(Rock 'n Roll High School director Allan Arkush, above. Photo courtesy of NBC.)
by Jon Zelazny
Editor’s Note: this article originally appeared at EightMillionStories.com on April 24th.
Jersey City native Allan Arkush has enjoyed a prolific career in television, currently producing and directing for the hit series “Heroes.”
He started in show business at Bill Graham’s legendary Fillmore East concert theater in New York City, then worked for the equally legendary low-budget movie producer Roger Corman. 2009 marks the 30th anniversary of Arkush’s solo directorial debut, the beloved cult classic Rock ‘n Roll High School.
I met with Arkush in his home office in West Los Angeles, and tried to keep from drooling all over his killer record collection.
Did you go to Springsteen last night? I thought he was amazing.
ALLAN ARKUSH: He really was. I thought it was interesting that he started out with some fairly dark songs: “Badlands,” “Darkness on the Edge of Town,” “Outlaw Pete.”
I really loved that “Spirits in the Night.” First time I ever heard it.
That’s a great one. It was on his very first album.
You must be a fan from way back.
I can remember driving in my mother’s car, listening to Scott Muni on WNEW talk about these new records he’d gotten. He said, “Here’s a guy named Bruce Springsteen, and this is a track from his debut album, Greetings From Asbury Park,” and he played “Blinded By the Light.” It immediately took me. I went out to the record store at the Bergen Mall, and there was that album… and even though I was out of work, I bought it. A couple years later, we were making Hollywood Boulevard (1976) when Born to Run came out, and we just played it to death!
I just got into him a few years ago. I married a Jersey girl, so… you kind of have to get with the program. But I got totally hooked on The Rising. Now as a guy who saw just about every great rock band in their prime, where do you rank Springsteen?
You know, my daughters are rock fans, and they’ve heard me talk about all these legendary performers. I told them what you’re really looking for are those times when a band is in the middle of a tour, they’ve got a great record out, so they’re feeding off that energy, and they’re not just playing as well as they can, but exceeding it… and on that night they are the best band in the world. There’s no empirical way to measure that, I said, but you’ll know it when you see it. Sure enough, we go see Springsteen on his last tour. He opened with “Radio Nowhere,” did two older songs, and then kicked into “Promised Land,” and just blew the roof off the place. Both of my daughters looked at me, and I said, “That’s what I was talking about!”
It reminded me of this Hendrix gig—it was April ’68 at the Fillmore, before I worked there; I was an NYU student. His amp blew out, so they took the top off of his speaker, and plugged in two new amps… and this huge feedback loop started. There was so much power coming off of it, you could feel it in the hairs on your arm. Hendrix sort of grabbed that note with his guitar, and it got louder and louder, and he turned to look at the audience over his shoulder. He was smiling, and he saw this one girl, and he like threw that note to her, and it became the intro to “Foxy Lady.” It was one of the great, primal rock moments I ever saw.
There’ve been times when Springsteen has done “Born in the U.S.A.,” and they finish, and do that section where the band breaks it down for a really long beat, then they bring it back together again… and it’s like everything happens in that section—y’know, birth to death—just like that one note by Hendrix. The Who have done that for me a couple times, or Led Zeppelin, or even The Grateful Dead, or The Ramones. They get to that white heat point where there’s nothing else in the world except those sound waves coming off of them.
Speaking of the Fillmore, there were probably millions of guys back then who would have killed to have your job. How did you score it?
I’d just transferred from Franklin & Marshall College in Pennsylvania—which was all men, and was like in Amish country. I used to read the New York papers, and in The Herald Tribune, Tom Wolfe was writing these stories about San Francisco—which became The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test—this Dickensian, ongoing story of Ken Kesey, and the guys who became The Grateful Dead. All of that was so fascinating to me. So I transferred to NYU film school. I was at the Fillmore the night they opened. I think it was March ’68. The very first show was Big Brother & The Holding Company, Tim Buckley, and Albert King… and the tickets were like $3.50, $4.50, or $5.50!
A few months later, a friend of mine literally saw an ad posted in his dorm: “Looking For Ushers -The Fillmore East Theatre.”
That’s it? That’s how you came to witness the cream of rock ‘n roll history?
It wasn’t even my job! My friend took the job… but he didn’t want to work both nights on a weekend! He said, “Ya wanna split it?” I said, “Sure, I’ll fill in.”
So we did that a few weeks, but this guy just wasn’t that reliable, and soon I was working both nights, and eventually I became the leader of an usher group. We took the tickets, and then counted them again in a back room to make sure everything added up. Maybe a year later, I became part of the support crew; I was the guy who brought the beer and soda to the bands. Then I got on the lighting crew—helping out with the light shows they used for the different bands.
We’re talking about the first few years bands were even doing that, right?
Pretty much. Light shows really started at the acid tests; like ’66, ’67. So I did that; I did it in England in ’71 and ’72. In ’73, I came back… and it was all over.
What do you mean?
There were no more concert halls or theaters that did that. Bands started bringing their own stuff.
Aha. So in the early days, it was the venues that provided those services.
Right. And the Fillmore was the premier facility. They had everything. A lot of people who did their lights and sound had studied theater, or they came from Broadway, or off-Broadway. These skills they’d learned to present stage shows were now being applied to rock concerts. All the bands did back then was show up with their amps.
I saw a list of everyone who played there. Did Bill Graham pick all those groups?
Yeah. And put them in those combinations.
http://www.fillmore-east.com/showlist.html
My god, he just had phenomenal taste... and I love how he mixed in the older jazz and blues performers.
Neil Young put out a Live at the Fillmore album a year or so ago, and you can see the marquee behind him. The lineup that weekend was Neil Young & Crazy Horse, The Steve Miller Band… and their opening act was Miles Davis with the Bitches Brew band! For $4.50?! Every night on stage, Neil apologized to Miles Davis: “I’m sorry. You’re the greatest.”
So a few years later, you’re working for Roger Corman. Were you a fan of his stuff?
No, I hadn’t seen that many. I remember The Trip (1967), and The Wild Angels (1966), but a lot of his movies didn’t play in my area. Then I met Joe Dante and Jon Davison, and they had this huge collection of 35 mm prints, and they showed all his stuff to me. That theater on La Brea Avenue used to let us run whatever we wanted at midnight, so that’s where I first saw things like A Bucket of Blood (1959) and Creature From the Haunted Sea (1961), and all those whacky ones.
When you watch Rock ‘n Roll High School today, you know it’s spoofing pictures from an earlier era—you’ve cited one called Shake, Rattle, and Rock (1956)—but I don’t really know those kinds of movies. Were they like cautionary tales? Or just juvenile delinquent melodramas?
I guess you’d call it the high school juvenile delinquency genre. I’d seen High School Confidential (1958)… but it really goes back to If… (1968) being a big influence.
Though If… was an intellectual art film, not a cheap melodrama. So it was a wide pool of influences you drew on… including earlier rock music films?
Yeah, I liked Bye, Bye Birdie (1963) somewhat. I liked some of the Elvis movies. Jailhouse Rock (1957). I really loved The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), by Frank Tashlin. His influence on me at that point was very strong. I’d say Tashlin and Richard Lester influenced Rock ‘n Roll High School the most, in terms of pop filmmaking, while If… gave me the license to take it even further.
Because in those fifties melodramas, authority always prevailed at the end, right? While If… ends with the triumph of revolution.
And that was the time I grew up in. The fifties movies were really before my time. I only saw them later, probably on TV.
Speaking of that genre—whatever it is—have you ever heard of a picture called The Godless Girl (1929)?
No.
I just saw it at the Silent Theater. It’s a Cecil B. De Mille, about a high school girl who’s a professed atheist… and she’s rallying all the kids at school to become atheists!
Wow.
They hold a big meeting—and it’s clearly all the dorks and misfits who are attending—then all the jocks and popular kids come and storm the place, and it turns into this huge brawl. It’s amazing because it’s De Mille, but it’s really hip! A total rock ‘n roll movie… 25 years before rock music!
The Godless Girl. I have to write that down. An older one I always liked was Wild Boys of the Road (1933).
I don’t know that one.
It’s a William Wellman. It’s about these teenagers during the Depression who realize their parents can’t afford to feed them or clothe them anymore, so they set out on their own. Kind of create their own society.
I think the first true rock ‘n roll movie was Rebel Without a Cause (1955), because it was the first movie that was really about teenagers. Before that, teens were just like little adults. The Blackboard Jungle (1955) was the other key one, just because that was the first time people went to the movies and heard rock and roll coming out of a loudspeaker. Most kids had only heard it on these little portable radios.
Ten years later, when the Beatles came running out of the Finsbury Park Astoria in A Hard Day’s Night (1964)—down those stairs, out into a field—that, more than anything, was the feeling I wanted to have when the music breaks out in Rock ‘n Roll High School.
It seems like after the Beatles, a lot of rock groups of your generation did not want to be in “Hollywood” movies… there’s like this ten year gap, where I guess they thought it was too jive. Was that a factor as you tried to mount a throwback rock musical in the late seventies?
That was one of the reasons Todd Rundgren didn’t do it. He connected with the idea of If…, but he didn’t like our story because it was funny. He wanted it to be more like If… So he turned us down. He was the first person we went to.
On the DVD commentary, you describe how Cheap Trick almost got the job. It seems to me they would have fit in pretty well.
Yeah, they had the kind of cartoon image, and the humor.
Weren’t they a lot more famous? Were they already too big for it?
Yes and no. They hadn’t broken big yet. They were working on Dream Police, and they’d done Live at Budokan, but it wasn’t out yet. “I Want You to Want Me” was just starting to get FM radio play.
Meanwhile, The Ramones were strictly a cult band… and there was this very negative vibe about punk music at the time. The Sex Pistols had really poisoned the well: all the magazines and newspapers talked about was the spitting, and the elements that seemed… unclean.
So we were at Warner Bros. trying to find a band. They showed me some of the short films Devo had made, but I thought those guys really had their own concept going. They talked about a band they had just signed, Van Halen, and then somebody mentioned The Ramones, who I’d only read about in The Village Voice. I knew the club CBGB’s, because it was across the street from where we built our lightshow equipment—it was the kind of place you went only if nothing else was open!
So I bought the Ramones’ albums, and I didn’t get it at first; the music I was listening to was much more complicated… but the humor of what they were doing finally clicked. I liked the first album, wasn’t too crazy about the second, but I really loved Rocket to Russia. I still think that’s a genius record.
Yeah, the production sounds kind of muffled on the first two.
Their managers loved the idea of the movie, and when we met the band, they understood the Riff Randall character—she was based on three women I knew from the Fillmore who were these total rock fans—and when I described the ending, how they’d show up at the high school, and be playing as the building went up in flames, they all went, “We’re in! We’re in! We’re doing this!” They totally got that whole wish fulfillment aspect of it.
I still hadn’t seen them play. I couldn’t afford it; I was broke. Somehow I got some money—maybe I was crashing on my father’s couch—and finally saw them at a place called Hurrah’s.
Lance Loud & the Mumps opened, and a guy named Klaus Nomi—this bizarre opera singer, who was one of the first people to die from AIDS. I was in the dressing room afterward, and this guy came in; very drunk, very loud… and I realized it was Lester Bangs! I’d read everything he’d written; he was like a god to me. He was just giving The Ramones a hard time, y’know, being really funny. Then the Talking Heads walked in… and he started picking on Tina Weymouth!
The movie makes The Ramones out to be much more famous than they actually were. I mean, there was no high school in 1979 where a hundred kids would be excited to see The Ramones, was there?
That was my sense of humor. And the band loved it… because at the time, they were opening for Black Sabbath, and getting booed off the stage. 
(The Ramones and P.J. Soles, above, in Rock 'n Roll High School.)
I’m sure for a lot of people, this movie was their introduction to The Ramones.
They thought Road to Ruin was going to break them out that year, but it didn’t. And that was a great record. It’s funny; when you listen to their stuff now, you really hear the pop element in it. The Beach Boys influence, the girl group influence.
Roger Corman’s first reaction to the movie was that there was too much of The Ramones in it! He and Frank Marino, his head of distribution—who never really liked me, or the movie—they told me to cut out the middle of every song! I said well, we’re gonna have to remix, and this and that, y’know… Finally they decided it wasn’t worth it to change it. Frank had written the whole thing off anyway. Roger also wanted me to cut down the two scenes where Riff and Kate talk about guys, and I just begged him to let me keep them. I think he finally just respected my passion for it.
How did you get away with not having any tits in it?
There was one shot originally. P.J. Soles did a quick flash. And finally we cut it.
She must have been pleased. I haven’t seen a lot of seventies Corman, but even in the ones Jonathan Demme did—there they are, every ten minutes, like clockwork.
That was the rule. We sure did it in Hollywood Boulevard! The only things that got censored, like when it played on MTV later, was Riff smoking the joint in her bedroom, and the scene in the theater with the guy sniffing coke off the carpet.
The initial theatrical distribution was a joke. Johnny Ramone was so mad: “How can you open a Ramones movie in New Mexico?” He said, “Our first record sold 135 copies, and our fourth record sold 135 copies! That means only 135 people care about us! Why didn’t you open it in New York?”
Roger Corman wasn’t one of the 135. It was probably just a teen comedy to him.
Frank Marino was so pissed off about it, he wouldn’t hold the movie until the album was ready. When it finally played in New York—with basically no support—it did very well in the theaters it was in, but it was really Ebert and Siskel who saved it… with the clips they ran on their show on PBS. Even if they weren’t praising it to the skies, they were laughing about it. They just loved the silliness of it.
I was going to say, the writing… it’s just incredibly juvenile—
Oh, yeah! But funny!
—to the point where you think it was actually written by teenagers. At the same time, the direction is not juvenile at all. It’s very smart. I mean… it’s not as dumb as you’re all pretending it is.
That’s definitely one of the secrets to its success. Audiences have always loved that aspect of it. You know, a lot of the humor was based on Woody Allen. The character of Tom; all his jokes about his ineptitude with girls; those were Woody Allen riffs.
Except Tom isn’t a nerd. He’s a beautiful, blonde California surfer type… and he’s the captain of the football team!
That’s the joke! That was our revenge on those people. I was always interested in hierarchies. Social hierarchy. That’s why I wanted to have one girl who’s in love with Tom, and another girl who’s in love with Joey Ramone, and show them as equals. 
Who was cast first, P.J. Soles or The Ramones?
The Ramones. And we had the writers on set the whole time—Russ Dvonch actually plays the freshman who gets stuffed in the locker—
So they weren’t much more than teenagers.
They were 23. Just out of film school. Anyway, the more time we spent with The Ramones, the more things we could incorporate about them into the story. It was funny at first because they were all so quiet. Especially Joey.
Yet you can clearly see in their scenes that P.J. genuinely likes him. There’s real warmth there; it’s very sweet. Joey even looks bashful sometimes.
He was so nice. She had them all over to her house for Thanksgiving.
So much of her dialogue is hilarious. When she talks about how she loves the way Joey eats pizza—
She came up with that herself. It came out in an improvisation. The other line I always loved was Mary Woronov’s, “Do your parents know you’re Ramones?”
She’s absolutely perfect. Every comic impulse is spot-on.
Mary and I were friends for a long time; we still are. She was part of that whole Warhol scene, you know. She danced with The Velvet Underground! If you watch Hollywood Boulevard and Death Race 2000 (1975), you can see the evolution of that character.
I forgot she was in Death Race. I saw a lot of these movies when I was younger, but they’re not things I go back to.
I’ve got a whole bunch of copies of Hollywood Boulevard. I can let you have one… it’s not like people are fighting to get their hands on them! 
(HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD, which Arkush directed with Joe Dante, above.)
Thanks. I was thinking about the story structure in Rock ‘n… what?
It sounds funny when you say that. “The story structure.” There really wasn’t any!
But in terms of how you alternate between plot, comedy, and musical numbers, it conforms pretty closely to standard Hollywood notions about musicals. You don’t say much about musicals on the DVD; was that a genre you also knew inside and out?
Yeah, I knew musicals very well. The Bandwagon (1953) in particular was a huge influence; it’s probably still my favorite Hollywood musical. “Do You Wanna Dance” was really my homage to that. I remember talking to the cameraman about lighting that number so the colors really popped out. There’s more front light in that hall, and the posters on the walls are more colorful. That’s why I’ve got the band coming down the hall on that riser as everybody breaks into song; it was as close as I could get to that old style.
“Do You Wanna Dance” clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcsVOFh-Ipo
I loved Meet Me in St. Louis (1947), A Star is Born (1954), all the Busby Berkeley stuff, the barn raising number in Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (1954)—
That’s a great number. The rest of that movie is pretty dull.
Yeah, I can’t remember much else about it.
I don’t think Rock ‘n Roll would hold up without that understanding of musicals. It’s really the foundation that anchors all these other influences.
Oh, and “I Want You Around” was an homage to Julie London’s “Cry Me a River” in The Girl Can’t Help It.
That’s my favorite scene. It’s also interesting how you use very few cuts. Rock music is synonymous with fast cutting, but that scene works beautifully without it.
My other favorite moment is The Ramones’ arrival; both on the car, and when you have them do that slow, methodical walk down the sidewalk. Rock bands in movies are always positioned somewhere, like they’re on stage, because it’s realistic, but you created a truly cinematic moment—the band advancing toward us. What inspired that?
I liked the idea of them working their way down that line. I’d seen so many lines of fans outside the Fillmore; it just seemed like the right thing to do. Now that you mention it, though… you’re right; it wasn’t the most obvious choice.
It’s a simple idea, but it looks so cool!
I wanted to briefly touch on Get Crazy (1983), a comedy you based on your experiences at the Fillmore. I assume Daniel Stern’s character represents you after you’d been there awhile, while the younger guy is a version of you when you first started?
Everything in that movie is based on real stuff, and I wish I could remake it as a realistic movie. But the only way I could get it made at the time was to do the Airplane! version of it. My second film, Heartbeeps (1981), had been a complete failure, and I was desperate to do a movie about something I really knew and cared about.
