I think we would have gotten out of Vietnam much, much sooner. All the cynicism that came out of Richard Nixon's administration would be gone. I think we lost our innocence as a country with John F. Kennedy's death. Then with Bobby's death, Martin Luther King's death and the scandal of the Nixon administration...had Bobby lived, I think this country would have gone through a healing process. And I think that we would be a United States today.

Everyone I've seen interviewed who was involved with RFK says that his death was the defining moment of their lives.
Absolutely. It was the defining moment of mine.

You were supposed to be up on the dais with him at the Ambassador, weren't you?
Yes, then at the last moment, it was decided that having a film director up on stage with him wasn't the image they wanted, so we had a friend named Paul Schrade, who was about my size and complexion, take my place. And he was one of the three people shot in the kitchen. Bobby said "As soon as I say 'On to Chicago,' get the car and have it waiting around back by the kitchen." So I got the car and pulled up and the cops started pounding on the car yelling "Move it! Move it!" Then this woman came running out of the side entrance screaming "Kennedy's been shot! Kennedy's been shot!" Then we saw the cops dragging this guy out from the side entrance, and the guy turned out to be Sirhan. My wife said "That's not Kennedy! He hasn't been shot!" The cops were pounding on the car now yelling for us to move, so I pulled away, then I flipped on the radio, when the news came over: "Senator Robert Kennedy, his brother in law Steven Smith and film director John Frankenheimer have been shot in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel." They thought Paul Schrade was me. This will show you how your mind plays tricks on you: for years I thought the driveway to the Ambassador Hotel was as long as a football field, but it's only about 150 feet long, as I found out when I went back to shoot "George Wallace" there thirty years later. But that night, as the news came over the radio, it seemed that long.

Was that the first time you'd been back since that night?
Yes. I just couldn't go back before then. And now it's in complete disrepair, just falling apart, almost symbolically.

After RFK's assassination, you took some time off.
Yeah. I managed to finish one film, "The Gypsy Moths," (1968) but I just felt like "What's the point? What does any of this really matter?" I mean, when you're a part of something like that and then all of the sudden it's taken away with just one bullet (snaps fingers). It really makes you take stock in what's important.

How did you get your faith back?
Time repairs a lot of that, really. And for me it wasn't a matter of getting it back, it was about finding a new reason to continue. And I found some material that I really was passionate about, which for me was Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh" (1973).

Let's talk about some of the later films. "French Connection II" was the only sequel you've done so far. Was that difficult doing a sequel to a film when you hadn't done part I?
I wasn't prepared for how hard it was. I wanted to do the story, which (writer) Robert Dillon and I had made up. I had lived in France, so it seemed a logical match. Then when I actually sat down and looked at the original again, I was just awed time and again with how great it was and what a terrific film William Friedkin had made. So I realized that I had to keep that distinctive style, and that was hard, very hard.

Frankenheimer directing Burt Lancaster in Birdman of Alcatraz (1962).

You did five films with Burt Lancaster. Tell us about him.
He was very professional. He set a terrific example for everyone else with his work ethic, which is probably the finest I've ever seen, his and Gary Sinise's. He was very nice to the crew and the other actors. He was a great collaborator because he knew a lot about script. And a lot about producing. We became very good friends. I have nothing but respect for him...He was very well-read, entirely self-educated. He taught me an awful lot. I learned more about stunt work from him, because he was a terrific stunt man. Burt really knew more about how to make a movie than anyone I ever met. What I learned from Burt was to have the courage to take my time. To really rehearse the scene, to examine it.

How much do you generally rehearse?
As much as I can. During "George Wallace" we rehearsed 2 1/2 weeks. During "Ronin" because we were so rushed to get going, not as much before shooting, but a lot during the production itself. I also like to shoot a lot of set-ups. On "George Wallace" for example, we shot 20 to 1. I like to work at a fast pace and I expect the people around me to do the same...It's interesting, because I went back and looked at some of my television work, and I found it a lot more interesting than a lot of my film work. And I thought "Why is this?" I mean, "Days of Wine and Roses," for example, is really interesting visually. Then I realized of every actor I had three different sized close-ups. Whereas in movies I'd been saying "Okay, let's shoot a close-up." And we'd do a lot of takes of that close-up, but it was always the same bloody shot. And it wasn't until I did "The Burning Season" that I deliberately did three sizes of close-ups on every shot. So when you edit, it becomes very interesting, because you can use whichever one you want. When you look at "Ronin," it's filled with different sized close-ups.

Frankenheimer with his 1995 Best Director Emmy for Against The Wall (1994).

Do you do a lot of takes?
No. We rehearse a lot, but don't do a lot of takes. A lot of times I like the first take best. Not always, but often, which is another reason to rehearse as much as you can. That's one reason Sinatra and I were perfect together.

Frankenheimer directing Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate (1962).

Tell us about Frank.
Well I was terrified of him. He had this reputation that he chewed up directors for breakfast, that he'd only do one take, that he was always late, things like that. And I said to my partner George Axelrod "I don't know if I want to do a picture with Sinatra." "Well then dear boy, we'll buy you out. United Artists has put up a lot of money to make a picture with Sinatra, much more so than with you. If you've got a problem with Mr. Sinatra, I suggest you call him up and discuss it with him." So I did. I went up to see him at his house on Coldwater Canyon, and he couldn't have been nicer. I mean this was a guy who could turn on the charm like no other. So I was honest with him about why I was there. That there was no way I could work with him only doing one take, that sometimes it took longer, and so on. And I finished it by saying "I say these things to you because I'd rather get it out now, rather than waiting until we start shooting. I also realize that what I'm saying could mean my leaving the picture, because if it becomes a choice between you and me, United Artists is going to choose you." So he said he really appreciated my honesty and said "Look, I'm an insomniac. I can't get to sleep before 5 am on any given night. If you can arrange it so we can start shooting at 12:00 noon, I promise you I'll be there on time each and every day." I said "You got it." And he was. Regarding the "first take" issue he said, "I'm an entertainer, not an actor. I'm better on the first take. It's very hard for me to do it again. Is there any way you could simplify the camera shots?" I said "If that's what you want, you might as well hire some hack, because part of what I bring to the party is to make the film visually interesting. But why don't we do this. We'll rehearse really thoroughly, and that'll make it more likely that we'll do fewer takes, but that means you'll have to come in and rehearse every day, with a full crew and cameras and everything." He said "Okay," and that's what we did. The first scene we shot, was the scene where Doug Henderson comes to visit him after he's had this nervous breakdown. And we rehearsed it, and rehearsed it and everyone was very nervous and finally we did the take, and I said "Cut." And Sinatra turned to me and I said "That was it. Print it!" And this big smile came over is face and he said "This is going to be okay!" And it was, it was more than okay. I'll never forget that smile "Are you sure you don't wanna do it again?" (laughs)

Frankenheimer lines up a shot on the set of The Challenge (1982).

Any advice for first-time directors?
Yeah. Joe Sargent and I were talking about that. He said, "You know when I first started out I almost set myself up for failure, because I waited so long to do my preparation. I kept putting it off, and putting it off. Then by the time I did my third picture I really dragged myself into it and started to prepare." So I think you really have to prepare thoroughly. Then I think you have to surround yourself with the best people you can surround yourself with. Not necessarily the best people who are qualified, but the people you feel the most comfortable with. And make sure to the best of your ability that the script is in the best bloody shape it can be in. If you have any questions about the script, ask the writer. Try and have a couple read-throughs before production begins. Then try to make sure you're not trying to do a schedule that' s too short, because once you fall behind, the pressure really starts to build and you start to worry about all the wrong things. You have to remember that when people see the movie, they have no idea if you were ahead or behind schedule. They don't care! The other thing I would tell you is what Henry Hathaway told me: "The movie business is a business of compromises. If you make one compromise a day on a 25 day shoot, you're gonna have a movie with 25 compromises." And that's the best advice I ever got: don't compromise.

Frankenheimer with actor Michael Gambon, portraying President Lyndon Johnson, in JF's final film, Path to War (2002).

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Joe Eszterhas: The Hollywood Interview

Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas.



JOE ESZTERHAS
IS TELLING NO LIES IN AMERICA
By
Alex Simon

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

Joe Eszterhas has been one of Hollywood's top screenwriters for the past fifteen years. The author of such diverse works as Jagged Edge, Music Box, Basic Instinct, Flashdance and Showgirls, Eszterhas is a man of many voices and many lives, his having begun in Hungary in 1944, born in a tiny town near the Austrian border. Eszterhas spent his first six years in German and Austrian refugee camps, emigrating to the U.S. in 1950, settling with his family in Cleveland, Ohio. There, Eszterhas attended Catholic schools and developed an interest in writing. After graduation from Ohio University where he majored in journalism and English, Eszterhas first made a name for himself as a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and later Rolling Stone, writing what many consider to be the definitive coverage of the aftermath of the Kent State shootings in May of 1970. Eszterhas followed this with a book on the shootings called 13 Seconds, written with Michael D. Roberts. In 1974 Eszterhas wrote Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse, which won a nomination for the National Book Award and gained the attention of a Hollywood producer, who thought the young scribe should try his hand at screenwriting. Eszterhas' first script F.I.S.T., a fictionalized story about a Jimmy Hoffa-type labor leader played by Sylvester Stallone, was produced in 1977. He hasn't stopped working since.

Eszterhas' latest film, his 17th produced, is Telling Lies in America, a semi-autobiographical story about a Hungarian immigrant teenager named Karchy Jonas (Brad Renfro) growing up in Cleveland in the early 1960's. Karchy is an outcast as a scholarship student in his preppy high school, seeking solace in the seemingly glamorous world of rock & roll. When a slick local disc jockey (Kevin Bacon) agrees to take Karchy under his wing, Karchy embarks on a voyage of self-discovery that takes him from being a wide-eyed boy, to a much wiser young man. Directed by Guy Ferland and produced by Banner Entertainment the film also stars Calista Flockhart and Maximilian Schell.Telling Lies is a bittersweet memoir, full of truth, nostalgia and laughter that stings in your throat. It is by far Eszterhas' most personal, and finest work to date.

Among Eszterhas' upcoming projects are the satirical comedy An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, Reliable Sources, Evil Empire, and Blaze of Glory, a biopic about the life of singer Otis Redding.

Eszterhas and his wife Naomi, who are expecting their third child soon, sat down recently in their magnificent Malibu home to discuss Joe's remarkable life, past, present and future.

When did you develop an interest in writing and storytelling?
JOE ESZTERHAS: My dad's a writer in the Hungarian language and he's written about 30 Hungarian novels. I grew up on the near-West side of Cleveland, which is a tough, sort of polyglot neighborhood with everyone having their individual turf. Until I was 13 or so, I didn't even read. It was the classic thing of the immigrant kid who comes to the new world, feels his parents are out of touch with the new world and goes in exactly the other direction. So I was really into baseball and rock & roll. There was a lot of bad stuff happening in the neighborhood. It was a time when people had zip guns and knives...and I got into a lot of juvenile trouble. When I was 13, I got into some serious trouble because I hit a kid in the back of the head with a baseball bat who'd been taunting me for a lot of years and was older, calling me names like D.P. (displaced person), Greenhorn...this kept going on for a while. I fought him a couple times, but always lost since he was about four years older than me. Then one time at a baseball game when he was up to bat, I just went up behind him and hit him the back of the head. I went to Juvenile. Went through the whole process. And I realized then that if I kept living the way I had been living, there was no future. And I started to read, read voraciously. Read anything at all. There was this paperback bookstore in my neighborhood, and I'd go down there. The guy liked me and he'd give me the books and I'd bring them back, like a library. And I read anything and everything: Tennessee Williams one day, A.J. Cronin the next day, Steinbeck, Forrester. I fell in love with reading. That's where it really began. I took notes on the books I had read, made lists for myself. I remember one year I went through 300 some books. What happened then is that I stayed off the street. I was petrified about what had happened to the kid that I'd hit. He was in the hospital for something like ten days and there was a period when no one was sure if he was going to survive. The only thing left with neighborhood that I really did was play basketball, which I usually did by myself because I didn't want to mix with the same kids I was with before, because it was all trouble. I just turned to reading completely. After two or three years of that, I thought, wouldn't it be wonderful to tell a story. So I wrote some stories for myself and fell in love with writing. I decided early on to do journalism as a way of making a living in the hopes of eventually writing fiction. It was the old Hemingway school where his theory was that every writer should spend five years doing journalism and not a minute more because those five years would be extremely educational, but if you stayed a minute longer, you'd get totally jaded and lose all of your sensitivity.

What was your beat during your newspaper days?
I was a street reporter. The intent was always that I'd use the experience for some day writing fiction. The political beat or the city hall beat were beauracratized beats, where you weren't really responding to experiences. As a street reporter, I covered whatever happened. From car wrecks, plane crashes, shootings, riots...I was always interested in the human aspects of those things. Then I was a feature writer and wound up getting a Jimmy Breslin-style column. Journalism, in my case, was an amazing training ground, first because I didn't know American society since I was an immigrant and in an ethnic sort of background for much of the time. And two, I was intensely shy as a kid and it was very difficult for me to talk to people. Journalism throws you into all levels of American society and forces you to interact with people.

How did you go from The Plain Dealer to Rolling Stone?
In 1971 I was fired from The Plain Dealer for writing a piece in The Evergreen Review on the My-Lai massacre. It became a huge national case that was about if you are employed by a publication, can you criticize that publication in a different venue if you're still paid by them. I had written as a free-lancer before I was fired in Cleveland, a couple of pieces for Rolling Stone. One of the pieces was on a biker gang shoot-out in Cleveland. After I did this piece, Hunter Thompson wrote me a note that said "Goddammit, now I know there's someone else out there that knows about bikers besides me." (laughs). Hunter, unbeknownst to me, went to (Rolling Stone publisher) Jann (Wenner) and said "I think this guy's a really terrific writer." So it was like a gift from God. Two days after I got fired in Cleveland, I get the call from Rolling Stone saying we'd like you to come out to San Francisco to do a piece on narcotics agents. Can you get a leave? I said "Yeah, no problem pal. I've just been canned!" (laughs) So I went out to San Francisco and met everybody, liked everybody. You have to remember that at the time, this publication was just raising its head from being absolutely underground. I went to Rolling Stone at a time when the closet was filled with shoeboxes full of cash from people sending cash for subscriptions, and we didn't know what the hell to do with it. Finally it got full one day, Jann called the Brink's truck one day and they came in and took it all away! (laughs) It was the very early stages of Rolling Stone. It was the fun stage. It was the kind of period where if you wrote a piece about narcotics agents who were abusive, and many were, and it was about busting kids with a little weed instead of going after the big smack dealers because that was too complicated and they may have been getting paid off. So they'd bust kids for having a little weed, get big headlines and look like heroes, which is total bullshit, right? So I wrote some pieces that brought that out. And when they came out, we had some of the biggest dope dealers in San Francisco coming by the office saying "Hey man, that was a really great story," and bringing us huge bags of dope! The office was filled with huge garbage bags full of marijuana! That's when I was with Rolling Stone. (laughs) We all felt that we were doing something different in journalism that was challenging to the establishment and the journalistic structure. There was hardly any advertising, no holds barred writing. You could have a piece that ran 40,000 words and if it was too long, they'd bump an ad to run the whole story! Imagine that today!

Let's talk about Kent State and your pieces on the killings of the four students by National Guardsmen in May of 1970.
The thing about Kent that I'm really proud of is that I wrote a book on it called 13 Seconds that came out at the same time as a book James Michner wrote on Kent State. The Michner book was a complete whitewash. His book's thesis was that the confrontation between student demonstrators and National Guardsmen had been caused by outside agitators and political radicals and that they were the people at fault. The truth about Kent State was that it was the culmination of months of red-hot rhetoric not only by Richard Nixon, but by James A. Rhodes, the Governor of Ohio, who kept attacking the protesters as "bums" and "lowlifes." The rhetoric had a prevailing psychological affect on everyone in the state, including the guardsmen. So you take a bunch of kids who are 18-21, put them in Kent with gas masks and helmets and guns, and they've been conditioned by this horrendous rhetoric, and suddenly they're there with protesters yelling at them, throwing stones but nothing else. And in the deepest part of themselves, they had bought the fact that these people were radicals, outside agitators, Communists, all that, and they lost it. They opened fire. That they lost it is understandable because they were kids. What got them to the point where it was easier for them to lose it, in my mind, which the Michner book ignored purposely because Michner was, in my mind, a Republican apologist, was that they had been conditioned by the rhetoric from Nixon and James A. Rhodes. I remember doing an hour on the Today show in 1971 with Michner and Izzy Stone, when it was done live. I was just a kid, 27 years old. I'm really proud that I wrote this book because otherwise I think Michner would've gotten away with his incredible whitewash...I covered it as a journalist. I wasn't there the moment of the shootings but I had covered the previous weeks protests and I was there an hour after the shootings, so I knew the build up. It is one of the great tragedies of our time, in my mind.

Tell me about the genesis of Telling Lies in America.
I wrote it around 1984. Everyone passed on it initially. Then through the years, many people started responding to it. Fran Kuzui, who is one of the producers...sometime in the late 80's, got a hold of the script, tried to get the financing for it and just couldn't do it. John Candy at one time wanted to do it, which would have been very interesting...then, ironically what happened is that I forgot about the piece because I don't like to re-read my stuff. Then after I met my wife Naomi, she wanted to read everything I'd written and went on this gigantic hunt.

NAOMI ESZTERHAS: I searched everywhere! Joe didn't have copies of a lot of his old scripts, so I went to studios, agencies, places like Script City...then I read Telling Lies and I told Joe that I couldn't believe it hadn't been made. It's such a wonderful story, so moving.

JOE: What Naomi did that was really cool was get obsessed with the piece in a very lovely, gingerly way...but then what happened was that she kept re-reading it and one day came in and said to me, very lovingly and gingerly, I've got an idea here that the relationship between Karchy (the protagonist) and his dad really isn't explored enough...so I took the script and re-wrote it from page one. So there were a lot of different little things changed. So Fran Kuzui had kept telling people how much she loved this. She and Guy Ferland were friends, she was kind of a mentor to him...Guy read it and said he'd love to direct it. So Guy and I talked. I looked at his film The Babysitter, which I thought had a lot of terrific things in it...then I gave Guy the re-write and felt that he really understood the piece from the inside. So he, Fran and Ben Myron took it to Banner, which was just started out and they agreed to do it for $4 mil, in 20 days for shooting! It's amazing.

I find it interesting that, even at your level, you still have a hard time getting your projects set up.
Oh, constantly! Constantly! I did a piece on Otis Redding two years ago called Blaze of Glory, another spec piece. People warned me, told me it was a tough sell, that nobody knew who the fuck he was. To me, the strength of the story, in addition to the great music, was the relationship between Otis and Phil Walden, who was his manager and his friend. On a whole other level it's about a black man who realizes his blackness and becomes in charge of himself and his company and of his destiny, even though he's begun with a white man who was his friend, which makes it very difficult...so we took the script out, everybody loved it, but nobody wanted to do it! (laughs)

How did you become interested in Otis Redding?
I was the last guy to interview him before he died. I was a young reporter in Cleveland and there was a place called Leo's Casino, which was the only place in Cleveland where people like Otis and Aretha Franklin and Lee Dorsey played. I was always in love with R & B, and that's where it was. And Otis was really sweet to me. We talked for about an hour. The next afternoon I was in the city room when a guy brought the wire up to me. Otis had flown out of Cleveland that afternoon and crashed in that lake in Wisconsin. So I had met the man. I felt this amazing warmth. I listened to his music all the time as the years went by, and I really felt something, so I decided to do it. About six months after we sent it out, Jon Avnet, the director, read it and liked it and we did sell it to Universal, then Jon decided he was going to do something else and the piece was just sort of up in the air. Only in the last couple months has something started to come together again because Iain Softley (Backbeat) wants to do it as his next movie. So it looks like it might finally happen now with Miramax. So to answer your question, is it difficult getting things set up? Oh yeah.

I hear there's a great story about you, Jimi Hendrix and a Hungarian restaurant.
(laughs) Hendrix comes into Cleveland in '69 and at that point is this totally feared, sexual, hot, stunning black person who's got all these young, white women around him. He's playing the Public Auditorium in town and the cops are very nervous. It was the same time that they busted Jim Morrison in Miami (for indecent exposure). So I go back and interview him for The Plain Dealer. What struck me about him was that he was one of the gentlest human beings I'd ever met. He had this wonderful gentleness and warmth that just sort of enveloped you. I talked with him for about an hour. He was there with Chas Chandler and Noel Redding. Jimi says he's hungry and what's good in Cleveland. I suggested this Hungarian restaurant...he sort of looks at these two other guys and says "Okay, cool. Let's go." So I take him to this little Hungarian restaurant on Buckeye road in Cleveland, filled with people in their 60's in black suits, women in babushkas and shit (laughs) and here we come as this fucking limo stops! Jimi gets out, things are dangling, hair is exploding. Here come the other two guys, bopping out! The owner knew me, comes running up "What the fuck are you doing?! Who are these guys?!" And we sit down and have this wonderful, big dinner and he loved it! Then what was funny, after dinner Jimi says "Man, I gotta buy a car. I want a blue Corvette." So Chas makes a couple calls. An hour later we're at a Corvette dealer in Shaker Heights. Jimi picks it right off the floor, hires some guy to drive it down. We go back to the concert and Jimi's in a great mood. We've been smoking dope all afternoon. Jimi does "Purple Haze," then the house lights suddenly go up. There's been a bomb threat! Everybody gets cleared out. I'm not certain to this day whether that was a real bomb threat, or whether the cops were just trying to fuck with him.

The first film of yours that had a big effect on my generation was Flashdance.
I was hired on Flashdance to rewrite the original script by Tom Hedley. A couple stories I remember about that. The lead role was down to three girls: Jenny Beals, Demi Moore, and this New York model named Leslie Wing. They were all terrific. Michael Eisner at the time was the head of Paramount and he had a hard time making up his mind as well. So Michael gathered the toughest, grungiest Teamsters and macho guys on the lot, put 200 of them in a screening room. Michael got up, said "Guys, I'm going to show you three screen tests. The only thing I want to know when they're done is, which one of these women would you really want?" Jenny Beals won hands down! (laughs) The other story is that (director) Adrian Lyne's cut was 40 minutes longer than the theatrical version. Paramount literally took the film away from Adrian and chopped it down to what it now is. If you can imagine taking 40 minutes out of a picture! Adrian's cut was much closer to Fame with that kind of character development than the movie that you saw. Paramount had so little faith in the picture that they sold off 34% of their own rights to the picture to a private investor group, thinking this movie was going to bomb. Those private investors were really lucky! (laughs) The movie wound up doing something like $380 million worldwide.

A lot of your films have dealt with the theme of betrayal: Jagged Edge, Music Box, Betrayed, Basic Instinct. Where does the need to keep exploring this theme come from?
First of all you have to realize that I've written a lot of other scripts in between those, some of which got produced and some which didn't--all with very different themes and of different genres. It's tricky for a screenwriter. A novelist writes what he writes and it's published. If you look at his body of work, you can see everything he's written and his progression. The screenwriter doesn't have the choice of publishing it. The studio either makes it, or not. That's why if you look at four things in a row that a screenwriter has had produced, they might all be of a similar nature or theme, and the assumption is that this is the only theme the writer writes about, when the reality most likely is, these are the sorts of films that the studio is out to make. In terms of the theme itself, it's one I would articulate as 'we don't know the people we love.' And there's part of them we will never know. And I think films like Betrayed, Music Box, Basic Instinct, certainly played off of that theme. I've always been fascinated by the hidden parts of us. I think a close relationship with someone, man or woman, is a lifelong quest to find that hidden part. And unfortunately in most relationships I don't think people do find that hidden part. They don't share it.

Let's go back to Telling Lies. Is it autobiographical?
I've called it figuratively autobiographical. What I mean is, it's always tough to tell how much is and how much isn't because it's a sort of swirl of imagination...parts of it certainly are. The kid certainly reminds me very much of how I was at that age. The insecurity, the false bravado, the desperation to do something and to be somebody when there ain't but a piece of fuckin' evidence that you can be something or be somebody. And underneath all that a terrific fragility of the spirit. I certainly felt all that...there was a lot of prejudice and ugliness in my school, too. I was one of the six poor kids who stayed together at one table all four years while everyone else just sort of pissed on them. And this was not just among the students. The brothers fostered it also. I remember brothers saying "Oh look, Joe's got a new pair of pants today," in front of the whole class, you know? I remember my father, who was making hardly any money, being brought into the school by the principal who told him he was one of the few fathers who hasn't contributed to some fund, and why was this. My father tried to explain that he was very poor and the priest said to him, "Yes your son's here on scholarship, but that doesn't mean you have to behave like a bum with us."

Don't you think that most artists have a hard time fitting in from an early age? You're thinking and feeling things that most of your peers simply don't think and feel.
Yeah, I think if you're off the beaten path in any way it's always tough. I've been off the beaten path my whole life. You can say it's "artistry" although I admit it's a word that scares the living fuck out of me, "artist."

Why?
Well, I always say I do the best that I can at what I do, which is writing and if other people want to use that word, fine. But I have great trouble with it in terms of self-definition simply out of humility, I think. It's one hell of a word to live up to. Maybe it's my background, having grown up blue collar with a lot of people who work with their hands.

It sounds like you had some tough times in high school. Did you ever go back to any class reunions?
No, I haven't. It was too painful. We've been getting these things 'Please come back and be our speaker,' that kind of stuff. When we showed Telling Lies for the first time at the Cleveland film festival last March, this guy came up to me after it was over and said "Joe, it's Marty...Do you remember me?" And he'd just seen the film. I said "Yeah, I remember you." He was one of the guys who'd given me a hard time. He paused and said "I'm sorry." (Pause) It was very telling. A terrific moment.

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Jim Jarmusch: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch.


JIM JARMUSCH: GHOST STORY
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the March 2000 issue of Venice Magazine.

Jim Jarmusch's hip, urban, comic jags arose from the same East Village-New York University explosion that nurtured the relentlessly contemporary films of Susan Seidelman and Spike Lee. Jarmusch offers lowlife reflections of post-modernist communication and mis-communication between characters sealed off from one another, their only connection the many-tentacled pop trash culture of America.

Jarmusch was born January 22, 1953 in Akron, Ohio. In 1971, Jarmusch enrolled at Columbia University in the English literature program. A few months before graduation, on a visit to Paris, Jarmusch discovered the rich treasures of the Cinémathèque Française and wound up staying in France for a year. Upon returning to New York City, he enrolled in the graduate film program at New York University, where he became a teaching assistant to director Nicholas Ray, then teaching at NYU. Through Ray's efforts, Jarmusch became a production assistant on Wim Wenders' tribute to Ray, Lightning Over Water (1980). Jarmusch completed his NYU film project, Permanent Vacation (1980), and began work on a short film, shot over one weekend, that eventually became Stranger Than Paradise two years later.

Stranger Than Paradise startled audiences with its gritty cool and fresh comic tone, winning the Camera d'Or at Cannes and the best film award from the National Society of Film Critics. Jarmusch has referred to his first three feature films as a trilogy. Stranger Than Paradise, along with Down By Law (1986) and Mystery Train (1989), take place in a blighted American cultural landscape—from the bleak, wintry moonscape of Ohio and the cracked seaminess of an over-ripe Florida in Stranger Than Paradise to the diffuse, cinema-reflected New Orleans in Down By Law and the tawdry, clapboard decay of Memphis' Mystery Train. In this world characters make connections by sharing TV dinners, chanting ice cream jingles and revering Elvis Presley. A Jarmusch film begins with characters who live a robot-like existence, unable to relate or communicate; a typical Jarmusch shot features a character staring offscreen until the screen fades to black or there is a cut to darkness. Into this stultifying atmosphere, a character with a different viewpoint and perspective enters, exposing the shallowness of the enmeshed character's existence.

Jarmusch followed Mystery Train with the ensemble piece Night on Earth (1991), an exhilarating five-part story, each taking place inside a taxi cab in disparate cities around the world: New York, L.A., Paris, Rome and Helsinki. Dead Man (1996) was Jarmusch's western/William Blake homage, starring Johnny Depp as a tenderfoot who heads west, and is mistaken for a notorious gunslinger. The film is also notable for being Robert Mitchum's final screen appearance. Jarmusch entered the documentary ring a year later with Year of the Horse, chronicling legendary rocker Neil Young's concert tour.

Jarmusch's latest is his most quirky, inventive work to date. Ghost Dog: the Way of the Samurai tells the tale of a solitary hit man called Ghost Dog (Forrest Whittaker) who lives according to the ancient Japanese code of the samurai. When he hits a "made" mafioso, Ghost Dog suddenly finds his beliefs, his beloved pigeons, and his life on the line. Co-starring wonderful character actors like Cliff Gorman and Henry Silva, Ghost Dog is one of the first great films of the 21st century, combining humor, nail-biting action, and genuine insight to the human condition.

I loved Ghost Dog. Tell us about how this story was born.
Jim Jarmusch: Boy, that's always the toughest question. I collect a lot of disparate ideas over time, then eventually sit down and make a script out of them. I guess it started with the fact that I wanted to make a character who was contradictory, like a likable killer. Then I thought, what actor could I picture playing this? That actor was Forrest Whittaker. So I started out with that sort of vague idea in my head, and started weaving a lot of details I'd collected together. I wanted to make him a samurai because western warriors are usually trained just to be killing machines, whereas eastern warriors are trained spiritually and philosophically, so that was interesting to me. It's a hard question to answer, because so many elements in the film seem to be linked together cross-culturally in our culture: the whole hip-hop interest in eastern culture is interesting to me, and the cross-reference between hip-hop and the mafia is interesting to me.

One film I kept thinking of while watching Ghost Dog was Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai (1967). Was that an influence?
Definitely. I even tried to quote certain things from the film directly, but in my own way. For example, Ghost Dog in the end has no bullets in his gun and no one's really aware of that, like in the end of Le Samourai when Alain Delon has no bullets in his gun when he's supposed to hit the girl who saved him.

I've always felt that you and Melville could have been filmmaking cousins.
He's certainly been an inspiration. I love his films, and have for a long time. He was somewhat cross-cultural in his storytelling, as well. Although his films are very, very French, his gangsters always dressed in an American style, drove big American cars in Paris. In his films, he had a running joke with his editor, where his killers would wear white cloth editor's gloves. I used that in Ghost Dog. I don't know if that was a joke on Melville's part that his editor was a butcher or a killer (laughs).

Tell us about working with great character actors like Henry Silva and Cliff Gorman.
Henry Silva's like a cult figure for me. I've always loved his presence, and any film with him that I've seen in the past, probably since I first saw Johnny Cool (1963) on TV in the early 70's...when I wrote this, I wasn't quite sure who should play Ray Vargo, then I suddenly thought of him...it was great working with him. He'd come to hang out on the set during a half day when he wasn't even working. He's really interested in the process, really interesting to rehearse and collaborate with. Cliff Gorman came in and read for Valerio, read this side once, put it down on the table and said "You know, that's about the best I can do. I dunno." And he walked out! I said 'That guy is Sonny Valerio!' (laughs) 'I wanna work with him!' He really brought a lot to the film. He's a great actor.

Tell us about your background.
I was born and raised in Akron, Ohio and left when I was about 17. I was kind of an introverted kid, read a lot. When I was a teenager and discovered music, first through the radio, then a friend of mine's older brother had books by William Burroughs and records by the Mothers of Invention, opened me up to all the strange things out in the world, beyond the borders of Akron. It was very much of a car culture, growing up there, with rock and roll on the radio and the only way to escape was when you were old enough to get your hands on a car and drive around.

What did your dad do? Was culture something that your parents valued?
Initially my dad worked for B.F. Goodrich, like everyone's father worked for a rubber company. My mother was actually the movie critic for the Akron Beacon-Journal before she was married, when she was very young. My grandmother on my mother's side was very interested in Native American culture and Oriental art. Even though she didn't have any money, she used to have prints of paintings that she liked, so as a kid I knew who Rembrandt and Vermeer were. When I was 15, she gave me the translation of Proust. My father is a little less interested in those things. So a lot culture was opened up to me on one side of the family, but in sort of a middle class, midwestern kind of way, you know?

Then you went off to college.
Yeah, I went to Northwestern for a year, as a journalism major, until I was asked by the Dean to leave the school. (laughs)

Why?
I wasn't completing the required courses. I was taking creative writing and history courses instead, not showing up for my journalism courses. So I transferred to Columbia and studied English and French literature.

Was it during this period that you discovered film?
Yeah, just being in New York and having access to a lot of different kinds of films in the mid-70's was amazing. Then one year I went abroad and studied in Paris, ended up staying for 10 months instead of the four I was supposed to stay, and came back with a lot of "incompletes" because I spent all my time at the cinematheque there. That really opened me up to films from all over the world...Then I came back to New York and was a musician for a while, was in a band. Then one day having no money and not knowing what to do with myself, I applied to the graduate film school at NYU. It was really a whim. For some reason I got in and got financial assistance.

Was there one film you saw during this time that really grabbed you, where you knew "this is it for me."
That's a tough one...maybe seeing Breathless (1959) for the first time in Paris. It really moved me. The whole nouvelle vague was important to me. It's interesting because all those guys wrote about Hollywood filmmakers like Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray and Robert Aldrich, and it was sort of like reading about those directors through the French directors, I came back towards Hollywood with a new appreciation of it.

At NYU you got to work with Nicholas Ray (Rebel Without a Cause, In a Lonely Place). What was he like?
Well, I went back to NYU for my third year to tell Laszlo Benedict, the head of the school, that I wouldn't be returning to school, because I had no money and I was going to try to make a film on my own. He said "That's really too bad, because I have a fellowship that I was going to give to you so you could pay your tuition, and I wanted you to meet someone I'm bringing here this year that I know you're a big fan of, Nick Ray." I was like, whoah! Laszlo said "He also needs an assistant and I recommended you. He's in the next room. Go talk to him." (laughs) So I go in and talk to Nick Ray. He says to me "Can you define the meaning of the word "dialectic"?" I said "Yes"...and he said "Good. You can be my assistant." So I was. Nick was pretty sick at the time, and he insisted on holding classes at his house. I learned so much from Nick about books, movies, his experiences, about baseball, painting, the design of things. A lot of it probably didn't register at the time, but now many of those things I'm still trying to apply. One thing he said to me was "Anyone who tells you that there's one way for all directors to direct all actors is an idiot. There's only one way for each director to direct each actor, and you have to find that way yourself and how you're going to collaborate. He told me that he and James Dean drove cross-country together before shooting Rebel, not to talk about the film, but to get to know each other so they could work well together. There's so many other things I learned from him: that the dialogue is often less important than the look in someone's eye. I could go on and on about Nick Ray.

Tell us about Permanent Vacation.
It was my thesis film for NYU, a 70 minute film. Then when I turned it in they told me it was a piece of shit, and that they weren't going to give me my degree. I didn't graduate until years later when they were using my name in ads saying "Scorsese, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch...all NYU film graduates." I mentioned that in an interview, not in a bitter way, that it was kind of ironic since I never got a degree. I guess they saw the interview, because I got a degree in the mail not long after that. (laughs) Funny how that works...