There was this small company called Sherwood Productions that had some capital. We had meetings, and they liked my idea of a comedy set in a theater like the Fillmore. Airplane! was really big then, and what they wanted was that kind of whacky comedy. We started working on the script… and I realized during that process that the executive, Herb Solow, was pretty much of a jerk. Whatever I’d suggest, he’d counter with another suggestion. It was just the way he was: everything he heard, he said “no” to… but he would take the germ of what you said, and put his own spin on it.
Ah, the dreaded “creative producer.”
The part of the little sister was supposed to be played by Mariska Hargitay, who was so beautiful, you wanted to fall on the floor. Herb wanted Stacey Nelkin. We wanted Jerry Orbach to play the owner; he was much more like Bill Graham. Herb went with Allan Garfield. Every role, there was an argument. He actually talked me into Daniel Stern in the lead instead of Tom Hanks… who was hilarious, and I think he’d only done “Bosom Buddies” at that point. So it was one stupid decision after another. Then the company was taken over by David Begelman, who was already on his way down. In the end, they never really understood the movie, and the scam they came up with to release it was to sell the shares in it to some Wall Street tax shelter group, and then put it out so it would lose money… just like The Producers (1968)! So nobody saw it—on purpose! It was so horrible to work so hard on something, and then see it just thrown away.
The audiences that saw it didn’t get it. They didn’t understand how there could be a rock concert with all these different kinds of acts. My take on it? It’s a movie with three thousand punch lines, but only a thousand jokes. There’s too much zaniness, and not enough human comedy. It’s just too bizarre.
I respect it as a comic portrait of the music business, made by someone who was there… just as Almost Famous (2000) was Cameron Crowe’s personal impressions of that milieu and that era.
I love Almost Famous. Especially the director’s cut box set. It’s just brilliant. I used to read his articles in Rolling Stone; I loved this one he did on The Allman Brothers, because I knew them, and his take was dead-on.
You guys both have great affection for that world. As opposed to, say, Lester Bangs, who clearly grew very bitter and resentful about rock stars towards the end. Do you think you and Crowe just kept a healthier distance from it… or maybe weren’t as judgmental?
I’d say so. The rock stars I remained friendly with, like Joey Ramone, were really nice people. Or with someone like Jerry Garcia, who I knew for a long time—I wouldn’t go back to the hotel after a show and hang out with them, party with them, y’know? I’d go to a show, talk to him a little backstage, and then I’d leave. Or he’d come over to my apartment if he was in town, and we’d watch movies together.
But Get Crazy was really kind of the end of my movie career. Luckily, rock videos happened right around then… and then I got work on the TV series “Fame.”
####
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Do You Wanna Dance? Allan Arkush Remembers ROCK 'N ROLL HIGH SCHOOL
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
DOUBT DVD Release: Interview with Viola Davis
Doubt has arrived on DVD from Miramax Home Video with a Director's Commentary from John Patrick Shanley, plus four featurettes: "Scoring Doubt," "The Cast of Doubt," "The Sisters of Charity," and "Doubt: From Stage to Screen." Here is Terry Keefe's in-depth interview with writer-director John Patrick Shanley which originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of Venice Magazine.
Viola Davis: Making Mrs. Miller in Doubt
By Terry Keefe
One scene can make a star out of a rising actor, although it’s a rare occurrence. Particularly when that scene is opposite the likes of Meryl Streep, who is certainly difficult to outshine. But Viola Davis is going to attract a great deal of notice for her relatively brief appearance in Doubt, to the point where she is already being mentioned as a likely candidate for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. Davis, who plays the character of Mrs. Miller, is only in the film for an extended scene with Streep, and then makes a dialogue-free appearance in the ending. But her scene with Streep, who plays the strong-willed nun Sister Aloysius, is powerhouse acting defined, particularly so since Davis performs it throughout with a quiet intensity in which she effectively manages to scream at times without raising her voice.
Doubt, written and directed by John Patrick Shanley, who adapted from his Tony-winning play, is set in 1964, in the St. Nicholas Catholic School in the Bronx. A young, charismatic, and progressive priest named Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has come at odds with the strict traditionalist Sister Aloysius, who is opposed to change as a general concept. But change is in the air nonetheless, personified by new student Donald Miller (Joseph Foster II), the school’s first African-American boy to attend. The true battle between Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius begins when a younger nun, Sister James (Amy Adams), shares with Sister Aloysius her suspicions that an improper relationship is occurring between Father Flynn and young Donald Miller. Although she has no real proof at all, Sister Aloysius becomes fully convinced that Father Flynn is guilty and sets out to destroy him. Although Father Flynn may well be innocent, Sister Aloysius has no doubt whatsoever of the moral certitude of her quest.
However, she doesn’t find the ally in Donald’s mother, Mrs. Miller, that she expected. (Note that there are SPOILERS ahead, as it is impossible to discuss this scene fully without revealing some key plot points). Mrs. Miller ultimately reveals that she believes her son may be gay, and that she also believes that the best thing for him would be to stay in the school. Donald’s father is apparently physically abusive of the boy, and if he ever found out that his son was having a relationship with the priest, Donald’s life would be in danger. As a black woman in the early 60s with little social standing, Mrs. Miller is not in a position of power with Sister Aloysius, but she must somehow convince her to leave the matter alone, because staying at the school is the lesser of two evils for her son, who she loves very much. As Mrs. Miller, Viola Davis embodies the pain of this horrible choice she must make in every gesture. The diplomatic manner she takes on to convince Sister Aloysius to back off is difficult to watch, but equally powerful.
Davis previously was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for her work in Antwone Fisher, and was also very memorable playing the housekeeper Sybil in Todd Haynes’ Douglas Sirk-inspired Far From Heaven. She has already conquered Broadway, having won a Tony for her work in August Wilson’s “King Hedley II.”
In crafting your performance, how much backstory did you create for Mrs. Miller, other than what was on the page?
Viola Davis: I created a bio that was more than 50 pages, which I wrote on her, her son Donald, and the dad. I wrote until I couldn’t write any more, because when you have just one scene in a movie….you have to come in with so much life already for that character, because, if you don’t, you’ll end up looking like you’re working too hard in that scene.
Did those 50 pages come out of research done by talking to people who had been through similar situations as Mrs. Miller?
Yep, I spoke with people who had been in similar situations. But when I say similar situations, I’m talking about women who had to be the advocate for somebody they loved, and women who were born in circumstances where they didn’t have a lot of options, where they were at the end of their rope, at the end of the road, and they basically had to beg for certain things. There were stories from my mom, which I had heard growing up. About how she was my advocate, and the advocate of my siblings.
Mrs. Miller has to push for what is right for Donald in that scene with Sister Aloysius, not so much in a rigid sense of right or wrong, but what is right relative to these particular circumstances.
Absolutely. It’s like they say in marriage counseling, not that I’ve been in marriage counseling but I’ve seen this on a show about marriage counseling, “Do you want to be right, or do you want your relationship to work out?” And here, in this scene, it’s like, “Do you want to be right, or do you want to save your child?” Remember that this is not a progressive woman. She’s just not. She is horrified by what may be happening. She’s not happy with it. But she loves her son, and she has weighed the two options. Because she believes that if you go to your grave and you are successful at everything else, other than being a mother, than you have failed.
Your dialogue about the father is so well-written, and performed, that I can practically see him in this scene. He lingers over it, although the audience never does meet him.
And she really doesn’t say a whole lot about him either. She doesn’t talk about where he works or how he looks. It’s just one or two lines. It’s so minimalist. So, it doesn’t take a lot of words, but it does take a lot of embodiment, because if you embody that life to begin with, that’s when the language comes to life.
As a performer, you had the pressure of having your character come in half-way through the film, after we’ve already gotten to know the characters of Phil, Meryl, and Amy very well, powerhouse actors all of them, and having to carry the bulk of one of the most pivotal scenes in the story.
Yes, although that would probably be a better question for Adrian Lenox [who played the role on Broadway], because she had a harder job to do in terms of that. Because she had to sit around for a lot of the play, until her scene came along. With me, I just came in on my day to shoot. I was like my character, I came in on the day I was called to the principal’s office. And it’s not difficult if you just play the scene. See, that’s your job – just to play the scene. You can’t think of anything else. You can’t think, “Okay, I’ve got 7 minutes of screen time, so I have to make the most of it.” Or “I have to be an advocate for gay rights.” Or “I’ve got to be the black woman.” You can’t do that. You’ve got to take all of that and throw it out the window, and you’ve got to play the scene. And what the scene is about is this: she loves her son; she’s terrified she’s a bad mother; and she wants him to survive. That’s it.
Her costuming is notable in highlighting the way she had to fit into the white person’s world. Her outfit is sensible, nice, but not too flashy.
There’s a formality to it, which was great because it reminded me of how people were very aware of how they came off in those days. They were aware of being polite. It reminded me to be polite as the character, because she’s talking with a white woman who is also a nun. Because I think that if I had come in wearing jeans or something, it would have given her a casualness which had nothing to do with the scene.
She’s also very formal in how she reveals her belief that her son is gay. She makes the decision to reveal this, but it is in almost as polite a manner as the rest of the conversation. That adds a whole new layer of tension to the scene, because it’s also obvious that she’s in agony having to speak about this.
Absolutely. She has to do it that way. I think when you come in and scream and yell about something, the other person ceases to hear you. I know that when people yell at me, I put up a wall automatically. And in this scene, I have to appeal to her heart. I know this woman has the power to make or break my son.
Let’s talk about your background a bit. You were born in South Carolina, and then moved to Rhode Island.
I was born in Saint Matthews, South Carolina in my grandmother’s house. My grandmother delivered me, because the midwife was late, as my mom put it. And Central Falls, Rhode Island, was very different from South Carolina. There were not a lot of African-Americans there at the time. Today, it’s much more racially mixed. And so, we were on the periphery there for a while, sort of fighting to get in. At the same time, it was also a fantastic place with small town values. I have memories of apple-picking, and going to the reservoirs, and parks. It was idyllic, in a huge sense, and in another sense, I was very much feeling like an outsider. We grew up poor. My father groomed and trained horses at a race track. So, that was my childhood. A childhood of very much feeling like an outsider, but also having real moments of pure joy and happiness.
Recently, you worked on the new Tyler Perry film, Madea Goes to Jail.
That’s going to give me incredible street cred with my nieces and nephews [laughs]. You know, there was a woman at my dad’s funeral and she prophesied for people. She was kind of a psychic. And my mom said to me, “You have to meet her, because she has something to say to you.” And I went, “Oh no. I can’t take it. I don’t want to know my future.” Anyway, I met her and she took my hand and she said, “Tyler Perry is going to offer you a movie, and do not turn it down.” I was thinking, “Of all the things you could have said to me. [laughs] You could have told me that one day I’m going to see God, and you told me that Tyler Perry is going to offer me a movie.” And sure enough, two years later, Tyler Perry offered me a role in a movie. I didn’t turn it down.
DOUBT DVD Release: Interview with John Patrick Shanley
Doubt has arrived on DVD from Miramax Home Video with a Director's Commentary from John Patrick Shanley, plus four featurettes: "Scoring Doubt," "The Cast of Doubt," "The Sisters of Charity," and "Doubt: From Stage to Screen." Here is Terry Keefe's in-depth interview with writer-director John Patrick Shanley which originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of Venice Magazine.
By Terry Keefe
It’s hard to believe that it’s been 21 years since John Patrick Shanley’s screenplay for Moonstruck made a whole generation of moviegoers want to move to Little Italy, marry Cher or Nicolas Cage, Danny Aiello even, and look for the mythical Cosmo’s Moon. The young Shanley had already been having a good career run at that point, with a number of successful Off-Broadway plays, along with another produced 1987 film, Five Corners, which starred Jodie Foster, Tim Robbins, and John Turturro. But the capper for him during that period was undoubtedly his win at the 1988 Oscars for the Best Original Screenplay for Moonstruck. From there, he went on to continue his career as one of America’s top playwrights, with notable works such as “Danny and the Deep Blue Sea” and “Four Dogs and a Bone.” He also directed the feature film Joe Versus the Volcano, which starred Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, in 1990. A near decade and a half later, in 2004, he found his greatest success as a playwright to date, at least as far as awards and ticket sales go, for his original play “Doubt,” which swept all the major theater awards, including a Tony for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. “Doubt” also brought Shanley back to the film director’s chair for the first time in almost two decades with his adaptation of the play, which will hit theaters this December.
Doubt takes place in the St. Nicholas Catholic School in the Bronx, in 1964, a time when the winds of change were coming to not just the United States, but the Catholic Church, an institution known to embrace change warily. The Vatican II proclamations by Pope John XXIII two years prior were designed to make the church more open, diverse, and modern. Embodying the spirit of Vatican II, in his outward manner at least, is the young Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman), while Sister Aloysius (Meryl Streep) is an older nun who prefers the more rigid traditions to stay exactly as they are. The major mystery upon which the plot hinges is sparked by the observations of the young nun, Sister James (Amy Adams), who informs Sister Aloysius that she suspects an improper relationship of some sort between Father Flynn and a young student named Donald Miller (Joseph Foster II), the school’s first African-American pupil. (Note: There are considerable SPOILERS ahead.) Sister Aloysius, who sees the world in strict right and wrong terms, is certain that Father Flynn is guilty, although the actual proof is sketchy, and makes it her goal to force his resignation. Thematically underlying the story is the conflict alluded to in the title, of certainty versus doubt, and the primal question of whether we can ever really know the truth of an event which we did not see with our own eyes. Sister Aloysius is forced to confront her own morality of purpose when she meets Donald’s mother, Mrs. Miller [Viola Davis - read our interview here], who reveals that she believes her son to be gay, and that because of an abusive father and the fact that no other school wants her son, she feels that staying at St. Nicholas might actually be the best thing for Donald. While the plot of Doubt certainly comes to a conclusion, the mystery of what happened between Father Flynn and Donald Miller is left hanging for the audience to resolve themselves, or not. Shanley’s great achievement here is that he has managed to craft what is, on one level, a mystery, and on another level, he has created a platform to discuss the impenetrability of that same mystery.
Meryl Streep as Sister Aloysius in DOUBT.
What was the initial kernel of inspiration that got your writing of “Doubt” the play started? Was it wanting to write a story about the concept of doubt itself, or were there specific plot elements that propelled the writing?
John Patrick Shanley: Well, when I wrote the play, we were living in a time of great “certainty” in our country, leading up to the Iraq War, and I didn’t feel certain. And the culture around me seemed to be sending me the message that I didn’t feel certain because I was weak. I didn’t agree with that. So, that germ of an idea, about certainty and doubt, was there. But, it’s not something that I would have written about just by itself. And then I thought about the black mother, and I thought that was an interesting story. That’s when things started to get interesting. Because in all of my experiences of life, people have their reasons for doing things, and there are rarely very specific reasons why people do things. It’s usually a fairly complicated tale. And I wanted to tell that tale. So, I wrote the play. And [producer] Scott Rudin came to me and said that he thought it should be a film and that I should direct it. I said that I agreed, but I hadn’t directed in 18 years. It was very daunting because the play only has a few characters and a couple of locations, and I was wondering how I was going to open up this thing cinematically in a way that is meaningful, you know?
You did find a lot of ways to open up the story for film. How did those ideas come about?
I realized that as a playwright I had sort of hypnotized myself into coming up with a way of telling a complicated story, with limited characters, and in fact, that was highly artificial. And if I were to lose my self-hypnosis, I’d see that it was only natural to show the kids, the congregation, and the nuns in their convent. That there were lots of aspects that I could include which were organic, and would only enrich the story. The first big challenge I had in the adaptation was with the opening sermon. I thought, “What am I going to do? This guy talks for a long time. At a certain point, this is just not cinematic.” Then I realized that this movie is partially about the joining in combat of these two characters, the priest and the nun. So, I decided to introduce her during the sermon, and that would make it cinematic. Because then there would be her major entrance, which was non-verbal, up against his major entrance, which was verbal. And then the cutaway shots would have real significance, rather than just busying it up by trying to put various reaction shots and such. I also realized then how difficult this was going to be. I’ve written a lot of screenplays, and this was the hardest one for me. It was going to be trench warfare as a writer. I was going to have solve the problem of how to shoot it, page-by-page. There wasn’t going to be any overarching solution. I was going to have to exploit and investigate the physical world and environment that these people lived in, and how it affected them, and I was going to have to do that repeatedly. I came up with this idea, in my head, for Sister Aloysius, that she was kind of a submarine commander, of an old, broken-down submarine. She kept plugging leaks, and lights would blow out, and she was trying to keep this vessel going, but eventually, it was going to sink [laughs]. The future was going to come but she was trying to keep it out. There was a thing in the play about a windstorm, which you don’t see in the play, you hear the wind. And I came up with the idea that the wind could be a character of sorts in the film. That it could be strangely cinematic. So, piece by piece, light bulbs blowing out, window blinds being shut, the mouse, and the cat…I put it together. Lots of little solutions to the problem of opening things up. But I always wanted to make sure that those little solutions did a few things: they propelled the story forward; they propelled character; and they motivated camera moves. So if I had two or three people talking for an extended period of time in a room, these small events propel the action of the scene. The intercom ringing makes Sister Aloysius get up to answer it, and then the camera moves to deal with that. The small events become part of the larger story and have a purpose. Then, there were, of course, things that happened [in dialogue] in the play, that you had to show on-screen. In the play, they just say, “Father Flynn left.” Well, you can’t do that in the film! [laughs] You have to show the guy leaving! And that became a natural new scene, with the farewell sermon, and in that scene, I could let a few other stories play out.
While writing the piece, did you keep in your head your own version of what truly happened between Father Flynn and Donald Miller?
Let me put it to you this way - you never know what’s going on in somebody else’s head. You never know what’s going on in somebody else’s heart. A lot of time is spent coming up with a conclusion in this story, but it’s like life, you don’t get to know for sure what really happened. You don’t get to know for certain. I feel like the narrative form, because of television to some degree, has boiled down to posing a question and, at the end, answering that question. And that form has become the standard, but it’s a little different than what the experience of life is. In life, you don’t get to know everything. You get to know that you think you know, maybe. You receive a lot of information, or a little information, and you reach your conclusions from that. And yet, life is sweet, and life is provocative, and life is gripping…and why can’t you have all that in a story? I didn’t want to pull a parlor trick, or a puzzle, that’s not what the story is about. I wanted to have a fierce dialectic and invite the audience to continue the conversation after the movie, about whatever topics they chose to.
Did you find that postproduction was particularly challenging, because you really could sway the audience ‘s perception of Father Flynn’s guilt by the way the film is cut?
No question, this was a very difficult film to cut, because you have to leave just the right amount of space for the audience. And [editor] Dylan Tichenor was a great asset. The “Final Confrontation Scene” between Father Flynn and Sister Aloysius, along with the scene between Mrs. Miller and Sister Aloysius, were the most difficult scenes to cut. We thought the “Tea Scene” [between Father Flynn, Sister Aloysius, and Amy Adams] would be the most difficult, but Dylan just went through that quickly and did a beautiful cut right away. But we suffered over the Final Confrontation Scene. It was complicated scene because of the constant shifting between the two actors. I don’t even remember how many days we shot it, but we did endless coverage.
Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams in DOUBT.
Well, what you do is…if what they’re doing is true and it takes the scene where it’s got to get to, then it’s valid. If it’s interesting. And most of the time, they’re interesting. But if you see something that isn’t grounded, which most of the time you don’t…there was a time when we were rehearsing the Confrontation Scene and Phil came over and asked, “How was that?” And I said, “It was good. It was very good. There was that one part that was a little maudlin by the window…” And he said, [quickly] “Let’s go over that!” That’s what he’s looking for with direction. It’s “Tell me when I jump the rails. Please, before it’s too late!” And then, if I see somebody do something and think, “Okay, that may well be over the top,” then I go back and say, “Okay, let’s take it down a bit.” There was a time in the confrontation scene where Meryl got very sarcastic, and I said, “Okay, do it again, but this time, take the high road.” And she then did a beautiful and quite different performance, and that was all the direction I gave her [laughs]. She was so impressive. And then, once in awhile, when someone knocks it out of the park, you stop a minute and say to them, “You knocked it out of the park.” Because they need to hear that. It gives them the juice to get to the next part.
You went to Catholic school. When you started researching this for the preproduction on the look of the film, what memories that came back did you find the most surprising?
I didn’t have to do any research [laughs]. Not for this one. I remember [costume designer] Ann Roth showed me the costumes for the kids, the jackets for the boys. I said, “You can’t use these. They’re all going to be in the same jackets.” She said, “But that will be visually boring.” And I said, “But that will be true!” [laughs] We had some wonderful fights, Ann and I. She’s very strong-willed, but she couldn’t tell me the kids should have different colored shoes on. They all have the same colored shoes on! She was like, “Give me a break!” [laughs] I said, “It’s wintertime. You can do it with the overcoats. They all have different colored overcoats on.” I have a good memory for this era, and we shot at the same school I actually went to. So, when the guys are playing in the street, it’s the same street I grew up on. When the woman cuts the pillow on the rooftop, that’s the rooftop I used to play on. The alleyway, the same thing. And I hired Sister James [whose name the Amy Adams character shares], my first grade teacher from that school, as my technical advisor. She was the one who told us things like that we had to put the rosary over the belt in this way, or it’s wrong.
Did Sister James get to see the play?
Oh yeah, Sister James saw the play in previews. I was in previews and I got this email from somebody which said, “I’m from the Bronx and I saw the play, and I know Sister James, and she’s really excited about this play, and she’s coming to visit.” I thought, “I thought she was dead!” I had no idea the woman was alive. None. I hadn’t seen her since I was six. And now she was en route to see my show. So, I rushed over to the theater and I sat with her, and I watched the play. She was now 70. She had been 21 when she was my teacher. I was in the first class she had ever taught. Now, here we were, 49 years later, sitting watching the play together. The designer had gotten a photograph of the school and rebuilt the school on stage. So, these two people who hadn’t seen each other in so long, we were sitting there looking back in time to this stage. It was very powerful. Afterwards, she was very enthusiastic and really liked the play, and she’d come with another nun. And then, I knew she liked it, because she came back with a whole bunch of nuns [laughs] ! And all of the nuns loved the play. They said, “Anything you need, you come to us!” And indeed, we ended up shooting in the College of Mount Saint Vincent, which is owned by the Sisters of Charity.
Shanley directs Meryl Streep in DOUBT.
No, I wrote it the first time. It’s because when I was 15, I ended up by fluke, in a lay Catholic prep school in New Hampshire. I had a heavy Bronx accent. The teachers didn’t want me very much. I was kind of violent. The kids didn’t want me that much. There was one teacher who took me under his wing, and protected me, and educated me. He was a very good English teacher. Now, he didn’t try anything. He didn’t do anything with me, but it was in the air. I didn’t admit that to myself at the time though. Now, three years or so later, I would continue to see him, because I was close to this guy and connected to him…he introduced me to another 15-year old kid and said, “This is my son.” But he didn’t have any children. And then he did it with a second kid and said, “This is my son.” I felt very strange about that. Much later, we had a 30th year reunion, when people who went there got together for a reunion. One guy pulled me aside and told me that this teacher had abused him when he went to school there. He was traumatized. And that’s when I had concrete confirmation that that’s what was happening. Then, just a few years ago, I got a letter from this teacher, and when I looked at the letter, I knew he was telling me that he was dying. I was that connected to him, just intuitively. He told me where he was and that I could come visit him. And I didn’t go. I have no regrets about that, but it’s bittersweet. So, when I wrote that scene, that’s where I was coming from. A very complex equation. This guy who was good to me. Who, in fact, saved my life, and educated me. And yet, had done terrible things. But not to me. And how do I feel about that, you know? And then I thought, “Did I, when I was a kid, know? Completely know. And use the situation to my advantage, and walk that line with him?” That’s a line that Mrs. Miller is also walking.
Did anything in particular from your life inspire the story of Moonstruck?
I was around 35-36, and I knew lots of women in their 30s, and they all had this kind of similar story. That they had some type of guy they always wanted to meet, and they had been looking for him, but they never found him. And now they were in their 30s, and they thought, “Maybe I’m never going to meet that guy.” So maybe they were going to have to make this concession to marry a real guy, as opposed to the fantasy guy. I thought, “What if you did that and the right guy shows up right then and there?” Sally Field had taken me out to lunch, and she said, “I like your writing. Why don’t you write something for me?” And I said, “I’ll write something for you. But you can’t pay me. If you like it, then you can option it. If you don’t like it, it’s okay, we were never in business.” So, I wrote Moonstruck. Sally loved the screenplay, but nobody would make it with her. And so, I sent it to Norman Jewison, but I didn’t want to option it until I talked to him. I met with Norman and I said, “Is this particular script the movie that you want to make?” Somewhere in the middle of the conversation, Norman realized that he was in the first job interview he’d ever had with a screenwriter [laughs]. Because I was saying, “If you don’t want to make this, that’s fine, but I am going home. This is not the basis for a film. This is a film.” And Norman said, “Okay, let’s read it.” And he took half of the parts, and I took the other half, and we acted the whole thing out together. And in the end, he said, “Yeah, I’m making this film.” And I said, “Okay, we’re in business.” [laughs]
Cher and Nicolas Cage in 1987's MOONSTRUCK.
I grew up with a guy who caught his hand in a machine, it got chewed off, and he got a wooden hand. And he was always trying to pick fights with people, but people wouldn’t fight him. They’d go, “I’m not fighting you. You’ve got a wooden hand!” And he did that with me, and I knocked him to the ground [laughs]. He also stayed with me as a character.
At what point in your life did you start writing?
Grammar school. From 10 years old on. Most of it poetry, a few essays, and short stories. But a lot of it was poetry. I was pretty much exclusively a poet until I was 22 or 23. Then I got my first poems published, and I immediately stopped writing poetry [laughs]. I started writing short stories. The Paris Review said, “Not this story, but the next one.” I stopped writing short stories [laughs]. I wrote a novel for a year, and when I finished it, I burned it. Because it didn’t have a plot. And that’s when I started writing plays.
Was that the only copy of this novel?
Yes. It’s gone.
Do you regret burning it?
Never! [laughs] You’ve got a lot of bad writing to do in this life. Get it out of the way early [laughs].
John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt opens on December 12th, via Miramax Films.
Ken Annakin: 1914-2009 -- An Appreciation
Director Ken Annakin.
I knew there was something familiar about the name when I read it: "Deborah Annakin-Peters." I had been corresponding with Debby via email for nearly a year after she had started working for Home Video Publicity at Paramount, and handled all my DVD requests. Then one day it struck me. I wrote her a quick email: "Are you, by chance, related to the director Ken Annakin?" I got a quick reply "Sure am. He's my dad!" It just happened that Annakin's most famous film, "The Longest Day," was getting a special edition DVD release from 20th Century Fox in a few weeks. I asked Debby if her father, then in his early 90s, was up to doing an interview. The answer to that question lies in the conversation below.
I was lucky enough to get to know Ken Annakin quite well over the next year or so when my producing partner, Chris Ranta, and I optioned Ken's final script: a corker about what really happened to famed aviatrix Amelia Earhart after her fateful "final flight" in 1937. During that time, we learned Ken Annakin was both a gentleman and a gentle man. He remained physically and intellectually active right to the end, still hustling to get his projects made from the office in his Beverly Hills home, decorated with framed one-sheets from his disparate body of work, as well as paintings by his devoted wife of 50 years, Pauline. As great a storyteller in person as he was on film, Ken would regale people with stories of his life in pre and post-war Britain, as well as colorful anecdotes, some best kept off the record, about his experiences with show business' most legendary names. Even if the story was a bit less-than-flattering, Ken always told it with that wonderful smile on his face. There was nary a hint of malice behind those twinkling eyes.
After suffering a heart attack and stroke within a day of each other back in February, Ken Annakin's health began to slowly decline. He passed on Wednesday, April 22 at home.
God speed, Ken, and thank you.
KEN ANNAKIN GETS HIS DAY
By
Alex Simon
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the May, 2006 issue of Venice Magazine.
Ken Annakin is one of the legends of British cinema. Born August 10, 1914 in Beverley, Yorkshire, England, Annakin initially cut his teeth working on WW II propaganda documentaries, moving into features after the war ended. Having directed close to 50 feature films to date, some of Annakin’s most celebrated titles include Quartet (1948), Trio (1950), The Adventures of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men (1952), and The Sword and the Rose (1953). Annakin has four bonafide classics to his name, as well: he directed the British and French sequences of Darryl F. Zanuck’s legendary WW II epic The Longest Day (1962), the Disney classic Swiss Family Robinson (1960), the hit comedy Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (1965), and the brilliant Across the Bridge (1957), starring Rod Steiger as a larcenous businessman who steals the identity of a man he kills aboard a train. It is rightfully regarded as one of the best British films of the 50s.
The Longest Day is being released on a new DVD edition this month in honor of Memorial Day, complete with feature commentary and interviews with Mr. Annakin. He sat down in the living room of his Beverly Hills home recently to discuss his remarkable career.
It’s been 44 years since The Longest Day was released. What was it like for you seeing it again after all these years?
Ken Annakin: The new DVD has two sections: one where I talk for about 25 minutes, then another section where I’m sitting and watching the film, making comments. I’ll be very honest with you: as you know I’m the only one of the four directors who’s still alive! (laughs) I’m very happy with what’s been going on with The Longest Day, because it seems like I’m the one solely responsible for making this fantastic war picture—which it is! But the truth is, there were long sections on which I couldn’t comment, because I only directed ¼ of the film. But I think it’s probably the truest war picture of its time, because Zanuck made sure that there was an expert there to advise the filmmakers for ever part of the picture who had taken part in the actual operations. For the Arne River bridge, that was even better for me, because I had the actor Richard Todd playing a British commander, and Richard had actually been one of the soldiers who took the Arne River Bridge during D-Day. So I couldn’t get more accurate help than that. Then Lord Lovett showed up, who was one of the commanding officers during the operation, and he was a great help, as well.
Ken Annakin with actor Kenneth Moore on the set of The Longest Day.
You worked with some legendary actors in the British sequence, most notably Richard Burton and Peter Lawford. Tell us about them.
Richard Burton was very, very willing to help in every way. I only did two shots with Burton, and Lawford was the one playing Lord Lovett, and I must say as the real Lord Lovett watched him lead the commandoes across the bridge, Lovett said “I never walked like that! He has a walk that isn’t mine!” (laughs) They all cooperated. They all seemed as though they wanted to make a true picture, which is what Zanuck wanted. On a lot of the work, Zanuck came and watched over your shoulder. He soon learned it was best not to watch over my shoulder, because I’ve never liked that, and Walt Disney also very quickly discovered that, and dropped the idea! I think if you’re working for a producer who knows exactly what he’s wanting, you’ve got to say ‘Leave it to me,’ then watch the rushes. That’s certainly what happened on The Longest Day. I remember Zanuck coming down to the beach landing and saying “You know Ken, I’ve got 3,000 troops for you on this beach, and I want to see all of them!”
And you did see them all! You’re also responsible for what most people feel is the best sequence of the film: the battle of Casino, which has that amazing helicopter shot.
That was the best shot I’ve ever done in my life. That shot they’d tried with a French director who left soon after that, and it was my introduction to the helicopter pilot who I used many times after that picture, particularly on Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. He was a great guy, and had a sense of placing his helicopter in just the right place, like it was a camera itself. He was a joy to work with. I must say I’m very proud of that Casino shot, and pleased I had an opportunity to do it. I think the sequence was quite accurate, although it came at a slightly different part of the war than Zanuck had it, although it was right with (Cornelius Ryan’s) book.
Trailer for The Longest Day.
Sometimes you have to take artistic license, for the sake of the film.
That’s right. For example, with Lord Lovett, when he approached the bridge, I had him coming from the right, because it was a better shot and we could see them all more clearly. Lovett protested, saying that they marched straight down, but Zanuck backed me up, seeing that for the sake of the shot, I was right. You have to use your head.
Sam Fuller said that Zanuck was the only studio executive who respected filmmakers, because he really was a filmmaker himself. Did you find that?
Yes. At the end of the shoot, when all the exteriors were done, he said “Ken, I’d like you to come shoot all the studio stuff, as well. I shall be upstairs with my four secretaries, but whenever I could be free, I’d like you to do the set up, then have someone get me, so I can say “Roll ‘em!” and “Cut!” I said to my wife, who was with me ‘I don’t know why I should do that!’ She said “Don’t be stupid! Think of the time you’ve had on this picture. What harm would it do you at all?” So in all, he came down twice and did that, but left me alone for the rest, so that shows how he really wanted to have been doing it all himself. You know how he managed to put together that amazing cast: he had those four secretaries going 24 hours a day, seven days a week, working in shifts, keeping in touch with every film that was being made around the world that had actors that he wanted, asking when they could be free for two days, three days, and so on. That was very clever, and I don’t think it has been done much nowadays.
No, it hasn’t. It was also very clever to have all that stuff being shot simultaneously by four different directors.
That’s why we miss the Darryl Zanucks, the people who loved film so much that they’ll do almost anything, using their brains, to achieve what it is they really want.
I think we have people like Spielberg today who have kept that spirit alive, but they’re few and far between.
Yes, I think Spielberg has worked very hard in that way, as has George Lucas, worked very hard for things to be right. Then, you take something like The Da Vinci Code. I think Ron Howard is a damn good director, but he fell short of reality this time out. He made his two main characters, Hanks and the girl, afraid to build any sort of real relationship. They had one tiny kiss at the end, but it didn’t mean a thing. Either you do or you don’t! The film is much too long, plus you never want a picture where some of the characters are almost reading out of the book to tell you what happened, and the main characters are just listening. It’s just ridiculous!
A youthful Ken Annakin in England, circa early 1950s.
Speaking of George Lucas, how did you feel when he named the character of Anakin Skywalker after you?
(laughs) Well, I asked him about that, but I’ll tell you: he never asked me. He never invited me to the first showing (of Episode One). Apparently it happened through Alec Guinness, who was working at Pinewood Studios on the first Star Wars and every day, would pass by my office door, which had my name on it. So it was Alec who suggested it to George. They dropped one ‘n’ from the spelling, and there it is. I didn’t mind it so much when Anakin was a good character, but now that he’s a bad character, I’m not so keen on it! (laughs)
You reached mainstream audiences on this side of the pond for the first time when you worked with Walt Disney on some very memorable films. Tell us about “Uncle” Walt, who’s become something of a controversial character posthumously.
Well, the final film I did for him, The Swiss Family Robinson, was the greatest adventure I’d ever had in my life. My wife, daughter and I were in the island of Tobago for eight months, and I really was able to use the landscape and these animals that we took to the island, to great use. But I had a very pleasant experience with Walt, overall. Although I still have the press clipping, the headline of which said “Annakin’s Ark Leaves for Tobago.” Reportedly Walt said “’Annakin’s Ark’?! Who the hell do they think paid for this picture?!” (laughs) But Walt was a great guy to work with, a great creator. As we now know with the books that have been written about him, right from the first he didn’t regard himself as the greatest artist, but he could get other artists to produce ideas that he had. That’s how he got started, and that’s how he carried on once he had his studio and had his team around him. I learned this whole business of making sketches for movies through Walt. Swiss Family was so sketched out in advance, that Walt said “Think of anything you’d like to happen to your family if you had all these things around you. I’ve got the best sketch artist in the business to sit down with you, and make drawings based on your ideas.” And that’s how we conceived the tree house, and nearly every other element of the picture over a period of about two months. Walt never did come out to the location, but we kept to the idea of all the sketches which he approved.
Annakin with actor Sessue Hayakawa on the set of Swiss Family Robinson.
That’s a film that’s held up beautifully over the years. It was my favorite as a boy.