You and Spike Lee were at NYU around the same time, right?
Yeah, Spike used to work in the equipment room, which was really frustrating because it was almost like a scene out of a Spike Lee movie: "Spike, I need to check out the Nagara." "You want the Nagra?" "Yes, I need to check it out." "When do you need it?" "Tomorrow." "How many days you need it for?" "Just tomorrow." "You only need it for tomorrow?" "Spike, I just need the Nagra for tomorrow." "You sure it works?" (laughs) And it just went on and on like that. Spike has a lot of Mars Blackman in him. I love Spike and I really liked his last film a lot, Summer of Sam (1999).

Your first film that got you noticed was Stranger Than Paradise. How did you get the financing for that first effort?
Initially I did it as a short film, because Wim Wenders had some unexposed film stock leftover from a film called The State of Things. I had met Wim through Nick Ray and liked him a lot. I showed Wim Permanent Vacation, and he really liked it. So I knew I had enough film to make a 30 minute movie. John Lurie and I had a vague idea that we turned into a little script, and we shot the film using one camera set-up for each scene in order to make the story work with the limited amount of film that we had. Then while editing that short version, I wrote a longer version to make it a feature, which took over a year to get financed. By 1984, we'd completed the whole film.

Down by Law introduced America to Roberto Benigni. Tell us about working with him.
I had met Roberto when I was in Italy through mutual friends, and didn't know his work or anything, but just fell in love with his spirit, and with him. I had started a sketch for the next film with Tom Waits and John Lurie in my head, but hadn't gotten very far. Then after spending a week with Roberto speaking broken French, since neither of us could speak the other's language we'd babble at each other in French. We became really good friends and I stayed in Rome and wrote the treatment in a few days for Down by Law, and he agreed to do it. I hadn't seen any of his other work until after we'd made Down by Law. Roberto's one of the most intelligent, amazing people I've ever met. He's memorized the entire Dante's Inferno, Orlando Furioso by Ariosto, he plays about six instruments which he's taught himself...He's great to work with. We have plans to work together again.

Screamin' Jay Hawkins, who left us recently, has played an important role in several of your films.
His death hit me really hard. Growing up in Akron, there were two AM radio stations I listened to, and one of them played I Put a Spell On You almost every night. And I remember thinking 'This is my theme song. It's like a waltz tempo in an R & B song with a guy screaming and snarling and beautiful lyrics. So over the years I collected everything I could find that was recorded by him. When I was writing Stranger I wanted the song to be in it, so I tracked him down and found him living in a trailer in New Jersey with no phone. I sent him a letter and he came into the city and we had dinner. The man was so proud, so smart, so his own person. He didn't care what the rest of the world thought. He had an incredibly beautiful voice. His plan was originally to be a classical singer. He loved Paul Robeson. He loved Caruso. But for some reason he got sidetracked on the R & B circuit, luckily for us. So we stayed in touch, and I cast him in Mystery Train. There was one point during the shoot where his acting was very big and I was trying to tone him down. And he said "Jim I don't understand. You ordered a nuclear device and now you're requesting it not to explode!" (laughs) So then I put it into musical terms: 'Now in this overdub...' and he was really responsive to that. He was just a wonderful, wonderful guy. I really miss him.

With Dead Man, you worked with Robert Mitchum on his last film.
I went up to Santa Barbara and had a two hour lunch with him where he told me so many stories about his life, I hardly said anything. He had a very old school approach, like you couldn't change any of his dialogue. I went into his trailer to talk with him about a very minor adjustment in the dialogue, and he said "You're not going to change his dialogue, are you? Good luck to you!" So he opens the door and Mitchum is sitting there, and he says "So I guess you're going to change my dialogue, huh?" I said 'It's just a minor thing. I'm sorry.' "You're sorry. That's what they said to Gary Gilmore." (laughs) But then he consented to do it. He had this facade of being really gruff. He'd arrive on the set and someone would say "How are you today, Mr. Mitchum?" "Terrible." Someone else would walk by: "How are you today, Mr. Mitchum?" "Worse." He was really funny, an amazing wit.

Tell us about The Sons of Lee Marvin.
The Sons of Lee Marvin is a secret organization. I can't tell you much about it other than we have cards, and if you get a card from one of the founding members, you are an honorary member. Some of our founding members are myself, Tom Waits, John Lurie. We inducted at one point (musician) Nick Cave, because if you look like you could be a son of Lee Marvin, then you are instantly thought of by the Sons of Lee Marvin to be a Son of Lee Marvin. I lived in Berlin for almost a year in '87. Nick Cave lived there too and we used to hang out. People would always mistake us as brothers. It all started years ago with an idea I had for a movie where Lee Marvin was a father with three sons who all hated each other, and he was an alcoholic guy and lived in a barn somewhere. It was one of those ideas that gradually became more interesting to me, then Lee Marvin crossed over to the other side.

You know you could still make that movie, but with James Coburn instead of Lee Marvin.
(laughs)Yeah, that's true. I was always surprised they never played brothers in a film. They would've been so great together.

Who are some of your other influences filmmaking-wise?
From the Japanese classic filmmakers like Ozu and Mitsugushi, to Carl Dryer and Bresson, to the nouvelle vague, then there's the Sam Fullers, the Nick Rays, Fassbinder...an endless wealth of incredible people.

You got to know Sam Fuller quite well.
Yeah. Sam was, like Screamin' Jay in a way, someone who just followed his own path. People could never figure him out. The leftists would say he was reactionary and right wing. The right wing would say he was a leftist socialist. His movies often did concern the big lie of American culture, so there's a lot of politics in his films. But what a particular human being. His brain was always on fire with ideas, with enthusiasm. He loved movies, knew so much about them and was very innovative in moving a camera by hand, or the way things were designed. He was considered by many to be a 'B' movie director, but in a way that allowed him the freedom to make a very odd body of work.

Any advice for first-time directors?
I'm not a teacher and I'm not really good at advice, but I guess my only advice would be to stay really true to your own vision, no matter what other people around you or people financing the film might say. What we really need is new blood and people who have their own vision that stays intact. If it's unconventional, then I'll be the first in line to see it. Make the film you want to make, not the film that you think could be marketed. Other than that, the mistakes you make are always the most valuable things. The things you do right, that worked, you don't learn as much from. Something you did that you imagined would come out differently, you really get a gift out of. So don't be afraid of mistakes, because they're valuable. Also, rehearse with your actors and collaborate with them. Rehearsal is like a sandbox. There is no money running through the camera and no mistakes can be made in a rehearsal. As there are to make films, theoretically there are that many ways to make a film, so find your own way.

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Jerry Bruckheimer: The Hollywood Interview

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer.


JERRY BRUCKHEIMER: KING OF THE BIG-TOP
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the June 2001 issue of Venice Magazine.

You don't hear the word "impresario" used much in the 21st century vernacular. If you don't know it's meaning, Webster's defines impresario as "one who puts on or sponsors an entertainment (as a television show or sports event)." Dry, dictionary-style definitions aside, impresario brings to mind those colorful characters of yesteryear. The Buffalo Bill Codys, the Flo Zigfelds, the Cecil B. DeMilles: larger-than-life characters whose moniker conjured up images of bigger-than-life entertainment spectacles. If Jerry Bruckheimer seems too low-key a guy to join the aforementioned rogues gallery, grab your magnifying glass and look closer, Sherlock.

Born the only child of German-Jewish immigrants in 1945, the Detroit, Michigan native attended University of Arizona, seeking out an arid climate to battle chronic asthma which he'd suffered since childhood. After earning a degree in psychology, Bruckheimer returned to Detroit to work in the advertising trade. After producing an award-winning Pontiac television ad, a take-off on then-current hit movie Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Bruckheimer's pinache caught the eye of renowned ad agency BBD & O, which lured him to Madison Avenue. It was during his four year stint with the prestigious agency that Bruckheimer met photographer, and aspiring filmmaker, Dick Richards. Bruckheimer, not yet 30, left BBD & O to produce three films for Richards: the gritty western The Culpepper Cattle Company (on which he was associate producer, 1972), the Philip Marlowe film noir Farewell My Lovely (1975), and the French Foreign Legion adventure March or Die (1977).

It was during the 1980's, however, that Bruckheimer truly found his place: as a producer of slick, big-budget, highly-commercial stories with pulsating rock music soundtracks, populated by a cast of beautiful up-and-comers. American Gigolo (1980), which made Richard Gere a household name, was the first of the decade, followed in rapid succession by Michael Mann's feature debut Thief (1981), and Paul Schrader's sexy remake of Cat People (1982).

It was with Flashdance, in 1983, that Bruckheimer formed a business partnership that would change his life, and the Hollywood landscape, forever, joining forces with Don Simpson to produce one of the biggest hits that year, not to mention one of the most influential films to American pop culture. Don Simpson was a larger-than-life force who seemed to consume the world and all it had to offer with the gusto of a starving child. His in-your-face approach to life sharply contrasted Bruckheimer's low-key, poker-faced, all-business style, forming the perfect balance between the extreme and the subdued. The Simpson-Bruckheimer logo on a film soon became a brand-name of its own, promising a bigger, louder, splashier moviegoing experience for all who came, turning the young producers into a sort of cinematic Barnum and Bailey. The suburban multiplex was their big top. And they were the undisputed kings. Just a few of their other titles include: Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and its sequel Cop II (1987), Top Gun (1986), Days of Thunder (1990), his first project with director Michael Bay Bad Boys (1995), Crimson Tide (1995), Dangerous Minds (1995), and The Rock (1996). It was during production on The Rock that Simpson died suddenly, leaving Bruckheimer to carry on their tradition of blockbusters. In the annals of show biz, only Paul McCartney has fared as well as a solo act. Jerry Bruckheimer Films went on to produce Con Air (1997), Armageddon (1998), Enemy of the State (1998), Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), and Remember the Titans (2000). To date, Bruckheimer's films have earned over $3.8 billion in box office, video and recording receipts, more than any other producer in history.

Bruckheimer's latest is (surprise) the biggest, most anticipated blockbuster of the summer. Pearl Harbor marks Bruckheimer's fourth collaboration with director Michael Bay, telling the epic story of the infamous Japanese bombing raid that kick-started America's involvement in the second World War. An all-star cast of heartthrobs (Ben Affleck, Kate Beckinsale, Cuba Gooding, Jr.), newcomers (Josh Hartnett, James King) and old pros (Jon Voight, Colm Feore, Mako) guide this epic during its three hour running time. The 40 minute sequence which re-creates the bombing itself might be the most spectacular movie spectacle ever filmed. See it on the biggest screen, equipped with the best sound system you can find. This is not a movie to wait for on video and DVD! The Disney release is currently playing nationwide.

Jerry Bruckheimer's Santa Monica offices say a lot about the man. Located on a small side-street in an unobtrusive part of the city, the red brick building with the unassuming facade houses an interior that resembles something out of Architectural Digest, its walls decorated with pop art canvases, and offices decorated with modern furniture, that look as if they were plucked directly from the Museum of Modern Art. Appropriate digs for a guy who walks softly, and carries one of the biggest sticks in the business.

Pearl Harbor must've been a real challenge for a producer logistically, since it has more big set pieces than any film in recent memory.
Jerry Bruckheimer: It was very difficult initially to get (Disney) behind it. Originally, when Joe Roth was running the studio, he was all for it. Once we finally got it to the number that he wanted to spend, Joe Roth was out and we had to pull the plug, and start all over again. We had to pull more money out of the budget. Michael Bay quit a bunch of times. The whole process was on-again, off-again for six or eight months 'til we finally got the go-ahead.

Was it difficult finding enough period aircraft?
It was. We were able to locate 14 of the real planes. One guy found one in the Philippines that was at the bottom of the ocean. He fished it out, got the original plans from Japan that were written in this ancient Japanese dialect. It was on microfilm because the Japanese had destroyed all their original plans. He restored it like new using those as his reference.

You also shot in a variety of locations: California, Hawaii, Mexico to name a few.
We were in England and Corpus Cristi, Texas as well. All the stuff in Baja, Mexico was stuff we shot in the tank that was built for Titanic. Most of the stuff with people going into the water and the U.S.S. Oklahoma rolling over. We were down in Baja for ten days.

How many days did you shoot total?
I think it was close to 100, amazingly fast for a film of this size.

Your cast is a combination of new faces, established actors and old veterans. You've always had a knack for finding new talent. Tell us about James King, for starters, who's a new face.
Michael saw her in a magazine and thought she was really interesting, loved her personality, her beauty, and she got the part. She really radiates a kind of youthful innocence that you don't see much anymore, more like the young women of (the early 1940's).

Josh Hartnett has an interesting quality, too. A lot of people think he has an uncanny resemblance to Tommy Lee Jones.
I see him more as a Gary Cooper type, a throwback, with a little Montgomery Clift thrown in.

I thought it was interesting that you decided to use the old three strip Technicolor process, which hasn't been used in decades, in some of the release prints.
Yeah, that was Michael's idea. He wanted to evoke that bygone look that movies used to have.

This is your fourth film with Michael Bay. Tell us how you originally connected with him.
We needed to do a video for Days of Thunder and we didn't have any money, so we called a commercial production house that had the best directors. And I said "Who do you have that's on the way up, a new star?" They sent us three or four reels and one stood out, that was Michael's. When it came time for Bad Boys, I asked for his reel again, and it was amazing. It's been an amazing collaboration. Each picture he does grosses double or triple from the previous one.

Like the other directors you've worked with, Dick Richards, Paul Schrader, Michael Mann, Adrian Lynne, Bay has an amazing visual eye, which is obviously important to you.
I think interesting visuals separates what we do from most other films. When a director has a unique take, a unique vision, that's what makes a unique, memorable film, and that's what I've always looked for in the directors that I like to work with: is their work interesting? Is it different? Is it unique? The image has always been important to me. When I was six years old, my uncle gave me his old camera and I fell in love with photography. I did it for years, then eventually gave it up when I just didn't have time for it anymore. Recently, I picked up the camera again, and shot lots of stills on the Pearl Harbor set, many of which are in the book on the film's production.

Pearl Harbor didn't feel like an "effects movie" which really added to its impact.
As an example, Armageddon had 400 visual effects shots. Pearl Harbor has 150. We always wanted to keep as much of it real as we could, so it stayed a "period" picture, as opposed to a film with a more modern feel.

How long did it take to shoot the entire bombing sequence?
That was all part of the Hawaii stuff and we were over there about six weeks.

Did the Navy and Army give you full cooperation in shooting at Pearl Harbor?
Yeah, we went to the Pentagon and met with the Secretary of Defense, who was a supporter of ours, and that kind of had a trickle down effect. I think it's the biggest joint operation they've ever done (for a Hollywood movie).

When you produce a picture how much of a voice do you have in the actual filmmaking process?
I get involved in the casting. I get involved in the screenplay. I get involved in the music, and the promotion. When it comes to filming it, I leave that to the director.

You were born and raised in Detroit.
Yeah, my parents were both born in Germany. My dad was a salesman who sold mostly clothes, never made more than about $140 a week. We were lower middle class. I was an only child. My mom's still here. She came out for the premiere, which was exciting for her.

When did you fall in love with movies?
Oh yeah, I was an avid moviegoer. I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to be part of it somehow.

Was there one movie that really did it for you?
Probably The Great Escape (1963). I said 'I wanna be Steve McQueen. I want to ride that bike!' (laughs)

From Detroit, you went to University of Arizona.
Yeah, I couldn't get into a lot of other schools, didn't want to go to school at home, and I wanted a warm climate for my asthma. I started at Arizona State, which I attended for a year. It was very much a city school, then, the campus was just deserted on the weekends, so I transferred to U of A the following year, which had a lot more out of state students. I majored in psychology, with an algebra minor. Psych teaches you communication skills and how to sell your point of view, which has been very helpful to me. U of A was great. I'd never experienced weather like that before. In Michigan it was always six below (zero).

From there you went back to Detroit and got into advertising.
Yeah. I started out in the mailroom, then got promoted to tracker for television, then an assistant producer, and from there to BBD & O in New York.

It was there that you met Dick Richards and your film career began.
Yeah, he hired me as associate producer on The Culpepper Cattle Company. It was tough. I was a new kid in Hollywood and I was this interloper, but we struggled and got it done. I worked with him on two more films, then went out on my own.

Your first film as a producer was a period piece, Farewell My Lovely, which has a strong cult following. What was that like?
That was a great experience. Robert Mitchum was...a lot of fun. (laughs) A nice guy, but real complicated. A character.

All of your films have made money, if not been outright blockbusters. What is it about a particular story that attracts you?
Do I want to go see it? That simple.

How did you meet Don Simpson?
My ex-wife was working at Warner Bros. for Don's best friend. We went to a screening of The Harder They Come (1973) and my then-wife introduced us after we came out of the theater. Then when I got divorced, he had this big house in Laurel Canyon with lots of bedrooms. One of his roommates had just moved out, and he invited me to take his place. We became roommates and he borrowed my only sportcoat to attend his first meeting at Paramount, where he eventually became head of production.

From everything I've read, it sounds like you guys were complete opposites and that's why you complimented each other so well.
Don was very funny, bombastic. He would've entertained you through this whole conversation. He had a great sense of humor. He could talk about himself for hours. Once you got him going, there was no stopping him. Whereas I'm much more laid back, even-keeled. Don was always up and down. Don understood the studio politics and all the things that people like Michael Eisner were saying in subtext, things which I didn't have a clue about. He'd report to me afterward, like a translator: "This is what was said."

What was it like suddenly being on your own again?
Very tough. One minute you have your best friend sitting next to you, bouncing ideas off him, then all of the sudden he's gone, and you're on your own.

What advice would you have for a first-time or aspiring producer?
Get on the floor, start working. Get any job you can, just to get in the door. Once you get in the door, if you're good, you'll move up so fast, you won't know what hit you.

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Jeff Bridges: The Hollywood Interview

Actor Jeff Bridges.


BUILDING BRIDGES
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the July 1999 issue of Venice Magazine.

Jeff Bridges is arguably the most underrated great American actor since the late Robert Ryan. A performer of incredible range, whose myriad of characterizations over the past 30 years leave the filmgoer with a continued sense of awe and admiration, Bridges' refusal to fit a mold on-screen might be the very thing that has kept him from becoming a conventional movie star. It's also the thing that has kept his work so fascinating, and so brilliant.

Born into a show business family as the second son of the late Lloyd Bridges and his wife Dorothy, Jeff came into the world December 4, 1949 in Los Angeles and made his first screen appearance at the age of four months, playing the infant in Jane Greer's arms in The Company She Keeps (1950). Bridges appeared on TV's "Sea Hunt" with his father eight years later and was an occasional performer, with older brother Beau, on "The Lloyd Bridges Show" in 1962.

After a stint in the Coast Guard Reserve and drama studies at New York's Herbert Berghof Studio, Jeff made his adult film debut in Halls of Anger, a B picture about student unrest, in 1970. This was followed by the unseen The Yin and Yang of Mr. Go (1970). Having paid his dues with two minor films, Jeff hit pay dirt with the classic The Last Picture Show (1971), portraying Duane, the town football hero and love of local bad girl Cybill Shepherd in Peter Bogdonavich's portrait of a small Texas town in the early 1950's. Bridges was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor for his breakthrough role, and he hasn't stopped working since. Other film highlights include John Huston's Fat City (1972), Robert Benton's Bad Company (1972), The Last American Hero and John Frankenheimer's film of Eugene O'Neil's The Iceman Cometh (both 1973). The Clint Eastwood actioner Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974, Jeff's second Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor), Rancho Deluxe (1975), Bob Rafelson's Stay Hungry (1976), Heaven's Gate (1980), Cutter's Way (1981), Tron (1982), Against All Odds (1984) and John Carpenter's Starman (also 1984, nominated for Best Actor), Jagged Edge (1985), Francis Ford Coppola's Tucker (1988), The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), The Fisher King (1991), American Heart (1993), Peter Weir's Fearless (1993), and the Coen Brothers' comedy The Big Lebowski (1998). Jeff's production company, Asis Productions, produced the Showtime movie Hidden In America (1996), starring brother Beau, which dealt with hunger in America, a subject close to Jeff's heart. The film received a Golden Globe nomination in 1996 for Best TV/Cable Film and earned a Screen Actor's Guild award for Beau as Best Actor. Jeff, who moved his family to Santa Barbara after the '94 Northridge earthquake ("It turned out we had our own private fault line around the old house"), is also a gifted musician, and is putting the finishing touches on his first CD (backed by David Crosby and Michael McDonald), as well as being a prolific photographer. An exhibit of his photos is currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Santa Monica.

The prolific Mr. Bridges has two new films on deck this summer: the home-grown terrorism thriller Arlington Road in which he co-stars with Tim Robbins and Joan Cusak, and Albert Brooks' scathing new comedy The Muse, co-starring Brooks, Sharon Stone and Andie MacDowell. Both films hit screens in July.

One would assume, based on his numerous portrayals of good guys, that Jeff Bridges would be a good guy in person. In fact, Jeff is so cool, laid-back and unassuming, that a bite to eat with him after a photo session feels like a friendly lunch with your next door neighbor or old college buddy. After a few bites of pasta, you forget you're talking to one of the world's great actors and almost want to ask him if he'd like to fire up a stogie and watch the playoffs on the big screen while you polish off the last of your old man's imported beer. We didn't, but it was tempting...

Arlington Road reminded me of the great paranoid thrillers of the 70's, like The Parallax View (1974).
Jeff Bridges: Yeah, I responded really strongly to the script right away when I read it. It was one of those situations where the writer was always ahead of you. The twists and turns were amazing. I read it completely cold, didn't know anything about it. It was a wonderful read just for that reason. Also, I knew Tim Robbins was involved and I had always admired his work, and knew this would be an opportunity to work with him, although when I read it, we weren't sure who was going to play what part. Tim's wonderful to work with. He's a really generous actor.

Your character was sort of a classic Hitchcock everyman thrown into an extraordinary situation.
Yeah, it had a lot of Hitchcockian elements, which I also liked. (Director) Mark Pellington was another reason I wanted to be involved. I met with him and saw a wonderful documentary he did on his father. The way he shot it was a real plus.

With your character in The Muse, you couldn't have two more different guys. Did you base your character of the wildly successful screenwriter on anyone?
(laughs) I was told that he was based on Jim Brooks (Terms of Endearment, As Good As It Gets), who is a good friend of Albert's. I've never met Jim Brooks, but this character was great fun, and I'm a big fan of Albert's. I loved Lost In America (1985), and a lot of his other films. People wonder how Hollywood works, and it's true that people in this town are always looking for that "special thing." I think the idea that there's this muse, feeding the writer ideas and inspiration is a wonderful one. And maybe it's true...(laughs)

Were you drawn to acting from an early age? When you were hanging out on the "Sea Hunt" set, did you know that this is what you wanted to do?
Not really. I was carried on-screen when I was six months old by Jane Greer, then worked with her again in Against All Odds, 30 some-odd years later. The scene where she carried me on, I had to be crying. And I was a real happy baby, so my mother instructed Jane to just pinch me to make me cry. So 30 years later, in Against All Odds, I went up to Jane before a really emotional scene and said "Could you just give me a little pinch?" (laughs)

Did it work a second time?
Yeah, it did. She's a wonderful actress, Jane Greer. She was in the film that Against All Odds is based on (Out of the Past, 1947), and her performance was so wonderful, so understated, especially for the times. It was a particularly bizarre shoot for us, though. Remember that Rachel Ward and I had some pretty torrid love scenes? All that stuff in Mexico was shot while she was on her honeymoon! (groans and laughs) Luckily her husband, Bryan Brown, is also a wonderful actor, and a very understanding one!

How do you wife and kids react when you have to do a torrid love scene on film?
I think it probably makes them feel uncomfortable more when people ask them about it, and how they feel. My wife is very supportive. I almost feel like she should get a credit up on the screen along with me. But you were asking about when I decided to act...I had done quite a few pictures before I finally decided to act full time. For a long time I had wanted to get into music...actually all my music is kind of resurfacing now. One of the great things about living up in Santa Barbara is that there are so many great musicians up there. So, I'm making an album. I've started a record label and am releasing it myself. It's a mix of rock, jazz, some reggae-type stuff. Three songs were written by a wonderful songwriter named John Goodwin, who's my oldest friend. We grew up together. Michael McDonald and David Crosby are my backup singers! (laughs)

Not too shabby.
No. We've been having a great time. So after thirty-five years of writing songs, it's finally come around. I play piano and guitar in the band.

Didn't your dad do some musical theater?
Yeah, he replaced Richard Kiley in Man of La Mancha and did Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls. He used to love to sing.

He also was a wonderful Shakespearian actor, right? He must've found it frustrating, always getting cast as action heroes.
Yeah, he loved doing Shakespeare. But he pulled off "Sea Hunt" so well, people actually thought he was a real diver, that he was Mike Nelson! So he was typecast as that. Years later, when I was doing Blown Away, there was this part of my uncle. So I talked the producers, and said, 'I know this really terrific actor named Lloyd Bridges who'd be perfect for this.' And they thought about it and said 'Yeah but, isn't he really more of a comedic actor, like in Airplane?' He pulled that off so well, spoofing himself, that finally that's how he was typecast.

Let's go back to how you decided to stick with acting.
I remember the moment. It was right after The Last American Hero. Usually after a film, because acting uses a certain emotional muscle, I feel pretty wiped out and don't want to act right away again. Thank God that feeling passes! (laughs) So my agent called me, and said that John Frankenheimer was doing a film of The Iceman Cometh with Robert Ryan, Lee Marvin and Frederic March and wanted me to be in it. I said 'No man, I want to get back to my music. I've got other things I want to do.' A couple hours later, Lamont Johnson, who'd just directed me in The Last American Hero called and just read me the riot act: "You call yourself an actor?! How can you turn down this opportunity to work with these masters of your craft?!" So I decided to do a little experiment on myself to see if I really wanted to make this my full time job. I figured professionals are supposed to do it, even if they don't feel like it. So that's what I'll do. And it turned out to be a really great experience. It was all shot on one set. Usually on a film you might rehearse for a week or two then spent eight or ten weeks shooting. On this, we rehearsed for eight weeks and shot for two weeks. It was all of us sitting around a table, all these great actors. All my scenes were with Robert Ryan, who's a guy who kind of stands alone. He's such an underrated actor. So it was hanging out with all these great actors and learning from them. It was kind of like a play that we could have taken on the road. John Frankenheimer did such a masterful job of shooting it, keeping the camera moving. The cameras used these huge magazines that could do ten minute takes...I'm not that knocked out by my performance, looking back (laughs). But it was great working with all those guys, and working with them made me realize that this is what I wanted to do.

Let's start with The Last Picture Show. Apparently there was as much drama going on behind the cameras as in front.
It was a great experience. I was 19 or 20 years old, getting to do kissing scenes with Cybill Shepherd...

That must've been tough.
(laughs) Oh yeah, it was. Everyone was in love with her. Peter (Bogdonavich) was so wonderful. The cinematographer, Robert Surtees, was incredible. He was a true master. The whole cast was great. I always felt that Tim Bottoms never got enough acclaim for his work in that picture. He's a wonderful actor. My favorite scene in that movie is the last scene between he and Cloris in her kitchen...Peter had such courage as a director to let the silence in the scenes just hang there. It was amazing. We had a great time going back 20 years later to do Texasville (1990), which was also written by Larry McMurtry. It was just like we'd had a long weekend, and then came back to work...Larry McMurtry just wrote a new book, the third installment, called "Duane's Despressed." (laughs)

He's turning into John Updike. Your character is like Rabbit.
That's right! (laughs) I'm looking forward to reading the book, hoping that down the line we can all get together and do it again, although Texasville didn't do that well, so it might be kind of tough. Peter's original idea for Texasville was to have it on a double bill with The Last Picture Show, which would have been interesting, but that never happened.

Tell us about working with John Huston.
I'm flooded with so many memories...the first thing I remember is the interview. I think Beau got me that gig. Huston thought he was too old for the part, so Beau said 'Why don't you check out my younger brother?' So I had the interview in Madrid, Spain. The night that I landed, I met this girl in the lobby and she took me out on the town and we ate all this great seafood, drank and really had a ball. The next morning I was feeling rather peculiar. All of the sudden when I got to the interview, it turned out that I was really sick. It turned out that I had food poisoning, from the shellfish. The interview was at this museum. John showed me all this fine art while I was vomiting with my mouth closed and swallowing it, trying to maintain! (laughs) He didn't notice at all, just kept showing me all his favorite paintings! I went back to the hotel and was so weak, I couldn't pick up the phone to call for help. Who saved my life, but James Mason, who was staying at the hotel and with whom I'd done a rather obscure picture called The Yin and Yang of Mr. Go, which was directed by Burgess Meredith. Funny story about that: James played a Chinese Mexican in the film...the money fell through and we finally all had to leave Hong Kong and come home. Fifteen years later, I'm flipping through a film catalogue and there's the film! I called Burgess and we had a screening. It was the saddest, funniest thing I've ever been involved in. All the scenes that we left out, they made cartoons out of! (laughs) Then they invented another character played by Broderick Crawford and just spliced him in! (imitating Crawford) "Yeah, I saw him over there, over at Sally's!" Then they'd have a cartoon of me and James Mason...we were laughing and crying at the same time, because this was Burgess' baby.

Let's talk about your photography.
I've been taking pictures for years now, usually on the sets of my movies and at the end of the shoots, I make up books of the pictures and give them to everyone as souvenirs. I've been using a Widelux camera, which is a panoramic camera, sort of what a letterboxed film looks like on video or DVD. I'm putting together a coffetable book of pictures which should be available in a year or so. I'm also getting into the web a little bit, and have a website up (jeffbridges.com) if people are interested in what's cooking with either one of those things. It's funny, because I'm not a computer guy at all. I was sucked into a computer in Tron once, but that's another story. (laughs)

Tell us about working with Clint Eastwood on Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.
Well, it was Michael (The Deer Hunter, 1978 Best Picture) Cimino's first film. Clint produced it, and was giving Michael a directorial shot after he'd written Magnum Force (with John Milius) for Clint before that. It was the first film I did up in Montana, and I fell in love with that state. Later, I bought some property and built a house up there. It was a great experience. Clint likes doing very few takes, one, maybe two at most, whereas Michael likes to do a lot, but couldn't since Clint was the producer. So there was one scene where I wasn't happy with the way it was going, and we'd already done a couple takes. So I went to Michael, and said I wanted to do it again. Everyone got really nervous, including Michael, who said "I don't know man, I'm gonna have to ask the boss," meaning Clint. So this hush sort of falls over the set when Clint comes back. He looks around, looks at me, looks at Michael and says "Give the kid another try." (laughs)

How different was Cimino on Heaven's Gate. Did it feel like a disaster?
No, not at all, and I still think it's a terrific film. Michael was very hot off The Deer Hunter, which had won all these awards, so he pretty much had free reign to do as he pleased. He'd shoot dozens of takes, sometimes 50 or 60. The problem with that is, you never know on which take you really have to be "on" as an actor and it sort of threw a lot of us out of synch. The other thing I remember was during the big shoot-out at the end, we all had to ride in a circle, half going one way and half the other. Now most of these guys playing cowboys were real Montana cowboys. And Michael must've had us do two dozen takes of riding around in circles--right at each other! I remember right before every take just going 'Please God, let me live through this one!" (laugh) One of the saddest memories I have making films is going to the premiere of the film in New York and the reviews the next morning. And that terrible sound of a smattering of applause at the end. I notice that every time I've seen the film, I enjoy it more. I think that might be a function of starting to relax into the film's pace, knowing what I'm in store for. I think it's very American, especially nowadays, to be used to seeing cut, cut, cut up on the screen. Even if you're not realizing what's making you uncomfortable, that's what it probably is...a big part of how much a person enjoys a film is what they know about it going in, either from the trailer, the ad in the newspaper or the reviews. And with Heaven's Gate, the reviews were so terrible! Talk about preparation going to see a film! And the reviews were so personal. One review said "If they shaved Michael Cimino's head, they'd find three 6's." I mean, what the fuck is that?! It'll be interesting to see, 10 or 20 years from now, how that film is received. On a positive note, Cimino gave me the whorehouse and that barn on that huge ranch at the end of the shoot, and that's now my house in Montana. The barn's my studio.

Winter Kills is a really crazy, interesting movie.
Yeah...boy. That was another first-time director, Bill Richert. It was all kind of a fictitious version of what happened with the Kennedy clan, sort of crossed similar territory that Oliver Stone's movie did ten years later, in a sort of weird way. That was an interesting film because, here's this young director, who was so charismatic...do you remember the cast he assembled? John Huston, Elizabeth Taylor, Toshiro Mifune, Sterling Hayden, Thomas Milian, Jack Elam, Belinda Bauer, Richard Boone...just a wild, wild cast! He got all these people just out of his sheer excitement about the project. It was interesting on a lot of levels. I had a chance to work with John Huston as an actor as opposed to a director, which was quite different. During Fat City he kind of kept me on my heels. He and Stacy Keach, who did the lead, were very close, but he kept me on my heels, saying things like (as Huston) "We've scheduled some fights for you, Jeff. We're going to turn you pro..." I was so in awe of him. During Winter Kills it was just the opposite. We sort of hung out and you always got the feeling that he was giving the actors lessons in how to work with a director. He was so deferential to Bill Richert, who'd never directed a film before. He was really wonderful. I feel so blessed to have worked with him on both those films. I keep waiting for an opportunity to work with Angelica now, I love her work so much.

Beau starred in Hal Ashby's first movie (The Landlord, 1970) and you starred in his last (8 Million Ways to Die, 1986). Tell us about Hal Ashby.
He was really one of my favorite directors I've ever worked with, a real master, and such "art balls." He would have such faith in the actors and himself and the whole process, that he would be so relaxed that it would seem to an outside person that he was unprepared. It was really just this faith in the artistic process. You just have to look at his work to see it. One of the sad, and tragic things about 8 Million Ways to Die, was the producer had hired this brilliant director who presented the script to me. I said 'Why does Hal want to do this? It seems like kind of a cop, shoot-em up picture.' Hal said "No, no. I want to get into the character's obsession with alcohol, and a whole different thing. I don't really know why I want to do it, which is maybe why I want to do it. The only way I'm going to figure out why is to get inside and examine it." I was eager to work with him, so I got in there. The way he worked, I can understand why the money guys would get frustrated. He would throw out a lot of the script and do a lot of improvisation. Coming from being an editor, which is another great place for a director to come from, he would draw on that skill. I remember him saying the secret to being a great editor is to making yourself so familiar with all the film that you've got, and just sit there and go over, and over every single piece. So the producer was on the set often, had no respect for Hal's process at all. Hal was very smart when one of the producer's guys came to the set to spy on Hal. Hal hired him into his camp to be my technical adviser because he was a recovering alcoholic! He was a wealth of information and most of my speeches were worked out with him...somehow, miraculously, Hal shot the film the way he wanted to shoot it. Then it got down to the last weeks of shooting, with a few days left, and the producer comes down and says "You've got one more day." So Hal, very brilliantly, made us all feel like we had all the time in the world. He let Andy Garcia, whose first film this was, do a bunch of takes for the bit he did on the phone. He wouldn't rush him. He said "Let him discover the scene." And at the end of the day, Hal got everything he needed! Hal was going to take some time off and he gave the film to his editor. The producer came in, fired Hal, came after the negative, then proceeded to cut the entire film against the grain that Hal shot it. Hal was making all these editorial choices in the camera while he was shooting. I remember asking Hal 'Are we going to do much looping in this film?' Hal said "I've never looped a film in my life! I'm an editor. I know how to take a razor blade, shave the emulsion off the film, and splice sound in." I ended up looping about 100 lines after the producer re-cut it. It broke Hal's heart, it really did...We didn't know that he was sick at the time, but he probably was.