Well, I think it gives young people a taste of adventure, which most of them have naturally. And if they want something sufficiently, maybe they can get it. Therefore that’s a very good thing for young audiences. I think the DVD still attracts a lot of young people. With all these films being re-released on DVD, I think the studios should give them all more of a push, so they can have a second life, but that doesn’t always happen, unfortunately. The Disney Studios have announced that they’re allowing another Swiss Family to be made in Australia this year. So that should be interesting to see what they do with that story today, but they won’t have the same set up that we had. My wife and I enjoyed life on that island so much, we stayed for a week even after the production had wrapped! It was really paradise.
Let’s talk about Across the Bridge.
Across the Bridge is my favorite of all my films. It was a Graham Greene story. He told the story from the bridge on, but hadn’t told the story of the first half. So Guy Elmes and I and an English producer called John Stafford, got together to see if we could tell the story of what led up to the Rod Steiger character crossing the bridge. I worked with Graham on the script until we got it right, then I got Steiger, who was a different experience from anyone I’d ever worked with. He was a Method actor to the core, and it was his own Method! I eventually was so impressed, however, with what he did that I just sort of let him go, as long as I could find something to cut away to, if he went on too long. I was able to let him cry and shriek and do all the things that he did. It’s an unusual picture, particularly for me, and it did very, very well in England and gave me a very good reputation there, and I enjoyed making it very much. It was created from the reality of the situation with the actor being put into positions by me, but then creating a complete character on his own. But also, without the dog Dolores, the picture wouldn’t have worked, either. In actual fact, Rod Steiger wasn’t very keen on dogs, but accepted that the dog was important to the story, and eventually became very attached to the dog, just as his character did.
Rod Steiger in Across the Bridge, Annakin's favorite of his films.
I love the fact that it’s such an uncompromising film, both in terms of how dark it is throughout and the fact that you had such an inherently unlikable protagonist that you still rooted for.
I was at that stage where I felt I could go in this free way, and I think since it was such a collaborative effort by all involved, that’s the reason the picture works so well.
Ken Annakin, circa late 1950s.
After watching it, I was wondering if Antonioni was a fan, because of how much The Passenger seems to have been influenced by Across the Bridge.
That’s right. I think he may have seen it! (laughs) I remember being in Malibu and running into Rod Steiger about three weeks before he died. We were both in the market, and he grabbed my hand and he said “Ken, really and truly, despite all the other pictures and things I’ve said, I feel that Across the Bridge was the best picture I’ve ever made, and it would be wonderful if we were able to do another picture like that.” And three weeks later he died. But it is very nice to know that one has achieved something like that.
Annakin and Stuart Whitman on the set of Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.
Let’s talk about Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.
I actually decided to make a picture about the early days of aviation because I’d been very excited about Alexander Korda, who’d been wanting me to make the story about the first crossing of the Atlantic by airplane. And we had it all set up, and then he went broke two days before we were due to start shooting. But I’d gotten so interested in airplanes, that I talked to my writing partner Jack Davies, and said ‘Let’s see if we can make a picture about early aviation,’ and we commissioned a girl who worked on a magazine called The Aviator, in England, to dig out all the things that had happened in the early days. And she turned up with 100 pages for us. So we used all those things to develop our story, so all these things had really happened in some way. That’s what makes the picture somewhat unique, and very true to the early days of flying. Here again, I was given a pretty free hand by Zanuck, solely because I’d done Longest Day with him. As long as I had his girlfriend, Irina Demick, in the picture, he got behind it 100%. (laughs) But it turned out to be my most successful picture.
Henry Fonda and Robert Ryan in Battle of the Bulge.
In Battle of the Bulge you worked with three of my favorite actors: Henry Fonda, Robert Shaw and Robert Ryan.
They were fine people to work with, and Hank Fonda of course, if I was asked what actor had I enjoyed working with at every moment and also respected so much, it would be Hank Fonda. I remember in that picture we were in Spain and we were shooting the tanks, I had 80 tanks under my command, and Hank was due to get into the shot where he jumps onto the tank and sees inside. I said ‘Where in the hell is Hank?’ My assistant said “Oh my god! I left him down there, and he said he’d wait for his call.” I went down a mile and a half, and there was Hank standing outside, flapping his arms, trying to stay warm. I said ‘This is an absolute disgrace this happened to you.’ He said “These things happen on films. Just get me up there and let me do it.” He was a generous, wonderful actor. And of course, he was able to make things very believable in the way that he acted. Ryan I liked working with very much. He seemed like a natural commander. Shaw, of course, was very a very fine actor, but at that time I’m afraid he was drinking very heavily and had to be supported by Bob Ryan whenever they walked out of places. So he did a good job, but he just got pissed too much.
Robert Shaw in Battle of the Bulge.
It’s interesting, when you look at so many of the actors of that generation, they either died of cirrhosis or lung cancer.
That’s right. And they all died comparatively young. Shaw was still in his 50s when he died. Shaw was a fine actor. Liked his own way, but could be talked into things if you had a very good reason behind it. But of course, when the producer’s girlfriend was introduced in that, he refused to act with her. I had to shape it in such a way without him knowing it. Her service to the picture was when the picture was shown, she marched down Hollywood Boulevard ahead of 400 soldiers!
"So You Wanna Be a Director," Annakin's autobiography.
You’re about to turn 92, and you’re still working: you just finished a script about Amelia Earhart. What’s the secret to your longevity?
Well, since I was paralyzed during a shoot in South Africa in the 50s, I’ve followed a strict regimen of homeopathy. I found a wonderful homeopathic doctor and I’ve stayed on it since. Also, being in love with a wonderful woman helps a great deal. My wife and I have been together for over 40 years, and she’s my best friend and confidant. And staying busy is the healthiest thing in the world. I still write and still have ideas that I’d like to see on the screen, although I don’t know that I’ll be able to direct anymore. I just don’t have the same kind of energy I did when I was 82! (laughs)
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
THE WRESTLER DVD Release: Interview with Darren Aronofsky
by Terry Keefe
The Wrestler has come to DVD this week with extras which include interviews with real professional wrestlers and "The Wrestler" music video from Bruce Springsteen. An in-depth interview with Wrestler director Darren Aronofsky, below.
Note that this article appeared in the February 2009 issue of Venice Magazine.
(Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky, on the set of The Wrestler, above)
Into the Ring with Aronofsky
As someone who has spent quite a bit of time researching the backstage goings-on of professional wrestling for two different screenplays (most notably a script which was a biopic of wrestling super-promoter Vince McMahon), I can say that director Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler captures the lives of professional wrestlers with an authenticity that has never been seen before in a fiction film. It is also, somewhat incredibly, the first major fiction film in recent memory to really begin mining the pure narrative gold inherent in this strange showbiz netherworld where sport and spectacle collide. Although there have now been a number of landmark documentaries on the subject of wrestling, of which Barry Blaustein’s Beyond the Mat and Paul Jay’s Wrestling with Shadows are my two favorites, studio fiction films about professional wrestling, such as 2000’s Ready to Rumble, have either played the wresling world using broad, and largely unfunny, comedy; or as a real sport, such as in the 1989 Hulk Hogan-starrer No Holds Barred, where the wrestling matches are presented as a genuine athletic contest. But, the “real” world of professional wrestling contains all the drama, and dark comedy, that any single story needs, without having to gild the lilly in any significant way, and it is in depicting that world in a straightforward, almost neorealistic, style that Aronofsky finds the strength of The Wrestler. That, and the performance of Mickey Rourke as Randy "The Ram" Robinson, which is a case of a performer meeting material that fits him perfectly for where he is in his actual life and career. The film is partially about the attempted comeback of the Ram, but it’s impossible to totally separate the Ram’s comeback story from the real-life arc of Rourke himself. That’s not to call this stunt casting on Aronofsky’s part, as that would cheapen a performance which will be admired for years, long after audience awareness of Rourke’s career path has diminished; but both the Ram and Rourke are former big stars from 20 years prior, pretty in their youth and pretty ragged-looking at times today. The Ram longs for his heyday of the 80s, and when the well-chosen soundtrack of hair metal tunes from that period plays throughout the film, it is far more related to character than the typical soundtrack assemblage. The songs of Quiet Riot and Ratt play constantly in the Ram’s head anyway; we the audience are just privy to it during this part of his life. And similarly, you can certainly imagine Rourke himself pining for the days when he was Harry Angel of Angel Heart. Lost youth. Lost promise. But with the chance of redemption.
One of the most heartbreaking things for me when researching my own wrestling projects was the discovery that many of the wrestlers who I watched, and idolized, as a child had met tragic ends before ever getting out of middle age. To call the wrestling lifestyle tough defines understatement when you know some of the elements that it entails. Wrestlers for the big companies are on the road for a large number of days each year. Inevitably, that seems to take a toll on their home life and personal relationships. Although wrestling is staged, this isn’t like being a movie stuntman, because performing before a live audience requires that the moves look real without any special effects. When you see a wrestler being dropped from the ring to the concrete, he often is really hitting the concrete. Night after night. A famous professional wrestler (I believe Terry Funk) was once quoted as saying the reason his punches looked so real is because he was really hitting his opponents. Pain killer addiction is common, as is steroid addiction. When we meet Randy the Ram 20 years after his peak, he is wrestling on the small indie show circuit, where wrestlers often get paid $100 per performance, if that, for a crowd that demands they continue to take big and bloody risks with their already-broken bodies. The Old-Timers Day of professional wrestlers, as depicted at the autograph-signing show that the Ram attends, is a sad affair, with many of the former stars crippled or on their way. But the Ram can’t let go of his glory days, and although he suffers a heart attack after a match, he is determined to have at least one last big payday in the ring, a rematch against his former rival from the 80s, an Iranian villain called the Ayatollah but played by an African-American in the film (wrestler Ernest “The Cat” Miller). Although the Ram makes his ring entrance to Guns ‘n Roses “Sweet Child ‘o Mine,” Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” was also playing in my head. The Wrestler is a reinvention for both Rourke and Aronofsky himself, who has taken on a much more objective style with this film. It’s gritty and fly-on-the-wall, and it suits the story well.
I can’t write an article about Aronofsky without mentioning his landmark 1998 film Pi, which for me at least, was one of the Top 5 indies of the 90s. For those who have never seen it, the story is about a computer and mathematics genius named Max (Sean Gullette) who has possibly stumbled onto the name of God, causing a bunch of different posses to pursue him for it, including the intelligence community and a group of Kabbalah-obsessed Orthodox Jews. Pi doesn’t actually provide the answers to the universe, but it does manage the deft trick of making you feel as if you touched the spiritual yourself during the lead character’s journey. And it also serves as a launching pad for the discussion of some mighty big ideas. That the plot is structured as a thriller gives its metaphysical tangents a framework to play in, so that the film never becomes so esoteric that it loses sight of entertaining the audience. It’s a marvel of independent filmmaking and one worth seeing in a theater if possible. The grainy, but high-contrast black and white photography by Matthew Libatique is exquisite at times.
Aronofsky and I met for shrimp burritos at the famous Tortilla Grill on Abbot Kinney in Venice, on a very rainy, cold day in mid-December of 2008.
What were the origins of the idea for The Wrestler?
Darren Aronofsky: I had the idea when I graduated from film school. I made a list of ideas for films, and The Wrestler was one of them. It just came out of an observation that no one has ever done a serious picture on wrestling, so that's where it all began.
At the time, were you thinking of presenting wrestling as a real contest in the story? Because until the mid-90s or so, there was very little information available as to what really happens behind-the-scenes.
That’s true. I wasn't sure at first. But I think, the more research I did on it, and the more I got to meet the world, and the more access I got backstage...I realized how real it all was.
What I always say is that professional wrestling is staged, but not exactly what you would call “fake.”
Yeah, that’s exactly right.
Did the screenwriter Robert Siegel have a script that he brought to you and then was developed further, or did you commission him for the original work?
We commissioned him. We gave him a few ideas, and we gave him the aesthetic of the world, and then we just let him loose.
How long was the development process on the script?
Well, we developed it all the way up to the day we shot. And even on set, we were working on it. Rob Siegel was on strike (during the Writers Strike), but we did a lot of improvisation and stuff.
Had you been a fan of wrestling when you were growing up?
Not really. I think I had, like, an eight-month romance with it.
That's about what I had. But because I was a kid, it seemed like forever.
Right [laughs]. I went to one match at Madison Square Garden. This was before Wrestlemania even began. In fact, Hulk Hogan was a bad guy at the time.
I remember that. That's when I was watching in the early 80s.
You remember Tony Garea and Rick Martel?
Sure, yeah! The tag team champions. I loved those guys.
They were my favorite. Tony Garea would get beat up forever, and then Rick Martel would come in and save the match.
Yeah, he would come in after what they call the “hot tag.”
Is that what that was called?
Yeah, the guy who comes in after being tagged and rescues the guy who is getting beaten up.
Right, that was always how it happened [laughs]. And the Moondogs, I was a fan of theirs also. It was funny, because, you'll appreciate this…Mickey was trained by one of the Wild Samoans. Afa [Anoa’i].
Yeah, I read that!
Afa was the sweetest guy in the world. Just a sweetheart. But he was always a bad guy on the shows, wasn't he?
The Wild Samoans were always bad guys, yeah. The worst of the bad guys, actually.
It's fun to meet a lot of these guys, like we also got to meet Nikolai Volkoff. He’s also a sweet guy. And Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka. It's just wild to see these guys who were heroes, you know, but also… seeing where their lives have taken them, from where they once were, these legends. It's just so…a fascinating story, I thought. 
(Afa Anoa'i, the former professional wrestling star, and a bloody Mickey Rourke, who Afa trained for The Wrestler. Below is a promotional pic of Afa in his 80s heyday, as part of the tag team The Wild Samoans, with his partner Sika.)
I know that Mickey was your first choice for the role, and then there was some point where Nicolas Cage came along and was attached. But ultimately you went back to Mickey.
Yeah, it was a small window [with Nicolas Cage]. It took a really long time to get the money to make it with Mickey. In fact, for many, many, many months, we didn't think it would be possible. No one believed in him, and no one wanted to make the film. But then, as soon as we had a movie star, it became a movie, and overnight, or within two weeks, we had the funding, and the green light. It was a lot more money, but it just didn't work as well, so…you know, eventually, we went back to Mickey, and took a lot less money, but we were able to make it.
Even with Mickey’s role in Sin City, it was hard to get financing on this. That's surprising.
Yeah, and all we wanted was six million dollars. It was tough.
So how much training did Mickey do for the role?
He did six months of bodybuilding.
He is big in this.
Yeah, he put on thirty-five pounds of muscle. And then he did three months of wrestling training.
The press isn't picking up on that enough. I wish they would give him a little more credit for how good his wrestling looks. How polished it looks.
Yeah, when we finished the film, some wrestlers came up and said, “There's not a wrestler in the world that won't believe you're not a wrestler.” And he did some great moves, and if you look at it, it's all him. Mickey did it all.
Did you stop in a bit while he was training with Afa, or did you just see Mickey when he was a fully-formed wrestler?
Oh no, it was a little scary at first. It took a long time. I thought that the fact that he was a boxer would make things easier, but actually, I think it made things twice as hard, because he had to sort of unlearn how to move like a boxer. They move so much differently than wrestlers, so that took a long time for him to let go…to learn how to just basically move in the ring and ham it up. So that part was tough.
There was always the serious possibility that he could get injured during that training, too.
True. Well, he did. I don’t know…it was somewhere between actually getting hurt, and…he's a bit lazy, Mickey [laughs]. He's so talented, but for years he's been able to just walk through roles, sort of put his feet up on the desk. When I kind of talked to him about going out there and doing the wrestling, I think he was up for it, but didn't realize how much energy it would take. So I had to push him a little bit. 
(Rourke wrestling Ernest Miller, in his role of the Ayatollah, in the final match of the film.)
How much of the “extreme wrestling” stuff, such as the razor blading and the weapons, did you guys do for real, and how much of it was, for lack of a better word, staged?
Well, there's movie magic happening. There's a lot of make-up, of course. I mean, Mickey's not bleeding, but that guy Necro Butcher (Editor’s Note: Mickey’s opponent in the bloody extreme match and a real-life wrestler), he's a real dude. He's a cult American hero.
That's a great way to put it.
He is. He's the top-billing guy. You go to any of these matches, he's the last match always. And the crowd loves him, they go crazy for him. And so a lot of stuff he did was real. Because it's what he does every day. But we did it in a very safe way. There's movie magic, but there are also real stunts happening, but nothing very, very dangerous.
You shot the wrestling matches at actual shows with a live crowd, in between the regular wrestling cards that they were there for. What was that experience like?
The wrestling fans, you know, well…the hardcore wrestling fans are a different breed than the other wrestling fans. That was the Combat Zone Wrestling (CZW) promotion, and they, and the other two promotions [which included the promotion Ring of Honor], they were all great. The fans, they get the theatrics of it, so they knew what to scream when different things happened, they just really played with it. CZW was the Philly crowd, and they were a tougher crowd [laughs]. They were pretty brutal and aggressive, but we did our best to sort of keep them entertained, and to keep it going, and we got it done.
How much time did you have to shoot with these live crowds? Were you able to do multiple takes, or did you have to use a couple of cameras at once because of time constraints?
We had to shoot with one camera. At CZW, we really limited how much stuff we had to actually do in front of a live crowd. There's a lot of stuff that we were able to cheat when the crowd wasn't there. You can see in those scenes that there are a few angles into the mat, and a few other things we played around with, to make it do-able. But in the other matches, we did shoot a lot of it in front of a crowd: the slapping contest, the coming out to the ring, entering the ring, the exiting the ring, you know. It was a lot of difficult things to get, but I think the crowds were all psyched, in general.
(Above: Aronofsky directs Rourke in the ring.)
Did you go out of your way not to use very recognizable wrestlers in the supporting roles? I recognized Ernest “The Cat” Miller, but that was about it.
That’s exactly right. The Ayatollah was a hard role to fill, so I had to get someone….how big of a star was Ernest? Was he that big?
He was popular in the WCW wrestling promotion , but more of a mid-card guy.
Yeah, that's what I thought. But yeah, I totally wanted to avoid using the big stars on purpose, because I thought, if you saw some legends show up, it almost pulls you out of the movie. We never mention Hulk Hogan, nor any of the other [real-life] wrestlers. We just wanted to keep the fiction alive, and not pull people out of it.
Was there anyone from the wrestling in particular that you were thinking of in regards to who Randy the Ram was? He’s got a little bit of Hulk Hogan to him, but not quite completely.
Not quite. He was never that big. We always saw him more as an Intercontinental-level Champion type of guy (Editor’s Note: The Intercontinental Championship was the second-level championship belt for years in the WWF, after the World Championship), or a tag-team champion guy. Never the biggest star, more in the middle-range. Like a Ricky Steamboat, or a Brutus Beefcake type of level guy, was the idea. That's how we always pictured him in our heads. Also, because he just didn't have the [physical] immensity of what some of those other guys would've been like. I mean, Mickey got big, but he didn't get big like Lex Luger, who was probably like 280, 290, something like that.
It was such a great nod to the 80s wrestling world that you had the ring nemesis be the Ayatollah. Wrestling in the 80s, in particular, was filled with Middle Eastern villains like the Iron Sheik, and it also would've been completely true to the history of wrestling that they have someone who isn’t even the same race as the character, in this case an African-American, playing the Ayatollah, and the crowd just goes with it.
Yeah, yeah. I always love that. I don't know if you heard, but Iran has condemned the movie.
I did. Did you want to speak about that?
I mean, it's upsetting to me, because it's not in any way…it's not meant to be disrespecting Iran or its people in any way. I mean, this is pro wrestling, and Arabic-slash-Iranian characters are kind of stock in the trade, and so we're not in any way, you know, lauding it and saying, “This is great.” We're just sort of making a comment: “Hey, look, we've got a black guy playing an Iranian guy. Don't you realize this is all like a joke, and a sham?” And it plays into America's….how guys like George Bush oversimplify things into good versus evil.
Right, mainly you're making a comment on how ridiculous it is.
Yeah, yeah, so, anyway, I think they missed the whole charm of it. All right. A little extra press for us, I guess.
Were you inspired at all by the real-life story of wrestler Jake “The Snake” Roberts as it was portrayed in Barry Blaustein’s documentary Beyond the Mat?
We were deep into our development when that film came out, and I didn't see it until much later. I didn't even know about it until much later, many years later, but I think I saw it on DVD. We were deep into the development of the character at that point, but the sad thing about a lot of these guys is…Jake's story is kind of cliché.
It's unfortunately very common, yeah.
Yeah, so, there are a lot of guys like that. You know, all these guys were on the road three hundred days a year, and their home lives, by the time their careers were over, were just shot, so they came back to nothing. 
(Above: Rourke performing his off-the-top-rope finishing manuever.)
I’m going to guess that, as an actor, Mickey works pretty loose?
That's where a lot of the whole visual style of the film came out of from. I thought that we should just let this guy be free, and just try to be in the moment with him, and surrender to that.
Does he give you, typically, takes very different from each other?
Absolutely. Yeah. He's pretty free, and between “Action” and “Cut,” he's really open to exploring.
In terms of the choreography of the wrestling, how specific were you in plotting it out, or were you able to sort of capture it on the fly?
No, we spent a lot of time on that, actually, even though, in general they're kind of improvising when they're in the ring…we couldn't really do that, because, you know, Mickey wasn't really a wrestler. These guys train for years, so we choreographed a very simple match, and that's what we trained and taught Mickey. And then we brought the opponent in, right at the end. With Ernest Miller, I forget where Ernest lives, but he wasn't living in New York, so we brought him in a couple of weeks before. Ernest, of course, learned it in a day, you know, because any professional wrestler could pick it up, and then they rehearsed a bit. We were very well rehearsed before we went into the ring, but still, even when we were in the ring, Mickey had to be reminded of which piece it was, and how to do the hits, and so, during a live promotion, we'd run out there, and the crowd would watch us. We'd work through it pretty quickly, and then I'd figure out where to put the camera, and then we would shoot. That’s basically how it worked.
I just re-read the interview you did with the late, great screenwriting magazine Scenario, back when Pi was released. You spoke a lot about the very specific “film grammar” you set up during the preproduction stages. In Pi, you kept to a very subjective point of view, in part, by only shooting over the lead character Max’s shoulder when he was in conversation with another character, never over the shoulder of that other character. The Wrestler has a much looser feel to it, but there’s definitely a consistent grammar here as well. What were some of the rules you set up with your Director of Photography?
Unlike the subjective direction of Pi, this was all about being objective, so it was all kind of observing and watching and we never cut away to inserts or any of that stuff. Things that I would've done in the past. I just really wanted to change and do something different. Like when Marisa [Tomei] reads the greeting card, normally I would cut to an insert, but there was just no place for it in this one.
I love the opening, where, for the first time, you see Mickey in the present day. He's sitting in the locker room in that long shot, you don't see his face very clearly, but his body language says it all. He’s slumped and then his reaction to getting the money from the promoter, which is clearly disappointing to him…that half-shrug speaks volumes about where he is in life.
Thank you. Mickey did a great job with it, you know.
The scene going into the deli, where you hear the music, where it's like his ring entrance, was that something that was planned from the beginning, or when you guys...
What, the music?
More the walk through the curtain.
That came when we were doing our tech-scout with the entire crew. I just saw the hallway, and I was like, “Oh, we gotta work with this,” and so we did.
I understand that the deli was actually functioning while you were shooting.
Yeah, we didn't have the money to close the supermarket and the meat counter, and people just started coming up, and I just got Mickey to start serving them, and so half those people in the scene are real people, half are actors.
The soundtrack is loads of fun. And I think there's going to be some kind of hair metal revival because of this movie, that you’re responsible for, one way or the other.
I'm sorry [laughs]. I send all apologies to the world. I don’t know, it's fun. It was interesting because this isn't sort of the A-list hair-metal anthems.
Right. That’s something that I loved about it. These were songs that you remember from that period, but not the biggest, overplayed hits.
Yeah, well, we couldn't afford them [laughs]. And it's funny, because it shows you how you can turn your financial limitations into strengths. We couldn't afford the big songs, the Def Leppard and Motley Crue songs, so we had to go to that next level, you know, the Ratt and Cinderella level -- but it was a lot of fun, because they were great bands, and they have a lot of heart and a lot of soul, and a lot of their songs, you can remember them pretty well.
Did Bruce Springsteen see the film and then write the song “The Wrestler” that runs over the end credits?
No. He based it off of the script, and a letter that Mickey wrote to him about it. Mickey wrote him a two-page letter, and told him why he was interested in doing the project. I think the Boss really is a big fan of Mickey's, and heard about this and wanted to help, and that's why he did it. He ended up giving us the song for free. It's coming out on iTunes tomorrow, I think. As a single.
As a big fan of Barton Fink myself, I have to believe that there were a few “wrestling picture” quotes thrown about the set during this production. Yes?
It's funny, when I got into the Venice Film Festival, they ask for a director's statement, and that was my statement….I took a quote from Barton Fink [laughs].
The Wrestler is in a very different genre and style from your previous work. How much of a conscious decision was there, in terms of career, to reinvent yourself somewhat with this movie, or was it not even thought about at all?
It wasn't really a reaction to anything. It was more that the first three films were kind of a chapter, and I had just, a lot had changed in my life, and my filmmaking team kind of got dispersed. My producer moved out here to Venice, actually, and was doing his own thing, and my DP was working on something, so I just decided to put a whole new team together, and it was just time to do something radically different.
What film gauge did you shoot The Wrestler on?
16mm.
That's what I was thinking. Super 16?
Super 16. Widescreen, though. So it's a little bit less of a negative and it gets a lot more grain, but I really like that.
It looked fantastic. I really like the grain. And the colors of Super-16.
Yeah, there's just something about it.
There have also got to be some limitations to working with it, I imagine.
But it's quick. It's quick, you know, and it gives you much more of a real documentary feel, because you can really move with the characters. 35mm is a lot heavier, it's hard to move, and so I was excited about the 16.
Did you have any concerns about working with Mickey yourself, before going into this?
Not really. I had a very, very honest conversation with him. Straight up. I knew he was going to be tough. I knew he wasn't going to be a walk in the park, that he was going to have a lot of opinions, and have a very strong point of view. But, you know, I didn't think there was anything else I could do.
I think you gave him his comeback, which a lot of guys have tried to do in the past, but this is the one.
Thank you.
Let’s talk a bit about what you’re working on next. You’ve been announced as attached to a new version of Robocop.
We’re developing a script [on Robocop], but we’ve got a long way to go. We’re also developing a few other ideas. I don't have anything that's set in stone, that's ready to go, but I’m working on a lot of stuff, and I really want to get back to work.
There have also been reports about a new edit of The Fountain.
Oh yeah, that's just a slight...I'm just doing a slightly changed version. That'll hopefully come out at some point. Hopefully, I'll get a chance to put that out there.
Will it be using footage that you already have, or stuff that you're recreating?
There's some new stuff, but, no it's all footage I have. I wouldn't be able to recreate stuff. But we shot it a lot of different ways, and there were a lot of different choices, and I think the version that's out there is definitive, it's the version I wanted out there. But this is another kind of version of it that has sort of haunted me. I don't know if one supersedes the other, but I think fans of the film would appreciate it, so that's why I'll put it out there.
Cool. And you’re also developing something revolving around the story of Noah’s Ark?
Yeah, that's a dream project that we've been working on, and we're probably going to do a graphic novel first. We're getting that off the ground, and hopefully someone will give me the money to do it. We'll see. It's complicated.
I read that you won some type of poetry contest when you were a kid with a Noah’s Ark-related poem?
Yeah, that was a long time ago [laughs]. It was just…it was a contest for the United Nations, and I probably was thirteen or fourteen, and I just wrote it and I won this big contest, and so it's kind of just always been with me, that character, that story. Like a lot of people, you know, but I had a personal thing with it, so at some point, hopefully, I'll get to tackle that one.
Do you still have the poem?
Oh, yeah. I'm sure I could probably dig it out of somewhere, but I don't think anyone will ever see that [laughs].
Just a few quick questions about Pi. I’ve always admired how you were able to examine so many big and rather cosmic ideas, but also keep the film moving by using a thriller structure.
Well, that was, that was always the concept: to have a really good skeleton, some type of genre that pulled you through it, but then to kind of hang on it as many interesting ideas as you could. It was a lot of stuff that me and my friends had been talking about over the years, and stuff I was interested in, and I just researched it all, and it kind of took off. 
(Above: The Orthodox Posse that pursues the hero of Pi.)
I remember seeing the symbol of Pi all over Los Angeles when the film was being released. It was everywhere, on posterboards and on the sidewalk. And I remember thinking that it was the greatest marketing scheme for an indie film ever. The symbol was everywhere, and so evocative that you had to see the film.
You got it [laughs] ! Yeah, it was fun. I mean, me and, I hired a bunch of guys I knew that did graffiti, and six of 'em….I think I paid them each fifty bucks a can. I gave them the paint, and I said, “Finish this can, I'll give you fifty bucks,” so I got like six guys with all these cans, and we just went all over New York, and I won't forget it, because, you know, I was up all night, doing it, and they were all up all night. But each time, you gotta squat, to get down, so you're doing squats all night, every like ten feet you're squatting. I got home, I got so sick for three days, because I was dehydrated. And I was in bed for three days, and then the phones started to come, the calls started to come: “oh, man, I saw this Pi symbol -- it's all over the place,” so you know, it was great.
They were here in L.A., too. I remember...
Yeah, I think we tried to repeat it here, but we didn't actually do it. I think probably the film company tried to repeat it.
I wanted to ask a little bit of your background. You're from Brooklyn, and your parents were both teachers. Do I have that right?
My dad was a science teacher. He taught geology and earth-science. My mom taught fourth grade, public school.
And then you went to Harvard, followed by the American Film Institute?
I went to public school in Brooklyn for all those years, then I went to Harvard for four years, then I went to AFI for two.
Were you able to start studying film as an undergrad at Harvard?
Yeah, I started. I got into the arts, I think, when I was a sophomore. My freshman year, I didn't know what the hell I wanted to be. And then my sophomore year, I started drawing, and that kind of changed my life, that class. Made me look at the world differently. It was just basic drawing class, but it was a great class. The first day of class, you would draw a self-portrait. That was your homework assignment. And then the last day, the last assignment was that you'd also draw a portrait, and then everyone would hang them up, side by side. And it was radical, how much, in whatever it was, four or five months, people's skills would change. You know, it was a great class. This teacher taught me totally how to look at the world, a three-dimensional world, and interpret it in a two-dimensional way. It was great.
(Below: The official trailer for The Wrestler)
FROST/NIXON DVD Release: Kevin Bacon Interview
By Terry Keefe (Bacon as Willie O'Keefe in JFK, above.)
Frost/Nixon comes to DVD this week with special features which include a director's commentary from Ron Howard. Below is an in-depth interview with Frost/Nixon co-star Kevin Bacon, which also covers his recent starring role in Taking Chance.
(Note: This article appeared in the February 2009 issue of Venice Magazine. )
Kevin Bacon: Hollywood’s Long Distance Runner
Memo to young stars: If you want to know how to manage an acting career, study the project choices of Kevin Bacon. After Footloose, he was as big as any of the young stars of the 80s, but, a few years later, deftly avoided being lumped in with the pop culture relics of a fading decade by a small role he took in 1991’s JFK, for director Oliver Stone, then at the height of his filmmaking, and press-creating, powers. Bacon’s screen time was brief as gay hustler Willie O’Keefe, who was a key witness in the conspiracy case being but together by Kevin Costner’s character, Jim Garrison, but Bacon was able to showcase his acting chops in a role unlike any he had been seen in before on-screen. Perception-wise, he was also in some very good acting company in JFK, a film which starred Kevin Costner, then one of the biggest names in Hollywood after Dances With Wolves, but also boasted a stellar supporting cast of extended cameos, which included the likes of Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Ed Asner, Donald Sutherland, and....Kevin Bacon. And with that, he was no longer regarded primarily as a young star for young audiences, but as a serious actor, in it for the long haul. (To be fair, his promise for more dramatic fare was showcased nearly a decade earlier in 1982’s Diner, but memories of both Hollywood and the public are short.) Strong roles followed from then on, right through to today in A Few Good Men, Murder in the First, Apollo 13, Mystic River, and The Woodsman (a very strong, and under seen, indie in which Bacon plays a pedophile who has been released from prison and is attempting to fight his compulsions), to name just some of the highlights.
Bacon continues to be willing to take supporting roles when the material and the director are strong, and can currently be seen in theaters in director Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon, in which Bacon plays Jack Brennan, who was Nixon’s real-life Chief of Staff during his post-Presidency years. He and Frank Langella, as Nixon, share one of the film’s most moving scenes when Brennan, who is as protective of Nixon as if he were his father, cautions the ex-President during a break from the interview taping about the long-term implications of what he might be about to reveal to the interviewer David Frost (played by Michael Sheen). It’s one of the few moments when Nixon is seen to let his guard down, and acts as a climax of sorts to the character arcs of both Nixon and Brennan. Bacon will also be back at the top of the masthead with his headlining role in the powerful HBO film Taking Chance, based on the real story of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl, a Marine who volunteers for military escort duty for the remains of a 19-year old fallen Marine, Lance Corporal Chance Phelps. The Department of Defense provides uniformed escorts for all fallen servicemen and women to wherever their final resting place is, and part of the job of the escort is to make sure that the remains are treated with the proper respect at every step of the journey home. Directed by Ross Katz, Taking Chance takes its time to concentrate on the small details of the trip, from the time the body of Chance Phelps is in the Dover Port Mortuary, at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, to when Bacon’s Michael Strobl takes charge of the transportation, and it is this concentration on detail that the film finds its story as Strobl interacts with numerous Americans along the way. Likely of every political stripe, they nonetheless find a connection with both Strobl and the memory of the young man he is taking back to his parents.
We reached Kevin Bacon by phone on Super Bowl weekend.
Hi, Kevin. Thanks for talking with me on a Saturday morning. I appreciate it.
Kevin Bacon: Hey, happy to do it.
I wanted to talk first about Taking Chance. Did you spend much time with the real Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl in preparation?
Yeah, we spent a couple of days together. I saw his home life, his family, and his kids. A couple of his friends came over, and they hung out there too. They took me around Quantico, where I'd actually been before. Because I had done the research for A Few Good Men. And we went around the Pentagon. He's been working with the Pentagon now for a while. Yeah, so that was pretty much it, you know. 
(Above: Kevin Bacon as Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl in Taking Chance.)
Did you feel the responsibility to kind of portray him, personality-wise, close to how he really is? Or, was it more of his spirit, and the spirit of the task he had undertaken, which you wanted to capture?
Well, I think that, there's a certain - I mean, I feel responsibility, obviously, to make characters real people. And I haven't really played many real living people that many times in my life. Actually, real people, living or dead. I didn't feel a responsibility in the sense of trying to do an imitation of him, because, you know, he's not like an iconic public figure. It's not like playing Nixon or something like that. On the other hand, I don't want to feel like me, when the camera's on, you know? And the time between “Action” and “Cut” is the time when I want to feel like I'm walking in somebody else's shoes. So, it was powerful for me to try to, you know, go as close to Mike as possible, and as close to who he is as possible. Even with something technical like the hair. Nobody knew that he had that sort of premature-grey hair thing going on. But, it just seemed like, when we first talked about it, it seemed like that in order to feel like him, and sort of lose myself in the part, that it might be something that we could try. So when I go to work and I put that uniform on, etc., it's nice to have the kind of external stuff, along with the internal thing as well. And also, the mannerisms, the way he sort of moves and speaks and gestures and all those things. So, I did try to get as close to him as I could.