Cutter's Way is a very underrated film.
Yeah, I think so, too. Ivan Passer directed it, who's wonderful. We shot it up in Santa Barbara, which is when I really fell in love with it. Ivan was, I don't want to say passive, but he said very little and created this wonderful sort of atmosphere where it could all take place. Jordan Cronenweth shot it beautifully and Jack Nietzsche did a beautiful score done entirely with German women playing champagne glasses. It was amazing. John Heard gave a really remarkable performance. He should have been nominated for an Academy Award.

What was it like acting against a computer in Tron?
It was a mammoth undertaking. It was shot on 70 mm, black and white, then hand-tinted in Korea. At the time it was very innovative, although I think it looks kind of dated now. Wendy Carlos did a great score for it. It was maddening, man. It was a long shoot, four months. I had to go to work every day and put on a dance belt, which is like a jock strap with only one strap--right up your ass! So sitting down or doing any sort of...it was terrible, man. All the sets were black velvet and we were wearing white clothes. After a month in there...I wish they'd explored the love triangle a little more.

How did you approach your characterization in Starman?
I remember going in and reading for John Carpenter. I almost gave myself one of these adjustments that actors give themselves. It was almost like I became a small being inside this huge body and I had to kind of steer it around, you know? I was always trying to "act appropriate," as human as possible. If he was crossing his legs, his legs would be crossed, but his weight wouldn't be quite on them because they weren't being crossed for the same reason that we humans would cross them.

He almost seemed like a baby.
Yeah, and I thought if I could get that initial scene when he's being born, if I could get that together and make that as real as possible, then it would just be a process of him getting more and more human towards the end. I have a dancer friend. One of the things I do to prepare for roles is get a role model, so I'll look through my phone book and find someone who reminds me of the person I'm about to play. So with Starman, I looked through my book for strange friends who I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they were an alien. (laughs) So I came across this guy named Russell Clark who I'd been friends with for years. So I had the studio hire him and we worked for about a week and videoed the work, doing a lot of body work for the birth scene. One of my fond memories of making that film was, I was in my study, reviewing all the tapes I'd made. And I was in there, naked, doing that opening scene of Starman's birth and my wife opened the door, came in, and saw me huddled in the corner, nude. (laughs) She had a very strange expression on her face and very quietly closed the door and left me alone! And also my daughters were small at that time, and I observed how they were in their bodies. I looked at different birds also, that kind of thing.

Who was your role model for your character in Jagged Edge?
I read a book by M. Scott Peck called "People of the Lie." And it was his study of evil people and what evil was all about. It was about selfishness, putting the self above everything else. So that book helped me a lot. As far as people I modeled him after, I really looked into myself, my own dark side for that. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be a sociopath. There's something about that idea that's very attractive to most of us, to do just exactly what you want to do. To just satisfy your own impulses. To me the theme of that character was what that kind of evil costs, because ultimately what we all want is love. To be loved and to express love. Of course when you're that evil and self-concerned, you're the most unloveable that you can be. What you really want, you can't have, because you can't let somebody know who you really are.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from that character was Preston Tucker. He was a really fascinating guy. It was also the first time in a feature film that you got to work with your dad.
That's right. One of the remarkable things about doing that film, was that it was done with the blessing of the entire Tucker clan. I was able to ask them things like 'What was the expression on your father's face during the trial?' So it was really great to have that support from the family. Another interesting thing that happened, about a week into the film I was doing the scene where I get very upset with my crew and I'm trying to get them to finish the car and I was supposed to bang my fist on the bulletin board...the last rehearsal before the take, I hit the thing too hard, and I just felt my hand break. I thought 'Oh shit, I'm gonna be fired now and they're gonna replace me...' I had to go right to the hospital. They put it in a removable cast and I told Francis (Coppola) that I wanted to keep shooting and that I'd try to hide the other hand. So I did the take again, and almost broke my other hand! So for the rest of that film, I had to act with a broken hand, and Preston Tucker was almost Italian with his hand gestures! Plus there were lots of crowd scenes where I had to shake hands with people...it was tough. There's only one scene now where I notice the cast, where I'm spinning around in a chair in an ice cream parlor. But nobody ever noticed it, and I had to use all my willpower not to mention it when I was doing press for the film.

How was it working with your dad on that?
It was wonderful. I'm so glad that Francis hired him. I don't know that you're ever a peer with your father, but...he was my teacher and everything, so we approached the work in a very similar way. He approached the work with so much joy. He loved the process. It was so much fun just pretending with him like that. We'd come up with ideas for each other. We had a wonderful time.

How was it doing Baker Boys with Beau?
That was a dream, both to get to work with Beau, and also with Michelle (Pfeiffer). Steve Kloves, the director, must have written that when he was about 24 years-old. It's one of my favorite films that I've ever done. Another great element of that was the producer, Mark Rosenberg, who was a champion for Steve and held out for him to direct the film.

Was it tough playing someone who was such a shit to his brother? I know you and Beau are very close.
Unfortunately I got a little out of hand during that fight scene. We cut the shit out of ourselves on that chain link fence. During the fight scene, we didn't have a word to say to each other during the scene in case things went too far that would get us to stop. When I'm about to break his fingers, he was saying "No! Stop it! Stop it!" (laughs) I thought he was acting, man! And he wound up having to go to the hospital that night. (laughs) I don't think I broke his fingers, but I sure sprained them badly.

Payback time for little brother?
(laughs) That's right! He used to tease me unmercifully when we were kids.

I think one of your best films is Peter Weir's Fearless.
It was a really remarkable experience working with Peter. He such a wonderful person and a wonderful director. He's very inclusive, really encourages the actors to give as much as they can to the project. I remember one time I found myself being moved to go out and buy myself a lot of art supplies and I found myself pasting all these drawings up on the wall to try to draw what my feelings about the plane crash were. I drew all these crazy, kind of swirling things, then presented them to Peter the next day. He incorporated a lot of them into the film. He's very musical. He loves music so much and would always have music on the set while we were working. He would have a big boom box with tapes that he would play to not only put the actors, but the crew into the mood that he was trying to create. He would also bring the boom box into the screening room when we watched dailies that day, so he would score the dailies! He also assembled a lot of people who had survived plane crashes for us to speak to, and that was very helpful. Also, speaking about role models again, another fella who was very helpful during that was Gary Busey, who's an old buddy of mine. He had read the script and was very moved by it, and wanted to be a part of it because he felt he'd been given a new chance at life after his motorcycle accident. He helped me out a lot.

Was your character of The Dude in The Big Lebowski based on any of the people you grew up with here in L.A.?
Yeah, myself! (laughs) Probably about 50% of The Dude's wardrobe was out of my closet: the jelly shoes, a lot of the t-shirts.

Tell us about your philanthropic work.
I've been involved with an organization called The End Hunger Network for about 20 years now. Originally it started out to be about the issue of world hunger, but over the last 10 years we've shifted our focus to hunger here in the United States because it's gotten so bad. It's hard to imagine that, but the United States ranks last among the top 23 industrialized nations in how it takes care of its poor and its hungry. It's really mind-boggling. You read the paper about how the economy is booming and how many jobs we all have. I keep reading on to find where they mention all the hungry people we have here, and it doesn't say anything about that. So we've shifted our focus here, specifically to children. One out of five of our kids live below the poverty line here in the U.S. and poverty and hungry have a very close relationship. So we're working with other hunger organizations and are in the process of forming a new coalition to bring about political changes. One of the reason it's gotten so bad over the years is that all the programs that were doing such a wonderful job feeding the hungry in our country have had their support systems shot to hell. So we're trying to do a lot of lobbying to inform the public about what's going on. One thing I'm really proud of is a movie called Hidden in America that I produced starring my brother Beau. It was a tough assignment because we didn't want to make a long (public service announcement) about hunger, but a story that generally moved people. Everyone did a wonderful job. Martin Bell and Peter Silverman, who respectively directed and wrote American Heart, directed and wrote Hidden. We're getting Hidden out to 20,000 schools along with a study guide that we've also made to teach kids about this issue. The cure for hunger is all in place. We know how to end it. It's just a matter of getting support for the programs that will put it in place. There's a web site, endhunger.com, that people can go to if they'd like to get involved.

Did you get your social conscience from your parents?
I think so, yeah. My parents have always always viewed themselves as part of the family of man, one big family, and have related to others that way. My father worked with CARE in Africa for a while, which was very inspiring to me. I turned him on to the whole hunger issue and the next week he tells me "Yeah, I'm going to Africa with CARE." (laughs) He was amazing that way.

What's next on your slate?
I'm working on something I'm really excited about called The Contender. It's being directed by a fella named Rod Lurie, who's a former film critic. Most critics, I always found myself thinking 'Well, you didn't like that movie, what can you come up with, hot shot?' you know? (laughs) He came up with a brilliant script. I saw another piece of his that he directed that I was very impressed with, so I'm excited about it. Rod got into the business with the idea that he would become a filmmaker, so he became a critic first, taking the same route as François Truffaut and Peter Bogdonavich. Joan Allen and Gary Oldman are in it, also and they're both amazing. We start shooting in mid-August, and until then I'm finishing my overdubs for the album, so I can get it out sometime over the summer.

Read more!

James Ellroy: The Hollywood Interview

Author James Ellroy.


JAMES ELLROY: BARK AT THE MOON
The "Demon Dog of American Fiction" sinks his teeth into RFK, MLK and Vietnam with The Cold Six Thousand
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the May 2001 issue of Venice Magazine.

If there were any justice in this world, and in the world of James Ellroy that's debatable, there would be a picture of the imposing, 6'4" author in Webster's Dictionary under the word "survivor." Regarded by literary scions as not only the reigning king of crime fiction, but also one of the greatest authors of our time, James Ellroy came into the world as Lee Earle Ellroy, born in the city of his literary dreams and nightmares: Los Angeles, during the post-war boom of 1948. Ellroy's father Armand was an accountant, and onetime business manager of Rita Hayworth. Mother Jean was a registered nurse. According to Ellroy, in his memoir My Dark Places, "They stayed together for 15 years. It had to be sex."

After a nasty divorce, Jean was given custody of young Lee, and a tempestuous relationship between the two quickly developed, for Geneva Hilliker Ellroy had two fatal weaknesses: booze and men. Both took their toll on her young son. After initially moving to Santa Monica, Lee suddenly found himself living in the town of El Monte, a less-than-glamorous enclave in the lesser-than-glamorous San Gabriel Valley. In 1958, after spending the weekend with his father in L.A., Lee returned to El Monte, only to learn that his mother had been murdered over the weekend, strangled to death, her body dumped in a field next to Arroyo High School. The murder is still unsolved. It would be the spark that ignited some of the most brilliant American fiction of the latter 20th century.

The next decade and a half was a continuous downward spiral for Ellroy, who nearly succumbed to alcohol and drug addiction while still in his early 20's. After getting sober, Ellroy began reinventing himself, and started writing in an attempt to purge some of the demons that nearly consumed him. While supporting himself as a golf caddy, Ellroy published his first novel, Brown's Requiem, in 1981, followed by Clandestine, the following year, which was a fictionalized account of Jean Ellroy's murder set during the Red Scare of the early 50's. Four more crime novels followed, each more powerful than the other, gaining momentum as Ellroy began to find his literary voice, many of his stories dealing with the brutal slayings of innocent women, and the knights in tarnished armor (usually cops) who sought to avenge them. His work garnered rave reviews and a solid cult following. Stardom was just around the corner.

The Black Dahlia hit bookstores in 1987 and made Ellroy a full-fledged literary star. A fictionalized account of Los Angeles' most notorious unsolved murder (wannabe actress Elizabeth Short's bisected body was found in a vacant lot. She had been slowly tortured to death over a two day period), it deftly blended historical fact with fiction so seamlessly, it was difficult to ascertain where the reality/fantasy line was in the sand, if it was ever there at all. The Black Dahlia was also Ellroy's first chapter in his now-legendary "L.A. Quartet," which includes The Big Nowhere, White Jazz, and the classic L.A. Confidential, which was adapted for the screen into one of the most honored films of 1997.

1995 saw the publication of Ellroy's epic American Tabloid, a down-and-dirty jigsaw puzzle of U.S. history in the early 60's, ending with JFK's assassination. Time Magazine named it "Book of the Year." In 1997 Ellroy published his shattering memoir My Dark Places, in which the author reopened the investigation of his mother's unsolved murder with the help of retired L.A. County Sheriff's detective Bill Stoner. Ellroy has also published Hollywood Nocturnes, a collection of short stories, and Crime Wave, a collection of fiction and non-fiction pieces that he penned for Gentlemen's Quarterly (GQ) Magazine. It was to be the 21st century, however, that would see Ellroy's greatest work, to date, come to pass.

The Cold Six Thousand is the sequel to American Tabloid, following that story's surviving characters, and a few new ones, immediately following JFK's murder, up to Robert Kennedy's assassination in 1968. A labyrinthine, epic, and passionate tale of greed, twisted ideals and the underbelly of the American dream, The Cold Six Thousand deserves to take its place alongside the greatest American novels of our time. Ellroy has outdone himself once again.

James Ellroy, who now lives in Kansas City with his wife, writer and journalist Helen Knode, sat down with Venice Magazine in his favorite L.A. haunt: the original Pacific Dining Car on 6th street downtown. Journey with us now to the dark places, big nowheres, and black dahlias that exist in the world of James Ellroy...

The thing that really struck me with this book, as you did in American Tabloid and many of your previous works, is how you weaved historical fiction with historical fact, and made it seamless.
James Ellroy: The one question I never answer is what's real and what's not in my books. What I give you is the human infrastructure of public events. I make them more real because I give you the hearts and souls of the people who were there, implementing public policy at its very lowest levels. There's no sense of hindsight in these books, and especially in this one, because the human stories I'm telling are so immediate. They're integral to the larger public events, but they are, in most occasions, even more compelling. The idea of a young cop who travels to Dallas on November 22, 1963 to kill a black pimp in order to prove himself in the police hierarchy, and then the shit hits the fan with JFK getting killed. What's important to Wayne Tedrow, Jr. now is getting out of Dallas with some honor still intact. But oops, he starts saying things he shouldn't.

All your books are journeys of self-discovery for your characters. But with this book, this was history that you lived through, as a young man. In the course of writing American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand what did you learn about the United States?
I made a conscious decision after I finished the L.A. Quartet books that I would never again write anything that could be perceived as a crime novel or, God forbid, a mystery. I think these two books, if you have to hyphenate with the word "novel", would be classified as historical novels. I was moving into the years of my cognizance. The four quartet books began in '47, before I was born, and ended in '59, when I was not quite eleven years old. I had a reluctant idea of what the key events would be in both books would be about going in: J. Edgar Hoover's reluctant war against organized crime; John Kennedy's ascent; Bobby Kennedy's rise as crime fighter number one in America; Fidel Castro's takeover of Cuba in 1959 and the mob's being pissed off that they were losing a couple hundred grand a day when Castro nationalized their casinos; the 1960 election; Howard Hughes' colonialist designs on Las Vegas; the crazy Cuban exiles mingling with the CIA and the mob; the Kennedy assassination; J. Edgar Hoover's war on the Civil Rights Movement; the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy; the early days of the Vietnam war and CIA men bringing heroin out there. Just an enormous tapestry of America from 1958-1968. I knew the rudiments of the story. I had a sense of collusion, which is the title of part II of American Tabloid. You had then that last gasp of republic accountability America, this nexus of rogue intelligence agents, crazy Cuban exiles, right wing lunatics of all stripes, the intelligence community and high-ranking law enforcement officials and political operatives all serving a common cause, which was the anti-Communist agenda. They were all in bed with each other incestuously. They had imperialist designs on Central America, Cuba and Vietnam. What I decided I was going to write was the epic history of American bad ju-ju.

That's when it really all started, isn't it, after WW II?
Exactly. I heard a story where Eisenhower, who was traumatized by what he saw during WW II, particularly the death camps, said in his first cabinet meeting "Gentlemen, I will tolerate no foreign wars during my administration." And what he did was let the CIA run amuck in Iran, Guatemala, and all over the globe, because he didn't want another full-scale conflict. As Saul Bellow wrote in The Adventures of Auggie March "Everyone knows there is no fineness or accuracy in suppression. If you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining." That's what these guys ultimately learn (in The Cold Six Thousand).

And we're still recovering from the hangover that this party gave us, aren't we?
Absolutely. The party of drugs and American expansionism, mass skepticism, and bad wars.

Do you think we'll ever recover from JFK's assassination?
I think we already have. I think if we found out today who really pulled the trigger, it would be irrelevant. I think that America was never innocent. This country was founded on slavery, land grabs and the genocide of the indigenous population. This narrative line has been stuck on JFK's death. The truth is, Jack Kennedy accepted favors from organized crime, then sicced his rabid, pit bull kid brother on them. Jack promised the Cuban exiles a second invasion after they were betrayed at the Bay of Pigs, then continued to screw them. Jack Kennedy deported (mob boss) Carlos Marcello. He walked out of El Salvador and Guatemala with cactus thorns in his ass. He fucked up and fucked with some very hot headed Latins that most sophisticated people would know "Don't fuck with these guys." It's a terrible story of hubris and naiveté. I think what Jack Kennedy's death was, was a glorified business dispute killing. I think that by the rules that Jack Kennedy lived by, he got what he deserved.

What about Bobby?
I came to admire him a lot in the course of my research. He was the greatest American crime fighter of the 20th century and Martin Luther King was the greatest man of the American 20th century. He was a marked man from the Montgomery bus boycott on, and I think that sustained physical courage that he was forced to have, messed with him.

How do you get in the mindset to write a period piece?
I isolated myself in the 1960's when I wrote The Cold Six Thousand. I thought about it from a 60's mindset. I immersed myself in it. I sat in a room and thought about it, and savored what I always call "the tremor of intent," which is the title of an Anthony Burgess novel. The tremor of intent is gearing yourself up to write a great novel, a novel of complexity, depth, stylistic ardor, characterization and, dare I say it, profundity. It's going back to when you were a kid and all you wanted was to be a great novelist, because great novels were the only thing that moved you. It's savoring that kid's feeling of "I want to do that, and I want to be the best." You've gotta get there first in isolation, which helps you conceptualize it, plan it, and steer you for the sustained concentration that books like that require. Part of the process for me, aside from the assiduous note taking from research, is the outline. The outline for The Cold Six Thousand was 343 pages, and took me eight months to write. Then you have to pull it off in successive drafts. There has to be perfect order in the words, perfect depth of characterization, perfect setting of every scene. You've got to be able to track all your references, to be able to juggle the 125 characters that the book has. You've got to be able to push everything away so you can shape this thing into a cohesive whole. Even though I'll break to do magazine pieces, like in GQ, it's all about living in that pitch. So present day politics and social conditions are not considerations. It's all about thinking, immersing yourself in the era. It all comes down to this: how well can you lie? How well can you do it? It comes back to that. You have it or you don't.

How did you get the nickname "Mad Dog"?
Well, really it's just "dog," but I guess it's because I've always loved dogs. I have a canine identity thing, and I've always done dog shtick.

Let's talk about your background. My Dark Places is one of the most amazing memoirs I've ever read. Like all your characters, you are a survivor who's lived many lifetimes. In a nutshell, what was it like being Lee Ellroy, long before you were reborn as James Ellroy?
It was fearful. It was anxious. It was debased. It was bufoonish. It was occasionally horrifying. It was degrading. I doubt if I've had five depressed minutes in my life. A lot of anxiety, though. Some anger. I possessed in the early part of my life, a horrible obsessive nature, and I've been able to turn my obsessions into something good, creative and life-affirming and now I'm having a big, fat, fuckin' blast! I'm the happiest person I know.

Any one of the things that happened to you as a young person would have killed most people. What do you think accounts for your resilience?
I saw the enemy, and it was me. It's like that line from the Pogo comic strip: "We have seen the enemy, and it is us." When I cleaned up and was suddenly sober at 29, I didn't have anybody to blame. My parents were dead. I didn't have any brothers or sisters, or any family. I knew that nobody turned me into an alcoholic and a drug addict and a bum and a thief and a lowlife and a full time fantasist. I understood that I had free will in all of this. And I understood at the time that each one of us is fully responsible for his success and happiness and no one else. I cleaned up because I wanted things. I wanted to get laid. I wanted either the woman, or women, plural and I knew I wasn't going to get either in my current, raggedy-ass state. I wanted to write novels. I wanted to live a decent life.

Tell us about when the fascination with writing started.
I always wanted to be a novelist, I think even preceding my mother's death. I read kid books up until her death, boy's adventure books. Then after my mother's death, I started reading kid's mystery stories, then adult mystery stories, then true crime books, then the entire crime fiction genre: Raymond Chandler, Joseph Wambaugh...good and bad crime writers across the board. I loved Mickey Spillane when I read him as a kid, because he's a big anti-Communist, as I was then. The Fugitive TV series made a huge impression on me as a kid. I watched the first couple years of that. It debuted at an interesting time: two months before John Kennedy got it. It was great, because wherever David Janssen went, he always hooked up with the best looking woman in town! (laughs) And these actresses...oh God, Diana Muldaur, Anne Francis, June Harding...

I love June Harding. Remember her in The Trouble With Angels. (1966), with Hayley Mills?
Are you a June Harding fan? That's great, because she's a friend of mine. I wrote a piece for GQ called "My Life as a Creep," about my teenage years when I was obsessed with June Harding. My buddy Rick Jackson of the LAPD was working as a private eye then, and I was telling him about her, and he found her, living back East. She's an artist now, a great human being. But she was a guest star on "The Fugitive." Let's see, there was also Patricia Crowley, Madeline Rue, Lois Nettleton...all these good-looking, classy, smart women and great actresses. I felt like the Fugitive as a kid, like I was on the run. So here I could fantasize being on the run, getting all the babes! (laughs)

Your first novel, Brown's Requiem, was written in 1980, when you were still working as a golf caddy.
At the Bel-Air Country Club. I was living in Venice, on Ocean Front Walk, near the Victory Coffee Shop. I didn't have a car, and would take the bus out to Bel-Air, write on a bench outside the caddyshack, caddy, make just enough money to pay my rent and eat off of, a little for bus fare. I'd write on my days off. I'd write at night, late afternoons. I wrote the book in 10 1/2 months.

The book that really put you on the map was The Black Dahlia.
I'd been obsessed with that case since 1959 when I read about it in Jack Webb's book The Badge, which my dad bought me for my eleventh birthday in March, 1959. In the wake of my mother's death, I found it shocking, revelatory. I didn't understand at the time, of course that (murder victim) Elizabeth Short was the stand-in for my mother. I had nightmares about Elizabeth Short, became obsessed with her. I used to ride my bicycle down to 39th and Norton where her body was found. I later read John Gregory Dunne's wonderful and fanciful novel True Confessions in 1977, which is also based on the Dahlia case. When I started to write two years later, I thought that I couldn't write about the Black Dahlia case because he already had...years later in 1985, I was finally, tenuously, self-supporting as a writer. I had moved East. I ordered up the LA Times, January-May 1947 on microfilm. I went to the big New York library on 42nd street and 5th avenue. I got myself $400 in quarters, which is a shitload of quarters, and copied it off of microfilm. So I had complete chronologies of the LAPD investigation. I had known the essential story for many years, the details. I savored the tremor of intent very large on that book. I was living by myself in a basement apartment in Eastchester, New York. I put the story together largely through finding a methodology and a psychology that was so horrible, so baroque, that it would credibly explain the horrible crime itself. So, hence the story of Georgie Tilden and the Sprague family. I realized after I'd finished it that I didn't want to write contemporary-set books, that I didn't want to continue the Lloyd Hopkins series. I wanted to write a quartet of books about L.A., my smogbound fatherland, between the years '47-'59...I even remember staring at my desk, thinking that the third book would be called L.A. Confidential, that it would be huge, that it would feature a hellish robbery, people gunned down in a meat locker, and scandal rag journalism. It all evolved in a fever pitch between the years '85 and '91--I wrote the four books in six years.

The film of L.A. Confidential became an almost instant classic and was adapted from your book which was thought by most to be unfilmable because it was so complex.
I thought L.A. Confidential was a wonderful film, and a very deft adaptation, particularly considering that it only encompasses 15-20% of the overall story. It was amazing and dislocating to see these deft actors portraying Bud White, Ed Exley, Jack Vincennes, Sid Hudgens, Lynn Bracken and Dudley Smith. It was strange to see these actors, because I never think of actors when I'm writing, who weren't these characters as I'd pictured them, speaking some of my words reinterpreted was startling. The music was wonderful. Curtis Hanson would be the first to admit that a few of the scenes are underdressed due to budgetary constraints. To see it fly along of its own momentum, it's own wit and own dramatic arc was startling because it was a work that could only have originated with me, but in the end, was something entirely different, yet mine. (The film of) L.A. Confidential is the best thing that ever happened to me in my career, that I had nothing to do with. It was a fluke and it's probably never gonna happen again.

Are we going to see more Dick Contino and Danny Getchel stories?
Yeah, I want to do another Dick Contino and a whole bunch of Getchels, with Danny spreading his bad ju-ju. I want to do a piece where he's hanging with Ayn Rand during the Red Scare. I want to do a piece where he's a front man for Ronald Regan during his gubernatorial campaign. I'm actually going to do one where he's hanging out with Curtis Hanson and Sam Fuller during the Watts riots! (laughs)

You dedicated The Cold Six Thousand to former L.A. County Sheriff's homicide detective Bill Stoner.
Bill's my best friend. We remain very, very tight and talk a lot. He's a profound human being and a very old soul, as they say. It wouldn't have worked with anybody else but him. It was a guide shot. It was a great confluence.

Were you able to make peace with your mother after My Dark Places?
We continue. As I say in the book, "Closure is bullshit." I think about her. There's moments when I'm savoring the tremor of intent, and my thoughts keep coming back to her. There's a great photograph of her that I describe in My Dark Places from August of '46. I'm a year and a half away from being born. She wasn't married to my father then. She got married when she was a few months pregnant with me. She's sitting in the backyard at a swimming pool at a party, looks like a Beverly Hills movie biz party. She's sitting there, and she looks so good, and she's smiling and she's delightedly content. And I'm thinking (whispers) "What were you thinking? What's going on there?" Why did you settle for so little when you could've had so much? What were the blanks, what were the fill-ins of your horrible story, your horrible childhood in rural Wisconsin? Her dad, my grandfather, drank himself to death at 49. He was a forest ranger and game warden. He'd hire Indians to put out forest fires, then they'd use the money to go out and buy booze, then start more fires so they could get paid to put them out again. It's a classic example of a woman who was molested in the home, was promiscuous at a very early age, back in the day when promiscuity was wild and crazy ju-ju, not like it is today. She got out of that town and never looked back. She was running for the rest of her life. My mother was statuesque, fair, red-haired, hazel eyes. She was a very handsome woman. Always wore her hair in a bun. She exuded allure and mystery and she created a blank space around her and made people come to her. She hid from people. She only told people so much. She didn't let people all the way in. She slummed with cheap men. She listened to the Brahms symphonies and piano concertos on a cheap record player we had at the place in El Monte. She loved reading historical novels and Reader's Digest condensed books. She'd get drunk and her alcoholism escalated during the last couple years of her life, even though I was only 8 or 9 years old I was able to figure that out. She would formalize and overstate her lies. She did not credit me with being a good lie decoder. There's so many mysteries. Who killed her? Why did she suddenly move us from Santa Monica out to El Monte, which my father called, aptly, "Shitsville, USA"? You never knew what she was thinking.

At the end of the book, even though you didn't solve the physical mystery, it felt like you solved an internal one.
I got a handle on my origins. I got a handle on my ancestry. I calculatedly understood, going in, that it's highly unlikely that we were going to find her. I understood, on a semi-conscious level, that the book would not be about a successful homicide investigation, but would be about my journey of discovery with my mother and Bill Stoner's journey of discovery as a homicide detective.

You live in Kansas City now. Any chance you'll ever move back to L.A.?
No. I love Kansas City. It's quiet. It's peaceful. It's homogenous. It's physically very beautiful. It's nicely contained. It's a peaceful zone in the middle of the country. I went there with my wife before we got married to meet her mother, and I fell in love with the place.

What advice would you have for a first-time novelist?
I would say, don't write what you know. I would say write the kind of shit that you like to read. I would say outline assiduously. I would say savor the tremor of intent. I would say think. I would say make the whole process as unintimidating as possible by planning. This will allow you to write a more surely plotted, and more complex book than you might be able to if you just went at it hack and burn and chop.

Read more!

James Coburn: The Hollywood Interview

Actor James Coburn.


JAMES COBURN:
COOL DADDY
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the February 1999 issue of Venice Magazine.

cool n 1: Self-assurance 2: sophistication
3: calm 4: Poise, composure 5: See Coburn, James.

James Coburn was born August 31, 1928 in Laurel, Nebraska. His father, an auto mechanic, moved the family to Compton, California in the early 30's at the height of the depression, in hopes of finding a better life for his family. Young Coburn stayed in Compton through high school. Following military service in the Army, Coburn studied acting at Los Angeles City College, USC, and with the legendary Stella Adler in New York. He then returned to Southern California, where he made his stage debut at the La Jolla playhouse in Billy Budd. Following some work in commercials and live TV, Coburn made his film debut in 1959 in Ride Lonesome, a Budd Boetticher-directed horse opera starring Randolph Scott. He then hit paydirt with his supporting role in the smash hit The Magnificent Seven in 1960, following this with the classic The Great Escape in 1963. Coburn continued doing solid supporting work in film and TV throughout the early 60's, finally earning leading man status as superspy Derek Flint in Our Man Flint (1966) and In Like Flint (1967). He formed his own production company in 1967, Panpiper, producing the critical and cult favorite The President's Analyst, a brilliant social and political satire that is now widely regarded as one of the seminal films of the 1960's. Coburn also did three films with ultra-violence guru Sam Peckinpah: Major Dundee (1965), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) and the WW II drama Cross of Iron (1977) which showed the war from the German P.O.V., and directed second unit for Peckinpah's Convoy (1978).

Coburn's screen persona gave Americans what Sean Connery gave to the English: an urbane, sophisticated hero, who can let loose a one-liner, dry martini or deadly karate chop in the blink of one eye, while winking at us, the audience, with the other. His cat-like grace and steely intensity made him one of the top box office stars of the 60's and 70's, and Coburn still retains a strong following of fans as the 1990's come to a close.

Coburn has appeared in dozens of films. Just a few other noteworthy ones include Don Seigel's Hell Is For Heroes (1962), Charade (1963), Paddy Chayefsky's The Americanization of Emily (1964), Sergio Leone's Duck You Sucker! (1971), Richard Brooks' Bite the Bullet, and Walter Hill's Hard Times (both 1975). A near-fatal bout of rheumatoid arthritis slowed Coburn down in the late 70's, just when he was reaching the peak of his career. After focusing his considerable discipline on building (or re-building) his body, Coburn now happily declares that he is "pain free." Seeing the silver-maned, elegant Coburn stroll through the garden of the Beverly Hills home where this interview took place, one would never guess this was a man who was near death once upon a time. The lithe, cat-like grace is still there, as is the charm, easy laugh, and ten thousand watt smile that has been captivating the movie-going world for nearly 40 years. The foremost thing on Coburn's mind these days is his latest film, Paul Schrader's Affliction. In it, he plays Pop Whitehouse, father to Sheriff Wade Whitehouse (Nick Nolte). Affliction is the searing, much-talked about film that deals with domestic violence as it's passed down through the generations of a family like a cancerous heirloom. Coburn's venomous performance has critics and the public alike buzzing "Oscar." If nominated, it would be a first for Coburn, who, at 70, seems less like an old veteran gunning for a last lap around the track, than a seasoned pro whose powers are every bit at their peak when he enters the ring. There goes the bell. Round one...

Your character Pop Whitehouse is one of the most loathsome villains to grace a movie screen in recent memory. Did you have trouble shaking him off once the picture wrapped?
JAMES COBURN: Not really, because I got it all out. It's really when you can't get it out or when you're doing it on stag and you have to do it over and over again that it can be troubling. But I learned long ago how to get rid of it by doing it! (laughs) You get it out...villains are really fun to play because they're usually meatier characters, because they've made decisions that haven't all been very good ones, (laughs) and are paying the price, with a little karma attached. They have something to say, I think. I never play them as a "bad guy." I play them like I have something to accomplish. In Affliction, it was "I have to get my boys to be men! If they're not strong men, by God, I'll beat the shit out of them!" That's what makes him seem so savage...it's that conflict. Scripts without conflict are really boring. Characters without conflict are really boring to play, because you're always trying to catch up with something. And this one was just loaded with conflict. Paul (Schrader) said to Nick and I in the beginning "I'm just gonna let you two guys go after each other!" And we did. We went for it. It was great fun. I'd like to do it all over again.

Is it difficult to go to such a dark place as an actor?
It's sometimes difficult to find, initially. But as actors, we don't have to be who we're playing. That's one of the good things about being an actor. But, if you let yourself get locked into that, where that character becomes your essence, that's scary. There was an old film called A Double Life (1947), starring Ronald Coleman, where he became so infected with Othello, that he actually performed it for real, with his own Desdemona. Stella Adler, who I studied with, said "Actors act. They don't have to be their roles." On Affliction, we were all joking around between takes, then when we went back to it, boom! We were right back into it again, because it was written so well. It was very straight-on. There was no ambiguity about the characters, and it's really fun and enriching when that happens. As actors that's what we try to do, enrich our own beings by absorbing impressions, then generating it out through our craft and giving it to the audience. Truth is obvious, it's always obvious, isn't it? Screenplays sometimes hide the truth, which isn't necessary. You have to give audiences some credit. You don't have to play around the truth. And what Pop Whitehouse was saying, even though you might hate him for it, was the truth! He knew exactly who he was. He was, nevertheless, afflicted, but he was also very honest.

Tell us some more about working with Paul Schrader.
Schrader knows what he wants and knows when he's got it. He'll play to shades. "A little darker, Jim." "Not so bright!" (laughs) It was a very good shoot, not difficult at all. And Paul certainly helped in that.

What was it like studying with Stella Adler?
Great. I actually studied with Jeff Corey out here first. His philosophy was more improvisational. Get away from your ego, get away from lines, things like that. Learn how to play the action of the scene, that's what improv is really about. Stella, on the other hand, was into style. The style of Shakespeare, modern styles...she'd show you how to do it. You'd see her transform into a raving hag and then into a little girl. Drop of a hat, bang. That's what I mean about acting. You don't have to live it. As long as the character doesn't inhabit you, that's the kick of acting. De Niro studied with Stella. She was furious with him for putting all that weight for Raging Bull. (laughs)(imitating Stella) "What are you doing to yourself?! You'll ruin your health!" (laughs). She was very demanding, very hard on women especially. She would just strip you down, peel your ego right off your skin.

Who was in your class at Stella's?
Warren Beatty was in my class. He played piano in this Irish drama we did called Red Roses for Me. I played an Irishman (in an Irish brogue) "Aye, what's goin' on over here?!" (laughs) There were a couple others, but Warren went on to the most prominence. From there, I went onto live TV. The first thing I ever did was with Sidney Lumet. That's how I paid my rent, that and commercials. I once did a Remington Rand commercial where I shaved off eleven days of growth, live on-camera, in less than a minute! (laughs)

You did a couple Twilight Zones also. What was Rod Serling like?
Serling was very tight-lipped. He had a jaw that never completely opened up! (laugh) But I really loved him. He was a sweet guy. I was always running into him when he was going back to D.C. to "do something." He was very active politically, always trying to "get things done." That's why all of his things had some sort of a political bent. Not just political, but sociological as well. They were all about something. You just don't have that anymore. You have a couple of guys beating each other up, a little sex here and there, but it's not about anything anymore. As good as NYPD Blue is, it's about relationships, and nothing else. But Rod was great, he was just dynamite and that's what killed him. He just used all of himself up. But now they don't even need actors. They've got The Rugrats, they've got the pig (Babe), they've got cartoons...they're slowly getting rid of the actor, which they've been trying to do for years. (laughs) "Why do we need actors?"

You and Steve McQueen were great friends. Tell us about Steve.
Steve always thought of himself as a re-actor, not an actor. I think he got that from John Wayne (laughs). What can I tell you about Steve? (His first wife) Neile used to call him a "male nymphomaniac." (laughs) He had an incredibly dynamic personality. He was like a kid. He said to me one time "Why can't they make a movie about just one guy--me!" (laughs) He even had a script idea about a guy who crashes in the desert, and trying to survive. While we were shooting Hell is for Heroes, we were shooting up in Redding, where it was so hot, I mean 110 in the shade. And the studio gave him this convertible. And we'd be driving along the road, and all of the sudden he'd shoot off the road and go tearing through the woods, as fast as he could until he ran into something! So he wore this car out in about a week and a half, and they sent a guy out who said "What the hell happened to this car?!" Steve said "I dunno. It just stopped running." (laughs) He would always test the producer, Marty Ransohoff. When they were doing The Cincinnati Kid (1965), he ordered two dozen pairs of Levis on the studio! Marty said "What the hell do you mean?! You don't wear any Levis in this picture!" Steve said "Yeah, but I wear them to and from the picture." (laughs) He hated to go out in public. He hated to sign autographs. He hated people to come up and bother him. So he'd put on disguises to go out.

It sounds like you guys were polar opposites.
We were, except that we both were fascinated with cars. We hung out together quite a bit, would drive cars, smoke grass, have a great time. He was a unique character, all those guys were. Steve. Peckinpah...

Tell us about Sam Peckinpah.
Sam Peckinpah was a genius for four hours a day. The rest of that time he was drunk. He called himself "a working alcoholic," but he was much more than that. I think the alcohol sort of quelled all the influences that were going on around him so he could really focus on what he was doing with the film. He would shoot with three cameras and just...do it. You never talked with Sam about things like motivation. I asked him one time, when we were doing Major Dundee. I said "Sam, what is it that makes my character tick?" And he thought about it for a minute and finally said "Drier. Dry. He doesn't give a shit." And that's who that character was! And that's how I played him...It was really sad what happened to that picture. The studio took it away from him and re-cut it. We had a great knife fight in that picture, between Mario Adorf and myself. And it was a viscous fucking knife fight. While we were shooting it, people were yelling for us to stop! That's how real it looked. It was a terrific piece of action, and it was cut from the film...the night it premiered at the Paramount theater, Sam saw the studio's cut and was just devastated. His hands were shaking. He had half a pint of whiskey and dropped it. It smashed on the floor. And my wife at the time said "Sam, it's okay, it's only a movie."

When you look at Major Dundee, it's sort of like looking at the U.S. cut of Pat Garrett, which was also severely compromised by the studio. You can see there's a masterpiece in there somewhere.
I agree, but what they call the "director's cut" of Pat Garrett is actually just the television cut. Sam had the only true cut that he made, and that's up in his archives in Sonoma. When he finished cutting Pat Garrett, it was taken away from him. This was Jim Aubrey at MGM and he was more interested in getting his hotel ready than he was in film. I think he really despised anybody who displayed artistry. He really like digging into them. When we started shooting Pat Garrett, I just finished shooting a film with Blake Edwards called The Carey Treatment (1973) that Aubrey also took away and re-cut. And I said to Sam "This guy's crazy! He could do this film all sorts of harm." Sam said "Don't worry about a thing, Jim. I just bought one share of stock in MGM, and if they mess with me, goddammit, I'll sue their asses!" (laughs) "One share of stock, Sam?! What's that gonna do ?!" "You'll see." (laughs)

I heard a story that Peckinpah got drunk during the shoot and didn't want to kill Billy! True?
Yeah, but he wasn't that drunk. We were sitting in his trailer and he said "Goddammit! Why do we have to kill him?" "Well Sam, that's the way it happened." "Well, why can't we make it un-happen?" "Sam we can't do it." (beat) "Why...not?!" (laughs) I think he saw a lot of himself in the character of Billy...We found out halfway through the shoot that most of the masters we had shot were out of focus. We were using five or six cameras at once and we didn't have a camera mechanic because MGM wouldn't pay for one! So we used different lenses, different set-ups, and still, it's all out of focus. Finally the camera mechanic is sent out. It turns out the flange in the camera was off by one one thousandth of an inch, or some damn thing. So we tell Aubrey that we have to re-shoot all these masters. He says "You're not gonna re-shoot anything. The audience isn't gonna know the fuckin' difference!" Can you imagine?! It was just mind-blowing! So what we did was, we stole all those shots when the brass didn't know we were shooting and got it all! So now this really pissed them off, because now we had some real film on our hands! (laughs) So Sam had his cut previewed, and at the same time, Aubrey had his guys cutting their film. So all the editors got together and gave Sam a cut of his film, but without a soundtrack. He didn't get that back until he cut it for television. But there's only about five minutes missing from that cut he originally made.

I thought R.G. Armstrong was really amazing in that film.
R.G. Armstrong saved my life. I had rheumatoid arthritis really badly and every day for ten months he'd come over and give me a deep tissue massage. I couldn't stand up without breaking a sweat. This was about 1978-79. I didn't come out of it completely until the last couple years. Doctors don't really know anything about arthritis, other than to say "take these." So I went on a long fast, fifteen days, then broke the fast. Took a blood test and found out I was allergic to 45 out 75 foods that I was tested for. Started eating right, but I was still contaminated, so R.G. came over and just broke down all that crystallization that had occurred. I was turning to stone, really, is what happened. I'm free of pain now because of this drug I'm taking called MSM. It rejuvenates the tendons. It's fantastic because I couldn't move. And this was all right at the peak of my career. If you have a background of Irish or Scotch-Irish, you're predisposed to having that arthritic gene. But you never know what triggers it. Mine was triggered by negative emotion. I was going through a divorce and I wasn't going to "let it affect me." So I was just turning to stone on the inside instead. It's a terrible disease. The immune system takes calcium out of the bones, and puts it into the muscles. And then the ligaments shorten. That's why you see a lot of arthritics who look shriveled.

Tell us about the genesis of The President's Analyst.
Ted Flicker I met while we were shooting Charade in Paris. He'd come over to meet with his friend Peter Stone, who'd written the picture. So Ted was sitting in the background with his big black shades, watching us shoot. So Peter introduced us...George Peppard and Elizabeth Ashley were having a Christmas party a few years later. Ted was there. He said "I've just finished a script called 'The President's Analyst.'" I said "That's an intriguing title. Do you have a deal on it?" He said "No." So I took it home, read it, and wanted to do it. Ted said he wanted to direct it, so I said "Let me talk to Paramount." I had just done Waterhole No. 3 (1967) over there. Robert Evans had just taken over, he loved it. Peter Bart read it, loved it. They said "Can he direct?" I said "I dunno, let's find out." So they put the whole deal together in five days! It was Evans' first film at Paramount. There are some great scenes in there. It was named one of the finest political films of the decade by the Sunday Times in London...Ted Flicker never did another movie. He moved out to New Mexico, did one hit TV show, the name of which escapes me, and sculpts, paints. Just finished a script about the Civil War.

I know you were also very close to Bruce Lee. Tell us about Bruce.
Bruce was a true martial artist, created himself, from a little roustabout guy running around the streets of Hong Kong, into this magnificent fighting machine. He truly was an artist. His art had no defensive movements. It was all attack. He was so fast, you couldn't touch him. He was so fast, he had to slow down for the camera, because it couldn't catch him! It would look like he hadn't done anything. (laughs) We wrote a script together called The Silent Flute, with Sterling Silliphant. We all went to India. Everytime we went someplace, Bruce had this pad that he'd hold in one hand and punch with the other! It drove me nuts! (laughs) I said "Bruce, will you cut it out, man?! You're shaking the whole airplane!" He said "But it make my knuckles hard!" "I know, but it's pissing me off!" (laughs) Everything he did was related to his art. But he had a great sense of humor, or he did until he went to Hong Kong. He came back from Hong Kong one time, and he was always very outspoken about martial arts. "This martial arts in Hong Kong is bullshit," he said, because there was no bodily contact. "Judo good. Ju-jitsu good. Aikido, best. But this other stuff, no good." So we'd go to these tournaments and he'd spout off...he was back in Hong Kong, and was invited to this tournament that was televised, as an observer. He was famous, and controversial, as being an outspoken martial artists. So they were breaking boards and ice with their heads...Bruce said "That's not martial arts." So they said "Why don't you show us your idea of martial arts..." So they taped up three thick pine boards. So he held it out and side kicked it, and everything went flying into the air, knocked one of the lightbulbs out way up. Sparks came flying down...it was one of those great, dynamic moments! And the next day, the papers were filled with this! From that, both Run Run Shaw and Raymond Chow, who were big film producers there, made him offers to do films there. So he came back and we were having dim sum at the Golden Door down in Chinatown, and he's telling me all this. He said "They want me to do this TV series at Warner Brothers called Kung-Fu. But I'm also getting these offers in Hong Kong. What should I do?" So I thought about it for a minute, because he really wasn't a good actor. But he had great dynamic presence and had this macho attitude that he could play really well...but that would be very tiresome watching for an hour on television. Plus he spoke with a very heavy Chinese accent. So I said "Go back to Hong Kong and make southeast Asian movies. You'll be huge star." "But I want to work here." I said "You want to be a movie star, right? It's what you've always wanted." He thought for a minute and said "I want to make more money than Steve McQueen." (laughs) So he went to southeast Asia, David Carradine did Kung-Fu in slow motion, Bruce became a huge movie star and made more money than Steve McQueen. Strange story...Anyway, then I get a call one morning from Sterling Silliphant saying "Bruce is dead." I didn't believe him, but I learned that a couple months before he'd come home and passed out in between really these really intense workouts that he was doing. And this girl that he was with couldn't wake him up. He went to all of these doctors who told him "Your body's perfect, you're just over-worked." He went back and within six weeks he was dead of an edema of the brain. And that was that...

What do you think of the state of most Hollywood films today?
I'm from the Billy Wilder school. Somebody asked him "Do you ever go to movies?" He said "No." They said "Why not?" Wilder said (German accent)"Build da set, blow it up! Boom!" (laughs) Finally, they've gotten rid of the actors.

Still, there's films like Affliction, only they're all indie films, as opposed to studio pictures.
Right, they're all about something. You have to go the indie route. The English Patient was about something, and it was an indie. But look how long it took that to get made. But when it was, all the actors went for it. And we do, we do go for that. And Billy Wilder, one of the greatest directors in history, can't get a fuckin' job! He can't get hired.

I know a producer who wanted Wilder for a film at Tri-Star a few years ago, and the exec at Tri-Star said "Billy Wider...?" Isn't he, like, 70?"
(laughs) Yeah, but he's got 70 years of talent in him, too! I don't know where these guys come from. They come out of business school, not film school...All the studio heads when I started out were filmmakers, they knew and understood the craft. They weren't owned by corporations. Zanuck was always a filmmaker. Jack Warner was at Warners when I started. Cohn was at Columbia. All their movies were about something. It wasn't about making money so much, as about making entertainment that would make money. Now it's about build the set, blow it up! Give somebody a giant gun and let it go boom-boom-boom...but it's really in the hands of the people. If it goes into the hands of the mechanics, it's going to go down the tubes. But I think there's enough interest in some of the young filmmakers and actors in doing quality work. There's some wonderful actors out there: Johnny Depp, Robert Downey Jr., Helen Hunt, Ed Norton...I think real filmgoers are interested in something more intelligent and challenging...but where is it going? Well, if I could say where it was going, I'd invest in it! (laughs)

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James L. Brooks: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker James L. Brooks.



JAMES L. BROOKS:
LAUGHTER THAT STINGS IN YOUR THROAT
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the December 1997/January 1998 issue of Venice Magazine.

Along with Norman Lear, James L. Brooks is arguably the single-most influential creator/producer of American television during the 1970's. A list of the hit TV shows he created and/or produced during the decade include Room 222, the seminal Mary Tyler Moore Show and all its spin-offs (Lou Grant, Rhoda, Phyllis), Taxi, The Associates, The Tracey Ullman Show, The Critic, Phenom, and The Simpsons. Brooks brought realism to the previously overstated world of television comedy. His characters were not cartoony buffoons created for the sole purpose of generating laughs. They had warts, were neurotic, lovable and maddeningly truthful, all the while delivering laughs out of real-life (and often heartbreaking) situations. These were not "sit-coms," but something entirely new. Brooks' fingerprints can now be seen in shows such as Seinfeld, Friends, Ally McBeal and numerous other shows from the 1980's and 90's.

James L. Brooks was born May 9, 1940 in North Bergen, New Jersey. He started out as a copyboy with CBS News in New York, eventually becoming a TV news writer. In 1965 he moved to Los Angeles to work for David L. Wolper's documentary company. Showing a growing interest in the entertainment aspect of television, he conceived the idea for the series Room 222 (1969-74). Forming a partnership with fellow writer Allan Burns (Rocky & Bullwinkle), he embarked on the big time by creating The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the string of other hits that followed.

Having conquered television, Brooks then set his sights on motion pictures, first writing the screenplay for the romantic comedy Starting Over (1979), then making an auspicious directorial debut with Terms of Endearment, which he adapted from Larry McMurtry's best-selling novel. The film won five Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor. He was again nominated for Best Picture and Best Screenplay Oscars for Broadcast News in 1987, a film he based on real-life experiences in the CBS newsroom. It was named Best Film and Brooks was honored as Best Director by the New York Film Critics. Brooks produced The War of the Roses in 1988, co-produced Big and served as executive producer on Bottle Rocket. He also executive produced Cameron Crowe's directorial debut Say Anything in 1989 and, most recently, produced Crowe's hit Jerry Maguire.

In 1990 Brooks produced and directed his first play, Brooklyn Laundry, a Los Angeles production starring Woody Harrelson, Glenn Close and Laura Dern and wrote and directed the feature I'll Do Anything in 1994 starring Nick Nolte, Albert Brooks and Julie Kavner.

Brooks' latest is sure to win a place in his "all-time best" category, As Good As It Gets, a biting comedy starring Jack Nicholson as the most un-P.C. of New Yorkers and as the people in his orbit whom he verbally abuses, Greg Kinnear, Helen Hunt and Cuba Gooding, Jr. As Good As It Gets, is full of the trademark Brooks humor: belly laughs that sting in your throat. It is funny, poignant and very truthful and contains some classic "Jack" moments that are sure to have a place in the actor's retrospective. TriStar Pictures releases the film December 25.

In person, James L. Brooks displays the same warmth, thoughtfulness and sense of humor that he imbues in his characters. Some words of wisdom from a man who helped to shape the perceptions and senses of humor of several generations...

Were you always a storyteller growing up?
James L. Brooks: I don't think I was a storyteller. I was a clown and clowned around, then I think I went through periods of isolation where I was very quiet. I was an early latchkey kid. My father was sort of in-and-out and my mother worked long hours, so there was no choice but for me to be alone in the apartment a lot.

Do you have any siblings?
I have an older sister who helped raise me.

So you were essentially an only child.
Yes, in a way. She was eight years older than I was.

Do you think that sense of isolation you mentioned helped you develop your creativity early on?
(laughs) Yes. It's the only good thing about being beaten up and being left alone: you get a chance to (be alone in your own head).

When did you really start writing a lot?
I think I started writing for fun when I was really young. Then I was on the high school newspaper. And for a while even in high school I'd send out short stories that wouldn't get published, but every once in a while I'd get a letter back from someone that was encouraging. It never occurred to me to make a living as a writer. It never entered my mind.

Were your stories mostly humorous?
Yeah. I always loved comedy and comedy writers.

Who were some of your favorite comedians growing up?
Oh gosh...As a kid I guess it was Sid Caesar. Jack Benny. I remember when we used to listen to Lenny Bruce. And (Mike) Nichols & (Elaine) May killed me beyond belief. I just couldn't believe they existed in the world.

I can see a lot of Nichols & May in your humor.
Really? I mean it's been a lifelong admiration, because I know them each now. I just always feel weird when I'm around either one of them...and don't ever burden them with the fact that I idolized them...And (if you listen to their material) it absolutely holds up today...Bob Newhart used to do albums like that. The first Bill Cosby album also had a big affect on me.

Initially you wanted to pursue a career in journalism, right?
Well, I wanted to pay my rent and then through my sister I got a job that you usually had to be a college graduate for, which was an usher and pageboy at CBS. They pulled on us to be occasional replacements if a copyboy was gone. I filled in for two weeks. And for that you had to be a college graduate from a good college. And the guy I filled in for never came back. So it was really just a great break for me. I mean, I was there for three years, thinking that I was going to be the oldest usher in the history of the world. Then once my foot was in the door, I became a union news writer. Then I left there, strangely, because I still haven't quite figured out how I got the guts to do it, to come out here and try writing documentaries for David L. Wolper. Then I got laid off there after about six months, newly married and now really out of work. I kept trying for any news job I could get, really fearing that I was going to wind up selling women's shoes, or something...Then I met Allan Burns at a party and he had a lot of shows that he'd created. And he was and is, a really warm, funny guy. Then Allan got me an in for a series called My Mother the Car, and I sold a story outline to them and once I did that, they called me in to re-write a script. And that's how I got into television writing.

How come your stay at Wolper was so short lived?
Well, they were cutting back, so I got laid off. The funniest story about that is that I would occasionally come back and do spot jobs for them. And at that time I had a tremendous phobia of insects. And the only job they had open was and write a National Geographic special about insects! (laughs) And I really needed the paycheck. So you had a movieola just stuck to your face and the most hideous close-ups of wasps and ants, eight hours a day for weeks, and it cured the phobia! It turned out to be aversion therapy.

What happened next?
Well, I wrote an episode of That Girl, then very shortly after that got to create Room 222.

Tell us about that.
Well, they said "Black schoolteacher" to me and that was very landmark at the time. It was the second series ever to have black leads. It's amazing, just amazing because I'm not crotchety, yet I'm the guy who did the second series ever with black leads, and I only missed the first by a few months. This was about 1969. Then I worked with a great guy named Gene Reynolds, who insisted that I do research. So I kept going back to Los Angeles High School and I found everything: The basis of some of the characters, the pilot story. And he kept sending me back, again and again and it was great because that became my pattern.

Was he a mentor for you in a way?
I wouldn't say that. I'd say he had ferocious integrity. He wasn't interested in pleasing networks or pleasing studios. He wanted it done right, like the way he did M*A*S*H. He set a great precedent, like a great editor would, which I also had the pleasure of working for at CBS news, a guy named John Merriman, who died in a plane crash. He was the first person of influence to work with me and sort of take an interest in me...I left Room 222 after a year, then Alan and I did The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Tell us about the genesis of that.
Grant Tinker, who was the head of programming at the time, secretly was working for a CBS on-air commitment for his wife (Mary Tyler Moore) and said to Allan and I that we should become a team and do the show. And we loved her, of course. Everyone loved her from The Dick Van Dyke Show. I don't think there's been another woman who's had so many people have a crush on her at once.

And you set it in a newsroom because of your background?
Yeah, my life had been research for that, although we didn't do that right away. We had some bad ideas for it initially.

What were some of those?
She was going to be an assistant to a gossip columnist for a while...I forget. There was another one that was probably worse, as if that wasn't bad enough. But at that time, it was very strange...her last series she and her husband had had twin beds and the serendipity...there were programming people at CBS who really hated the show, and we were in danger. Grant had been asked by CBS to fire us and he refused, which we were unaware of for years. And then there was a guy named Bob Wood, who was president of the network, who took a bunch of top 20 shows and canceled them, like The Beverly Hillbillies, and then put on shows like All In the Family, saw our pilot and responded to us. Took us out of a death time period and gave us a good one to nurture us...and so this business guy really revolutionized television. He'd never been that involved in programming before, but he did it. And we were the beneficiaries of this man passing through at the same time we were. And that's the luck of the draw, because later on, Taxi got canceled because the wrong guy in the chair came along at the wrong time...and also the woman's movement was just starting at this time, which matched our agenda for the show and the wave just carried us.

The thing I remember about Mary Tyler Moore that I'd never seen in any show up to that time, was that the characters were neurotic and realistic, which I'd never seen in a TV comedy before. Even Dick Van Dyke was essentially made up of characitures.
Yes, I guess that's true. That's true...This guy John Merriman I mentioned, who was the basis for the Lou Grant character, very hard-boiled...This is a true John Merriman story and a perfect Lou Grant story. It was a freezing cold night. I was living in New Jersey, working odd hours. For me it was a subway ride, a walk, and a bus through the tunnel to get home. I was a copyboy. John was an editor. We were working at 52nd and Madison Avenue. John lived in the 70's. The bus terminal was in the 40's. I didn't make enough at the time to afford a cab. So the snow is coming down in the wee hours of the morning. And he says "Can I give you a lift in the cab?" And I said, "Well isn't it out of your way?" He thought for a moment and said "Yeah, I guess it is," and closes the door to the cab and takes off! (laughs) And I was just crushed because it meant I had to walk all the way to the subway in the middle of this snow storm!...But the thing that was not revolutionary, but evolutionary about the show was the idea of work as family, colleagues as family, which was my life because that's where my family always came from, because I didn't have much of a family. And also the two arenas of home and work were new, especially for a woman. Here's the funny thing: there was no company. We were two young writers and we hired the accountants, we hired the business apparatus...we didn't know anybody and we were given the keys to the asylum and just took it for granted. It was amazing! We hired everybody! It never happened to me again and it never will. It still flabbergasts me. So typically at the end, we were going off voluntarily after seven years and there was a lot of heat around our last show, and everybody had these speeches and moments except for Mary. And she came to us and said she'd like to have a final speech too, and the speech we wrote for her was about work as family, and that's how we went off. I think that was true of Taxi also in a blue collar way. Now I think that's no longer true anymore. It's a lot harder with people moving and people working over computers. Something else is happening.

Technology has made us a much more isolated society, hasn't it?
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

Let's talk about Terms of Endearment. I understand that took years to get made.
About four years, yeah. It was after about two years of trying to get it made and every studio saying they didn't think it would work, then Michael Eisner said he'd give me $7.5 million to make it, which wasn't a bad budget then. When we budgeted it out, we realized it wouldn't work, not to shoot on location. Because I couldn't see doing it without doing it as a location picture. I was brand new to everything. It was intimidating enough that I, who had never been to Texas, was adapting the great Texas writer (Larry McMurtry). I knew I had to go hang and spend time there and shoot there, as well as in Nebraska and New York. I just knew the last place to shoot it was Los Angeles. And I just kept on trying. Then MTM invested a million dollars. Then NBC agreed to buy it before it was made for television airing. It was four years of asking people for money, which was tough because from my background asking people for money rings bells anyway...It was a tough shoot because of the personalities involved. Then I went two days over after three weeks and things got really ugly...Eisner came down to the location and I showed him a chunk of what we'd shot and he said "Watch what you spend, but keep going." So it was tough. I was learning on the job and it was pretty scary...I haven't had too many electric moments in my life, and they don't mean anything except that you experience them. They don't create a changed universe, or anything. But the last shot of Terms of Endearment, because we'd been through some very rough times in the weeks before, I was strapped to the front of a car as we got the shot of Emma arriving in New York. And we were in Brooklyn when we went over the bridge and got the shot, then we rode back. And it was on that ride back that I knew I'd finished the movie and I felt like my head was gonna come off! And then it was amazing because we were looking at the statue of Liberty and...I had finished. I had finished. I'll never forget that.

How much of Broadcast News was autobiographical?
None, really. What happened was I had finished Terms and had been very lucky with the way it turned out and I was casting about and a friend of mine invited me to go to the political conventions in '84, and it was like I was doing research for something that didn't yet exist. I was hanging out with and meeting people...and I remember the lunch where I got the basic story of the nature of a romantic triangle between these journalists that I had met there. And I started to meet a new kind of woman. I felt so much that we as a society and everybody I knew and me were going through fundamental changes and I wondered whether our way we looked at romance was changing and that the girl was changing. I thought there was a new kind of heroine out there and that was the story. Even though you're doing fiction, there's always a story to cover if you can find it. So the character of Jane came out of four women that I met, all different ages...I just really think for me if you can be somewhat dumb about part of what you're doing it's a good thing because it gives you an innocence because it gives you humility to a certain degree. And the thing that always happens with romantic triangles is that you always know she's gonna go with guy a). I mean, Ralph Bellamy built a career on being guy b). So I thought, what if I was open to her winding up with either guy? So I was. I told all the actors that. I shot it in continuity so I could change the ending and I was really looking for the picture to inform me which way to go.

So you really didn't know who she was going to wind up with until the end of the shoot?
Right. And at the end of the road I couldn't put her with either guy.

Tell us about I'll Do Anything, which I hear was originally shot as a musical.
I wanted to do a Hollywood story. At the time it seemed to me, and it turned out to be a real miscalculation, to get the truth about Hollywood, the form had to be larger than life, a musical. I did a lot of strange things on that. Because of my background I went for actors on it and not singers. I'm in love with actors. I had great musical people, the best. I had Twyla Tharp as my choreographer. Prince as my songwriter. Sinead O'Connor did one song, a beautiful song. And I went to work...and it was the first time I fell in love with my leading lady, who was this six year-old, magical child. And her mother was great...part of the movie was based on my experience with my own two daughters...and I sort of became a surrogate dad...I had all these other people around me that I loved, and it was great. And then we went to our first preview. And it was a disaster. We had walkouts...it was awful. Then the worst thing of all happened someone who saw it told somebody who told somebody who told the Los Angeles Times about what had happened, and then they came after the story. So now here I was trying to fix the film, now I actually have the major home town newspaper publish what had happened, and kill us dead in the water. And they made a story of my odyssey, came to my next preview and it was just horrendous. So eventually I pared down the music, took almost all of it out. And you can speculate on a lot of things about why the picture didn't work. I'm a guy who started out in one form and changed it to another, but the movie played and people laughed, because I saw it with an audience. But it utterly failed commercially and I felt like I had let down a lot of people. I don't want to say too much more about this because I might make a documentary on the experience and I don't want to steal my own thunder.

Is it hard not to take it personally when something like that happens?
I think it's my job to take it personally. When I ask people to join me and come work with me, who else is responsible? But I haven't seen the movie in a long time and I still think it's a good movie.

Tell us about the genesis of As Good As It Gets.
There was a script I thought was terrific called Old Friends, written by Mark Andrus and I was going to produce it. And whenever I'm producing I support the voice of the writer. But to my way of thinking when I decided to direct it, it had such wonderful people in it, it needed you to suspend disbelief. And Andrus' writing is so earnest and lovely that you do. And my style when directing is that I really don't know how to get people to suspend disbelief. I need people to believe it. So I said I'd do a three week polish on it. Well a year later I'm pouring my heart and soul into this thing. Mark had spent at least a year pouring his heart and soul into it, had been through all the studio wars with it...so what you see in the final product is a collaboration between two writers who didn't necessarily work on it at the same time, but years apart. And that was the genesis of the picture. There were changes made and the emphasis was changed but it's the product, really, of a very unusual writing team. And again there was trouble getting the money and getting it on track...

How long did it take to get it off the ground?
Over a year to get it all together. Again, at first I didn't know how to do it. I didn't understand the tone of it. I was open on that and it was an exploration. There were a lot of late ideas in it. It was a late idea to make Jack's character chemically ill. It was a late idea to put the emphasis on he and the girl. It's very hard to explore what to do with a picture at a certain budget. There is another type of budget where you can just say "We know what we want to do and it's this (snaps fingers)!" And for me, because I'm a responsible person, you start to feel very weird if you're out there playing with someone else's money without a clear idea of what you're doing with it. But, like most things, it worked out in the end. It just took that little extra time of exploration.

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Gus Van Sant: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker Gus Van Sant.


GUS VAN SANT: GOOD WILL HUNTER
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the December 1997/January 1998 issue of Venice Magazine.

Gus Van Sant has long been recognized as one of America's most audacious and original filmmakers. Born Gus Van Sant, Jr. in Louisville, Kentucky in 1953, Van Sant graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design, soon after traveling to Los Angeles where he landed a job as an assistant to director Ken Shaprio (The Groove Tube). Van Sant debuted as a director in 1985 with Mala Noche, the story of an ill-fated love affair between a homosexual clerk and a migrant worker. The work established him as an original voice and won the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for best independent film.

Drugstore Cowboy, his following film in 1989, was an unapologetic look at a drug-addicted "family" led by Matt Dillon that supported itself by robbing pharmacies across the pacific northwest. The film was a critical and arthouse hit, and set Van Sant as a voice for the young. His study of a gay hustler in My Own Private Idaho (1991), was praised for its lyricism, find performances and contribution to the canon of gay and lesbian cinema. It also contains what many feel is the late River Phoenix's seminal performance. His adaptation of Tom Robbins' novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues in 1994 received a critical trouncing that would cause many filmmakers to reassess their careers. Van Sant, however, bounced back the following year with To Die For, a blackly comic examination of the American obsession with fame and celebrity, featuring a career-redefining performance from Nicole Kidman and a witty, caustic screenplay by Hollywood legend Buck Henry.

Van Sant's latest effort is Good Will Hunting, from a screenplay by two of its stars, Matt (The Rainmaker) Damon and Ben (Chasing Amy) Affleck. Robin Williams co-stars as a determined psychologist who attempts to get through to a working class prodigal math genius (Damon) who buries his intellect under a veil of self-destruction and apathy. Minnie Driver also stars in one of the year's smartest and heart-felt films, which is sure to recognized on Oscar night and, quite possibly, put Van Sant's name into the (dare we say it) mainstream of American filmmakers.

Gus Van Sant recently spoke to Venice in a dubbing stage on the Disney lot about his enigmatic work and career.

You moved around a lot as a kid. How did this shape your perceptions?
Gus Van Sant: My father was a salesman of men's sportswear. In my lifetime we lived in Kentucky, Colorado, Illinois, California, Connecticut and Oregon. It made it easy for me to adapt to different places, but not necessarily to blend. They were all very suburban, very similar places.

When did you discover the arts?
When I was about 12 years old. I had some very influential teachers in my school in Connecticut. Painting was my original interest. I had a great art teacher. I had another teacher in 9th grade named David Soan, who used to show films and let the kids in his class make 8mm movies. So I started to do that with the family camera.

What were your first films about?
They were animated. That's also the sorts of films he was showing us in class, from the Canadian Film Board. Very experimental sorts of things. Schools in the 60's had a lot of very experimental aspects to it, which is why the English teacher was showing, essentially, art movies in class. It was the era of Marshall Macluhan. My English teacher actually wrote a book called Stop, Look and Write, that was sort of an experimental look at how to write. He even showed us Citizen Kane. Seeing that at 14 was a major influence on me. I don't know what would have happened had Mr. Soan not been there and he hadn't shown that film to me. Pretty amazing stuff for a public school. I was interested in film initially more as a painter than as a dramatist.

So you really had an introductory film education in high school before you even hit film school.
Yeah, we even made a 20 minute 16mm film at my high school in Oregon that was the equivalent of what you'd do as a senior project in most college film programs. So the first year of film school especially was quite easy for me.

Who are some of the filmmakers who influenced you early on?
A lot of avant-garde filmmakers from the 60's, like 80 or 90 of them, that I would read about during the 60's. Sometimes we'd see their films at the Museum of Modern Art or something like that. There were the Kuchar brothers, Bruce Conner, Kenneth Anger, Stan van der Beek...

There were parts of My Own Private Idaho that I thought hearkened back to some of Kenneth Anger's work, with the leather and biker imagery.
I never got to see any of his films until film school, but he took the same role on influencing me as the other guys. But it was mostly about reading about his films that influenced me. As a kid in the suburbs it was hard to see those kinds of films.

What about any of the European filmmakers from the 60's?
Yeah, a little bit. Fellini and Alexandro Jodorowsky. El Topo was one of the films I saw when I first came out, around '68 or '69. Bergman was another one...Truffaut, Goddard, Antonioni, Passolini. Lina Wertmuller was also very popular when I was in film school.

You went to the Rhode Island School of Design initially to study painting. What made you change over to film?
Well, you didn't have to declare your major until you were a junior...It didn't seem like painting would really be a way to make any kind of money or to support yourself. There were a lot of these art students that either wound up staying in Providence, or the people who went to New York City as painters, and remained unemployed. It was a long road to be traveling. There was a reward at the end of the long road, perhaps, but there wasn't a lot of hope...the painter students who'd come back to speak at the school, they'd reel off these statistics of how many painters were living in New York City and how many actually made it and it was pretty staggering.

So you looked on filmmaking as a more pragmatic way of making a living?!
Yeah. (laughs)

What did you do immediately after film school?
I actually traveled to Italy and visited all the working Italian filmmakers sets. We just sort of observed or sometimes would have interviews with the directors. We saw Fellini while he was shooting Casanova. Wertmuller was shooting Seven Beauties. Pasolini was finishing Salo. Tinto Brass was finishing Madame Kitty.

What was the set of Salo like?
We didn't actually go to the set on that one. One group of students got to watch him dubbing. Another that I was in got to go to his house and talk with him.

What was your impression of him?
He was very smart, but that was my impression of a lot of these guys as a 20 year-old student. Italy itself was quite interesting because it was sort of like being inside a Fellini film. So I could see where Fellini had gotten a lot of his material--from his own culture. The directors all had their kind of (quirks) that you would expect. We had lunch at a table with Lina Wertmuller and Giancarlo Giannini. None of us spoke Italian and sometimes we'd be interpreted through someone who did but...basically it was just being there. Our guide was Gideon Bachman, who still lives in Italy, writes and works on film projects there. He was the guy who knew all these filmmakers and got us in. Then after that I moved to L.A. because I didn't speak Italian...

What was Hollywood in the 70's like?
It was great. I went to a lot of places and met a lot of people and got a lot of advice, but again, there was no work to be found. So after about eight months of looking for work, I read this interview with Chevy Chase where he mentioned this old friend of his named Ken Shapiro. And I knew Ken Shapiro's movies, The Groove Tube I'd seen...Someone had told me early on in my journey to Hollywood that you could contact anyone you wanted, just call them up. You could call Hitchcock if you wanted and bug him for a job...So I realized that that's what I should start doing. So I decided to call Ken Shaprio as opposed to Hitchcock because that seemed slightly less intimidating...So I showed Ken some movies and he gave me a job and I worked for him for about two years on the Paramount lot and also at his office at his house. I learned a lot working with him. He was hot off The Groove Tube. This was 1975. There was a big group working for him before I arrived, including Lorne Michaels, who was writing a script for him before he went to make Saturday Night Live, which essentially used a lot of the ideas that were in The Groove Tube. Then when Lorne Michaels pitched the idea for SNL, they invited Ken to go along with them, but he felt like he had other important things to do and didn't want to get involved in what was essentially a pilot, even though it was live skit humor. So really all of his friends left and went to New York to work on that show. Meanwhile he was embarking on his career at Paramount, which at the time seemed like the better of the two deals. But, as you know, Saturday Night Live became this huge institution that unbelievably still exists today. But he was really like one of the creators, if the not the creator of Saturday Night Live, but he never got to see anything of it, even though it was really a spin-off of The Groove Tube.