Did you accompany any actual military escorts yourself?
No, I didn't do that, no. I don't know that - first off, I think I would feel kind of uncomfortable doing that.
Okay. That's understandable.
And I also don't know that the military would be all that, you know, hip to doing that. But one thing that was very, very helpful was that we had -- the Marines will, if you work on a film, and they have signed up or agreed to be involved in a film, there's kind of a Hollywood office that'll send technical advisers to work with you. And that was helpful, but even more helpful was, we got some of the guys from the Dover Port Mortuary. And the Mortuary obviously plays very heavily into the film. As it turned out, one of the guys, who not only volunteered and worked at the Mortuary, but also had done like six or seven escorts, he was on the set with me, you know, pretty much the whole shoot. And he was extremely helpful, not just to me but to a lot of the other actors who were playing with me. You know, I had the benefit of having months to prepare, to do a good job with it. Whereas, one of the other actors [in a smaller role] comes in and has an audition, and then they just have to play it for one day -- it's equally important that they know what they're doing.
What do you think drives the people that work at the Dover Port Mortuary? They are portrayed as near-angelic in the film.
It’s a good question, because this guy from the Mortuary, for instance, during Iraq, had done at least two tours of duty. Then in an attack, like six or seven of his friends were killed, and he was wounded himself---and then he wants to go, and be so hands-on, you know, in terms of that job [at the Mortuary]. And that truly has to be a difficult place to work, and yet, it's on the wall there - it says, “Dignity, Respect, and Honor." I mean, this is what they feel, they feel honored to work there, they feel honored to have this job. Something about it sort of transcends just basically working in a funeral parlor. I don't know, there's something about it that's a little more...obviously a little bigger than that.
A big part of the story are the many people Michael Strobl meets along the way that show their support and respect for both his duty, and the loss of Chance Phelps.
That was the thing that Mike Strobl said that really struck him, and, as you know, he's a co-writer on the film, so there's very little embellishment in regards to those scenes. It's very much similar to what his experience was, and I think the thing where he was really knocked out, was how people did react with such compassion and sadness and respect for this kid that they'd never met and they would never see, you know. I think that Mike Strobl was really sort of surprised by that, and also by the fact that, as he told me, he assumed that, given the amount of people he ran into, they probably cut a pretty wide swath in terms of their political views. And yet, universally, they had this similar kind of reaction, you know, so that was kind of part of what the film was about, in terms of transcending the politics of whatever you happened to be feeling about the war.
I think that, whatever side of the political fence you're on, Americans have been dealing with great regret with how the soldiers were treated coming back from Vietnam for a lot of decades now. And I see that change in their treatment of the Iraq veterans, regardless of whether they support the war or not.
Yeah, I don't think it's the same kind of thing as it used to be, in terms of these guys coming back from Vietnam who would often talk about being spit on. For myself, another interesting thing that happened to me is that, because of the structure of the film, I'd go, typically to one location for a day, maybe two, and then we'd move to another location. But at each spot, there would be new actors, and new extras, and new people, you know, involved in the process of making the film. And it involved actors or extras who would just sit by and watch it part of the time. And they were incredibly moved and touched by the whole thing, and even though there was obviously no body in the box, right? But they still had reactions that were similar to characters in the movie, so they would come and they would speak to me about friends and family members who were serving or who had been killed. They would come up to me and say, “Thanks so much for doing this," which, for me - I was a little embarrassed, because it was kind of like "I'm just the actor, you know?" I'm doing the job and I'm getting paid for it, but for some reason people wanted to thank me for making the film. And, like I said, I was a little embarrassed, and I think that was just a little of the feeling that Mike had, when he was thanked for his service in the escort, and he was feeling like it was nothing more than a duty.
Your character has a lot of silent time onscreen, where you're not even really playing against other actors, and so you're kind of playing Mike’s internal life a lot of the time in this film. You have to do a lot sometimes with no dialogue. How do you approach that?
Well, I think that it's one of the challenges with a part like this. It's a reactive kind of part. But it's one of the things that I've tried to do more as I've got a little bit older - the idea of trying to do more with less. I mean, I sometimes will go through, you know, with the script, and go, “Do I really need to say this?” I just think there are sometimes things than can be more powerful than words on a page. The Woodsman was a lot like that. We did a lot of cutting of stuff. I would just go through with the director, and say, “I really don't need this, I don't need this line.” I mean, I guess the challenge is to try to get, somehow, the feeling, and, for lack of another way to say it, sort of put it in your guts, and hope it comes out through your eyes. That's the work. And, you know, luckily I had a director who trusted that that was going to work, that that was going to play.
There’s a very methodical nature to the film. Particularly with the procedure of preparing the body for the shipping, which is pretty detailed. At the beginning, I was worried that this type of pacing would become dull. But the methodical pace of the preparation procedure, and then the escort sequences, just starts to slowly sweep you up into it, and becomes very powerful. You don't even realize it's happening, which is a testament to the filmmaking, but I'm sure this type of pacing was something that was of some concern to [director] Ross Katz, and perhaps you, also.
Yeah, because the impulse is certainly to dramatize it. I think, you know, Ross - his instinct was just to duplicate what the process was for Mike, and if you cut any of that out, then you're not really showing what the process is, and what they go through. I think it was kind of cool that he did that. And I'm glad that you feel that way, because I feel like it does slowly sweep you up, and what, you know, is at first kind of the simple telling of this thing, becomes an emotional journey without your even realizing it, and I think that's really what happened to Mike Strobl. I don't know that when he set out he knew how emotional this journey would be for him. Certainly, a kid from his home town was killed, and nobody ever wants to have to deal with the loss of a life. But I don't think he was quite aware of how much this would affect him.
Let’s talk about Frost/Nixon. You met with the real Jack Brennan, who you portray in the film. How did that meeting go and what were you hoping to learn from it?
Well, you know, interestingly enough, I was in a situation, if I remember correctly, where I had to meet with Jack, almost right after I met with Mike Strobl. Because I think I was starting Taking Chance and then jumping right into Frost/Nixon afterwards. But again, I wanted to sort of try to find the essence of Jack, you know. Frost/Nixon is a much more theatrical presentation of the story. And, again, Jack is not like Nixon - it's not a character that you're going to go, “Oh, my god, he looked and sounded just like him!” [laughs]
But I wanted to sort of get the essence of him, and I spent time with him. I listened to his feelings about Nixon, about his feelings about Nixon's family, and about the time that he spent with him. I have a hard time describing what it is, exactly, but there is something that's kind of different about Marines. And Jack was a Marine. He was a Marine when he met Nixon. Nixon took a liking to him, and I think admired him, and was kind of enamored with Marines, because they were the stuff that he was not made of, you know?
And, then when Nixon left the White House, he asked Brennan to go with him, to become his Chief of Staff, and Jack left the Corps, and started working for Nixon. And I think that his thing was, you know, a sense of duty. He was an honest, hardworking, and committed guy to his Commander-In-Chief, and I also think he had a real admiration of Nixon's intellect. And I also think that, as was the case with many people, in Nixon's kind of inner circle, you could only get so close to the guy, you know, before a wall would sort of come down.
It’s often said that very few people really knew Nixon.
He was socially awkward, and in some ways very, very guarded. They played golf, probably, what, like three times a week or something like that -- and in some ways he felt like he still didn't know him all that well. 
(Bacon and Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon, above)
Did Jack tell you what he thought of the film?
I saw him briefly after the film, and he said, you know, he was happy with what I did. He’s seen the Broadway show, and his quote to me was, “I think it's a fascinating and fantastic piece of theatre -- as long as nobody calls it history.” So, I think that some of the dramatic details, he may have taken exception to.
Was that midnight phone call [from Nixon to Frost] one of them?
You know, I never spoke with him about the midnight phone call.
Frank Langella. What really struck me about his performance was that Nixon has been so parodied, that when you see the real Nixon in old films and tapes, it's hard to take him as seriously as you might have at the time. What you get with Frank's performance is how formidable Nixon really had to have been. Did Frank tell you anything about what his process was in developing his Nixon?
Well, to tell you the truth, I saw Frank on the very first day of shooting, for a brief moment, as “Frank.” And on the very, very last day -- but for the rest of the time, he was “Nixon” [laughs].
Really!
Yeah, he came to the set, full makeup, wardrobe, and in character every day, and stayed that way until we wrapped at night. And I never saw him, outside of the work. And so, I would never have the occasion, you know, to ask about what he was doing.
So he kind of treated you as he might have treated the real Jack Brennan then?
Exactly.
Do you remember the Frost/Nixon interviews being aired at all? I only remember them very vaguely.
I remember vividly the Watergate hearings, but I don’t remember watching the interviews. And you know, it's interesting, because I was thinking about why that was, and if you just look at the timeline: When I was a junior in high school, and the Vietnam War was raging on, I was a child of a pacifist household -- we were vehemently anti-war, and anti-Nixon, so when Watergate rolled around, and there was a chance he was going to go down, even though I was a kid, I was fascinated, and was thrilled with the opportunity of watching him, you know, eat it. And then, by the time the interviews came around, which was what, '77, I guess, I had now moved to New York, and was, you know, in my late teens, and off to the races with a movie career, and was completely apolitical. Because I was seriously, you know, trying to become a movie star. Well, if not a movie star, just trying to make a living as an actor, you know, and to get out of the restaurants [laughs]. So, no, I don't remember the interviews at all.
Let’s talk a little bit about The Woodsman. I really love your work in that film, and it has to have been a difficult character to portray, because you wanted to make him somewhat sympathetic and likeable, just so you could watch him onscreen. But you also have to be truthful to what he is.
Yeah, it's not a nice place to want to go to work every day, you know, to step into those shoes, but what I really feel is that often the word “monster” is the one word that comes up when you talk about someone who's committed these horrible, horrible crimes against children. And the truth is that if they were monsters - monsters don't exist - if they were monsters, then we could send a hero to kill them, or there would be a sort of anti-monster laser gun, that could, you know, zap them out. A much more frightening piece of this puzzle is that there are teachers, friends, family members, people in the clergy, politicians, regular people living down the street. And so, all I wanted to do, was rather than just say, “Let me make this guy creepy and as monstrous as possible,” which is the usual kind of approach to playing a sex offender or child molester, I wanted to turn him into a real human being. And that was kind of the point. Generally, the use of the child molester in filmmaking is to make him the worst possible guy so that the hero gets the chance to kill him, and the audience gets to stand up and applaud. You see it time and time again. That’s where that story ends up in cinema. And I actually have kids of my own, so I totally get that. It’s just not what this movie is about. It was trying to look at the person as a human being.
(Kevin Bacon in The Woodsman, above.)
I wanted to ask about the supporting character of Candy, that your character is watching out the window, and who is a potentially another child molester on the prowl that your character intends to stop from doing any harm. In your head, did you play that as if Candy were a real person, or a representation of your character’s own demons?
I played him as though he was real, because I feel like that's the way to play it, but certainly, when he's sitting there beating him up, all of a sudden you realize he's beating himself up. There's a lot going on in his head that just kind of rips him apart. I think that my character in The Woodsman is certainly a paranoid sort of guy. And I think that he is someone who has convinced himself that he's done the time, and so now he's fine, and he's rehabilitated, and, you know, he's paid his price. There's a tremendous amount of denial that's going on with that character -- you know, it's like an addict that thinks they no longer have a problem. That's what's going on with him. I think that movie is about his realization that this is something he's going to have to live with for the rest of his life. That he does have a problem, that it's something that's not going to go away because he got out of prison.
Let’s talk about JFK and your work as the imprisoned gay hustler, Willie O‘Keefe. Looking through your filmography, that film was when I started to look at you a little bit differently as an actor, as you started to transition into more adult roles. Career-wise, did you get a similar reaction from your work in JFK?
It wasn't so much the adult nature of it, as it was the character nature of it, with JFK. Because, you know, I was kind of rolling around, and spinning my wheels, and doing some leads in movies that just weren't turning out, and those were starting to go away, and I remember that, for whatever reason, agents, and people in the studios or whatever, would say, “Once you've played the lead, you have to keep playing the lead.” But it wasn't really working for me, you know, and also, creatively, it wasn't all that interesting to me.
So, I worked with an agent at the time, who said, “You know, you were on the stage, in New York, in the '70s and early '80s, and you were doing, you know, really kinda out there character work. So why can't you do that in movies?” And I said, “Well, I can,” so at that point, I had this meeting with Oliver Stone, and he said, “You got the part," and I went in and did the part, and it completely turned things around for me. It was just great, because, all of a sudden, now I was getting parts that were kind of all over the map. And that's continued. I mean, you know, to go from child molester to Marine --- I'm very grateful that when I do get offered things, that they are a pretty wide variety of guys. 
Was the real Willie O'Keefe still alive at the time and did you speak with him?
Well, the name Willie O'Keefe was kind of fictionalized.
Oh, it was a composite character. I never knew that.
Yeah, but there was a guy who Oliver hooked me up with, who Willie was kind of based on, and he was a guy living in New Orleans, who was gay. And so, I had a very, sort of wild night, going around with this dude to sort of like, you know, hardcore gay clubs, stuff like that, and just getting this guy's take on the world. And again, I'm not doing an imitation of him in the movie, but it certainly was helpful to try to get a little bit of his perspective.
Going further back, do you have a favorite of your '80s films at all?
I know this sounds strange, but I really don't go back and look at films. I mean, I do see them. I see them when they come out, maybe twice. I've had a couple of opportunities recently, where people have been nice enough to kind of do retrospectives, and they'll put together kind of like a reel, and it'll really surprise me, because I'll see scenes in films that I have...I just have no memory of having shot [laughs]. And that's kind of fun. But, I mean, in terms of favorites, no, I don't, really.
What’s coming up with the Bacon Brothers Band, in which you play and record with your brother Michael?
We’ve got a brand-new CD, it's called New Year's Day, and we're doing quite a lot of touring. We're really happy with the CD. It's starting to get airplay, which is great. It's been a long time since we've had anything resembling that. And, you know, we're just rattling along.
Have you and your brother played together since you were kids?
Yeah, you know, I started writing songs before I actually even took an acting class.
I was probably around 12. My songwriting was about being heartbroken. When I was very young, I just seemed to always be heartbroken [laughs]. I was always in love with somebody who wasn't in love with me. That's when I started writing songs. And my brother, who's nine years older than me, he was already off on a music career. But we would write together, and I started backing him up with his band, when I was about thirteen, I guess, or fourteen. And in high school, I was playing in bands. And then I took an acting class around the same time, and just kind of fell in love with it, and since my brother was being a musician, I said, “Well, I'll do something else,” so I became an actor.
And then, you know, when I got out of high school, I moved to New York, and started pursuing an acting career. But I alway kept writing, and kept playing, and always would kind of dream, of playing, and playing with my brother. And then, we put the band together, it was like, I guess, thirteen or fourteen years ago, and we just really did it for one gig. And then, with that one gig, somebody else asked us to play. So, we played another one, and then somebody else asked us to play, and then we got a record deal, you know, it just kept rolling around. And we never kind of set out to say, “Okay, I've had an acting career, now it's time for our music career." It was really kind of unexpected. And, in a way, I feel like we sort of follow the Bacon Brothers - it's not like we're leading it, we're just kind of following it.
Do you keep writing songs while you’re on film shoots?
Yeah, I think probably because, you know, if you're working on a film, you have to be emotionally, sort of, in-tune, you know what I mean? Because you're creating, and reliving, or replicating emotional kind of situations. And songwriting, for me, is certainly an emotional exercise. I don't really write like...I won't just come up with a chorus and then try to build a song around it. It's more a question of keeping your heart open, your mind open, and, you know, living experientially, and then finding a song out of that. People have different things that they do in their trailers. Some people do yoga, and other people watch movies, read books. I have a guitar, and I have a computer and a microphone, and it's really a studio. I mean, I basically have a little home studio in my trailer.
You’ve started a website called Six Degrees, with the nonprofit group Network for Good, an idea that was partially inspired by the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game.
Yeah, a few years ago, you know, having lived so long with the Six Degrees concept, I started Six Degrees.org (http://www.sixdegrees.org/). And it was the idea of...I was thinking, if you take me out of the equation, the idea of Six Degrees is kind of a beautiful idea, in that it just connotates that we're all connected. And that there is this kind of small-phenomenon, and that whether it's social or environmental, if you do something in your neighborhood, it can affect people down the block, and around the world. And I was trying to look for something to do to give back. So, I started this organization where you can go on the website, and you have all the million charities that you can donate to.
If there's anything at all that's going on in the world that you're interested in helping out, whether it's, you know, a disease, or a place in the world where you think people need help, or the environment, or whatever it is, you can with a thing called Good Cards, and Good Cards are these cards that you can buy, from twenty-five dollars up. And if I buy a Good Card and give it to you, then you can also go on SixDegrees.org, and redeem it for that value, towards the charity that you want.
That’s great. We’ll definitely include links to the site. What was your reaction when you first heard about the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game?
At first, I kind of thought it was a joke at my expense. I hadn't really gotten my head around the idea that these guys actually were fans of mine [laughs]. I kind of thought they were going, “Isn't it hilarious that this jackass would be linked to some of the great actors in history?” But eventually I just sort of warmed up to it. I really honestly thought that it would have gone away a long time ago. You know what I mean? I was shocked that it's had the hang-time that it's had. You know, but it's actually, it stayed so much in the zeitgeist for so many years, and I think because...I think it has very little to do with me...I think it's more that this idea of connectivity is true. And as we, you know, with the internet, as our connections grow exponentially, through networking, or information, the information highway, we start to realize more and more how connected we all are. And certainly that's been an important part of the environmental movement. And, so, since it was kind of dogging me for so long, I just said, you know, “Fuck it, I'll try to do something cool with it!” And so now, I'm thrilled to be connected to it. It doesn't cause me any kind of grief at all.
It was a pleasure talking to you, Kevin.
You too. Take care.
Taking Chance debuts February 21, on HBO, at 8 PM ET/PT. Frost/Nixon is currently in theatrical release.