The first film of yours that got you recognition was Mala Noche, right?
Yeah. It was my second film as a director. My first was called Alice in Hollywood in 1979. I also did a short film from a William Burroughs short story. I moved to Portland to make Mala Noche. Around 1980 or so, I got really fed up with L.A. I was writing screenplays on spec that weren't selling. I was getting editing jobs when I could. I was mostly working as a temporary secretary. Then when my father offered me a job working in his warehouse in New Jersey I realized that made about as much sense as working as a temporary secretary in L.A. So I moved to Portland...and Mala Noche took four years to make. Things were cheaper in Portland. I had friends who were filmmakers up there who had equipment. At the time the TV news was still being shot on film, so it was easy to get extra stock if you knew somebody. In those days video got a bad rap, I think. Now with the MTV generation, people are used to looking at film done in distressed super 8, video and all kinds of formats. Now you've got a moviegoing public that accepts any sort of distressed format...you can present it at Sundance and nobody will care that the image isn't perfectly pristine. It's all about your ability to tell your story in a way that isn't putting the audience to sleep... Filmmakers should try to shoot film every single day. It's almost like a weight lifter who decides he's going to save all his strength and not train until the day of the competition. Well when that day comes, he realizes that he should've been preparing by lifting weights every single day instead of just waiting around for the competition to finally start. It's the actual process of doing the work that's the most important thing. Shoot on video. Shoot on High-8. I've seen a lot of great things on video that couldn't have cost much.

You cast legendary author William Burroughs in your breakthrough film Drugstore Cowboy. Tell us about him.
He was very interested in the screenplay. He didn't want to play the character Tom the way he was originally written in the screenplay, which was as this sort of pathetic loser...he wanted the character to have some more pride. So he came up with the idea of making Tom be a junkie priest. So he pretty much created the stuff in his scenes on his own.

A lot of people consider River Phoenix's performance in My Own Private Idaho to be his finest. They've also drawn a lot of parallels between his character in the film and the way he died. Did you perceive any hint of the self-destructiveness that eventually killed him?
I never really saw his death as a self-destructive death. I see it more as a sort of calamity. A sort of mistake that was made on a wild bender that I don't think was related to self-destructiveness, because he really wasn't a self-destructive person. He got that rap though, I think, from the press, who have created a whole angle on his situation. I remember Johnny Depp saying that that kind of death can happen to anybody. And if people think that it can only happen to someone like River and not to them just aren't watching out. The media is its own sort of entity, its own sort of animal. River had a certain public image that went against the grain of how he died. It was like "how can a vegetarian possibly do drugs." It's like they felt they'd been cheated and lied to by this guy...If he had been hit by a truck it would have been different, which is really how I look at it, as a tragic accident. To me River really was a symbol of hope and good cheer. He was probably one of the greatest persons I've ever met.

Tell us about how you became involved with Good Will Hunting.
I read the screenplay and I knew the two guys who'd written it. Matt had tried out for To Die For and Ben I'd met on the set of To Die For where he was visiting his younger brother Casey, who was in it. As soon as I'd read it I was scrambling to find their numbers and finally got Ben on the phone and said "I'm in! I want to do this right away, as my next project." It's kind of an amazing thing to have happen, because they'd just gotten it set up at Miramax and hadn't really been around very long...but the screenplay was really good enough to attract attention right away. I was just lucky enough to get ahold of it first.

We spoke before about your advice to first-time filmmakers. Any more words of wisdom to impart?
Get plenty of rest and exercise and do your homework before you shoot. Don't wait until you get to the set.

Read more!

Gary Oldman: The Hollywood Interview

Actor Gary Oldman.


GARY OLDMAN:
WORKING CLASS HERO
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the September 2000 issue of Venice Magazine.

Mel Gibson once said of actor Gary Oldman "He's kind of like Mr. Potato Head. It's like he has this ability to transform himself into something different at will." To the point, no other English-speaking actor since say, Dustin Hoffman, has donned such a wide variety of cinematic masks (including that of director) as the versatile, London-born Oldman. Born the youngest of three children, and the family's only boy, in the tough, blue collar section of South London in 1958, to a welder father and homemaker mother, Oldman endured a near-Dickensinian childhood. After his father left the family when Gary was seven, he managed to survive his formative years at a brutal boys' school, and won a scholarship to the Rose Buford College of Speech and Drama. Oldman's talent was spotted early, and his career on the London stage took off, followed by his film debut in 1986.

An actor of uncompromising intensity, commitment and range, Oldman blasted into the world's collective consciousness in his film debut as doomed punk rocker Sid Vicious in Alex Cox's visceral 1986 film Sid and Nancy. Oldman then played another British working class icon, with his masterful portrait of the flamboyant gay playwright Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears(1987). Memorable work followed in films such as Nicolas Roeg's Track 29(1988), Phil Joanu's State of Grace (1990), and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern(1990), but it was Oldman's turn as one of American history's most mysterious figures, Lee Harvey Oswald, in Oliver Stone's controversial JFK (1991) that firmly placed him on the map as one of world's greatest living actors. Blessed with an ability to inhabit the skin of the character he is playing, Oldman's work as Oswald, as well as turns playing such diverse figures as Bram Stoker's Dracula in Francis Coppola's 1992 film, and Beethoven in Immortal Beloved (1994), all give insight into people and/or characters previously thought inaccessible. Oldman's in-depth interpretations made these cultural icons all-too-human.

Other noteworthy performances include scene-stealing work in films like True Romance (1993, as a white, Rastafarian drug dealer), Luc Besson's The Professional (1994, as a drug-addicted crooked cop who listens to classical arias as he shotguns innocent families), and the blockbusters Air Force One (1997, as a terrorist leader),The Fifth Element (1997, as a wonderfully goofy intergalactic baddie who sounds as if he was raised in the bayous of Louisiana), and Lost in Space (1998, as the nefarious Dr. Smith).

Oldman made his writing/directing debut with the searing domestic drama Nil by Mouth (1997), about an abusive familial situation in Oldman's old stomping grounds of South London. The film was released to widespread critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic and revealed Oldman to be as gifted an artist behind the camera as he is in front.

Gary Oldman also has the distinction of being one of a handful of great actors for whom an Oscar nomination has proved elusive. That could all change with his latest film, The Contender. The Dream Works release is a riveting political drama, telling the story of Vice-Presidential nominee Laine Hansen (Joan Allen) who is put through a grueling confirmation hearing, led by one Senator Shelly Runyon (Oldman), a veteran politico who is determined that Hansen will not make it to the nation's number two office, especially when his staff uncovers a possible sexual indiscretion during her college years. Oldman's performance as Runyon is a deliciously layered, complex piece of work which the actor pulls off with panache. Oldman just wrapped work on Ridley Scott's Hannibal, the long-awaited sequel to Silence of the Lambs, in which he co-stars with Julianne Moore and Anthony Hopkins.

Just when the Oscar buzz for Oldman seemed like a sure thing, ugly rumors of internal strife on The Contender's set started to surface, highlighted by a controversial Premiere Magazine piece on the subject. What followed was a Rashomon-like series of allegations and accusations with writer-director Rod Lurie on one side, saying that Oldman, whom he calls "a conservative," suffered from "Stockholm Syndrome" and over-identified with his character, feeling that Runyon was the moral hero of the piece. On the other side are Oldman and manager/producing partner Douglas Urbanski, claiming that they were both quoted and interpreted out of context, including (according to the Premiere article) Oldman's accusation that DreamWorks re-cut the film to have a more liberal agenda. Oldman has long had a reputation as a man who speaks his mind and doesn't suffer fools. The actor sat down with Venice Magazine recently in Urbanski's West Hollywood offices to set the record straight, and to shed light on one of the most distinguished acting careers of his generation.

There seems to be a difference of opinion on how things transpired during the making of The Contender. Where should we start?
Gary Oldman: Well, (Rod Lurie) is something of a revisionist, really. All this talk of me suffering from "Stockholm Syndrome" with my character is ludicrous. It's one of Rod's theories that is based on nothing. If he were to get in the ring with me and go toe-to-toe on acting, who do you think knows more? He says these things, just runs off at the mouth. He said them when he was a critic. He said them in his film class. And he said them on the radio. You go 'You don't know what you're talking about.' One gets taken over by a character. Many years ago, Laurence Olivier was playing a character that he really didn't like. He was sort of standing outside the character looking at it, and was being sort of patronizing towards the character. And a good friend of Olivier's said to him "If you don't find something nice about this character, if you don't love this character, you will never be able to play him." If I stand in judgment of the characters I play, where does that leave me? There's a lot that Runyon does, that actually does make sense to me. I find a lot of that "Stockholm Syndrome" stuff really insulting, both to me and to actors in general. He doesn't know what he's talking about. I don't want to sit here and take cheap shots. This feud, this thing that has bubbled up, has become this sandstorm. I don't even know if it's interesting. It is odd that the word "conservative" has become the sort of politically-correct bad word to call someone. We've even had people call here and say "I didn't know Gary was a conservative," like they were saying I was a Communist. It's been really strange. I have never, politically or publically, claimed affiliation with any party. So this is just a story that got out there, maybe based on a few comments I made in the Premiere piece. And these things just have a way of spinning out of control. They talk about movies, and TV, and video games being the new kind of evil towards kids. It's replaced rock and roll, hasn't it? The Internet, I think, is a more insidious weapon, because it's like an expressway to the world. It's not just in one paper, one edition. If I'm misquoted in Premiere magazine, then a bastardized version gets out there, and the Daily Mirror are writing about it in England. Years ago, it was tomorrow's fish and chips paper. Now, it goes into the file. So this sandstorm that's been kicked up, it's all been a bit bemusing, and rather hurtful.

Let's start at the beginning. How did you see The Contender as story. How did you see your character Shelly Runyon, and what drew you to the project as a whole?
It's not only how I saw it. There was a creative team. Two of that team are myself (executive producer) and Doug Urbanski (co-producer). The other half was Rod Lurie and Marc Frydman (also a co-producer). If you're going to make a movie with anyone, you have to meet a lot, talk the thing to death, and you have to be on the same page. We never used the words "bad guys" or "villains" or "heroes." What was very interesting initially about the material was that ambiguity. We discussed with Rod the complexity of Runyon's character and that we had to be careful not to let Shelly Runyon twirl his mustache, so to speak. This indirectly brings us back to Rod's "Stockholm" comment and why I object to it so much. Firstly, an actor doesn't have to suffer from a psychotic disorder to be good. Second, the comment is saying that I'm out of control. Thirdly, I didn't invent any of this. Rod and I discussed Runyon. It was never black and white. Never good guys vs. bad. One could argue that (Jeff Bridges' character, the President) Jackson Evans is an egomaniacal man obsessed with food and ending his term with a controversial bang by appointing a woman. Runyon doesn't invent the sex scandal. If there's a weakness in his character, it's the (way he uses the) scandal. Instead of fighting her on the issues, i.e. abortion, her atheism, her wanting to ban handguns, and wanting a centralized, Orwellian government, he goes for the cheap shot. The turning point for me was the score. That was the big red flag for me. Everytime Runyon appears, there's this dark, sinister music playing. I believed it would contaminate the audience. The movie we discussed allowed the viewer to make up its mind. Now they're being told "This person's good, this person's bad." Music isn't Rod's forte and on viewing Deterrence (Lurie's directing debut) one of our big talking points going into The Contender was the music. We felt the music could be more quirky and witty, a bit like in Rushmore. The music playing at the end of The Contender now, you could put on the end of Hannibal because it's like horror movie music. The other disappointment was the poster and trailer adverting. The line reads "You can assassinate a leader without firing a shot." I thought I'd already made that movie. (laughs) I thought that was an obviously partisan shot, saying isn't that what happened to Clinton?

And you feel that the final product didn't reach the height you originally saw it reaching?
I liked an earlier cut that was more ambiguous and more loyal to what was originally on the page. That was not a four and-a-half hour cut, by the way, which I've also read somewhere. This also wasn't a longer cut with me in it more. (laughs) It was, I thought, an edgier, more ambiguous film.

Was there really as much internal strife happening as the Premiere piece would have you believe?
No, not at all. It was a really nice shoot. It was one of the nicest shoots that we've ever had. The beef with DreamWorks was never about The Contender itself, it was about something else, a contractual issue. There was some bad blood there for a couple of weeks and it got resolved. Let me make it clear that I'm a champion of DreamWorks. They picked up the movie and released it.

As the film is now, the version playing in theaters, how do you feel about it?
I feel good about it! I haven't seen it for a while. They were some changes made to it that I haven't seen. As producers you have two jobs: the first is to sort of chip away at the cut to make the film better and better. The second is to honor the director's vision and his cut. I always said that the notes we gave were suggestions. We never said, we were never in a position, where we were laying down the law. It's not a studio where they say "shoot this ending, or else." That's totally against our philosophy. On the one had we wanted to peck away at the film, on the other we wanted to honor Rod's cut. Making a film is not a democracy. There has to be one voice and one vision.

There's an amazing cast in this film. How was it working with them?
I think back on it with great affection. It was terrific. I loved Richmond, VA. We had a beautiful summer and they were all nice people. I don't have to talk about their work, because it speaks for itself, particularly in this movie. We all got along very well. We had a lot of laughs. We had fun making this film. It was a very nice experience that has, sadly, soured a little.

Let's talk about your background. You grew up in South London.
Yes. I have two older sisters. My mom was a housewife. My dad was a welder.

Were either of your parents artistic?
My mom sang. Still sings, given half the chance. My dad made models, like remote controlled boats and things, from scratch. He was an engineer in the Navy during the war. I have some letters, as well, that he wrote, which are quite beautiful. He was a real poet.

Were you always drawn to things creative?
Well, I was taken to the circus as a small boy and hated it. I remember screaming...and we left. (laughs) Never keen on pantomime, although we have that tradition. I loved movies. I also painted, and drew, and made models, and always off on my own doing something. The thing I do remember is that my mother had this wide white plastic belt like they had in the 60's. I put cigarette packs on it, painted it yellow, and it became my Batman utility belt! (laughs) I did things like that. I was always taking stuff and turning it into something else.

Was there one movie that did it for you?
Well I loved The Beatles. One of my sisters was like 16, 17 when that happened. And the first movie I saw was A Hard Day's Night(1964). She took me to see it in a cinema that is now a supermarket. My sister Jackie liked the movies a lot, and the ones that I could get into, she would sort of drag me along. I loved Hammer horror films when I was a kid, but of course, I was too young to see it. So what my sister would do, she'd go see Dracula with Christopher Lee, and she'd come back, and I'd make her tell me the whole movie! That was a given, that I made her promise she had to do! She'd say "Well, it starts with this belltower, and there's this blood dripping. Then this guy comes in..." and she'd describe it to me.

When did you know you wanted to act?
Well, it's an old story. I saw Malcolm McDowell in a movie called Raging Moon (aka Long Ago Tomorrow, 1970) and that was it. It was like a moment of clarity. 'This is it.' That was lightning bolt. You have to think, is there such a thing as a coincidence, or are things predestined? I knew that to get into drama school, I had to have a Shakespeare monologue and a modern monologue. Having never read any Shakespeare, I went to Fowles bookstore in the West End, to the drama section, and looked for books on speeches. I looked at the binders, and there was a book that said "Audition Speeches for Men." I opened it up, flicked through it, and came across the speech of Sloane, in (Joe Orton's) Entertaining Mister Sloane. And I read the speech, and I thought 'This is good.' Then I sought a guy out called Roger Williams, who was then the artistic director of the Greenwich Young People's Theater. I said 'I wanna go to drama school. I've got the modern speech, but I need a Shakespeare.' So he picked a speech from "Two Gentlemen of Verona."...So I got into to drama school, my education began, and I later played Sloane, and later played Joe Orton. Strange...

You made your film debut in Sid and Nancy (1986). All the characters you play you seem to embody, and seem to learn something about them. What did you learn from Sid Vicious?
If there's anything I learned from Sid, it was not to do heroin.

Did you have access to any of his friends or family for research?
I was able to speak with his mother, who was very helpful. That locket I wear in the film was actually his. She loaned it to me. I believe she committed suicide later. It was wonderful meeting her. It was sort of like being able to play John Cassavetes and having access to Gena Rowlands! (laughs)

Do you think even if he hadn't had access to drugs that he would have been doomed, regardless?
Probably, yeah. It would have been something else.

Do you think some people are born inherently self-destructive? That that's part of their genius?
I think there's a side to us all where some days we just get out of bed and want to smash it all to pieces and start again, full stop. You go to extremes because you just want the body to feel something. Whether it's sex, or booze, or drugs, or running, or weight-lifting. But self-destructive people, I think, are rarely born that way. I think their behavior is more the symptom of an event, or environment. I've been working on my own self for years, and my own self-worth, so I know what it feels like to have that side of Gary that is the self-destructive side. It does surprise me when we are shocked by someone in the entertainment industry breaking the law, or what would appear to be a moment of insanity or craziness. Why should we be shocked by that? Look what we do for a living! My son will take Lego bricks and take his little car and a stick from a lollipop, and create a world. He's at that age now, three, where the whole imagination starts to kick in. That's what I do. I just get paid for it. It's a very strange way of earning one's living: you go into work. You have to summon up emotions, because acting is feeling. I don't speak in absolutes, mind you. In my experience of two decades acting, I am convinced that it is not intellectual. First of all, it's concentration. And it is a sensation. It's a physical thing. You have to plug-in, or connect somewhere to stimulate the required emotion. Then at the end of the day, someone says "Cut. Wrap." and you're supposed to sort of go home and be all sort of nice and sane, and fluffy. And you've been invoking the spirit of your dead father all day, or whatever, to get to "the place." My analogy has always been that it's like a snowshaker. You go into work and shake this thing, and all these feelings and things come up. Then you're supposed to go home, have a beer, put your feet up and watch TV. The more I do it, the better I am at it go at the end of the day, the more capable I am of doing that. But there's a residue of something. It's a feeling, for Chrissakes. It doesn't surprise me all the problems Robert Downey, Jr. has had. He's fucking talented! He's an extremely talented man. I've never really met anyone in the arts who didn't have that side. The thing about Sid and Nancy is, it was a very depressing shoot. Now here's where something can get taken out of context. I say 'The shoot was depressing.' Then I read somewhere that I don't like (director) Alex Cox, or I didn't get on with (co-star) Chloe Webb. No. It was depressing, because you were in that head space every day for 17 weeks, and it bummed me out. But did I know I was acting? Yes. Did I think it was real? No. Was I suffering from "Stockholm Syndrome"? No.

Joe Orton was a fascinating character as well, also very self-destructive.
Joe, I'm sure, would have become a victim of AIDS, one of the first, had he not been murdered. People think "self-destructive" equals drugs and booze. Sex is another form of addiction that you can be very cavalier with.

You worked with the legendary Nicholas Roeg on Track 29. What was he like?
Adorable. I was still very young, green. I did Sid Vicious and Joe Orton back-to-back. There was no planning in that, there rarely is. So I made a bit of a splash with those. When I was working with Nic Roeg, he said "You're sort of the fair-haired boy of the moment, aren't you? Just wait, pretty soon they're going to want to see what you've got downstairs," and he sort of feigned a punch at my crotch. And he was right.

JFK had you playing Lee Harvey Oswald, arguably the most mysterious figure in American history. What did you learn about Oswald during the course of your portrayal?
We had that gun that he used. And I was up in the window of the book depository. It's not possible (that he made those shots). I'm not as paranoid as Oliver (Stone), but he's certainly on to something. Oswald probably was, in some capacity, set-up. There was something going on. There were too many coincidences and too many strange events. I mean, he's been a radar operator at an American air base in Japan for U-2 spy planes. He goes to Russia. He denounces his American citizenship. He meets this woman, marries her, then comes back at the height of the cold war, at the height of McCarthyism, when they were debriefing tourists who'd been there, and he got back in?! And they were like, "Oh, he slipped through our net." With that record?!

What about his psychology?
I think he was not too bright. Very keen, very idealistic, very naive. Easily manipulated. The set-up is, you look at the paper trail he left, he must've been told by others to do what he did. It was too perfect. It was almost like it was scripted. You can buy any gun over the counter, but he had to order that rifle so there was a paper trail to him. And actually it's not the gun that they found. The first gun was the Mauser, that then disappeared, then reappeared.

How was it working with Oliver Stone?
He's a force of nature. Brilliant. Self-destructive. He might want to watch that, curb that a bit. Great vision. Angry. Good. He's good. His energy is just enviable. A powerhouse. I had a great time working with him. Oliver saw me in State of Grace and that's what convinced him to cast me as Oswald. He said he saw an "intensity" and "haunted quality" in my character and wanted Oswald to have that same sort of withdrawn, haunted quality. I remember I was very isolated on that shoot, didn't hang out with anyone. I stayed in my hotel room on my own, ate on my own, walked around town on my own. There's a part of me that is that, a loner.

Isn't that a necessity in being a creative person, having time alone?
Yeah, but you have to get it from somewhere around you. You have to be living life. But if you're writing, or working on a character, there are pockets of concentration you need, where it helps to be alone, to have quiet. But you should never lose observation and imagination.

Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula was incredibly cinematic. Tell us about working with him.
Wonderful. A lot of rehearsal. We had four weeks of rehearsal. Coppola gives you room, gives you space, leaves you alone, really. It comes back to that thing of casting well and knowing when not to say something. Knowing when not to step in. Even though what an actor's doing might not be exactly your take on it, or you're not sure where they're going with it, you can't stifle the creative process. You have to let it breathe, then maybe later, come in and say 'Well, you're going off a bit there," or "Why don't you think about this?"

How long do you generally like to rehearse?
Oh, I could rehearse for years. There's something about the actual filming process that kind of gets in the way. It's like, do we have to film this? (laughs) This whole thing of making a movie in 28 or 30 days, maybe Sidney Lumet can do it, and God bless him, but the process is really hurt (by rushing)...I have a script now called Joe Buck that I spent a couple years writing that I'm now trying to raise money for. I have a certain process that I like to work with. And if I can't make my movie my way, I won't do it, as simple as that. "Can't you do it like this? Can't you do it like that? Can't you get him, he's a star? Do you really need that many days?" It's hard.

Drexel, your character in True Romance was a small part, but it's still one that people remember.
Yeah, they remember that and the "eggplant" scene, which was really like a short, wasn't it? It's like a one act play in itself. Very well-written. One of the few films I've made where you just shot what was there because the script was so good. The Contender had one or two little tweaks and re-writes, but it was more or less what was there, as well. Hannibal, which I've just done, was written by Steve Zaillian. Same thing.

I loved The Professional, and Leon, the European version, even more.
I was dating a girl at the time who had been a girlfriend of Luc (Besson)'s. He came to town and we met and he said "I have something for you, I think." He gave me the script and that was it.

How does he work with actors?
He tells you how to move, how to speak, where to stand. He tried that with me (laughs), not always with the greatest success. You have to be open to ideas, and it's okay if someone has a better idea than you. You can't nest and be so closed off. You act and direct with an open hand. It's about collaboration. There's one vision, ultimately. I am there to serve the director's vision, and I respect that. I'm not just going to stamp my foot and demand my own way. I'm going to go with the flow. If you come in open, you rasie the ceiling. You want an atmosphere where you can do your job. I'll offer up ten ideas, and I'll be lucky if the director uses one, but that's what I'm paid for, surely. The scene will only be as good as the director. If he's closed off, to the actor's creativity, then there's no surprise, and the scene will only be as good as the director.

In Immortal Beloved you gave a brilliant interpretation of Beethoven. What do you think made him tick?
Well, it was all about artistic control. He was like the Orson Welles and John Cassavetes of the music world. He wrote with passion. He wrote about feelings and emotions and he wrote what he wanted to write. Most of the work from that period was commissioned, because that's how you earned your money. It's hard to believe that most of what Mozart wrote were gigs! You listen to "The Requiem," and you can't believe that it was a commission! That he just sort of wrote it. But Beethoven wrote what he wanted to write.

Your writing/directing debut, Nil by Mouth, was a shattering portrait of the British working class experience. Tell us about its genesis.
Well the story is a fictional one, first of all. You work with thoughts, feelings, ideas. I guess my own upbringing. It's a film about codependency. It's a film about dependency. The idea for it had been swimming around for a long time. I always say that it took 35 years in development, and five weeks to write. It wasn't a desire to play with the toys, so to speak. There's no short film, no MTV videos. I shot it in the area where I grew up. It's a very matriarchal society. A lot of single moms. I don't like those men, although I'm completely fascinated by them, but I can't say I ever really was one of them. Growing up, my passport to manhood was booze. Once you got a certain age, you went to the pub. So I was around those men and my sister was married to a man who was a bit of Ray (the husband), although it's a thumbnail sketch. So I wanted to paint a portrait of that world, with the men at the pub talking nonsense and the women at home talking common sense and that represented them, without making fun of them.

I've been a fan of Ray Winstone, who played the husband, since Scum and Quadrophenia. What was he like?
Oliver Stone, ditto. (laughs) Please see the above! We called him "Hurricane Ray." Before I became an actor, I remember seeing Ray in Scum, had never worked with him, never met him and I was writing that character and had no face for him, really. I had a face, you know: red and puffy, and toxic. A toxic person. Then I thought, who could play this? Then I thought of Ray, with a few pounds on him.

His character in Scum could have been the same guy as a kid.
Yeah, absolutely. I sent it to his agent and, unlike here, he gave it to him immediately. He read it and called me back the next day and said "It's fucking brilliant. I'll do it." The next day!! Two days later I met him, and we talked about it. It's funny, you send stuff to people here and you just never hear back. Never even just a courtesy call saying they received it.

Any advice for first time directors?
(long pause) It's a hard one. I don't know if I can use myself as an example, because Nil by Mouth wasn't a piece of cake getting set up and getting financed, but being Gary Oldman the actor didn't hurt. At least you get into the room with the people. We're meeting people tonight for Joe Buck, who are meeting with us because I'm Gary Oldman, although that doesn't mean they'll give me the money. I'm a little more hard-nosed, because if I can't make Joe Buck the way I want, I won't do it. That's not necessarily great advice for everyone. We're all different. I believe the process is the process. It has to be respected. It takes time. I will not cast a star who's not right for the role just to get the film made. I will not change the dialogue, the language or the ending to get a rating. I have my own editing process, which is longer. I believe you should get your first cut together and then walk away from it. Don't look at it for four, five, six weeks. Ten weeks, even. Then look at it, and you'll learn a lot doing that. In my case, I saw Nil by Mouth after a break of two months, and I said, 'Well, it's a lot better than I remember it.' I also thought it was far too long, and you just see the woods from the trees. Some of the best writing and some of the best acting in Nil by Mouth isn't in the film, it's on the cutting room floor.

What I hear you saying is 'Be yourself.'
You've got to be yourself! It's all you have. Which brings us back full circle to what we started talking about. It's all about putting your head on the pillow at night and being able to sleep, retaining some degree of integrity and peace. That's what it's about, for me. John Cassavetes said it best: "To compromise an idea is to soften it, to betray it, to make an excuse for it." I think they are very wise words.

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Garry Marshall: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker and television icon Garry Marshall.


MARSHALL LAW:
Garry Marshall on TV,
the current state of American humor,
and a certain gal named Julia
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the August 1999 issue of Venice Magazine.

If you were a kid growing up in the 70's, it's likely that, along with the original cast of NBC's "Saturday Night Live," no other collective group or single person did more to form your pop culture sensibility than Garry Marshall. As the creator and executive producer of such TV classics as "The Odd Couple," "Happy Days," "Laverne & Shirley," and "Mork and Mindy," Marshall's TV world of aw-shucks all-American kids in the 50's, blue collar gals with hearts of gold, and a loveable alien with an uncanny gift for improvisational humor, brought feel-good stories and belly laughs to American households during a decade when our uncertain country desperately needed both.

He was born Garry Marscharelli in the Bronx, New York on November 13, 1934. The oldest and only son of three children (sister Penny is a former actress and now a powerhouse director in her own right), Marshall graduated Northwestern University with a degree in journalism, getting a job as a copy boy, then a reporter for The New York Daily News. At the same time, he pursued parallel careers as a drummer in his own jazz band and a standup comedian and writer of comedy material for others including Joey Bishop, Phil Foster and others. By the mid-60's, Marshall and partner Jerry Belson began writing regularly for "The Joey Bishop Show," "The Danny Thomas Hour," "The Lucy Show," and "The Dick Van Dyke Show." Turning to the production end of the business, Marshall created the series "Hey Landlord" in 1966, then scored a huge hit in 1970 as executive producer of "The Odd Couple" TV series. He and Belson penned the screenplay for The Grasshopper (1970), a dramatic character study of a young girl (Jacqueline Bisset) and her fall from grace. Marshall turned to directing in the 1980's, debuting with Young Doctors in Love in 1982, followed by The Flamingo Kid (1984), Nothing in Common (1986), Overboard (1987), Beaches (1989), the smash hit Pretty Woman (1990) Marshall's first outing with Richard Gere and Julia Roberts, Frankie and Johnny (1991), Exit to Eden (1994), Dear God (1996), and The Other Sister (1998). Marshall's play Wrong Turn at Lungfish (co-written with Lowell Ganz) had a successful off-Broadway run in 1992. His autobiography "Wake Me When It's Funny," detailing the ups and downs of his 35 years in "the biz," was co-written with daughter Lori Marshall and published in 1995.

Marshall's latest outing continues his "feel good comedy with pathos" tradition and re-teams him with his Pretty Woman co-stars Gere and Roberts. Runaway Bride tells the story of a perpetually gun-shy bride-to-be (Roberts) who has left men standing at the altar three times. Enter Richard Gere's intrepid reporter whose career is on the line as much as Robert's love life when he gets wind that she's about to attempt knot-tying with fiancee number four. Gere smells a story and swoops down on Roberts' small town. Fireworks soon erupt between the two stars and much romance and hilarity follow. The Paramount Pictures release is currently in wide release.

Garry Marshall sat down over ice cream sundaes at the Four Seasons recently to discuss life, television, and the coolness of Hector Elizondo (not necessarily in that order).

Were you influenced by the films of Preston Sturges and Frank Capra at all? Much of your work seems to capture that same feeling of Americana that theirs did.
Garry Marshall: Yeah, I loved those guys. Those pictures hold up pretty well today, I think. There wasn't all the mean-spiritedness that's in so much comedy today. Don't get me wrong, mean-spirited can still be funny, but there's a lot of other humor out there that I think a lot of people have forgotten about. The trap is, if you do "normal" humor, then (the press) compare it to sit-com humor, because they don't know what else to write! (laughs)

Sit-coms today are very different from when you were producing them. Most of the comedies from the 60's and 70's, looking at them now, seem to assume that the audience has a brain.
Well, they don't move anymore. It's so much more talking heads now, although much of the humor I find very witty and funny. I prefer to have a lot of physical humor in my work, as well. But everything goes in cycles. I facetiously tell the joke about when, in the late 60's, there were all these shows like "Green Acres" and "Petticoat Junction" on the air. Then one day somebody said 'Hey! Let's do a show without a shovel or a rake in it, and see what happens!' (laughs) So all of the sudden there were all these great shows on the air that were made with adults in mind, by people like Norman Lear and Jim Brooks. So I said, 'Well, I'd better do something different.' So I decided to go toward nostalgia and did "Happy Days" and "Laverne & Shirley," and that helped put ABC on the map again. So then, because those were hits, everybody went 'Young people! We have to do young people's shows!' Now in the 90's with the new networks like Fox and WB, they realize they can't compete with the big network shows like "Frazier," so they go a little more lowbrow, aiming for kids again, and this kicked off another cycle.

What drew you do Runaway Bride?
I had read it years ago, and didn't think it was so good. Then Julia and Richard called me and said they wanted to do it. So I read the re-writes and thought they were terrific. I always thought Pretty Woman was "Pygmalion," which was remade as My Fair Lady (film version 1964). I think of Runaway Bride as being "Sleeping Beauty." I even made reference to it in the movie, but I cut it because it slowed down the pace. I feel that the fairy tale gives the story its structure, whereas the characters give it its depth and foundation. There's a lot of good dramatic moments in the story too, I think.

I liked the dramatic elements. It gave the film balance.
Yeah, I like structure and motivation. It's a very hard line to draw these days. It used to be the classic way you wrote a story. The Greeks wrote them that way. Now the audience seems to feel they don't need that much information. There was a bit that was cut from the final version, where Julia's character had a bell collection. Now I believe that anything a character does says something about them. So Julia saved these bells because her mother, when she died, left her this collection. So bells became the motif in Julia's life...and in the end we had all these shots of bells ringing. But then we realized that all that slowed things up, especially when we had all these credits to run in the end. But it didn't seem to matter because, like I said, audiences today don't seem to need or want that much information.

You've worked with many of the same actors over the years, and seem to encourage a familial atmosphere on your sets.
It's fun when you can work with the same people. That means you all enjoy working together! There's also a shorthand at work so you can move quicker. With a new person, you've always got a couple weeks of walking on eggs. With Julia and Richard, I think both of them have become much finer actors in the last ten years. They play comedy and drama equally as well. The star factor has changed as well because they're both so big now! But the nice thing is that they've still stayed themselves.

Tell us about Hector Elizondo, who's been featured in all your films.
Hector and I have spent a lot of time together over the years. We played ball together, but then my knee and his back went out, so we don't play so much any more (laughs). He's just there for me. I've never done a picture without him and I hope I never do. He helps hold down the decorum of the set for me. He's got a very professional attitude. There's no temperament or craziness there, and the others tend to follow his lead because he's such a respected actor. He can also deliver comedy and drama with equal skill. I really hired him this time for that one line he has at the end of the film. I called him and said 'Hector, I don't trust anyone else with this line, because it's the best line in the picture.' So we built up that character for him. Hector's a man of many skills and many toupees. (laughs)

Tell us about your beginnings when you were at Northwestern.
Northwestern was a great experience. I have a lot of loyalty to it still. All of my kids went there. My son-in-law went there. So when we went to the Rose Bowl a few years ago we were like, eight strong! I got some of my first dramatic experience there. I was in the Wa-Mu variety show with Warren Beatty, but I also have to add that I'm three years older than Warren. He always makes me say that! (laughs) But college was great because it gave me the opportunity to fail. You can try something and it doesn't matter if you fail. It helps you to deal with that if you do a picture that fails, or even a scene that fails. They say the key to writing is to "give up your little darlings," which are your favorite bits, because they don't always work as a whole with the rest of the script. College taught me that even when you give those things up, you can still move on.

Let's talk about your early days writing with Jerry Belson.
When I was in Korea, Jerry's brother was a buddy of mine and introduced us when we got back. We teamed up and did very well. We're still very good friends and a play we wrote called The Roast is something I hope to make into a movie in the next year or two. We hold the record for the most freelance TV scripts sold in one year. Jerry was a very modern sort of guy and writer. He came up with a lot of really great offbeat jokes. It sometimes went a little wild, but was sometimes too racy to do in TV back then. One day he came into the office late. I said 'Where were you?' He said "I was shooting a funeral for a dog." Jerry was a photographer, too. "The dog's name was Spot Moskowicz. It was so sad, watching those five little dogs sitting there, wearing yarmulkes." (laughs) Years later I did that joke visually in Young Doctors in Love. But in that time, in the 60's, that was way too far out for TV. Nowadays it would be fine. I like the weird and the strange as opposed to the sick. Your farting, vomiting and peeing material I always tried to stay away from, or at least put a different spin on. But that stuff is still funny. People will always laugh at what's irreverent.

Speaking of irreverent, I read that you were the drummer in Lenny Bruce's back-up band. Did you get to know him at all?
He wasn't so coherent usually, but I got to know him a little bit. I know his material very well. Lenny taught me to take all the pain in your life, give it a little time, and it'll turn into humor. He used to do this routine where he'd just say "Fuck you" over and over and over, so finally it had no meaning anymore and it wasn't offensive. I think if you do a joke the audience has never seen before, they'll appreciate it. Like in Runaway Bride, Joan Cusak's character is named Peggy Fleming, like the ice skater. Now if her name were "Peggy Johnson," no one would give a shit, right? Nothing funny about that. With a name like "Fleming," though, you can have a lot of fun. Now you can give her a husband who has a morning radio show called "Wake Up with Flem." (laughs) Here's another example: if a guy comes into a bar, says to the bartender "I'd like a scotch and water, please." Now the audience will be ready to listen to the next line. However, if you come in and say "I'd like a Wild Turkey," the audience is saying "What the hell did he say 'Wild Turkey' for?" So now the set-up is different and they're ready for a different kind of thing. Sometimes when Jerry and I would write a joke, I'd stand back and say 'How many people do you really think are going to get this?' Jerry would say "More than enough." (laughs)

Who would you say some of your mentors were when you started out?
Well, Joey Bishop definitely. He was a very hip, understated comedian and very successful and never dirty. That always appealed to me. He gave me the plane ticket that got me to Hollywood and had a job for me when I got here. Joey also taught me to be merciful. (Comedian) Phil Foster was sort of my mentor also because he was the first one who said that I could write. And you need that from someone other than your parents. Phil said to me "You have to decide where your strength is as a writer. Look around you. Do you want to write for the waiters? Do you want to write for the band? For the drunk across the room? For your date?" The point is, you want to have them all laughing, but you can't always do that. So I must say, I had a great plan for writing for the band and the waiters at that time, but that didn't pay much money. So I decided to write for the audience that came in, because they were the ones paying for it, and I did the best I could. It's the same way making pictures. No matter how bad you might feel on any given day, you've got to make the best picture you can, and I'll tell you, I see some pretty sloppy picture-making nowadays. There's a whole group of us, me, Jim Brooks, Penny, Ron Howard, Rob Reiner, that all came from TV. We're all used to trying until someone takes it away from us. I know a lot of filmmakers who don't take enough time. I always try to give it my very best shot, and that's all you can really do. It always helps to take your material from life, too. Lenny and Phil Foster both said "If you try to work solely from your imagination, you're gonna be working in a shoe store before you know it." Sheldon Leonard taught me later on how to be objective, and in control of your work and I still am, as a director and a producer.

You've also done a lot of acting in other people's films. You really seem to enjoy it.
I do. I love it. It's great fun. I have an acting range of about one foot (laughs) because I always play the same character, the angry executive.

I thought The Grasshopper was a terrific film. I remember being shocked the first time I saw it when I saw you and Belson were the writers and Jerry Paris, also primarily known for his comedy work, was the director. It was a powerful dramatic movie made by comedians.
Yeah, that was a pretty exciting experience. We were trying to branch out to do a dramatic movie with a little comedy. It was a case of mis-timing. It became well-received in retrospect and was even noted as one of the best underappreciated American films at the Filmex convention one year. I think timing is a critical thing. It's not that the audience is stupid or that the critics didn't get it, it's usually just a matter of timing. With The Grasshopper, 1970 was not a good time for a black-white romance, between Jim Brown and Jackie Bisset, in a major movie. Another case of bad timing was a TV pilot I created called The Recruiters, which I made right in the middle of the Vietnam war when they were burning draft cards in the street! (laughs) So before you create anything, look out the window and see what's going on! (laughs)

I noticed that you have a lot of your family involved in your films, particularly in Runaway Bride.
Yeah, my son Scott is in it and was also my second unit director. He shot the whole opening sequence with Julia on horseback. He's a very talented director, went to the American Film Institute. He's shooting a music video right now in Spain. He'll get his own movie soon, I'm sure. My daughter Kathy plays the bridesmaid in the film, Cousin Cindy. Scott played the hotel clerk. And my wife has one line in the dress shop. She was in Pretty Woman and got cut out, so I owed her!

Is TV a good training ground for aspiring screenwriters and directors?
I definitely recommend television for aspiring directors. It teaches you how to work on a deadline. There's no Heaven's Gate in TV! (laughs) You either get it on the air, or you don't. Many of the TV directors were not welcomed into features, until studio heads realized how well we worked. Rarely do you hear headlines of "Chaos on the Set!" or "He Didn't Finish!" when you've got TV guys behind the camera. We know how to make things work. For writing it might not be so good. You've got to write a certain number of jokes per minute in TV, and you have to hold down the visuals. I think all writing is good and TV writing teaches you whether you're funny or not. It also pays very well. TV is the best business in show business. In TV, you always get paid.

What do you do when you're not making movies?
Well, the Burbank Falcon Theater is my big thing now. I built a 99 seat theater from scratch. Very pretty, wonderful bathrooms, wonderful parking, all the important things I learned about when I did theater as a kid. (laughs) We're doing a lot of original works, plus kids shows on the weekends. It's a perfect place for kids to be introduced to theater.

Any advice for first-time directors?
A lot of people direct one movie and then never do it again, because it's a pretty strange job. Very difficult in the sense that you can't keep a consistent emotion. As a producer you can keep a consistent emotion. A producer has to be an adult. That's why I became a producer at first. I came to this town and saw that nobody wanted to be an adult, so I decided to pretend to be an adult, even though I was a bigger baby than any of the other people here! As a writer, you can be a great, temperamental baby, because that's your part. Same with actors. The problem with directing is that you have to be an adult part of the time so you can work with the crew, and a baby the other part, so you can get your creative way. It's back and forth each day. That's the toughest part. The other tough thing is whether you can still be creative when you're exhausted. That's all it's about, directing. Anyone can create, but try when you're exhausted. That's a whole other thing, and that's why most people quit. They don't want to go that fast. They don't want to make decisions that fast. So you surround yourself with people who love you and who you love and they're always pumping you up. So those are the factors: work under exhaustion, get a dual personality, and always try your best. If you think you can't do it, find a way!

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Frank Darabont: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker Frank Darabont.


FRANK DARABONT GOES THE DISTANCE
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the December 1999/January 2000 issue of Venice Magazine.

Frank Darabont was born January 28, 1959 in a French relocation camp, the son of Hungarian refugees. After moving to the U.S., the family lived in several different cities, before finally settling in Los Angeles in 1971, when Darabont was 12. A voracious reader from an early age, Darabont was especially drawn to fantasy and horror stories, as well as classics by such writers as Dickens. While a student at Hollywood High, Darabont was active in the theater department, and this soon blossomed into a love of film. Following graduation, Darabont skipped college and started at the bottom of the ladder on low budget film crews, learning the craft while working as a P.A., set dresser and gofer.

In 1983, Darabont directed his first film, a short based on a Stephen King short story entitled The Woman in the Room. The relationship with King, who granted the fledgling filmmaker the story rights for a dollar, would prove to be a fortuitous one for Darabont, who would keep struggling for another four years working on film crews, while continuing to hone his skills as a writer. The persistence paid off, with his first produced credit A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors in 1987. From there, Darabont penned two more horror pics, the remake of the classic The Blob (1988) and The Fly II (1989). Although he was now making a living as a screenwriter, Darabont longed to step back behind the camera and make a feature. After cutting his teeth directing two made-for-TV movies (Buried Alive and Til Death Us Do Part), Darabont made what many feel was the greatest feature film debut of the decade.

When The Shawshank Redemption hit screens in 1994, it took everyone by surprise, especially everyone in Hollywood. Based on the Stephen King novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, it told the story of a friendship between two convicts (Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins) in a maximum security prison over a period of 30 years. A straightforward drama with none of King's trademark supernatural or horror elements in sight, the film was nominated for a total of seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor. Shawshank left audiences around the world spellbound, asking themselves "Who is this Darabont guy, and where did he come from?" There was no doubt that a major new filmmaker had arrived.

Darabont waited five more years before he stepped behind the camera again, however. His additional credits during this period include penning several episodes of the acclaimed Young Indiana Jones Chronicles for TV, co-authorship of the screenplay for Kenneth Branagh's unfortunate retelling of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994), the cable TV film Black Cat Run in 1998 and uncredited re-writes on several high-profile films, most notably Steven Spielberg's masterpiece Saving Private Ryan (1998).

Darabont's venture back behind the camera proves the filmmaking genius that brought Shawshank to life was no flash in the pan. The Green Mile is quite simply the best film of 1999, and the one to beat at this year's Oscars. Many who feel that Darabont deserved a writing or directing statuette in '94, might well see their wishes come true with this modern day classic. The Green Mile is based on another Stephen King novel, this time a serialized group of books that told the story of one Paul Edgecomb (played in the film by Tom Hanks), a prison guard at Cold Mountain Penitentiary in 1935. Edgecomb is head guard on the pen's death row, nicknamed "the green mile" for the color of its floors. When a gigantic black man named John Coffey (played brilliantly by newcomer Michael Clarke Duncan) convicted of murdering twin girls arrives on the mile, his childlike demeanor doesn't strike Edgecomb as that of a killer. Edgecomb investigates the man's case on his own, and comes to discover not only might John Coffey not be guilty of murder, but that he carries a gift deep inside him, the likes of which humanity has never seen before. The Green Mile is world-class filmmaking straight down the line. The cinematography, editing, production design, writing, direction and acting from the fine ensemble cast which includes James Cromwell, Barry Pepper, Jeffrey de Munn, Bonnie Hunt, David Morse, Patricia Clarkson and Gary Sinise, are all seamless. The Warner Bros. release opens December 12. This is a film that will stay with you long after the final fade out.

Frank Darabont sat down recently in a Century City hotel suite after an exhausting three day press junket. In spite of his fatigue, Darabont offered up an easy smile and warm handshake, and became increasingly energized as he talked about his new film.

I haven't seen a film that has affected me this much since L.A. Confidential (1997).
Frank Darabont: It's interesting that you should mention that. It's one of my favorite films, and I actually watched it quite a bit before I started shooting The Green Mile. I loved the way Curtis Hanson shot those scenes. He's an old-fashioned filmmaker in the best sense of the word.

Both of those films, and Shawshank, were so wonderful because they took their time! They're all anti-MTV school of filmmaking, which is very refreshing to see. It was like pages turning in a book.
The filmmakers that I admire so much...most of them are dead: Buster Keaton, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Billy Wilder, Frank Capra would be at the top of that heap. William Wellman, William Wyler...those guys.

What would you favorite films be from each of those guys?
Let's see...Capra: It's a Wonderful Life (1946), one of my all-time favorites. Buster Keaton: The General (1927), an awesome piece of filmmaking. Ford: My Darling Clementine (1946). Wellman: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Wyler: The Big Country (1958). Billy Wilder, Stalag 17 (1953), hands down.

How about modern-day directors?
Well, Spielberg, that's a no brainer. I'd have to pick Schindler's List (1994) as my favorite of his films. What a journey that was, and a theme that really sparked me, that I'm continually drawn to...issues of human potential. I love Scorsese. With Goodfellas (1994) alone, we should probably hand him the keys to the Ferrari and say "Here, you the man!" James Cameron, I think possesses a virtuosity that's rare, and is a much better writer than people give him credit for. This man knows how to tell a screen story like nobody's business. I'm leaving a lot of people out, I know. I hope I don't piss them off. (laughs) It's not intentional!

Really you've named recent directors whose style is very much a throwback to the older guys you just named.
That's true, probably because I'm a throwback. I'm a dinosaur. (laughs)

I heard you wanted to turn The Green Mile into a film after only reading the first book in the series.
Yeah. I actually flew to Colorado to see Steve King after I read it, that's how much I loved it. The genesis of it was, during an otherwise innocuous phone conversation Steve and I were having one day, he out of nowhere said "I've been thinking about this story, and I think you'd be great for it. I know you don't want to make another prison movie, but let me just tell you this idea." And he gave me a very brief thumbnail description of The Green Mile. I was so intrigued by this idea that I said 'If you ever sit down and write this thing, give me first crack at it.' Six months or so later, the first book arrives in the mail. I got a week or two sneak peek at it before it hit the stores. I read that first volume and thought 'Oh! Here I go! I'm back in the joint again!" (laughs) I've been a huge fan of Steve's since high school. I've read everything he's published and a few things he hasn't and I can sense it when he's speaking so to my heart. So I jumped on a plane to Colorado, to visit him on the set of The Shining (TV version), which he was executive producing and my friend Mick Garris was directing. It was being shot at the Stanley Hotel, which is where Steve stayed when he got the original idea for the book. So I drove up this mountain looking for a job, just like Jack Torrance in The Shining! (laughs) I get there, and there are ghosts everywhere! Hundreds of extras done up in ghoulish make-up, wearing period costumes, and I thought 'I have come home! This is where it all began!'

Because The Shining was the first book of King's that you ever read, right?
Right, I read it in high school. I just thought that this too much delightful synchronicity. I walk into the ballroom, and there's Steve King up on the stage in a white tux, leading the band in this great swing tune, shaking his ass like Cab Calloway. He turned around and saw me and said "Frank, what are you doing here?" I grabbed him and said 'I'm here for The Green Mile, and I'm not leaving without it!" (laughs) I'm also happy to say he gave me the rights for our usual fee of a dollar.

I've always felt that Stephen King has been our most underrated American writer.
He's the most Dickens-like of any living writer. He always deals with the themes of humanity. Like Dickens, he's been dismissed by the literary intelligencia of his day, as a populist and therefore not to be trusted and endorsed, because how dare he tell a really entertaining and involving story with a plot! Steve's work will outlive all the critical darlings of today, I can promise you, just like Dickens did. Some people also forget that Dickens was a great fan of the supernatural, and was renowned for his ghost stories.

This is the second film you've done with Castle Rock.
Castle Rock has been a blessing in my life, a boon to my career. It is one of the few places in this business, actually they might be singular in this business in how they view the films they want to make. They lead with their hearts. They're so supportive and afford filmmakers the most precious commodity in this town, which is creative trust, which leads to creative freedom, which leads to one hell of a satisfying experience if you're making a movie for them. You've got some smart people there making decisions based on gut, creative instinct. They're not depending on their marketing department to tell them which films they should make. And if they can't get one of the six movie stars everyone's trying to get, they're willing to make it with Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman, bless their hearts.

Tell us about working with Tom Hanks.
I first met Tom at the Oscar nominees luncheon. He was there that year representing Forrest Gump, I was representing Shawshank. I had so admired his work for so many years, and he knocked me out with Gump, so I went up to him and told him so, and he was very complimentary in turn about Shawshank, and said if I ever had anything for him, he'd love for us to work together. So a few years later, after I'd finished the screenplay for The Green Mile, I sent it off to him and he committed to it within 48 hours...There's nothing I can say about Tom as an actor or a person that hasn't been said before. I've been trying to come up with some great smart-ass answer like 'He's a Satanist,' or something. (laughs) He's got so much integrity and so much inherent decency. And what a generous actor, my God. We always try to draw comparisons when someone great comes along, but I think Tom's a real original. He's the Tom Hanks of the 90's. (laughs) By the time all is said and done, people will be saying "He's the Tom Hanks of the 22nd century." Spielberg said to me "He's gonna spoil you," and he was right. Tom shows up for work every day like it's his first job. That might be a boring answer, but it's the truth. Having said that, I have to say that the whole cast down the line was the most generous group of actors I've ever seen. Everyone wanted the other person to look good, too, and wanted the movie to be something special. Which goes to show that the old theory of the more chaos and animosity on the set, the better the movie will be, is bullshit. I think it's just the opposite.

Michael Clarke Duncan is a revelation in this film. Tell us about him.
Finding him was so significant to this film, because if that part was even slightly less than optimal, it wouldn't have worked. I didn't know if there was a guy out there who fit that physical description who was that good. He came to us through a very surprising source: Bruce Willis. I have to credit Bruce and thank him for steering Michael toward this movie. Bruce was a big fan of the books, and was avidly reading them on the set of Armageddon (1998), which Michael was in. Bruce pulled Michael aside and said "Michael, you have to read these, and there's a part in here you have to play." Bruce called us up saying "I'm sending you John Coffey." Bruce as yenta! Bruce as matchmaker! (laughs) Michael not only rose to my hopes, he exceeded them.

The rest of the cast was amazing, too.
I was able to cast my first choice in every single role. I don't know that that's ever happened before. If you get one or two of your first choices in a movie, you're lucky. Getting your first choice in every role is like winning the lottery! I'm a lucky guy.

The other thing I liked is that there are no easy answers at the end.
As there isn't in life. I love the ambiguity of the ending, and I was pleased to be able to make a film where I wasn't made to force-feed the audience a conclusion to draw. At the end of the day, I call this movie "the world's longest Twilight Zone episode. It's got this wonderful sort of monkey's paw irony to it that is very tasty to me. I'm really looking forward to hearing people's interpretations of the film. That's part of what's exciting about making movies.

Let's talk about your background.
I was born in France in a refugee camp. My parents left Budapest in 1956 when the Russian tanks rolled in. They snuck over the border to Yugoslavia, where they met in a relocation center. I was born three years later. I have an older half-brother, and half-sister, both of whom I'm very close to. Talk about a cinematic sequence: my mother had all her possessions and this little child, my sister, that she's dragging on a little toy sled through the snow while there are squadrons of soldiers in the woods shooting at anything that moves! It was a really courageous thing she did. My first memories are when we were living in Chicago. Then the folks split, and both came west. Mom located here, and my old man located to the Bay area. I bounced back and forth through grade school, then settled her permanently once junior high started, so I feel like a native.

How did you first fall in love with film?
For me it was a continual and cumulative process of being transported to other places by great storytellers. Not just in the movies, but in literature as well. Let me list some of my gods: Dickens, Ray Bradbury, Raymond Chandler, Mark Twain, Richard Matheson, and Harlan Ellison whose book I am Legend really redefined an entire genre, and Steve King credits as one of his biggest influences. The Universal monster films were big influences on me, as well. One moment in particular stands out to me. I saw George Lucas' first feature THX-1138 (1971). It's so underrated and overlooked. One of the glossy newsstand magazines did their "100 best sci-fi films of all time" things, another one of these pointless lists. When I see a list that Tron (1982) is on, and THX isn't, it makes me want to kill somebody! This movie is one of the most amazing, brilliant sociological statements I've ever seen. I was 12 years old when I went to see, not that, but The Brotherhood of Satan (1971), a cheesy horror movie with L.Q. Jones and Strother Martin, to just show you how badly THX was dumped by its studio. My mind was so blown when I saw THX-1138. It really spoke to me. I was so impressed with it, I sat through Brotherhood of Satan again, so I could watch THX again! I think my mother had the cops out looking for me by then! (laughs) But that's when I realized for the first time that movies don't just happen by magic, that there was a storyteller at work there. That there was somebody pulling the strings, whose perspective on life and whose world view was stamped on every frame of that film. I remember thinking 'If I could get up and walk up to the screen and stick my head into the world of that movie, I could look of to the side of the camera, and see whoever the hell that is!' I didn't know who George Lucas was, but I knew that I wanted to be that storyteller. So being able to work with George later on (on Young Indiana Jones) was full-circle, it was amazing.

After graduating Hollywood High, you skipped college and went to work as a P.A.?
It wasn't quite that clean a jump. I didn't realize that if you were willing to be a P.A., that there are ten people that will hire you today! (laughs) To me, Hollywood was this vast Olympus that was impenetrable. It took me three years to get a gig as a P.A. on a picture called Hell Night (1981), with Linda Blair. At the end of 1980, I remember this very clearly because John Lennon had just been killed, another big touchstone in my life. I got a call from a guy I went to high school with named Steve Ringel, who was going to University of Redlands. He said "They're shooting a movie out here and I hear they're hiring P.A.'s. I remember that you wanted to be in the movie business, so maybe they'll hire you if you drive out here." So as I sit here, at the end of the century, having directed The Green Mile, let me just point out that Steve Ringel is responsible for all this! If he hadn't been thoughtful enough to pick up the phone and call me, who knows what I'd be doing for a living! So Steve, if you're reading this, thank you! So I hopped in the car with a couple friends of mine, drove two hours to Redlands, finally found the set. We jump out of the car and say 'Hi! We're here to be P.A.s!' I didn't even know what "P.A." stood for at that point, although later I found out that it stood for "pissant." (laughs) "Production Assistant," for those that don't know...It was there that I first met Chuck Russell, who was line producing that film. The following year he hired me again on my second gig as a P.A., on The Seduction (1982). It was on that shoot where I became friendly with the costume designer and showed her this little spec script I had written for MASH, which obviously never went anywhere, but she liked it, and passed it on to Chuck, unbeknownst to me. Chuck read it, and called me after the film wrapped, and said "Let's talk. I'm looking for a writing partner." And we're great friends to this day. So Chuck and I started writing, and I moved out of the P.A. business into set design and construction, and that was my film school. I just tried to absorb the process through my skin. Then, in 1986, Chuck had the opportunity to direct Nightmare on Elm Street 3, and we rewrote the script that they had. I got paid scale, got to join the writer's guild. We did the rewrite in 11 days, and three weeks later Chuck was on the set calling "Action." And I've never really looked back from there.

Let's talk about The Old Woman in the Room, your first film.
I was 20 years old and wrote Steve King a letter. He said 'Okay kid, go ahead.' He gave me the option for a buck. He's been known to do this for young filmmakers. It's his way of giving back. So I spent the next three years making that film with my friends. Steve was very happy with the film. A few years later, in '86, I asked him for the rights to Shawshank, thinking that would be my first picture. So he gave me that option as well, for a buck. Then I waited until my ambitions as a writer caught up with my actual skill to adapt Shawshank. I did the script in two months, took it to Castle Rock, and we were off to the races. There was some conversation with my agent once I was done with the script, who felt that we could get a bidding was going with the studios. I didn't want to do that because I had a feeling about Castle Rock. I didn't know a soul there, but after I'd seen what Rob Reiner had done with Stand by Me (1986), I thought it was the most intelligent adaptation of the most unlikely Stephen King story, that was ever filmed. Its success also allowed Rob and his partners to form Castle Rock. I thought, if anybody gets this, it'll be them. I also knew that there were certain studios in town where, if I took it there, it would be totally re-written into some testosterone fest. You know, kickboxing behind bars or something. (laughs) Luckily my instinct about Castle Rock was right. They really are my home.

How was it working with Morgan Freeman?
Very no nonsense. No monkeying around. He showed up, and he was ready to work. He made it look so easy, the really good ones always do. I had the same experience with Tom. No muss, no fuss. Roll the cameras and let me break your heart. (laughs) Cool!

What happened with Frankenstein?
I think Ken Branagh will probably think I'm after him now (laughs). We've all heard stories about their work didn't turn out the way they wanted when it hit the screen. This is my prime example of a movie I wrote going down the shitter. In my opinion, I think Frankenstein was one of the best things I ever wrote. Easily equal to The Green Mile. And that wasn't the movie that Ken Branagh wanted to make. He wanted to make something else. What he made I thought was a dunderheaded, ham-fisted mess. But I wasn't the director on that, so...I felt like he tried to reinvent the wheel every step of the way. It's so dumbed down. It's so bombastic, that I was just flabbergasted. And let's describe Mary Shelley's novel: very understated, very smart, conceptually brilliant. I don't know what happened there. Had I known how it was going to turn out, I never would have done it. My all-time favorite book is Shelley's Frankenstein.

What about your favorite music?
Beethoven's ninth symphony is, I think, one of the great reasons we have for being alive. It is so sublime, so touched by God. I'm wild about Mozart. Bach has certainly woven his spell. Those are the big three, like G.M., Ford and Chevy. (laughs) Then there's the Beatles, of course. I'm also deeply steeped in 20's, 30's and 40's jazz. Everything in that era is wonderful. Fats Waller, Billie Holliday, Louis Armstrong, the Mills Brothers, Cab Calloway, they're all great. Louis is the king! I got to use some of my favorite tunes in this picture, including "Stardust," one of my favorite songs.

Any advice for first-time directors?
I went to Steven Spielberg before I started shooting Green Mile, because it had been a while since I directed. I asked him his advice. So he looked at the ceiling for a minute, and you know what he said? "There's this pair of shoes you should buy, they're called Etonic Summits. Buy yourself a pair of those. You'll thank me!" (laughs) So I bought a pair, and they were great. They were my good luck charm. It was like crawling up the mountaintop to ask the wiseman the meaning of life and having him say "Don't forget to floss." (laughs) But in all seriousness, the toughest thing for me my first time out was knowing I could rely on my instincts, that they'd do right by me and carry me through. The self-doubt creature in you never goes away, so all you can ever do is trust your instincts. They're there for a reason, and usually your first instinct is the correct one, so don't second guess yourself to death.

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Eric Idle: The Hollywood Interview

Comic actor Eric Idle.



ERIC IDLE:
ALAN SMITHEE'S FLAMING PYTHON
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the March 1998 issue of Venice Magazine.

Eric Idle is regarded as one of the fathers of cutting edge comedy. As a member of the legendary Monty Python troupe of TV, stage and film fame, Idle has been keeping the world in fits of side-splitting laughter for nearly 30 years. Born March 29, 1943 in South Shields, Durham, England, Idle began his comedy career while at Cambridge, where he joined the school's legendary Footlights revue, along with future Python John Cleese. After graduating Cambridge, Idle wrote for BBC Radio's I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, before moving to TV writing for The Frost Report, Marty Feldman and The Two Ronnies. Do Not Adjust Your Set, a children's show for Thames Television, led to the ground-breaking Monty Python's Flying Circus television show for the BBC, which ran from 1969-74. Along with fellow Pythons Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Jones, and the late Graham Chapman, Idle and the Flying Circus helped bring a new brand of humor to the airwaves, one that combined absurdity, social satire, surrealism, animation and spam. The world has yet to recover from their inspired lunacy.

Five Python feature films followed the TV series: And Now for Something Completely Different (1971), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), the hugely (and absurdly) controversial Biblical satire Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979), Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl (1982), and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983). In addition to the films, the Pythons released several hit records, books, three CD-ROMs and even a popular web site (PythOnline).

Post-Python Idle has kept busy. He has appeared in many other films (Splitting Heirs, Nuns on the Run), had his own TV series (Rutland Weekend Television), written a novel called "Hello Sailor," a comedy book ("The Rutland Dirty Weekend Book"), and a play which ran in London's West End for five months called Pass the Butler.

1998 finds Idle nominated for a Grammy for Best Audio, for reading his Dove Kids book "The Quite Remarkable Adventures of the Owl and the Pussycat." At the upcoming Aspen Comedy Festival on March 7, the Pythons will re-unite for a Q & A and be presented with an award for their outstanding achievements in the world of humor. His newest novel, "Levity, or The Road to Mars" will be published by Vintage Books this fall.

On the screen, Idle stars in the outrageous comedy Burn Hollywood Burn, from the prolific pen of Joe Eszterhas. The film, presented as a mock-documentary, satirizes the making of a big-budget Hollywood action epic. Idle plays a director named Alan Smithee. When his big action epic goes over-budget and the producers force him to make changes that he's against, Smithee realizes that he can't take his name off the final product, because it just happens to be the same as the pseudonym used by the Director's Guild for any director who doesn't want credit for his work! Smithee, in desperation, steals the negative of the film before any prints can be struck and therein the chaos ensues. The film co-stars Ryan O'Neal, Richard Jeni, rappers Coolio and Chuck D., as well as a host of Hollywood royalty making cameos or playing themselves including Sylvester Stallone, Whoopi Goldberg, Jackie Chan, Robert Evans, Shane Black, and Dominic Dunne, to name a few.

In person, Eric Idle is every bit the delightful loon one would expect him to be, constantly inspiring those around him to laugh at life. Having moved to "this side of the pond" several years ago with his wife and young daughter, Eric sat down in a Four Seasons hotel suite recently to reflect on his remarkable career as one of the world's funniest men. Between the fits of laughter, here's what transpired:

Most comedians say that their humor stems from painful childhoods. How was yours?
Eric Idle: My childhood was a piece of shit. I was orphaned by the RAF at the age of two and I was shoved into a boarding school at seven for twelve years. "So you became a comedian, how odd!" (laughs)

Were you a funny kid, interested in dramatics and things like that?
I guess so. I was into puppeting a bit. Writing and performing sketches and so on, which is really what Python is: writing sketches and then donning masks and disguises...I guess I started doing that about 11 or 12. In boarding school, remember, you have all these extra hours in the day, because even when you're not in school, you're still in school! (laughs) So there were always things that you wanted to do to fill in your time. There was no TV then to sit and gawk into. You had to find different ways of filling in time. I guess one of them was reading, which always been great...I think I'd always been funny because being funny is a wonderful defense against bullying, of which there was an enormous amount, as well as institutionalized bullying was very big. You were beaten. It was a very Victorian sort of boarding school. And then you get to be a bully yourself as you move up the system.

So were you a bully yourself?
I tried not to be. I was protesting to the headmaster, "Ban the bomb" and all that. That was my way of protesting against the system. But you could even be beaten by the kids in our school. They could "slipper" you. Masters had the privilege of hitting you with a cane. It was very Tom Brown. We were all war orphans. It's interesting, I met a journalist earlier today who went to the same school...but I've had no contact with anyone from that period since.

From there you went to Cambridge?
Yes, at the age of 19 and that was just wonderful. They had this wonderful thing called The Footlights, which I got involved in and that was a wonderful club and experience to be in...That's where I met John Cleese and it pretty much took over the rest of my life at Cambridge. We were always performing, doing cabarets and sketches. That was the only way to be in the club, was to perform. You had to audition and then be voted in by the members.

Where did the rest of the Pythons come from?
Graham Chapman was from Cambridge. Mike and Terry were from Oxford and I'd met them during two consecutive summers at the Edinburgh Festival. At the end of the year we'd always take the revue up there...so I must've met Terry in '63 and Michael in '64. And (Terry) Gilliam (their frequent director/animator who went on to direct The Fisher King, among other films), who's American, appeared out of the blue when we were doing a kids' show called Do Not Adjust Your Set. This weird chap came in and said "Well, I've written some sketches." Mike and Terry said "We write the sketches. We don't need any bloody Yank writing our sketches!" (laughs) And I said "No, wait a minute. This guy is good. I don't know why, but there's something about him." So they said "All right, then" and they let him in. (laughs)

So you went straight from Cambridge to Television?
Radio and television. It was just after the big satire boom, so they were on the look-out for young, smart, agreeable, cheap people who could write from Cambridge. (laughs) Then we did a bit of writing for various shows and they asked if we'd like to do the kids' show and we did, and then they were going to offer us our own show for late in the night. Then Cleese came across with Chapman from Marty Feldman's show and said "Look, I've got this other offer from the BBC." We said that we'd gotten an offer from ITV, the other network. Cleese said "Well, we're secured for 13 (shows). It's for certain." So we agreed and the two shows melded.

The format of the kids' show was similar to that of Python?
Very similar. We had a band on the show called the Bonzo Dog Do-Da Band, who were real loonies. They did very wild, sort of send-ups of Hollywood 30's and 40's music. Up to that point we were fairly straight-laced Oxbridge students and I think they sort of skirted us left a bit. They introduced a whole new level of pop culture and 60's madness.

What was it like when you went to the BBC and did your first Flying Circus? Were you all viewed as these completely insane anarchists?
The BBC didn't really know who we were or what we were, and didn't really care in those days. It was a bit like the RAF: "Alright you, you go over there and that's your room over there and we'll see you at the end of the season. Jolly good. Carry on." And it was great. We had no executives. No help or interference. They gave us a loony director called Ian McNaughton, who'd been working for Spike Milligan...he was wild and wacky. We knew what we didn't want to do and that's all we knew. We didn't want to end sketches with tags and punchlines. We didn't want to cut to the singer, "And now on a serious note..." "And now for something completely different..." was something you always heard on comedy shows. "And now for something completely different, here in a relaxing mood, is Vera to sing 'The Dance of the Seventeen Veils.'" (laughs) And I remember our first show very well actually, because the BBC refused to accept our first four titles, which were A Horse, a Spoon and a Basin; Bunwacky Buzzard, Stubble and Boot; Owls Stretching Time. They kept saying "No! You cannot call the show Owls Stretching Time!" You know, duh! (laughs) So finally, they kept calling it The Circus. "Maybe The Flying Circus," they said. Then we came up with the name 'Monty Python.' So they sent out tickets and people came thinking they were actually seeing a circus! We had little old ladies making up our first audience. (little old lady voice) "Oh, is this a circus?" "I dunno, I don't see any animals." (laughs) They were totally puzzled. And I was quite puzzled, too. Because if you look at the first show, it's totally bizarre! I mean, sheep drop on people's heads...I used to play soccer in the park on Sundays and the show went out on Saturday nights. So on Sunday they'd go "That show of yours is bloody weird, but I quite like. But it's really a very stupid bloody, silly show!" (laughs)

What was the genesis of the name 'Monty Python'?
The BBC always put "Circus" on the contract, so we deflated it by saying "Flying Circus." And I think it was Michael who said he wanted to call it Gwen Dibbly's Flying Circus because there was a real woman in his village called Gwen Dibbly. (laughs) And wouldn't it be funny if we named a television show after her? We were like, 'Alright, that's funny for you, Mike." So John and Graham came up with "Python" because they always liked animal jokes. And I came up with "Monty" because he was a bloke in the pub where I went in Stratford. "Has Monty been in yet?" "Hello! Where's Monty?" And he wore a bow-tie and he was like, an agent, and the name had this sort of seedy quality 'Monty Python.' It has a sort of persona, almost very Goddot. Waiting for Monty. (laughs)

Did you guys write all your sketches together, like in a round table?
No. Mike and Terry wrote together. John and Graham wrote together and I wrote alone. We'd go away for like, two weeks, get a block of stuff, then get together for two or three days and read it all out. And if you laughed, it was in and if you didn't, we sold it to The Two Ronnies. (laughs)

Did the show take off right away?
Well, it's not like here with ratings. It's the BBC, so they don't care if nobody's watching. We were only competing with ITV anyway...so it wasn't measured like that. It was never really a hugely popular thing. I guess it got bigger. Here was where it got big, when it finally came here, about 1974 or so. PBS is going to run the whole series again for the 25th anniversary, I think starting this April.

Tell us about Python's first excursion into feature films.
Well we started with And Now For Something Completely Different, which we did for £80,000. Then we did Holy Grail for £200,000, or about $400,000. I actually like Grail better than Life of Brian. I think it's more filmic and weird. It's not the general opinion of the whole group, but that's what I think...We were on such a tight budget with Grail, sharing rooms together. We couldn't afford horses, so that's how we got the things with the coconuts banging together. (laughs) That's how things happen. We actually raised money privately for that, from Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and Charisma Records...They were fans. And of course George Harrison picked up the tab for Life of Brian. It worked out well, really. We shot Brian in Tunisia where Sir Lew Grade had just made The Life of Christ, so we used their sets!