The Six Degrees website can be accessed at http://www.sixdegrees.org/.
The Bacon Brothers Band have information on their tour dates and recordings at http://www.baconbros.com/.
The Taking Chance trailer can be viewed below:
IT HAPPENED IN HOLLYWOOD LAST NIGHT: Bai Ling introduces Harry the Dog & the All-Star Traveling Soul Circus at the Unknown Theater
(Actress Bai Ling and Harry the Dog, left. Photo by Dave Edwards)
by Terry Keefe, All photos by Dave Edwards: Special thanks to Dave and Robert Gross-Herndon of DailyCeleb.com
(It Happened In Hollywood Last Night is our new column about the Night World of our City of Fallen Angels.)
British rock musician and vocalist Harry "the Dog" Bridgen unveiled his new All-Star Traveling Soul Circus after a spirited introduction by Bai Ling, at the Unknown Theater on Seward in Hollywood (a cool and spacious theater, complete with bar area, all hidden behind a single door. As they said in Swingers, "It sort of has a speakeasy feel." ) 
(Jenny McShane, photo by Dave Edwards)
Joining the band on guitar was musician-actress Jenny McShane (above), who has starred in the Shark Attack series of films, along with Furnace and The Watcher, opposite Keanu Reeves. Some of the many colorful guitars Jenny played were Gibson USA custom guitars. 
Photo by Dave Edwards
(The line-up for the band included Natalie Wilde, Kim "Mickey" Enlow, Bruno Frasca, Mike Colavitti, Randy Billings, Gary Bulldog Taylor, and Perri Lister.)
Photo by Dave Edwards
The RED ROBIN Takes Flight
By Alan Kline
Modern Primitives Films has announced the second feature film by writer-director Michael Z. Wechsler, entitled The Red Robin. Pitched as a blend of The Celebration and The Manchurian Candidate, the plot focuses on a family reunion which goes very awry when the youngest son accuses his ailing father, a famed psychiatrist, of using his own adopted children as guinea pigs for psychological experiments for the CIA.
The cast includes Jeremy Sisto ("Law and Order", Waitress, "Six Feet Under"), Claire Forlani (Meet Joe Black), Hill Harper ("CSI: N.Y.", Get on the Bus ), and Roger Guenveur Smith (American Gangster). Jonathan Sanger (The Producers, The Elephant Man) is on board as executive producer.
Wechsler has directed series for the BBC and Bravo and previously helmed the feature film Slaves of Hollywood, which also starred Harper. Slaves of Hollywood was a selection at 35 international film festivals and was awarded “Best Feature” at the Rhode Island Film Festival. He has sold screenplays to Spike TV, MTV Networks, and Village Roadshow Productions. “The Last Date,” an internet comedy series about the worst dates of all time, and created by Wechsler, has received over 17 million views on YouTube, making it one of the most viewed web series in history.
The teaser trailer for The Red Robin can be seen here.
Monday, April 20, 2009
A Sweeping Tour of the new USC School of Cinematic Arts, including Special Appearances by George Lucas & Steven Spielberg - PART ONE
(Steven Spielberg, Dean Elizabeth M. Daley, USC President Steven B. Sample, and George Lucas at the dedication of new USC School of Cinematic Arts.)
By Terry Keefe & Alex Simon, Photography and Videography by Gregory Weinkauf.
Back at the turn of the 90s, when we attended what was then known as the School of Cinema-Television at the University of Southern California, we always considered our institution the best film school in the world and it was an easy argument to make. Buildings and production facilities with the names of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Johnny Carson, Harold Lloyd, and Marcia Lucas formed the centerpiece of the physical campus, and when these were dedicated back in 1983, it made international news. A somewhat forgotten fact of university cinema studies is that majoring in film wasn’t always considered to be a legitimate pursuit by many, but suddenly, the most state-of-the-art section of the USC Campus was its film program, a department which had previously shared space with the Trojan Band in a space known as “the stables.” It was a great school, no doubt, but in fairness, there were other strong contenders for the title of best in the world at the time, including NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and the venerable American Film Institute, on the graduate level. But after recently attending the dedication of the new campus of what is now known as the USC School of Cinematic Arts (SCA), it was obvious that it will truly be difficult for any other school to compete with USC in the near future, at least facility-wise, because the new buildings which were unveiled to us were futuristic and a little mind-blowing. And there are still several more under construction.
(A majestic statue of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. stands in the center of the new SCA.)Prior to the dedication, the press were given guided tours of the newly completed Steven Spielberg and George Lucas Buildings, which face each other and form the walls of a spacious courtyard, designed as a place for students to gather. In the middle of the courtyard is a dynamic and gorgeous statue of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., a founder of the original film program at USC, which now gives film students their own version of Tommy Trojan, the famed warrior statue in the middle of the main USC campus. The Spielberg and Lucas buildings are each four stories tall, in addition to an underground level which houses post-production facilities. The two buildings contain within them a combined 137,000 square feet of educational, production, and administrative space. To break that down into detail some more, there are 10 classrooms, 19 conference rooms, 8 screening rooms, 6 editorial labs, 3 mixing rooms, 9 sound editorial rooms, and 3 picture editorial rooms. The spacious lobbies with high ceilings of both buildings are designed to be natural exhibition spaces, as well as ideal locations for receptions. And there is even a Coffee Bean in the lobby space, where George Lucas and Steven Spielberg themselves had the inaugural coffee at the dedication. The halls of the buildings are lined with magnificent film posters from the private collection of George Lucas, including classics such as Fort Apache, which starred fellow USC alum John Wayne, as well as more modern classics such as Ed Wood, scripted by USC alums Scott Alexander & Larry Karaszewski, who were also in attendance.
(Below, the George Lucas Building and the Steven Spielberg Building.)
The estimated time for completion of the other buildings in the new complex is August of 2010 and these will include four enormous sound stages. Also ready for its debut shortly will be the Animation & Digital Arts Building, as well as another structure which will be the headquarters for the school’s Production Services Building.
More to come in PART 2, including more pictures of the campus and video of the dedication speeches!
A Sweeping Tour of the new USC School of Cinematic Arts: Special Appearances by Steven Spielberg & George Lucas - PART 2
(The statue of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. above.)
Our tour continued into the many levels of the Steven Spielberg & George Lucas Buildings. Both of the legendary filmmakers were on hand for the dedication of the new USC School of Cinematic Arts. Below is one of the gorgeous new screening rooms, followed by a picture of a busy editing suite at SCA.
(Below, in the first photo, Alex Simon in the nerve center of the underground SCA post-production floor. In the second photo, a student records foley a bit further down the hall.)
(Below, a conference room near the Dean‘s Office, complete with vintage Cagney poster from the Lucas collection. In the second photo, a view from the George Lucas Building.)
Our tour concludes with the dedication ceremonies for the new USC School of Cinematic Arts, including speeches by Steven Spielberg & George Lucas, waiting here to be introduced! Part 3 awaits.
A Sweeping Tour of the New USC School of Cinematic Arts, Featuring Speeches by George Lucas & Steven Spielberg - PART 3
By Terry Keefe & Alex Simon, Photography & Videography by Gregory Weinkauf.
Our tour of the new USC School of Cinematic Arts concludes with speeches by Dean Elizabeth M. Daley, USC President Steven B. Sample, and Steven Spielberg & George Lucas.
When it was time for the dedication ceremonies to begin, the Trojan Band once again reunited with their old cinema mates from the stables by playing the USC theme from the second floor balconies of the new Lucas and Spielberg Buildings. Elizabeth M. Daley, Dean of the School of Cinematic Arts, opened the dedication, followed by remarks from USC President Steven B. Sample, who introduced Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.
Below are a few highlights from the individual speeches:
Dean Elizabeth M. Daley: “As the LA Times said, this is a pretty amazing 80th birthday present. With this wonderful facility, dreams will be realized, and while the new students are going to be in quarters that are just a bit more luxurious than those students from days past, (laughter) we know that these new surroundings will help them bring the dreams that are in their very fertile imaginations into reality.”
President Steven B. Sample: “Much has changed over the past eight decades. When the School of Cinematic Arts held its first class in 1929, the technology for talking movies was in its infancy. The content for motion pictures, and later television, was produced by a relatively small group of people. But in today’s age of digital technology, with the Internet and sites like YouTube and MySpace, the tools of mass communication are available to nearly everyone. The tremendous increase in information and media is redefining the very core of communications. For centuries, universities have taken what is best in a culture at a particular point in time, and explained and evaluated it for future generations. But only very recently have film, television and interactive media been viewed as subjects worthy of academic attention. 500 years from now as scholars look back to the present day, they might well look back on the cinematic arts as the primary artistic legacy of the 20th century.”
Steven Spielberg: “I was thinking about something that Elizabeth Daley said to me earlier, which was, 'What if every single USC film graduate didn’t show up for work tomorrow morning?' (laughter from the audience) The business would grind to a halt immediately. USC SCA alumni comprise the backbone of the film industry. Every year since 1973 at least one USC SCA alumni or alumnae has been nominated for the Academy Award. SCA alumni have received 256 Oscar nominations and won 78 times. Also every year since ’73, at least one SCA alumni or alumnae has been nominated for an Emmy Award. They have received 473 Emmy nominations, and taken home 119 awards. The top 17 highest-grossing films of all time have at least one SCA alum in a key creative position. I’m very proud to have some association with the school, dating back to 1980. As you all know, I tried to have an association with the school a bit earlier (laughter) but I eventually had to buy my way in.”
George Lucas: “I've got news for you, Steve, we all had to buy our way in.” (laughter) “Since Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. and USC President Rufus von Kleinschmidt realized in 1929 that there needed to be a university-based film studies program, the USC School of Cinema has never looked back. I know I speak for thousands of alumni when I say how much I value my time at USC. One of the biggest parts of my education was from just being here. Before I came here I knew nothing about making movies, even the fact that you could go to school to learn how to make movies but, by an act of fate I guess, I ended up here. It was a pivotal moment in my life. Just the idea that you could spend time with like-minded people, discussing something that you loved, was a huge part of my education. To this day, I continue to collaborate with the like-minded people I went to school with here. Back when I was here, film students weren’t considered human beings. Now, perhaps we’re still not considered human beings, but everyone wants to be like us. (laughter) This building wasn’t just built for USC SCA students, but for film students all over the world, who struggle to make their love for the cinematic arts legitimate."
None of what has happened to create the new SCA could have occurred without the leadership of Dean Elizabeth M. Daley, who we wanted to share a story about from our days as students. Daley took charge at the then-School of Cinema-Television, just as we were finishing our undergraduate degrees in film production in 1990-91. Although we were happy to be completing our studies, we recall feeling a tinge of envy at the students who would be attending film school under the stewardship of Daley. This stemmed from a single meeting in which a few of us represented the undergraduate production departments in a discussion about the future of the school, much of which focused on a production class known as 480. The 480 class at the time was the crown jewel of the USC production program, and a select group of students were chosen each semester to direct a 480 film, the budgets of which came largely from the school itself. The best 480s were later shown in series of prestigious industry screenings, heavily attended by top studio executives and agents, and were thusly considered a potential golden ticket into the film business. Just a few years before, undergraduate student Phil Joanou showed his 480 “Last Chance Dance” to the industry and had received what became a legendary phone call from Steven Spielberg, offering him an episode of Spielberg’s television series “Amazing Stories” to direct. Since then, of course, every film student wanted a 480 of their own to helm, and competition for the directing positions was fierce. Dean Daley had asked a few representatives of both the undergraduate and graduate programs to gather the concerns and ideas of their fellow students and to bring them to the aforementioned meeting with she and a few faculty members. The biggest complaint that most of my fellow undergraduates conveyed was that undergrads were almost never given a chance to direct one of the 480s, with those directing spots largely awarded to graduate students. It was somewhat understandable, as the equipment and resources of the school were not infinite and giving graduate students the opportunity to direct the top productions of the film school was a defensible position. But, as an undergraduate, the unofficial policy was nonetheless disheartening, and many undergrads complained about this, frequently. Sometimes formally, more often amongst ourselves. Nonetheless, little changed in regards to who was able to direct 480s and it seemed like it never would.
But when we brought this concern to Elizabeth Daley at the meeting, she was extremely responsive, smiling and saying that she understood our concerns. It seemed too good to be true. But as soon as a semester later, select undergrads were given an opportunity to direct 480s. It was a new day at USC Film, to be sure. Alas, then it was time for us to graduate.
In the nearly two decades since she took command, Dean Daley has led the school into the realm of digital moviemaking, created new departments, and oversaw the completion of numerous new state-of-the-art facilities, including the Robert Zemeckis Center for Digital Arts, which houses a television studio where we, along with Gregory Weinkauf, were interviewed two years ago on CU@USC. This is a nightly talk show produced entirely by the students, on their own network entitled Trojan Vision. The show broadcasts not only to the dorms, but also on a number of cable systems around both Los Angeles and select parts of the United States, reaching millions of viewers. With a professional control room and a crew as polished as any we’ve encountered on a “professional” level, the affair reminded of a hipper version of “The Tonight Show.” They even had commercials, seemingly making it a profitable enterprise to boot.
Some of the notable SCA alumnae of the past few decades include Bryan Singer, Judd Apatow, Doug Liman, John Singleton, Jay Roach, producer Bryan Burk (Star Trek, “Lost”), and producer Don Murphy (Transformers 2), to name just a few.
It truly is a brave new world of film and television-related education going on at USC. If you are lucky enough to be a student there, take advantage of every opportunity. In terms of facilities, your new school is more of a major studio now than many of the major studios. Well played, all.
VIDEO of the dedication speeches is below:
Check out Part One and Two of our Tour also.More information about the USC School of Cinematic Arts can be found at http://cinema.usc.edu/
Special Thanks to John Zollinger, Assistant Dean of Communications, School of Cinematic Arts.
Special thanks to the Angellotti Company.
FIN.
Read more!
Friday, April 17, 2009
JEFF DOWD: The Hollywood Interview
(Indie film producer, producer's rep, and BIG LEBOWSKI inspiration Jeff Dowd, above.)
Ten Years After Lebowski, The Real Dude Still Abides
by Jon Zelazny
Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on EightMillionStories.com on September 26, 2008.
September 9th saw the release of a new 10th Anniversary Special Edition DVD of the Coen brothers’ cult favorite The Big Lebowski, their “Raymond Chandler on acid” saga of two middle-aged L.A. slackers (Jeff Bridges & John Goodman) who get caught up in a Byzantine kidnapping plot.
It used to be a little show biz secret that Jeff Bridges’ amiable character, Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski, was based on the Coens’ real-life friend and colleague, indie film producer and producer’s rep Jeff Dowd, but that began to change in 2002 when four Lebowski fanatics in Louisville, Kentucky promoted the first annual Lebowski Fest, an event so successful, they’re now staging three a year in various cities.
Jeff Dowd has attended several Lebowski Fests over the years, and managed to turn his unique cult status into an actual side business, making personal appearances, speaking at colleges, and writing his memoirs. The real-life Dude will happily talk Lebowski ‘til the cows come home, but that’s just the tip of the Jeff Dowd anecdotal iceberg, as I discovered at the Santa Monica Airport’s Spitfire Grill:
In one of The Dude’s scenes with Julianne Moore, he tells her, “You ever heard of the Seattle Seven? That was me. And six other guys.” I was surprised to learn that’s a fact taken from your actual life. I was just talking with Robert Forster about his experiences at the 1968 Democratic National Convention; as an anti-Vietnam war activist, that must have been a galvanizing event for you as well?
JEFF DOWD: I wasn’t there. My father was, but my SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) chapter at Cornell University had voted not to attend. I certainly watched it on TV, and it was a seminal moment for all of us. It was essentially a big electoral reaction against the war. There were all kinds of reactions, but one of the biggest was the candidacy of Eugene McCarthy, who had done very well initially; he’d won the New Hampshire primary that year.
McCarthy was more anti-war than Robert Kennedy?
Much more so. Kennedy wasn’t anti-war for a long time. He was way behind the curve there, and a lot of people in New York State were very disappointed by that. But what happened—and this is one the great reasons I’ve always remained an optimist—is that Kennedy changed. He actually changed, and not just for opportunistic political reasons, though that was part of it. When Johnson decided he wouldn’t seek reelection, Kennedy threw his hat in the ring against McCarthy. And he brought in his whole machine, and his union backing; it was a more middle-of-the-road, charismatic campaign. McCarthy was more of an intellectual type.
And there’s little doubt in my mind that Kennedy would have been nominated, but after he was assassinated, the Democratic Party put up Hubert Humphrey as, really, a pro-war candidate, you know, this old establishment/machine politics nominee. Vietnam was the Democrats’ war: started by Kennedy, expanded tenfold by Johnson, so that’s why the anti-war movement targeted their National Convention; that was the place to make our stand against the party. And then it turned into the televised spectacle of a police riot; not only police clubbing protesters in the street, but charging into hotel lobbies and clubbing McCarthy delegates in ties.
What kinds of things did SDS do at Cornell?
My anti-war efforts began when I was in high school in Westchester County. A bunch of my friends had joined the service, like there were maybe 150 guys who volunteered from the high school class ahead of me. And I was set to follow them. The cultural pull was just so heavy then; that manly-man tradition—even among guys who were listening to the Rolling Stones, or even Bob Dylan. But I started getting letters from my friends in Vietnam saying how bad the war was. Not only that it was mismanaged, but that we were on the wrong side even. All the anti-war material I saw was from U.S. Marines! Then some people who went started getting killed. One of my good friends was killed two weeks after he got there! That made a huge impression on me. So instead of 150 guys from my class signing up, it dropped to maybe three or four; y’know, no one’s little brother wanted to go. Then I spent a year in Europe, and that kind of took me out of the brainwashing bubble of America, the one young men are particularly susceptible to. When I came home, I very quickly got active in the anti-war movement.