Did the uproar surrounding Brian surprise you?
We thought it was rather good. Saved us from doing publicity. (laughs) It was a wonderful American controversy. Once you're on the news, you're fine. You can go home now. You don't have to do a publicity tour. Oh, thank you very much. (laughs)

Who were Python's biggest influences?
I'd say it was a bit of the Goon Show (Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan) and a bit of Beyond the Fringe, which was Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Alan Bennett. They did this wonderful revue around '62. It was really fun.

You hosted Saturday Night Live four times during its heyday in the 1970's.
What was that like?
It was fairly chaotic. You always felt that the hours were written around Lorne (Michaels) desire not to get up before lunch and stay up all night and have a bit of fun. (In Python) we always worked office hours, start at 10, 10:30, break for lunch, then finish around 4:30. And they would sort of start after dinner, then go to five or six in the morning. They would never re-write, so they'd never stockpile stuff, you know what I mean? (On SNL) sometimes if they had a sketch, and we liked the first bit, we'd throw it across to somebody else, who would just complete it or stick it into something else. So we always had the opportunity to re-work things...But sometimes you'd have a panic as to whether they were going to have a monologue ready or not.

I remember that great sketch you did with Dan Aykroyd, as David Frost interviewing Nixon.
I wrote that! And I didn't get writing credit, which really pissed me off. Lorne said, "Well we don't have any budget for this sort of thing. I'm afraid we can't give you writing credit." "Well, that's okay. Alright, then. Oh, never mind." "You understand?" "Yes of course, it is only NBC, isn't it? I couldn't possibly have any money." (laughs) But the show was always the opposite of Python. It was about ego, celebrity, and fame! Fame in New York! Yeah, here we are! Yeah! And Python was about...nobody knew who the fuck we were. We never put our names up until the end credits, and even then it didn't say who played what. So it was sort of the opposite, but interesting though. For me it was good because it led to The Rutles.

The Rutles was the Beatles satire you did with Gary Weis. Tell us about that.
I had my own TV show after Python called Rutland Weekend Television. Rutland was a county in England which the Conservatives put out of existence after a thousand years of history. It's back now, I'm glad to say! (laughs) So we gave it its own TV station and The Rutles was just a sketch on that. When I first did Saturday Night Live I was asked to bring some stuff over. We played it over the air and the response was huge. People wrote in to The Rutles. "Dear Nasty, Stig and Barry," you know. So they asked me, "What are you doing next?" And I said I wanted to make a documentary about The Rutles. George (Harrison) was very encouraging and I was going to do it for the BBC. They said, "Well come and do it for NBC. We'll give you a bigger budget." So we sold it to NBC and Lorne suggested Gary Weis as co-director with me and...just went away and did it, really. I started in New York where I interviewed Paul Simon and Mick Jagger about The Rutles, which was nice to get under your belt, because Mick's really bitchy about The Beatles in their thinly-veiled disguise as he tells his stories. (laughs)And those rivalries don't die. There's extraordinary British band rivalries that are still going on.

It pre-dated Spinal Tap, didn't it?
Yes! I invented the mocu-mentary! It pre-dated Zelig , which is another one that gets credited (with being the first). But I'm not bitter or twisted. (laughs) I'm just broke. (laughs)

Do you have any favorite sketches from Flying Circus?
You know, I liked the Bruces. I really enjoyed them. I had sketches I loved performing on the stage show. I loved doing the Travel Agent, which was written by John and Graham. There's still a lot of good stuff that plays well.

Have you all stayed close?
Yes, we've all stayed close and we still meet and see each other. It's fun.

Will you ever work together again?
No. We've been tempted. Occasionally I've thought about Vegas. I thought that Monty Python live in Las Vegas would be a real trip. Basically I don't think we should do it, even for ready-money. It's disappointing ultimately. You hear people say "They want you, they want you, they want you!" What they want is how you were. We can't go back. And I think what it really is, is that they want to go back. I think it's okay for us all to turn up and sort of reminisce and have people say "Oh, look at those old bastards still natchin' away." I think that's okay. But I think people like to know that we're all still friends and really the shows are all better than we could be. We don't age. We're still 26. And they still find the new markets. It's extraordinary.

Tell us about your new novel "Levity, or The Road to Mars."
It's been something I've been trying to write for 16 or 18 years, and I just finally figured out what it was about. I'm proud of it. It's been fun and very nice to get away from film writing, which can drive you mad with their notes, listening to them while you pretend that you're impressed. But that's the way it is. I went to (famous comedy director) once for a meeting and he said "So, have you ever done comedy?" (laughs)...But the book is about comedy and comedians, which is sort of the only thing I know after all these years. I found it really a fabulous job. It's nice when someone just says to you "You know, I love what you're doing. I'm going to pay you to finish it." More of those jobs, please! What I miss about Python is that freedom and that liberty we had to do whatever we wanted. And when you write a novel, you have that liberty back. It's given me a new lease on my love of writing. Of course day to day, writing is fucking hell. But generally, compared to being an actor stuck in a trailer for 18 hours, it's wonderful because you're constantly searching within yourself for something. Only rarely can you do acting that even begins to touch what you can get into with writing.

Tell us about Alan Smithee.
I thought it was a good script. When I read a script I go "Can I play this or can I have fun playing this." And this was good because, unlike "comedy," this was real. There was a real move in his character. When we were filming, my mother was dying. And we brought her back here to my house to die. And I had to spend three or four days sort of crying and weeping in the story. So it was very therapeutic for me...So for me it was a really good acting role because you didn't have to be shallow. Usually in comedy, you've got it in take two or three because where are you going to go? You're not going to give more depth to it. So it was good for me to do it.

Did the film reflect a lot of truths that you've learned from your years in "the biz"?
Well, I used to be very bitter and cynical, but now I think the mistake that I made and that other people make is expecting it to be anything other than it is, which is Detroit. They're making cars, they're not making fabulous little art films. If you want to make fabulous little art films, go live in France or Germany where they pay you to do that. Here it's about making a certain type of film. A lot of people's expectations are dashed because they're looking for the wrong thing.

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Dennis Farina: The Hollywood Interview

Actor Dennis Farina.


DENNIS FARINA FINDS BIG TROUBLE ON THE SIDEWALKS OF NEW YORK
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the September 2001 issue of Venice Magazine.

Part tough guy, part comic foil, and 100% Chicago through-and-through, Dennis Farina is one of those rare and enviable souls who has made the transition from one wildly divergent career to another with the greatest of aplomb. Born in the windy city on February 22, 1944, Farina, the son of a doctor and one of seven children, was an active duty Chicago police officer for 20 years, before discovering the theater and becoming a full time, working actor.

Initially hired by director Michael Mann for bit part in his feature directing debut, Thief, in 1981, Farina went on to steadily build himself a niche in the acting world as one of the most distinctive character actors of his generation, delivering memorable turns in diverse films such as Andrew Davis' Chuck Norris thriller Code of Silence (1985), Michael Mann's Manhunter (1986) which was notable for being the first film to introduce the character of Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Brian Cox), Martin Brest's Midnight Run (1988), Barry Sonnenfeld's Get Shorty (1995), Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight (1998), Steven Spielberg's sublime Saving Private Ryan (1998), and John Frankenheimer's Reindeer Games (1999).

Farina has also made a distinctive mark on television, as well, playing the lead on the now-legendary NBC series "Crime Story," as Chicago police detective Mike Torello. The series, executive produced and created by Michael Mann, was a stylish blend of 1960's period flavor and hard-boiled noir drama. It still has a strong cult following, and can now be seen on the A&E network. Farnia proved his acting chops in spades with his chilling portrait of serial killer Angelo Buono in the TV movie "The Hillside Stranglers," co-starring Richard Crenna. In 1998, Farina executive produced and played the title role of "Buddy Faro," a critically well-received, albeit short-lived series about a hip, rat pack-era detective doing his thing in the 1990's.

2001 sees Farnia featured in three very different films. Earlier in the year, he gave a deft comic portrait in Guy Ritchie's Snatch as Avi, a conniving Jewish diamond merchant. In Ed Burns' upcoming Sidewalks of New York, he plays a renowned ladies' man and father confessor to Burns' confused protagonist. In Barry Sonnenfeld's riotous new comedy Big Trouble, Farina gives one of his best recent performances as a world-weary hitman attempting to execute what he hoped would be a simple contract in Miami, only to have it plagued by a series of comic disasters.

Dennis Farina, who has seasonal homes in both Chicago and Phoenix (you guess which seasons), sat down with Venice recently at his favorite Beverly Hills hotel, looking ever the dapper gent in a double breasted blue blazer and crisp white shirt. A model of old school charm and pizzazz, Farina held court like the mayor of a major metropolis, greeting hotel employees and guests alike with patented Chicago pleasantries such as "How ya doin', palie?" Consider it an invitation to read on...

You're in two very different movies right now: Big Trouble and Sidewalks of New York.
Dennis Farina: Yeah, they are very different but I had a lot of fun on both. I like Ed Burns a lot. We met on Saving Private Ryan, and I'd enjoyed his work before we'd met: The Brothers McMullen, She's the One. That's a case where Ed just called me up one day and sent it to me. I thought it was a great part, even thought it's not a huge part. Ed's a guy who's very easy to get along with, knows what he wants. There's a time to play and a time to be serious about things. The nice thing about Ed, and Guy Ritchie as well, is that they're also the writers, so if you have a question about your character, they're right there to work with you.

Big Trouble reunites you with director Barry Sonnenfeld.
Yeah, I love working with Barry. He's a terrific director and also a great cinematographer. He shot a lot of the Coen brothers' films. Barry's just one of those guys that if he calls you, you go to work for him. I love his sense of humor. I like and admire him as a person and as a director.

It looked like you guys were having a lot of fun.
Yeah, Jack, the guy who plays my partner, and I did. I call Jack the Walter Brennan of our generation because he's been in every movie that's ever been made. (laughs) It was funny because we never really saw a lot of the other cast members since most of our scenes just involved the two of us, which is too bad, because I always like seeing Renee (Russo) and Stanley (Tucci). Like all of Barry's movies, it's really smart and really funny and really inventive the way it's shot. When you have a director who's also a cinematographer, that's someone who really knows his way around a set and knows exactly what he wants. Andy Davis (Under Siege) started as a D.P. too, and he's the same way.

You've almost become synonymous with the city of your birth: Chicago. What part of the city did you grow up in?
The near north side. We just call it "the old neighborhood," but the new term for it is "near north side." If you met someone from Chicago who asked where you're from and you said "The old neighborhood," my neighborhood is the one you'd be talking about.

Mostly Italian?
Yeah, mostly. Some Jewish people. Our landlords were Jewish. A few Irish. Mainly Italian.

You were a Chicago police officer for 20 years before becoming an actor. Are there any other cops in the family?
Just one: my uncle, my mother's brother, but that was years before I joined. Most of my family became lawyers, actually.

What did your dad do?
He was the neighborhood doctor. I have three brothers and three sisters, also. There were a bunch of us running around.

What division of the police did you work in?
I worked in burglary, which we called "the burglary room." In New York they call it "B & E." The more I know people from New York, it's almost like the United States versus England, how they have different terms for the same things. "Lifts" are elevators, for example. In New York they say "macaroni," we say "spaghetti." We say "sauce," they say "gravy," that sort of thing. Little things like that are interesting.

Did being a cop help in developing your acting skills?
No not at all. In fact, it gets in the way sometimes. As Michael Mann told me once, we're in the business of entertainment, not reality. I'm sure doctors cringe every time they see medical shows. You can't let reality seep into what you're doing as entertainment.

When you were a Chicago police officer, were on duty during the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention?
Yes, I was.

I've never heard a cop's point of view of what really happened there.
Honestly, to us, it was just another day's work. I was never political in my life, and I'm still not. Nothing remarkable happened to me during that incident that didn't happen to everyone else. From my point of view, as a guy who was there, it was we have to go there and do what we have to do, and then go home when we're done. It's kind of like the way a soldier would look at things. Not in the combat sense of the word, necessarily, but police departments are semi-military organizations and that's the way they do business.

When did you start getting interested in acting?
With Michael Mann. When he came to Chicago, he put me in Thief. Then pretty soon, I started meeting people from the Steppenwolf Theater: Gary Sinise, John Malkovich, John Mahoney, Terry Kinney, people like that. They kind of took me under their wing and took a nice chance with me, put me in plays, and I started doing some theater around town. Then eventually, I made the move to acting full-time.

What's it like working like Michael Mann, with whom you've worked several times.
I'll always have a soft spot for Michael. He's a moviemaker and a storyteller and knows what he wants to do. He has a vision and doesn't let anything stand in his way of doing it. He does nothing haphazardly. Everything is very well thought-out and planned. He doesn't do anything that he himself wouldn't do as far as hours and doing hard work. I think in the final analysis all of that comes out as natural as anybody can get. Michael's a pretty sharp cookie.

Manhunter is an overlooked masterpiece, in my opinion, every bit as good as Silence of the Lambs.
I thought so, too, but then again, I'll always like that film a little bit more because I was involved in it. But what I think is a little more scary about it is that you don't know much about Dr. Lecter. I think in the other one the mystery isn't quite there as much. In Manhunter, Lecter (played by Brian Cox) is a very normal-looking and even to an extent, normally-behaving person. That's what's so scary. He could be anybody.

William Petersen, your co-star in that, is another amazing actor. How was he to work with?
Billy's a great guy. We did a couple plays together in Chicago, and we both did our first film together, which was Thief. I got to know Billy well doing theater at the Steppenwolf. Billy was another one who really looked after me during my salad days in the theater.

What were some of the plays you did that helped you develop your craft?
The first play I ever did was at the Steppenwolf called "A Prayer for My Daughter," directed by Malkovich. It was me and John Mahoney, Jeff Perry and Terry Kinney. Then I did "Streamers" that Terry Kinney directed. We did that for a while, all over, including the Kennedy Center. Then Billy and I did a play called "A Class C Trial at Yokohama," which was a look into the Japanese war crimes trials. Then we went to the Goodman Theater to do "The Time of Your Life," with Don Moffat and Billy and Amy Morton, Natalie West, John Pankow. Then I did a play called "Some Men Need Help," about a young guy who's an alcoholic. There's a knock on his door and there stands this guy who just starts talking to him. You don't know if the guy's an angel, or what. It a two person play with these two men just talking. I think it would make a great movie. If I ever get enough juice, I'd love to do it.

Ever thought about directing yourself?
No, I haven't. I don't know if I'd want to make that kind of commitment. That's a pretty tough road unless you're ready to really commit a year, or more, of your life. As an actor, you're there for two or three months, and then it's over, and you can move on. As the director, the easy part is the filming. The hard part is the post-production, the editing, the pleasing all kinds of producers and studios.

You've worked a lot with Stanley Tucci, as well.
(laughs) You know, it's funny. Stanley and I were just talking the other day about how we've done about five movies together, and never had a scene together! The only time we actually had a scene was when he was in an episode of Crime Story years ago.

Let's talk about Crime Story. It was such an inventive, innovative show, but probably wound up being too offbeat for it's own good.
Thanks, and I think you're right. It was great fun, and really grueling work at the same time. Again, it was Michael and he demanded perfection. I think we worked harder on that show than anything I've ever done. I'm not complaining, because I think the hard work paid off with the final result. We were really making a movie every week, as opposed to a TV show. I learned a lot. It was a great way to learn a lot about what goes on with filmmaking and with television. I'm still learning, and will always be learning, but that was great basic training.

After Manhunter, you did Midnight Run, which was your first stab at comedy, which you do really well.
I'm actually not sure if I have an affinity for comedy, or not. In that case, it was just a very good script. I would've been a fool not to do it. I was just fortunate enough to be there. The more I know about this business, the more I realize you can only bring so much to the project. You have to have a great script, director, cameraman, everything. It's a real collaborative business where no man's an island. If anyone is good, I think it's due to the sum total of what everybody else does.

Does working with an actor like De Niro raise the level of your performance?
I found out that when you work with guys like Robert de Niro, or any number of people that I've worked with, is that those guys are there to work. They come prepared to work. They have nothing to prove. They are the most helpful, generous, understanding people that you could meet. It's actually easier to work with someone like Bob de Niro than someone who's trying to become what guys like Bob already are. Bob just sets you at ease, right away. He did that the first time I met him.

Get Shorty was a terrific movie where you gave another wonderful comic performance. Since you seem equally adept at comedy and drama, is one more difficult than the other for you?
Well, my character in that thought he was very serious, but again, it was in the writing. The book was written that way. The script adaptation was written that way. Again, with Barry Sonnenfeld, who's a great collaborator, it was really a pretty easy process. It's hard to screw up a good hamburger when the ingredients are all there, right? I had a great time on that one and really enjoyed being in the make-up chair putting that nose on everyday! (laughs) Actually doing that "broken nose voice" came pretty easily with that make-up because everything got kind of stuffed up and, well...some things just naturally evolve. (laughs)

In Out of Sight you worked with Steven Soderbergh. What was that like?
Steven's another guy who comes to the set totally prepared, knowing exactly what he wants, a great collaborator. Plus, it was an Elmore Leonard story again, so the ingredients were there. Steven's a pretty low key guy, sort of the calm in the storm.

Do you like to be directed as little as possible, so you have room to spread your wings?
Well, I think you try things all the time. You add or remove a word, or a look, and pretty much when they hire you, it's for what they think you're going to bring to the game. Sometimes you can surprise yourself with what you do when you just sort of go with the flow, so to speak. I remember one time Michael Mann told me "Nobody is gonna know a character better than you are, even more than the writer. You are gonna know that character better than anybody. If I don't like what you're doing, I'll tell you and bring you back."

You have the distinction of co-starring in the one good Chuck Norris movie ever made, Code of Silence, directed by the great Andrew Davis (The Fugitive). What were Chuck and Andy like?
I knew Andy Davis' dad (actor Nate Davis) because I'd worked with him before, so I felt very comfortable with Andy. There was that Chicago connection where I knew he wasn't gonna lead me astray. He treated me so kindly, because he knew I was a novice, and kind of watched after me. And Chuck Norris was just a delight to work with, a hell of a nice guy. That film was a nice break for me. Andy Davis is, I think, a really good director. I wish he'd work more.

"The Hillside Strangler" was probably the first film where people realized what a really terrific actor you were. What was it like getting inside the mind of a psychopath?
I was still on the force in Chicago when that case was happening (in L.A.), so I was very familiar with the particulars going into it. When I did the movie, I had a little bit of an idea of the kind of guy he was, although I didn't have any first-hand knowledge of him. I didn't meet or talk with him for research, and didn't want to. I didn't like the guy, for obvious reasons, so if you were to psychoanalyze it, you could say that it was a portrayal born out of dislike. I really can't comment intelligently on it beyond that.

A lot of actors have trouble shedding the skin of a character who's that dark, but I'm assuming you didn't have that experience.
Not at all! In fact, when the scenes were over, I wouldn't stay in character, or any of that crap. I mean, who would? If you're playing some happy-go-lucky guy, that's one thing. But with a guy like that, what would be the point? The thing I remember most about that experience is that I got to work with Richard Crenna, who's become a very good friend over the years.

Tell us about Saving Private Ryan.
Well, that's another no-brainer! (laughs) I remember when I read the script, it was like reading a great novel. I remember I had gone to meet with someone about it, never heard anything. Then a year later, I got a call, asking if I'd like to come in and work with Steven Spielberg. So I said "Oh, okay. I guess I can do that." (laughs) Not a big dilemma, right? I think everybody involved in that knew that it was going to be an important film. It was an event, even more than a movie. That was obvious just from reading the script. Then you added the talents of Spielberg, Tom Hanks and the rest of those guys. Tom Sizemore, I thought, should have been nominated for something. He was terrific. They filmed a couple of different endings, one of which I appeared in. My character is with a column of tanks that went through the town and we find Hanks and his men, and just keep moving. I thought the ending they used was far superior.

What was Spielberg like as a director?
Well, again, sort of like the calm in the storm. There were tanks going here, and people marching here and cameras moving here, and all these explosions in the middle of all this chaos was Steven, who very calmly would say what he wanted and get it done. He also had a wonderful D.P. who was very easygoing, as well.

You worked with another legendary director, John Frankenheimer, on Reindeer Games.
Yeah, there's another instance. I got a call "Wanna work with John Frankenheimer?" No-brainer! He was terrific, a very old-school director, and I mean that in the best sense of the word. Like Spielberg, and the other people we've talked about, he knows exactly what he wants and he gets it done. He's got this wealth of knowledge and experience and you just let John show you the way. He's a real movie director. A no-nonsense guy, but he's also got a terrific sense of humor. I have a vision of John as what we think of movie directors from the 30's and 40's being: bigger-than-life. I also got to work with my old pal Gary Sinise on that movie, which was fun. Let's face it, it's all fun! Acting is fun. It's a lot more fun than about a hundred other things I could be doing.

Like dodging bullets, for example?
Yeah, or running into a burning building. Now I'm not sophisticated enough to think those things aren't important, because they are. In fact, they're a lot more important than what I do now, but I'm just very fortunate that I get to make a living having fun, and doing something that I love. I'm very blessed. I think if you have a sense of proportion in life that's a very healthy way to be.

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The Coen Brothers: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmakers Ethan and Joel Coen, AKA The Coen Brothers.


BROTHERS' KEEPERS
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the April 1998 issue of Venice Magazine.

Joel and Ethan Coen have been labeled (perhaps rightfully so) the makers of America's most eccentric and unpredictable films. Joel (43) and Ethan (40) were born and raised in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, the second and third child born to parents who were highly-regarded academics, their father in economics and their mother in history. Joel attended NYU film school, after which he began his career in movies as an assistant editor, cutting his teeth on several low-budget horror films, including pal Sam Raimi's now-legendary übergorefest, The Evil Dead in 1982. Ethan graduated Princeton with a degree in philosophy that same year and the two decided to branch out on their own. Although their credits list Joel as the director, Ethan the producer and both as co-writers, the brothers share all their duties evenly on-set.

The brothers' first entry into the Coen collection was Blood Simple (1985), a stylish and clever film noir that earned the young siblings international critical kudos. The film also starred a fresh young face named Frances McDormand, whom Joel would later marry. They followed this with the outrageous comedy (and the first of their, so far, three kidnap-themed movies) Raising Arizona in 1987, with Holly Hunter and Nicholas Cage, creating what many agree is the finest portrayal of white trash in screen history. This was followed by the off-beat and riveting gangster drama Miller's Crossing in 1990 and then Barton Fink, the tale of a 1930's Hollywood screenwriter who slowly descends into madness. The film won Best Picture, Director, and Best Actor (John Turturro) at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, as well as two New York Film Critics Awards, three Oscar nominations and one Golden Globe nomination. Next in 1994 was the Joel Silver-produced Hudsucker Proxy, a Preston Sturges/Frank Capra homage that featured Tim Robbins as a naive young Capitalist in training and Paul Newman as the crafty industrialist pulling his strings. Finally there was Fargo, the now-classic tale of a pregnant Minnesota police chief's search for three of the most inept criminals in the annals of crime movies. The film won 1996 Oscars for Best Screenplay for the frères Coen and Best Actress for Mrs. C., Frances McDormand.

The Coens latest opus is The Big Lebowski, a mistaken-identity comic adventure in the Raymond Chandler mold, about a 60's leftover named Jeff "the Dude" Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) who's mistaken for another Jeff Lebowski--this one being the very rich Jeff Lebowski. The Dude, as he likes to be called, takes this misunderstanding and uses it as a psychedelic roadmap for one stony adventure after another through the back streets, bowling alleys and mansions of L.A. And through the Coens' eyes, L.A. has never looked quite like this! Lebowski is a feast for the eyes, the ears and the funnybone and is populated with the most outrageous cast of eccentric characters in any film since bizarro icon Federico Fellini took the long good-bye to that big studio in the sky. Check it out.

The Coens sat down recently to discuss the amazing collection of celluloid canvas that they've given the world. They are an interesting contrast. Joel, tall and thin, has a stillness and focus about him, never moving from the chair he's firmly planted himself in, while Ethan, smaller, wiry and more intense, is given to sudden fits of pacing about the room which he is currently occupying. They frequently finish each other's thoughts and, as one journalist rather perceptively put it, one can almost picture them as a latter-day Laurel & Hardy, sharing the same bed, wearing matching monogrammed pajamas and night caps. In reality, they are just a couple of nice, midwestern Jewish guys who happen to have an unquenchable appetite for movies and talent for movie-making.

So how do a couple kids from St. Louis Park, MN fall in love with the movies?
Joel Coen: Well, they had this show on TV called Mel Jazz's Matinee Movie. Mel Jazz was the guy who introduced the movie and he also sold Munce TV's and, what was the other thing, Eth'?
(Ethan Coen is pacing the room now).
Ethan Coen: His other sponsor was Downtown Chevytown.
Joel: Yeah, he was really, in a way, a very eclectic programmer...
Ethan: He was a visionary...
Joel: A visionary, yeah. And sort of a precursor to a lot of the sort of, great film programmers that turned up on cable networks later on. One day he'd show, like,
8 1/2, and the next day he'd show Son of Hercules. (laughs). Ethan's theory was that he'd bought the whole Joe Levine catalogue...
Ethan: Right...
(Ethan stops pacing and sits).
Joel:...and would just indiscriminately show whatever was...
Ethan: He'd just kind of interrupt the middle of 8 1/2 and go "Wow! This movie is really wild, isn't it?"
(Both Coens laugh)(So does the interviewer).
Joel: He had other really insightful things to say during the break. So we'd watch The Matinee Movie as kids...Steve Reeves, Fellini, Doris Day movies...
Ethan: Then later at night, at eleven, there was Downtown Chevytown Theater. And they had Tarzan movies on that frequently. And those Johnny Sheffield Tarzan knock-off movies. He played "Boy" in the old Tarzan movies, then he got too old to play "Boy," so they gave him his own series of movies.
Joel: That was Bomba the Jungle Boy, wasn't it?
Ethan: Was it?!
Joel: Yeah. Downtown Chevytown was kind of a mix of Tarzan and A Touch of Mink. That was the stuff we really liked.
Ethan: Yeah. Isn't it interesting, though...
(Ethan gets up and paces some more).
Ethan: The whole Johnny Sheffield phenomena is kind of a Jean-Pierre Leaud thing, you know? He got older so his character had to get older.

"The 400 Blows of the Jungle"?
Joel & Ethan: Yeah! (laugh).

Did you start out making little super 8 films as kids?
Joel: Yeah. When we got a little older around 11 or 12...we remade a lot of the stuff we'd seen on Mel Jazz's Matinee Movie. I remember doing a remake of The Naked Prey...
Ethan: Yeah, jungle movies really made a mark...

How did you film The Naked Prey in St. Louis Park?
Ethan: Well, we had trees. (laughs)
(Ethan sits for a spell).
Joel: Yeah, we'd have a couple kids who would be natives and much more impressive than that was the remake we did of Advise and Consent, which is a Washington, sort of political thriller. I think that was a Super 8 two-reeler. It was...
Ethan: Pretty ambitious...

Did having two academicians as parents help foster a more creative thinking style for you as kids?
Joel: Well they certainly had no connection to the movie business, although they went to movies. They were certainly very open to any kind of, you know, when we first started doing this it wasn't alarming to them in any way.

Were you guys always writing together when you were in college?
Joel: Not really until I'd started working as an assistant editor on low budget, sort of, splatter movies. Then Ethan and I started writing...a lot of these guys came in and wanted scripts written, these producers who were looking for very low budget things.
(Ethan now stops pacing, stands).

What were some of the movies you worked on?
Joel: They mostly had "Dead" in the title. The best one was The Evil Dead, Sam Raimi's first movie, and that's how we got to know Sam, who's an old friend of ours. The rest were all those sort of early 80's Friday the 13th knockoffs: Fear No Evil, Nightmare...you know, they were all...

Scantily-clad girls running from guys with big knives.
Joel: Right. Evil Dead was the only really distinguished one I worked on.

So how did Blood Simple come about?
Ethan (as he sits): Having written these things, especially for Sam, and going through the process of watching people raise the money for their own movies, starting with very limited, or no experience, as we had, in production...we figured, if they can do it, why not us?
Joel: And we'd been writing together, so we thought we'd write something that theoretically we could do for a low enough budget that we could go out and raise the money for ourselves. And Sam was very helpful in terms of he'd sort of gone about setting up a legal entity in order to raise it, what you had to do...
Ethan: And some people aren't very forthcoming with that sort of information and want to treat it as a sort of trade secret, but Sam was really generous in terms of giving us all the benefit of his experience.
Joel: Yeah, he was an early mentor of ours in terms of showing us how to get something off the ground.

How difficult was that first one? Was it a major hurdle?
Joel: Very difficult. It's a very frustrating process raising money that way, especially in the economic climate at the time...It took about a year to finally raise the money. To be honest with you, it was the last time we had any real trouble getting money for a movie.

I thought you perfectly captured Arizona in Raising Arizona. Did you research the area at all before you shot there?
Joel: We'd never even been there before we shot the movie! We liked the landscape, or the idea of the landscape...
Ethan: We had this sort of cartoon idea about cactus, really...
Joel: Yeah because you really only get the Saguaros around there, you know?
Ethan: We didn't know anything. We were going to shoot in Tuscon, but when we went there, it was much greener, not the sort of classic desert with Saguaro, which was what we were after.
Joel: It was the landscape we wanted and then the title that we came up with.

You came up with the title and then the story?!
Joel: Early on...
Ethan: Yeah, early on...

Do you guys outline before you write, or just write?
Ethan: Just write...
Joel: Generally we do. Depending on the script, we may have a sort of vague idea where we want things to end up...but never outlined or rigorously laid out in any way before we write.

How long do you generally work on a script, or is there no set amount of time?
Ethan: No set amount of time. Some take longer than others. Then it also gets complicated by the fact that frequently, actually more and more, we'll put one aside and then move onto something else, or because an actor that we're writing a part for isn't available for whatever reason. It might be years after starting a script that we actually get around finish and shoot it.

Do you usually cast in your head before you shoot?
Joel: There's a little bit of a mix always going on. Even from Blood Simple on, we would write specific parts for a specific actor, someone whose work we knew or who we knew personally and were friends with. So there's always been a mix of parts for specific actors and parts where we're not sure who's going to play them. In Blood Simple, for example with Emmet Walsh's part, we wrote that for him. We knew his work. Holly's part in Raising Arizona, was written for her, but Holly was an old friend of ours.
Ethan: Yeah, Holly was Fran (McDormand's) roommate when Fran did Blood Simple.
Joel: John Turturro we knew before Miller's Crossing because he went to school with Fran...you know...

You guys have a very distinctive visual and narrative style. Were there any specific filmmakers who influenced you heavily as you got older?
Ethan: Well that's hard to say. You can look at specific movies. I mean, when we brought Barton Fink to Cannes, we said to Roman Polanski that we were very lucky he was President of the jury because that film certainly owes a lot to Polanski with films like Repulsion and The Tenant. I think it's kind of like, movie-to-movie the influences vary and I think they've tended to be more literary influences than filmic. Miller's Crossing is pretty much a Dashiell Hammett story, but it was his novels we were thinking of, not the movies (adapted from them).

The Big Lebowski actually reminded me of something Raymond Chandler would have written.
Joel: Yeah...
Ethan: Yeah...
Joel: And again (Ethan gets up and starts pacing again) we were thinking of his novels, except in certain passages. The scene where Jeff Bridges passes out and Sam Elliott narrates saying "Darkness washed over The Dude..." that was sort of lifted from a different language, from Murder My Sweet, the Edward Dmytryk movie.

Was Barton Fink partially born from your own experience as writers and the insanity that the writing process can create?
Joel: I don't know...We both read this book called "City of Nets" by Otto Freidrich...
Ethan: It was about Hollywood in the 40's, specifically about German expatriates in Hollywood. You know, Schoenberg and Thomas Mann living in Santa Monica. It just sounds so funny...There was this other book called "Faulkner In Hollywood." It was kind of reading that book and thinking, uh...
Joel: Again, we thought of the two Johns (Goodman and Turturro), putting them in a movie, one next to the other. That's sort of how that got started. And also thinking about this idea of a big, deserted hotel. So it was those three things: the Otto Freidrich book, those two actors and thinking about the hotel.
Ethan: There was a lot of Jim Thompson influence there, as well...
Joel: Yeah, Jim Thompson has this novel set in an empty hotel, called "Hell of a Woman."
So it was kind of a weird mix.
(Ethan sits).

Hudsucker was your first foray into "mainstream" Hollywood with Joel Silver producing. Were you hoping that would be your breakthrough into the mainstream?
Ethan: Well yeah, sure...
Joel: It's the lowest-grossing movie we've done. And the most expensive.
Ethan: It's not that we were looking for a mainstream success necessarily, but anytime we do a movie, we want the people who financed it to come out well.
Joel: Yeah, we generally work with people we like and they put a certain amount of trust in you to make something that's going to work. So you're disappointed when it doesn't. You know, it happens. It's hard to predict, that's for sure. I mean, I never would have predicted that Fargo would have been the movie that grossed the most of all of our...
Ethan: Right...Hudsucker was the movie that was most directly influenced by other movies, Preston Sturges and that kind of thing.
(Ethan starts pacing again)

If anything, when people read Fargo did they say that nobody outside of the midwest is going to get this?
Ethan: Yeah, but then again, we knew the movie's cost would be so cheap, that it'd be hard to lose. So we thought that, okay, maybe it wouldn't be a huge, big commercial hit, but for $6 million...
Joel: Who cares?
Ethan: Right. Who cares?

Fargo was based on a true story, right?
Joel: No. It says it was a true story at the beginning, but it was actually all made up. We wanted to write a movie that was a "true story" sort of genre. We thought that if we did something where we told the audience up front was a true story, that they'd allow you to do things they wouldn't normally allow you to do, if they thought it was fiction. So it allowed us to introduce the heroine after 40 minutes without pissing people off. Or Fran's scene with the Japanese guy that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the plot. It'll make people more accepting if they're not prepped for a thriller. That way they'll be like "Well, it must've happened this way, 'cause it's true, right?"

How did people in Minnesota react to Fargo?
Joel: Well, it was very split. People either thought it was very funny and that they were in a unique position to appreciate it, or they felt that we were distorting and exaggerating and being very patronizing and cruel. The other funny thing we kept running into were the people who'd say "I don't talk like that, but I know someone who does." (laughs) The reaction to the movie everywhere was bigger and more widespread than we expected...Even with Raising Arizona, which is pretty hard to be offended by. It's such a broad comedy. But people in Arizona were very offended by it.

You've experimented with pretty much ever genre of storytelling. What's next?
Ethan: Well, we've never done a dog movie, like Old Yeller, or a western. (Ethan sits).
Joel: Raising Arizona got close to it in parts. We wanted to do a movie with Fran and a pal of Fran's as toxic waste inspectors. They'd walk around in the big suits, you know, inspecting toxic waste dumps.
Ethan: Kind of a Troma comedy.
Joel: We did write a western actually called The Sons of Ben Coffee. It's more of a TV movie, though, because it's only like a half hour long.
Ethan: It's kind of a contemplation of man's passage on this earth in the old west.
Joel: And we've been working on an adaptation of The Odyssey...
Ethan: Updating The Odyssey...
Joel: Yeah. Set in the American south during the depression. Mostly because we want to see in the opening during the titles "Based upon The Odyssey by Homer." (Coens laugh) (Interviewer laughs)

Gonna stick Kirk Douglas in there somewhere?
Joel: No. Goodman was the Cyclops, though. He's a member of the Ku Klux Klan and he's wearing one of those hoods with only one hole cut out. (laughs).
Ethan: Yeah, we've actually written a lot of that.
Joel: We've also written a movie about a barber in northern California in the late 40's who wants to go into the dry cleaning business. It doesn't have a title, actually.
Ethan: We need someone to finance our TV movie, really. Ben Coffee. Maybe we could make it one of The Contemplations, Joel, although it's a little long for that.

What are The Contemplations?
(At this point both Coens trade knowing glances and start laughing in synch. It borders on being disturbing and the Interviewer almost bolts from the room, expecting their braying cackles of laughter to perhaps summon the Devil Himself. The laughter soon subsides, along with the Interviewer's uneasiness).
(Ethan starts pacing again).
Ethan: Over the years we've written a bunch of shorts to be used in an anthology, The Contemplations. It starts with a guy going through this dusty old library and he finds this old leather-bound book called The Contemplations. Each contemplation is then a chapter of the movie.
(Ethan stops pacing. Looks at Joel. Joel looks at Ethan. That synchronous laughter starts again. Heart-in-throat, the Interviewer musters up courage for a final question:)

Any advice for first-time filmmakers?
Joel: Make the shooting schedule as long as you can, even if you have to sacrifice other things that seem important. The trade-off towards time for shooting is always the smart one to make. The big compromises you make are the result of not enough time to shoot. Cut anything that costs money...pay people less. You're always going to be better off the more days you have.

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Charlotte Rampling: The Hollywood Interview

Actress Charlotte Rampling.



CHARLOTTE RAMPLING: WHAT LIES BENEATH
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the June 2001 issue of Venice Magazine.

Often compared to Lauren Bacall for her cat-like beauty and femme fatale movie roles, Charlotte Rampling has been illuminating the world's movie screens (and giving its male members heart palpitations in the process) for nearly 40 years. Born in Sturmer, England February 5, 1946, the daughter of a British colonel who became a NATO commander. Rampling and her older sister spent part of their childhood in France, educated at the prestigious Jeanne d'Arc Academie pour Jeunes Filles in Versailles and later at the exclusive St. Hilda's school back in England. Rampling initially entered show biz as a model, then won a small role in Richard Lester's The Knack and How to Get It (1965). The following year brought triumph and tragedy to Rampling: a star-making turn in the hit film Georgy Girl and the suicide of her older sister.

Determined from then on to do something meaningful with her life and abandon the "frivolous," Rampling turned down the dozens of "dollybird" roles offered to her and was cast as the young wife of a Nazi industrialist family in Luchino Visconti's controversial and sensational epic The Damned (1969). Her taste for provocative material continued from there, reaching its zenith with her role in The Night Porter (1974), a twisted tale of a concentration camp survivor (Rampling) reunited with her former Nazi lover ten years after the war's end. This highly controversial (and at the time, X-rated) film catapulted Rampling to international stardom, becoming a sort of thinking man's sex symbol. Her role in John Boorman's cult sci-fi film Zardoz (1974) opposite Sean Connery helped to solidify this status.

Rampling continued to work extensively in Europe, coming Stateside for memorable turns in the Philip Marlowe mystery Farewell My Lovely (1975) opposite Robert Mitchum, the Jaws rip-off Orca (1977, which she cheerfully admits "I did for the money"), Woody Allen's suicidal girlfriend in Stardust Memories (1980), and Paul Newman's turncoat lover in Sidney Lumet's The Verdict (1982).

Following her marriage to French composer Jean-Michel Jarre (son of legendary film composer Maurice Jarre), Rampling relocated to Paris and worked steadily in French and European productions throughout the 80's and 90's, doing an occasional part in American productions such as Angel Heart (1987) and Wings of the Dove (1997). Perhaps her most notorious, and in many circles most lauded, effort during this period was Nagisa Oshima's Max My Love (1986). Written by Luis Buñuel's frequent collaborator Jean-Claude Carierre, Max was the blackly comedic story of a woman having a passionate love affair--with a chimpanzee! Rampling got raves from all who saw the film, which got shoddy distribution on this side of the pond.

Rampling's latest effort is Under the Sand, directed by enfant terrible filmmaker François Ozon. In it, Rampling plays Marie, a woman whose husband of 25 years, Jean (Bruno Cremer), disappears during a casual swim in the ocean while on holiday. With no body present to confirm his death, Marie continues the relationship in her mind, having long talks with Jean, pouring him coffee in the morning, and so on, much to the consternation of concerned friends and a new man who wants to enter her life. A major hit in France, Under the Sand is a powerful film full of emotion and understatement, and is a breathtaking showcase for the incandescent Rampling. It is currently playing in selected theaters.

Charlotte Rampling is still every bit as beautiful today at 55, as she was when she made her screen debut 36 years ago. A refreshingly candid woman with an infectious laugh and charming sense of humor, Rampling continues to make her home in Paris, where she is currently separated from Jarre. She met up with Venice recently during a brief Los Angeles stay to promote Under the Sand.

The role of Marie in Under the Sand must've been a terrific part for an actress since you were able to express so much without dialogue.
Charlotte Rampling: Yeah, I was able to express a great deal through other mediums. So much of it was just "being there."

Was it difficult to go to some of those places, those lonely places?
I suppose it was, but you don't think about it at the time. It's usually afterwards that it hits you, then it goes away after a few weeks. But while it's happening you know that you have to go there and you just do it.

I saw in the notes that there was a six month break in the shooting between the film's two halves. Was it tough coming back after that long a hiatus?
No, it wasn't. When I first met François Ozon, he wanted to shoot the first part where the husband dies, then stop shooting and work on the screenplay with me for three months, and then film the second part. But, (laughs) because we had such money problems, nobody wanted to finance a film like this, it went on a bit longer. So in the end, it was all part of the process.

It sounds like you had a lot of input in the script. Is there a lot of you in this character?
Yeah, there is a lot of me. Not specific, but a lot of the way I am. There's a great deal of dichotomy in her character, and in me, and in all of us, and as actors, we bring that out. We expose what we all have lying dormant: the grief feeling, the loss feeling, the feeling of being abandoned which we all have and have had at one time or another. Those feelings can be very terrifying. In this film, we create a situation where you do actually feel that. You have this situation where a husband disappears but there's no body, but how do you make the audience feel what Marie is going through afterwards? I think that's what people think about a lot when they see this film, because it could happen. To any of us. At any time.

You now live in France and lived there as a child, as well?
Yes, my father was in the army and was posted at Fontinbleu. That's why I'm still able to speak fluent French. He put my sister and I in French school, kicking and screaming the whole way. We hated it! Nobody spoke English and we couldn't understand a thing anyone was saying. And it was a convent, and we weren't Catholic, we were Protestant. So we just sat! (laughs) Then when I married Jean-Michel I settled in France in '78.

How did you become drawn to the arts?
Completely coincidentally, in a little show in the suburbs of London where I lived. I would put on little comedy shows with my sister and other people, and we did a little thing singing in French since we just got back from France. And everybody loved it and it all got quite good! So I got carried away by it all and thought 'Well, obviously I'm going to be a cabaret singer.' Well, obviously my father said 'no way,' put me in school and that was that. Then some time later, in one of those funny stories, someone saw me on the street and put me in Richard Lester's film The Knack. From then, things just sort of took off.

You were already modeling by that point, right?
Yes, although I was a rather hopeless model. I only did it for six months. I wasn't the look at all, at that time. The look was like Jean Shrimpton, Twiggy. I have these sort of heavy, slanted eyes, more of a 1940's look that they tried to put in these 60's fashions, and it just didn't work.

Georgy Girl was the movie that put you on the map. Tell us about that.
I got the screenplay and read it and thought (my part was) just one hell of a horrible girl! (laughs) I was actually hated after that by many people for a really long time. I was very upset. I wanted to be liked, and I played this bitch with such conviction that nobody would cast me after that! (laughs) They were all convinced I was this downright, complete bitch! (laughs) I got completely typecast after that, throwing my baby away in the hospital. I mean, that was outrageous, wasn't it? "Here, take it! Free, gratis and for nothing, with none of the pain and discomfort. Instant family!" Quite a line! But I loved playing that film, because that's when I realized that I had a really wicked alter ego, and that one was the one that was more interesting to use in cinema. I always sought out roles after that which were a bit left of center.

The next big film you did was Visconti's The Damned.
Yeah, the reason I went off to Italy after that was, it was all sort of "dollybird" roles in British cinema, you know? It was all about being pretty and lighthearted, and it wasn't about grit anymore, because we were finished with kitchen sink drama by that point. I wasn't too suited to the whole "mod" thing. Doing The Damned then put me into a whole new "theater of life," so to speak. (laughs) Visconti was really like my master, or mentor. I didn't even know who he was, or what his kind of cinema was all about when I met him. I was a very young, very uneducated person. I had not wanted to study anything. I said to him "I don't think I can play this role. She's in her 30's, has kids and a family and I don't even understand this story..." Visconti says "I will dress you. I will make you up. I will turn you into this character. You will be absolutely exquisite! And you will play for me!" (laughs) "You have it. It's all here. You have to imagine that you are this woman, because you are every woman!" (laughs) So he really became my mentor.

You did John Boorman's Zardoz after that, which has a strong cult following, although many people are still baffled by it.
Some people think that Zardoz is the film. It's a cult film beyond cult films. I loved it. It was so wacky. I had no idea what we were doing. Everybody was just doing weird things in these weird costumes. Nobody knew what they were doing! (laughs) It was great.

What were Boorman and Connery like to work with?
John was wonderful, like a naive poet who's illuminated by the Grail, by this mystical journey. He's a wonderful man. I just saw him again recently. He's very sweet. And Sean, well...Sean is Sean, what can I say? (laughs) I prefer Sean on-screen to off-screen. 'Nuff said.

The next film that really established you as a serious actress was The Night Porter. That was the second film, after The Damned, that you did with Dirk Bogarde. Did you get to know him well?
Yes, very well, we remained very close friends until his death. He was the reason that I got The Night Porter. He said he wouldn't do it without me. He'd had the screenplay for some time and hadn't wanted to do it. Then one day he saw one of (director) Liliana Cavani's films on television and decided that he was ready to make it. If you ever read any of Dirk's books, then you got to know him. His books are absolutely who he was: a renaissance man, a real gentleman.

Tell us about the experience of doing The Night Porter.
What can I tell you? It was hell. I knew it was something I wanted to do, but when you're younger, you don't really think about any other implications, you know? I had just had my first son, and then suddenly three months later, I had to sort of put him in his basket, go off to Rome and make this film. We started with the concentration camps scenes because she wanted us to get right in there, and she was right. There are some films that just sort haunt you forever. The Night Porter was one of those, I think, as is Under the Sand.

Farewell My Lovely was a wonderful film. How was Mitchum to work with?
He was a fantastic man. He tried to hide everything about himself that was good, and tried to come off like this huge badie, (laughs) but was really a very sensitive, very fine man, which I saw little bits of when he wasn't fooling around too much with the actor who played Moose Malloy. (laughs) (Doing Mitchum) "I'm lookin' after Moose!" And they'd be in some bar down the beach getting drunk!

You got to work with Woody Allen in Stardust Memories, playing a character that was so different from most of your other portrayals, so fragile. Tell us about Woody.
Woody called me and offered me the part, and I'd just given birth to my other son, and I didn't think I could do it. We eventually worked something out, where I could work on and off for five months, because he was taking a very experimental approach to making this film, very impressionistic, so it was a brilliant way to work. He was in an interesting place himself personally at the time, having just broken up with Diane Keaton, and wasn't yet with Mia. So being in between, he was in a very interesting place creatively. When he cast me, he said he wanted my character to be his ideal woman, and made this whole sort of game around this fact and how do we make her Woody's ideal woman. What I learned was that for Woody, the ideal woman was someone who was absolutely nuts 27 days out of the month, and for the rest of the time, is so perfect, lovely and charming that you can't resist her. (laughs)

The Verdict. Tell us about Lumet and Newman.
We rehearsed that for two weeks in a studio in New York. Sidney likes to rehearse all his films completely, almost like a huge dance rehearsal. We all knew what we were doing, so that when we shot, we went really fast. Lumet's an amazing director, just the way he handles the job of directing. Once rehearsal was over, we were all on our own, which is fantastic. You've been through all the sort of teething problems, and you're okay, so you can just get on with your acting. It was one of the most coherent shoots I've been on in terms of the most complicated scenes just being completely there. With Newman, it was a really extraordinary role for him, and a risky role in many ways, playing this guy having to come to terms with all the demons. He was a sweetheart, absolutely sweet.

You've been working in Europe almost exclusively for the past decade.
No, I really wanted to go underground in a sense and wanted to stay close to home. There's less "business" in European show business. It's more of a community. It's not as competitive there as it is here. The stakes are much less in Europe. Here, the stakes are so high. I mean, nobody in Europe gets $20 million for doing a film! It's manageable in Europe. Nobody wants to rape, and smash and kill to make a deal there. Here, I don't know how these people manage their situations, I really don't. The other reason I've stayed close to home is that I had three kids to raise, who are now grown, and didn't want to miss out on their childhoods anymore than I already had. My son Barnaby wants to be a director and he's making shorts, directing music videos. He lives in London. My son David is a magician, who used to practice on us at home, and my daughter Emilie works as a fashion accessories designer.

What's next on your slate?
A comedy! At last, image that! Back to my roots! Michel Blanc, an actor-director, has written a film called See How We Dance, which is an ensemble piece about these characters that sort of tango in and out of each others' lives. I've also got a film called Signs and Wonders that should be coming out in the States very soon.

You obviously enjoy other things aside from acting. What is your life like in Paris?
Well, I'm very contemplative. I love to sort of be around my life. It's not all that interesting, but it's something that I need to do in order to move on and to keep going. I have to sort of go away from the bright lights so that I can actually survive and come back, and I have come back, so it's great! Otherwise you get completely emptied out, and there's nothing left in there.

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Bryan Singer: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker Bryan Singer.


BRYAN SINGER:
AN APT PUPIL GOES TO THE HEAD OF THE CLASS
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the November 1998 issue of Venice Magazine.


Bryan Singer was born in New York in 1966, and raised in suburban New Jersey. Following the path of his idol Steven Spielberg (Singer's production company Bad Hat Harry Productions, is a direct reference to a line from Jaws, his favorite film), Singer started making 8mm films in his early teens, as well as experimenting with still photography. After graduating high school in 1984, Singer spent two years at New York's School of Visual Arts before transferring to the University of Southern California's prestigious School of Cinema-Television after being accepted to its Critical Studies program. Singer quickly made a name for himself at USC among his classmates as the one to watch in his class. His 8mm films stood out from the pack with their bold visual imagination and polished presentation.

After graduating from 'SC, Singer wrote and directed Lion's Den, an award-winning short chronicling the lives of five high school friends who come together after graduation. It starred Singer's childhood friend Ethan Hawke, and was shot on 16mm for the bargain price of $15,000. With the success of Lion's Den, Singer found financing for Public Access, which he co-wrote, produced and directed. The film, a thriller/character study, told the story of a mysterious drifter who arrives in a small town and sets its inhabitants against each other by means of a public access cable talk show. The film took the Grand Jury Prize at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival, which opened the flood gates of opportunity for the young filmmaker. Singer broke ground in Hollywood in 1995 with the double Oscar-winning thriller The Usual Suspects, which had the world asking "Who is Keyser Söse?" and quickly established Singer as the leading filmmaker of his generation. Singer's latest is an adaptation of Stephen King's novella, Apt Pupil, a thriller about an all-American boy (Brad Renfro) discovering that a Nazi war criminal (Sir Ian McKellen) lives in his neighborhood. In exchange for keeping the old man's secret, the boy demands that the Nazi teach him all he knows about the war, Nazism, and the nature of evil itself. Apt Pupil boasts virtuoso filmmaking from Singer and top-notch performances from its stellar cast, including chilling turns by McKellen and Renfro. Produced by Jane Hamsher and Don Murphy (Natural Born Killers), the Tri-Star release hits theaters October 23.

In person Bryan Singer is the antithesis of the self-absorbed, pretentious filmmaker. He appears much younger than his 32 years and carries himself with a humility that is refreshing, becoming animated and passionate when discussing his greatest love: film.

All three of your features have rather dark subject matter. Have you always been drawn toward that sort of material?
Brian Singer: Yeah, I think so. Most of my little student films I made were filled with despair and had these unhappy endings.

How did you come by Apt Pupil?
I read the story when I was in college and I always thought it would make an interesting movie. I think the thing that most interested me is that the terrible deeds that occurred so long ago could somehow manifest themselves into contemporary society.

Was it difficult adapting the story?
Very, yeah. The book takes place over four years and involves a lot of reoccurring violence from both characters. I found that as I was adapting it and trying to bring it to the conclusion that the book had, I found it very difficult. Although it works very well on the page, the written word allows you more room for imagination, whereas on film the experience has to be more believable, I think. If I had shot it like it was in the book, it would have come off as repetitive and exploitative, which was definitely not the way to go given the subject matter. So I tried to capture the essence of the book, the theme of the book, the terror of the book and celebrate that. It was difficult, though. We went through a lot of different drafts (of the script) and explored staying closer to the book, but in the end it took some time before we came up with something that worked. But I love the book. I'll always love the book.

The thing I always loved about the book was that it was a perfect metaphor for how easily innocence is corrupted by evil.
Yeah, I agree. And the other thing is, it's important to realize that this film is not about fascism. It's not about racism. It's not about Nazism per se. It uses that as a device to talk about evil or evil deeds. I think that the character of (the Nazi) Dussander easily could have been a serial killer, a degenerate, Pol Pot...or any number of incarnations. It's about what the character represents.

It must have been interesting working with a relatively new actor like Brad Renfro and a seasoned veteran like McKellen.
Yeah, it wasn't that much different from doing The Usual Suspects, where I had actors coming together from different backgrounds and levels of experience. It's what made (Apt Pupil) exciting to me: that mixture of oil and water, the coming together of two completely individuals is what intrigued me most about the book, so why not try to recreate some of that energy in casting? I auditioned a number of young people and I found Brad to be, by far, the most real and raw, and simultaneously, the most intelligent and talented. With Ian McKellen, we were actually introduced by a mutual friend early on. I had a list of a number of the sort of obvious older, European actors...I wanted, like with Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects, to have this character played by someone who wasn't as familiar to mainstream audiences, which Kevin wasn't at the time. I also thought that Ian brought a degree of British charm and flamboyance to this otherwise stoic German character.

Do you generally give a lot of direction to actors, or just sort of let them go and watch it happen?
It depends on the actor. It depends on the day. It depends on the moment. It depends on the shot. Sometimes the actor isn't aware of where the camera is, or how important the blocking for a scene is. Sometimes the actor might forget where we are in the course of the movie. They feel where they are in terms of the arc of their character, but they don't see the movie in their head the way I do. So sometimes certain things are called for which I try to fill in, but otherwise I try to give them as much freedom as possible.

How much do you rehearse?
I don't rehearse. We do a run through with blocking and on this movie we did a read-through with part of the cast to see how it sounded. Richard Dreyfuss was nice enough to read Ian's part, who couldn't make it because he was in London doing a play.

What's the trick to adapting a book for the screen?
The trick is your movie is separate from that book. Do whatever it takes to make the story make sense on screen. The biggest mistake a filmmaker or screenwriter can make is to get mired down in details from the book that don't work on-screen. A film is written three times: once on the page, once on the set, and once again in the editing room. You're constantly recreating what that movie is every time you go in to work with those materials.

How did you become interested in film?
My neighbor was a photographer for the high school yearbook and he was really cool, so I thought it'd be cool to be a yearbook photographer. That's how I started.

Who was the filmmaker who inspired you initially?
Steven Spielberg. Actually, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, but it was really when I was 16 and E.T. came out I was blown away by the film, then they profiled Spielberg's life on "Nightline." And all of the sudden a personality was given to the man who made the movie that moved myself and so many people. Here he was a Jewish kid from the suburbs, like me, sort of a nerd, like me, a drawer full of 8mm movies...and I thought, hey, maybe I should do that too. It was such a relief because I figured out what I wanted to do with my life, even though it wasn't being a pilot, or marine biologist, like a lot of the people I'd grown up with.

Have you met Spielberg?
Yeah, he had seen The Usual Suspects before it came out, and I got word when I was at a film festival in Thailand that he wanted to meet me and (screenwriter) Chris McQuarrie. So Chris and I went to Amblin', he walked into the room...for twenty minutes I was nervous, then I was completely comfortable, felt like I was talking to a fellow filmmaker. I mean, I'll always be starstruck around him. I saw him at Deauville a couple weeks ago and it was still like "I'm talking with Steven Spielberg!" He's been great to me. He, Robert Altman and John Schlesinger are my DGA sponsors, which was amazing! I also went on the set of the new Star Wars film when I was in London, which was an incredible experience, because I'm doing this very effects-intensive film next (X-Men). I also got to go down to the Titanic set in Rosarito and watch Cameron work, which was a real treat. I learned a lot. All these people have been very accommodating and helpful to me. It's good to talk to those sorts of people about these sorts of movies because they have a better sense of how to do them. They also don't let the effects govern them. Story is always the most important thing to them. Then of course, you forget everything you've heard and make it your own! (laughs)

Do you think it's crucial for young filmmakers to have a mentor?
I think exposure to these filmmakers is crucial, but I don't know about mentoring. I've never really had a mentor. I've never really spent that much time with any of these gentlemen to consider them a mentor. But I think exposure, and conversation and questions to them are important to give, if anything, a feeling that they've overcome the same hurtles you're trying to and how they did it. It can be anything from informative to inspiring.

How was your experience at USC?
It was great. I was exposed to so many great films. It's been really great being an alumnus. I was down there recently for a ceremony, and afterwards myself, Randal Kleiser (Grease), John Milius and George Lucas went over to the film school and surprised the kids who were up all night editing their final thesis projects. It was a real thrill to be able to waltz into the editing area with these people and watch the kids react. Lucas and Milius just poured out the stories to the students. Each finished the other's stories, it was great. A once in a lifetime kind of thrill. I felt kind of in the middle. I've only done a few films and these guys are like, history! So I just sort of stood back, listened and enjoyed the moment. It was one of the best nights I've had.

What's surprised you most about success?
I guess the fact that you think it will change everything for you, and it doesn't. I went back to my high school reunion thinking I'd be "Ha, ha, ha, look at me," and it just wasn't like that. I sat at the same table the whole night with the same three geeks who I was best friends with. For the first twenty minutes there were people who talked to me who'd never talked to me before, then there were others who just ignored me, thinking it wouldn't be cool to talk to me at all. It's hard to know how to act in situations like that, I guess. I never had any real bitterness or resentment. I just tried to stay focused on the work. But success doesn't take away any of your fears, or anxieties. Those things stay put, regardless.

Any advice for first-time directors?
Once you have a great script, get a great producer, one who can be very objective. And remember, a film is written three times: once on the page, once on the set and once in the editing room. And don't ever be a slave to something just because you wrote it, or shot it. You have a chance to remake your movie in the editing room. Take advantage of it. If you look at any of your favorite movies really carefully you can see where they were cut, and they're great because of those decisions. Don't be afraid to cut.

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Billy Bob Thornton: The Hollywood Interview

Actor/Filmmaker/Musician Billy Bob Thornton.


BILLY BOB'S TRIPLE THREAT
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the November 2001 issue of Venice Magazine.

Few Hollywood insiders have lived the real-life Cinderella stories they often portray on-screen like Billy Bob Thornton has. Born in Hot Springs, Arkansas in 1955, Thornton's years of struggle on the fringes of Hollywood were finally rewarded when his writing/directing/starring labor of love, Sling Blade (1996) became the toast of the indie, and legit, film world, copping the Arkansas native a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for his efforts. From then on, Thornton's spot on Tinseltown's A-list was etched in cement that would have made the denizens of the concrete around Mann's Chinese theater jealous, delivering memorable starring and supporting turns in diverse films such as The Apostle, Primary Colors, A Simple Plan, Armageddon, and Pushing Tin, to name a few.

2000 also saw Thornton direct and produce an elegant, lyrical adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel All the Pretty Horses, and pen (with Tom Epperson) the supernatural thriller The Gift. As 2001 comes to a close, Thornton brings his talents to three distinctly different projects: Barry Levinson's Bandits, in which he plays the screen's most neurotic bank robber since Woody Allen bumbled through Take the Money and Run, The Coen Brothers' moody noir thriller The Man Who Wasn't There, as a stoic barber embroiled in a murder plot, and Marc Forster's Monster's Ball, a visceral masterpiece of a film that has Thornton sizzling the screen as a racist prison guard who finds his life coming apart at the seams. As if that weren't enough to have on one's plate, Billy Bob releases his first solo album this month, entitled Private Radio, a unique blend of country, blues and folk sung by Thornton in a voice described by Rolling Stone.com as "a cross between Leonard Cohen and Tom Petty. These preceding reasons alone are testament to Thornton's versatility and evidence that his status should be elevated from writer/actor/director/producer/musician to that of national treasure.

Billy Bob Thornton sat down with Venice recently over a plate of freshly-sliced papaya to discuss his newest films, the greatness of High Noon, and the beauty of keeping it simple.

We have a lot to talk about. Let's start with Barry Levinson, your director on Bandits.
Billy Bob Thornton: Barry is, first of all, just a great guy, probably the funniest human being I've ever met. We could hardly wait for him to say "Cut" so he could tell us another story. Plus, he's very intuitive. You can real feel him with you while you're doing the scene, and that makes all the difference in the world for an actor, especially if you're doing comedy. I've been pretty fortunate in my career to work with, for the most part, some pretty amazing directors.

Even early on, when you were just doing small parts, you worked with some heavyweights.
Oh yeah, I worked with Taylor Hackford (Blood In, Blood Out), Adrian Lyne (Indecent Proposal). I tell you what I really loved about Taylor, is that he's a music guy, like I am. We hit it off right away because of our mutual love of music. Any time someone's musical, we always hit it off. Bruce Willis is very musical and during the Bandits shoot he would play for the crew a lot of times. That was great. Bruce loves music and does a lot of recording in his home studio, just like I do.

Is that where you cut Private Radio?
Yeah, the whole thing. We mixed at A&M on the radar system, which is where you use all the modern technology, but it still sounds stripped-down, like analog.

You mentioned Bruce Willis earlier. You guys had a great chemistry on-screen.
Yeah, we actually already knew each other. We've been friends for several years. He's the sort of guy that's always been there for me, and I've never forgotten that. In terms of hanging out together, I don't really "hang out," so to speak. I have friends and I'll see them over at their house or if they come over to mine. I'm not a partyer. I don't like going to premieres, and haven't even been to the premieres of all the movies I've been in. I don't like going out to big functions just because that atmosphere makes me uncomfortable. Sometimes you have to go, and when I do, once I'm there I'm usually okay. It's like flying. I don't like to fly, but once I'm on the plane I'm fine. But not before.

Did you guys improv a lot? The whole film had a very naturalistic quality.
We did some. Harley Peyton is such a great writer that we didn't really want to stray too far from the script. But Bruce and I have always found it really easy to sort of riff with one another. Cate (Blanchett) is the same way. Cate's my buddy, so we work real well together. We've been friends since Pushing Tin, and Cate's just one of the coolest people on the planet. When you get to make movies with friends like them and work with a director like Barry, it doesn't get too much better than that.

Tell us about The Man Who Wasn't There, and the Coens.
Once again, it was an honor just to work for them. I'd always wanted to and we'd spoken about it before. When I was nominated for A Simple Plan and they were nominated for Fargo, they sat behind me at the awards show and we got to talking, and every time we saw each other after that, we'd always say "You know, this would be a perfect fit." But part of their genius is that they bide their time. They know when it's the right time and the right part. And this was it. It's one of my favorite parts I've ever played. It's one of the hardest parts I've played, because there wasn't a lot of dialogue to work with.

Do the Coens give a lot of direction or do they leave you alone?
They kind of cast the right person for the part and then love it if you come up with something on your own. Again, they're such good writers, you don't want to digress too much from the script. I did come up with little things that we put into my character. For example, if you look closely at (my character) Ed Crane in the movie, you'll see that he's always doing this little nod. We started calling it the "Ed nod." And that became part of their direction. "I think at the end of the scene it might be time for an Ed nod." That kind of thing.

Let's talk about your background. You grew up in Arkansas.
I was born in Hot Springs but grew up in a little town of about 110 people up in the mountains. We lived in my grandmother's house, which is kind of common among poorer southern families. Close-knit families. I remember when we were really little, we didn't have running water or electricity. I tell my friends that and they laugh: "Billy Bob, you're describing the 19th century, that's impossible." But they don't understand that in the rural south, there are areas where when it's night time, it's pitch black because there's no lights! I mean, we weren't like Lil' Abner, or shit like that, (laughs) but we didn't have much.

Your parents sound like a real study in contrasts: your father was a high school basketball coach and your mom was the town psychic.
Yeah, dad was a hot-headed little Irishman and mom is part Italian and part Choctaw Indian. I remember I'd come home from school as a kid and there'd be all these little white-haired ladies from town waiting for their turn to have a reading. The Gift was based on her and an experience we had as kids. It was a strange household. My dad and I were never close and he died when I was eighteen, of cancer.

Do you have siblings?
Two younger brothers, one of whom is now deceased, also. He had a heart condition and passed away when I was going through a real self-destructive period. His death really made me come to terms with that, get out of the self-destruction and into self-preservation.

That must've been tough for an 18 year-old boy, losing his dad.
Tough on a lot of levels. I'd just graduated high school, and now suddenly I had to be the man of the house. It's also made me really terrified of older men. Maybe it's a need to be accepted by them, or something, 'cause my dad and I never really came to any understanding before he died. (pause) And people wonder where I get these stories, right? (laughs)

Did you take to acting and writing early on?
No. First it was rock n' roll, then it was baseball. I thought I'd try to be a professional baseball player because I was pretty good in high school. Then when I went to try out for the pros, I got injured, busted my collarbone, and that was the end of that.

You struggled for more than a decade out here, supporting yourself with some really demeaning, miserable jobs.
Yeah, but I had this catering job that changed my life. I was working this party where all these real powerful Hollywood types were just filling the room, like a who's who of Hollywood, right? Then this little German guy asks me if I'm an actor. So I said 'Yeah,' and we started talking. He said "You'll never make it just being an actor. You're not good-looking or ugly enough to stand out. Can you write?" I said 'Yeah, I can write. My buddy Tom (Epperson) and I have written a couple things.' "That's the ticket," he said. "Stick with the writing and you'll make it." I go back into the kitchen and one of the other waiters says to me "So what were you and Billy Wilder talking about?"

No way!
Can you believe that, man? (laughs) I had no clue who the man was! But that's when I got really serious about writing. And that is what changed everything.

One False Move (co-written with Tom Epperson) really put you on the map in terms of your career as a writer, jump started your career as a character actor, and was a huge indie hit in 1992.
Yeah, I'm very proud of that and a lot of the credit should also go to the director, Carl Franklin (Devil in a Blue Dress) who's really brilliant. It really upset me how controversial it was for its violence though. I mean, here you have these summer action movies where dozens, hundreds of people get killed with squibs going off in every direction, and it's almost sanitized, like a video game or something. We had a couple scenes of violence in that film that showed violence for what it was: ugly, sick, horrifying, with lasting consequences. Which is worse to show to someone with a sick mind? If you're going to show violence on film, you should be honest about it, and not glamorize it. That's when it becomes dangerous, I think.

Then Sling Blade took you up to the next level.
Yeah, it's funny. The way they do movies now with all this test-marketing stuff. Sling Blade tested very average, was made for $900,000 and then made something like $27 million at the box office. I've had other movies I've done that tested through the roof, like A Family Thing (co-written with Tom Epperson), which was made for $15 million and earned something like $13 million. So you never know.

What kind of film did you shoot Sling Blade on?
We shot it on 35mm with Panavision, the whole deal. But because I shot it back home in Arkansas, a lot of folks were real nice and helpful and we got a lot of stuff for free. We had a great time doing that movie, shot it in 24 days.

Sling Blade had a true genesis from one man show, to short film, to feature. Tell us about that.
The short film was done because I'd worked with the director, George Hickenlooper, on another film and he asked if I had any scripts he could look at. I said 'Yeah, I've got this short film,' and he liked it and we took it from there. I like the short very much. It all came from the character, really, and just grew from there, sort of took on a life of its own. I just knew what this guy looked like, talked like, how he walked, how he smelled. I do that when I read a script. When I read A Simple Plan for the first time, I just knew what this guy looked and sounded like. You just know.

Mike Nichols is one of the greats. Tell us about working with him on Primary Colors.
Mike is another director like Barry Levinson. He gets a kick out of the whole process, laughs a lot during the shoot. He gets very immersed in the movie itself, talks with the actors a lot about the story and their characters. He's a very psychological director and our rehearsals consisted of sitting around a table and psychoanalyzing the characters. Another really terrific thing about that movie is that Elaine May, who wrote the screenplay, was there. So we got to hear Nichols and May comedy routines every day! That was a lot of fun.

Your character was based on Clinton campaign manager James Carville. I know that you're friends with President Clinton. Were you initially gun-shy about doing that part?
I actually called him and asked if he'd mind if I did the movie. He said "Are you kidding? It's a great part. Play it." I played a character based on Carville, but I didn't want to imitate him. I tried to imitate his attitude, but that's it. I wanted to make him a more laid-back, smart-ass southern guy, as opposed to a hyperactive one. (laughs)

It was Mike Nichols who turned you on to All the Pretty Horses, right?
Yeah, he was thinking about directing it for a while, but thought I'd be better for it. How can I start this story? Okay, let me start by saying that my favorite movie of all time is High Noon. I watch it probably three times a month. I think it's a perfect movie. Everything is in that movie. Everything you need to know about human beings is in that movie. The poetry of that movie is so beautiful, yet so simple. I believe in simple stories with complex people, about behavior. When I was given the book of "All the Pretty Horses," I didn't want to direct someone else's movie. I didn't want to film a book. It just all seemed to me like way too much. I get over to Sony and they said "Mike Nichols really wants you to do it! We really want you to do it! Which was probably bullshit. I'm sure they really wanted Spielberg or somebody, but they probably went "Well, Mike wants this asshole..." I'm not sure what happened. Anyway, I had a deal with Miramax, so they had to be involved, too. So we all started to hook up and they started to tell me how things should go. At that point I said "Look, I don't have to direct this movie. I don't need to. I kind of don't even want to. But I love the book. I think Cormac McCarthy is a great writer, and this is the kind of book where if I were as good a writer as Cormac McCarthy, I might have written it. So I would like to do it, but I'm using my crew, not the Star Wars crew like you want. They said "We want a big movie." I said 'Yeah, but the desert's already lit. My crew can probably do this better than your crew. They understand me and they understand how I work. What's hard to light is a 12x12 room, and that's what we do best.' I said 'You understand that I see this as a big character story. So when we're inside, I'm going to shoot this movie just like Sling Blade. When we're outside, it's going to be John Ford. You understand that by hiring me, this is what you're going to get. Is that what you want?' "Oh yeah, yeah!" Then they say: "Who's gonna be in it?" I said 'Here's who's gonna be in it.' They said "We don't want those people. We want these people." So I argued wi