I joined a group called The Resistance, and we all turned in our draft cards. And what happened was they reclassified us from 2S, which was a deferment, to 1A, meaning we could be called up. So our group decided that if called up, we would refuse to be inducted, and from the time we refused induction to the time we’d be sent to jail—a court process that would take a year or so—we would go around and talk about why we were willing to go to jail for five or ten years. We saw this action as a part of what’s called the Moral Witness tradition. So there we were, foolish enough, in some sense, to be willing to go to jail to protest the war. And we went all over New York—Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Plattsburg—and talked about the war. Church groups, student groups, community groups. We were very effective at it. And within a year, we became part of SDS, which had begun in the civil rights movement of the early sixties. So then we traveled around nationally, speaking on behalf of SDS.
Was civil rights still a big part of their agenda, or was it just about the war?
SDS was all about fighting racism in America, ending poverty, and ending the war. My father was part of the early civil rights movement.
So the Seattle Seven came out of SDS?
A bunch of us from Ithaca moved to Seattle, late ’69, early ’70. Pretty wild times; the Weathermen had started going underground, and bombing, and we were very opposed to all that. We started The Seattle Liberation Front; the idea was to have these independent groups—collectives, we called them—which had anywhere from five to a hundred people—and each group would do what they wanted. One group was very environmental, another worked with the unemployed—Boeing had laid off over 100,000 people, so Seattle was decimated by unemployment. You could buy a nice house for about seven or eight thousand dollars, became people were just streaming out of there in droves. Some collectives did health care stuff. Clinics. One of the best clinics there today was started by one of our collectives.
Then we got indicted. Eight of us. We were charged with Conspiracy, Destruction of Federal Property—
This came from your February 17th, 1970 protest? Was that a situation like Chicago? A peaceful protest where the police turned aggressive?
That was one of many demonstrations all over the country that day to protest the Federal indictments of the Chicago Seven. There was some mayhem; some protesters smashed windows at the courthouse, and maybe of some office buildings downtown. The police arrested 89 people, but hardly any of them were with the demonstration, most were just bystanders. So it was not that big a deal; there wasn’t going to be any larger local repercussions. It was the Nixon Administration that decided to indict us… and they did it without even informing the local Federal prosecutor! Eight people, some of us didn’t even know each other, or had just met once, and they lumped us together and said we were “conspirators.” Four of them were Weathermen, who we didn’t even get along with.
The Weathermen were already a known terrorist cell at this point?
Good question. The main point was that these indictments were literally an Oval Office decision, by Attorney General John Mitchell, and John Ehrlichman, who were sending a message to the anti-war movement that they could really tie us up, and it didn’t much matter to them if anybody was actually guilty of anything. They picked Seattle because it was a remote location, and not a media center.
We were indicted on seventeen counts of Overt Conspiracy, meaning none of our supposed illegal activities was done in secret: they were done in public, sometimes with hundreds of people present! What were these seventeen acts? We were making speeches! Which were all covered by the press—who happened to include Frank Herbert and Tom Robbins, by the way. They both worked for the morning paper. Frank had the education beat, so we saw him just about every day.
We were also charged with Crossing State Lines to Incite a Riot, which was totally absurd: we’d left Ithaca on December 6th, arrived in Seattle on December 21st, and “incited a riot” on February 17th. When we left Ithaca, we’d piled into a car with fifty bucks, and didn’t even know if we’d make it to Seattle! It was a throwaway charge.
So there we are, just young guys—21, 22 years old—and we’re suddenly on the front lines of Nixon’s national war of repression against the anti-war movement! What did we do? Well, we put up a hell of a defense. We got great lawyers—the head of one of the top firms on Wall Street actually led our defense, all for free—because even these kinds of people were truly freaked out by what Nixon was doing.
How do you even begin to cope with that kind of pressure?
Well, y’know… we’d already turned in our draft cards. We were already prepared to go to jail. Some of my friends did. One reason I didn’t is that the day of my induction, I was on trial in Seattle for Conspiracy! The judge had to write them a note.
So because you were already fighting The Man, the indictments just felt like an escalation in an ongoing battle?
I think it’s like when people go off to war. You know, you adopt a mentality... I’d been prepared to give my life for my country as a teenager. And I knew how bad it got in the civil rights movement. My father was shot at. People were killed. So we just kept fighting, and we were winning the trial, so they gave us a mistrial, and then found us in Contempt of Court. I ended up doing about six months in jail.
What kind of facility was it?
Five or six different places. They kept moving us around.
Were you with your friends, or did they put you in general population?
In King’s County it was just me and my friend Joe Kelly for awhile. We were with this heroin dealer named Owlface Larry, who was always complaining about his Cadillac being seized by the IRS. Fascinating character. And the head Hell’s Angels guy.
Then I ended up at McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary for a while. The first week, I was in Solitary. No windows, no shoes. The only books I had were the Bible, and, of course, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. So the guy would come by once a day with the food, and I’d go, “Gee, you really look like you know what you’re doing! You’ve got a great understanding of all this… uh, you got a smoke?” Then, before we went into general population, the warden called us in, and gave us a talk: “You guys were protesters, but now you’re in the Big House, so watch your ass,” that kind of thing. I think my mother had called him too, or something.
He had to be careful, I imagine. You’d had national attention; it wasn’t like you could just vanish into the system.
Right. So he gives us this big warning, we walk out of there, and start down the row between these three tiers of cells… and hundreds upon hundreds of cigarette packs came down! That was their currency, like a buck a pack, so it was like getting a standing ovation. Why? Well, we’d been on the front page of the paper every day during our trial. And our judge was this notorious hanging judge—he gave ten years to a soldier who’d just come back from Vietnam, and stolen some diapers from a 7-11—like Nic Cage in Raising Arizona. Every con in McNeil hated that judge. Then they all read in the paper, or saw on the local TV news, that we were just continually giving this guy shit every day. So they loved us.
By the way, it came out later about this judge—who was this grumpy old guy, who could never keep our names straight; every day, it was “You’re Jeff Dowd?” “No, I’m Joe Kelly, he’s Jeff Dowd.” Well, a few years after he died, his widow came forward, and said he’d had Alzheimer’s the whole time! That explained a lot! Like, even the reporters who covered the trial eventually all ended up siding with us because they were constantly correcting him in the paper; he’d say all kinds of things that were flat-out wrong… and everybody just thought, well, y’know, he’s a cranky old man.
That sounds surreal enough to get us back to The Big Lebowski. So you got into the movie business, and around 1983 you worked on landing a distribution deal for the Coen brothers’ first feature, Blood Simple. You remained friends with them over the years, and one day they called you up and said they were writing a movie with a lead character based on you. What was that conversation like?
I knew it before hand; one of their producers had told me. When they called, they told me it would be John Goodman and Jeff Bridges as these two Hollywood guys. And, y’know, I’m a big guy, so I thought it would be Goodman playing me, as some kind of Hollywood ne’er-do-well; that the story would be some kind of modern Barton Fink.
They didn’t tell you it was a riff on the detective genre?
They showed me the script at some point. And here was the entire description of me: “The Dude: his casualness runs deep.” That was it!
You’ve said The Dude is an accurate portrait of you in an earlier period in your life, like in the mid-1970s.
After I got out of jail, I traveled around South America for a year, and when I got back the anti-war movement was pretty much over. Watergate had finished. It was a time in our lives before we all went back to work in a serious way. I was driving a cab two or three days a week. A lot of guys did that. We were just hanging out pretty heavily.
(Jeff Bridges as the Dude, above.)
A lot of people are like that at that age. Why did the Coens decide Lebowski would feature two middle-aged men?
The basic idea is they’re buddies, right? And in every buddy movie, one guy is always getting the other guy in trouble: Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in Some Like It Hot (1959), Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in Lethal Weapon (1987)—
Sideways (2004). Swingers (1996).
Right. So one guy drives the movie, and in Lebowski, that’s John Goodman as Walter. The Coens took these two buddy types: Walter, who’s still fighting the Vietnam war everyday in his head, and The Dude, who’s in this post-60’s bliss of some kind, and they moved them forward to 1991. So that’s why they’re older.
So really, they took a slice of your life, and sort of projected what you might have become, not what you did become. It’s like your Road Not Taken. You were The Dude we see in the movie, but you did not remain that way.
Right.
I know you spent some time with Jeff Bridges before the shoot—
And a lot of time on the set.
Do you know if meeting you in any way altered his take on the character?
Well, he picked up all my body language. I think that’s 100% me; you can see it just sitting here. But he and I are the exact same age; we went through the same cultural experiences. Some of the traits he brought in. Like the jellies. I never wore jellies.
So he knew that guy on some level. He didn’t have to meet you to understand—
He was that guy, to some degree. He’s said so. I think the key to understanding The Dude—and I got this from Phil Cousineau, who’s one of the leading experts on modern myths—I asked him what’s the mythological significance of The Dude, and he said, “That’s easy. He’s the Holy Fool. Full of heart.” In the tradition of Saint Francis of Assisi, or the court jester; the one guy in the king’s court who’s allowed to tell the truth. Stephen Colbert. John Stewart. Holden Caulfield. These are our modern day holy fools.
Watching it again last night, what struck me is that he’s a man with no pretense about him… in a world where everyone else is operating almost totally on pretense.
I think for a huge amount of people who go to work every day, it’s a theatrical act. When you put on a coat and tie, x amount of your day is a performance; it’s not who you really are. If you’re selling something, or part of a corporate bureaucracy, or any kind of position where you’re not using your brain as much as you could or should be. People who do that often appreciate somebody who doesn’t have to do that, or just doesn’t do it.
It also struck me that old man Lebowski is a dead ringer for Dick Cheney! That monologue, where he calls The Dude a bum, who ought to hoist himself up by his bootstraps and all that… it’s a classic Republican riff.
Yeah. It’s very timeless in that sense.
The Dude also reminds me of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, especially how Elliot Gould played him in The Long Goodbye (1973). He’s always got some smart-ass answer for authority figures, but he says it half under his breath. Dick Powell played Marlowe like that too: a smart-ass, but a very subdued smart-ass.
That’s Joel and Ethan too. They love the feeling of all that stuff.
I read that John Goodman’s Walter was based on Hollywood director John Milius. Do you know John Milius? Would you really hang out with a guy like him?
If there was gunplay involved, sure.
I ask because Walter is such an abrasive asshole, I have trouble believing The Dude would really be friends with him.
Joe Kelly was one of my closest friends going back to Ithaca, and the reason we ended up moving to Seattle was that Joe wanted to hunt in Washington State. Joe showed up at my wedding with these kill pictures; you know a picture of his wife field-dressing a moose! He moved his family up to Alaska for a while; he was our John Milius. But who doesn’t have a friend like Walter, who may be kind of an asshole, but that you continue to love and support? I think we all have a Walter in our lives.
(John Goodman as Walter and Jeff Bridges as the Dude, above.)
What was your first reaction when some guys from Louisville called you and said they were throwing a “Lebowski Fest?”
My first thought was of the famous William Shatner sketch on SNL, when he addresses the Trekkie convention, and tells them all to get a life! But it really surprised me; it was totally different. With all due respect to the Trekkies and the Rocky Horror folks—whom I’ll confess I only know from afar—Lebowski fans are just incredibly smart. They get Joel and Ethan’s sense of humor: the irony, the satire, the double and triple entendres. They make the kind of connections you’ve been making. They connect the dots.
And unlike the stereotype Trekkies, Lebowski fans are not nerds, or couch potatoes. They’re totally social people; people that really like to hang out, party, meet new friends, and get together and do things actively. In San Francisco last weekend, you had twenty scantily-clad women, dancing, carrying bowling pins, and it took them forty five minutes to get to the stage through a thousand people because everybody was dancing with them—that’s the Lebowski crowd!
Lebowski Fest is drawing a thousand people?
Four thousand, even. They’d get more, but it peaks out at whatever the venue can hold. So if it’s at a bowling alley, it’s usually about a thousand.
So you’ve really seen it grow over the past six years.
I don’t go to every one. And I do not get paid for them; it would be very un-Dude-like to get paid to hang out with old and new friends. You know who’s really into this movie? Virtually all bands and sports teams have watched it over and over again on the tour bus. It’s like the de facto compromise of choice for what to watch on tour buses.
Why?
I think it’s because you can channel surf into it at any point, and it works. It’s not so much about the plot, which, like The Big Sleep (1946), is kind of hard to figure out--
That’s true. Some of the reasons I’ve never been that crazy about it are the same reasons I wasn’t crazy about No Country For Old Men (2007). They both introduce a lot of elements that are never really addressed or resolved in a way I’d consider satisfying.
You realize when you say that, you’re saying “I’m old school. I like to be manipulated by the story in the traditional way.”
Yeah, I’d have to agree with that. As a screenwriter, if I introduce something into the story, it’s important that I—
Pay it off. Set ups and payoffs.
And the Coens certainly know how to do that. But I think in some films they do it extremely well, and in others, like these two, I’m just not as—
That’s the point.
An example I noticed last night is the introduction of Ben Gazzara as this porn king in Malibu, a very stylish guy with this great house. In any other detective story, this would be one of the main villains. But the Coens make all this fuss about setting him up, and then they never go back to him.
But those kinds of red herrings are in Chandler as well. People like that.
Yeah, I can see that, to a degree, but…
See, you have to forget the plot.
I guess my main complaint about Lebowski is that it’s overstuffed. There’s just too much going on in it.
But that’s what people like about it.
What about when it veers from satire to silliness? Like those three German guys; they’re just too silly for this kind of story. The dream sequence looks like something out of Michael Powell—
It is! And that’s a legitimate dream. I have flying dreams like that all the time—
But for a detective story? I would’ve loved it in Raising Arizona (1987), because that was the tone of that movie.
But it’s Raymond Chandler on acid, not Chandler straight up.
So as a guy with these hang-ups, I’m curious: what do the fans really enjoy the most about it?
It makes them feel better. I run into families all the time who’ve told me they watch this movie every Thanksgiving, or at Christmas! All three generations—and I’m not talking about hippie families either. There’s thousands and thousands of families that do it. I ask them why, and that’s what they say: “It makes us feel better.” I got a great letter from a New York City fireman who said he sunk into this deep depression after 9/11. You know, a lot of his friends had been killed, and he just shut down. Then one day he put in The Big Lebowski, and started laughing again. After seven months, he said, it cut right through his pain. I think it’s like in Sullivan’s Travels (1941), when Joel McCrea realizes his dopey comedies are lifting the spirits of all those hopeless convicts, or when Woody Allen watches that Marx Brothers clip in Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and it kind of zaps him back to life.
That’s how I feel about Duck Soup (1933) myself… another totally off-the-wall comedy that didn’t do very well when it was first released, then developed a huge cult following. We should start a Duck Fest!
Duck Soup, Sullivan’s Travels, The Big Lebowski; it’s all the same thing. These movies are like drugs that take away people’s pain.
Check out the official promo for The Big Lewbowski 10th Anniversary DVD:
http://www.biglebowskidvd.com/
Check out Jeff’s website:
jeffdowd.com
Check out Jeff’s father’s website:
http://www.dougdowd.org/
"BRIDEZILLA STRIKES BACK": Review of Cynthia Silver's One-Woman Show at the Zephyr in Los Angeles
By Terry Keefe
A few years back when money was particularly tight and dignity was in short supply, my writing partner and I went in to interview for the coveted positions of head writers of a particularly sleazy, and wildly successful, network reality show which revolved around a group of couples…doing something particularly tawdry at a particularly exotic location. The title of the show and the exact premise aren't relevant at this point, but this particular exchange with the series creator is, to this article at least:
Me: “Well, here’s one idea we had for a competition between the couples, but I’m not sure of the moral implications of it -”
Series Creator: “Morals? [laughs hysterically]” He did everything but twitter his fingers and go, “Mwahahaha.”
We didn’t get that job. Just as well, obviously. This was still back when people responded to my telling of this story with, “Reality shows have writers?” Yes, Virginia, sometimes even a whole staff of them. Fairly well-paid also, or I wouldn’t have even been in the room. But God help those who decide to actually appear on reality television, if they’re dealing with unscrupulous producers like the one referenced above. You sign your life away with a release form and they can edit you any way they please. Hero, villain, or Omarosa. A few years ago, actress Cynthia Silver became an unwitting cog in the reality show machine, although you can hardly blame her for not going into what became the series “Bridezillas” with her eyes wide open. As she was heading towards her wedding with her fiancé Matthew, she made what seemed to be the fairly innocuous decision to participate in a documentary about soon-to-married couples, produced by a British production company with the Merchant-Ivory-esque name of September Films. Silver expected that the footage would be a nice memento of their wedding preparations which they could show to their grandchildren.
Some time after the shooting wrapped, Silver got the news that the show had been sold to Fox. (Right after “You have cancer,” the phrase “Your footage has been sold to Fox” is one of those things no one should have to hear. )
“Bridezillas” was soon born and became a huge hit on both Fox and WE. Silver’s segment was entitled “Life’s a Bitch, and then You Marry One.” All of her worst moments during the stressful wedding preparation process were highlighted. She found herself pilloried on internet message boards and then tried to defend herself on said forums, only to get slammed worse. If you’ve ever tried to argue with anyone on a message board, you will sympathize in particular with this part of her tale. Regular posters on reality television-themed message boards wouldn’t be throwing down their trailer park bon mots all day long if they were normal.
There wasn’t much Silver could do legally about the tarnishing of her public image, so she made lemonade out of this rotting box of wedding cake the best way she knew how: by putting on a one-woman show about it, which was entitled “Bridezilla Strikes Back.” And revenge has been sweet indeed. The show was one of the breakout hits of the prestigious New York International Fringe Festival in 2005, winning the award for Outstanding Solo Show and landed for Silver a number of glowing profiles and reviews in the top Manhattan magazines and newspapers. The performance we saw was during her recent Los Angeles run at the Zephyr Theater on Melrose. Co-written with Kenny Finkle and directed by Lee Sankowich, “Bridezilla Strikes Back” is sharply scripted and quite funny. Silver is charming, particularly during the bits where she self-deprecatingly imagines herself being the best friend of Jennifer Aniston, and interviewed by Oprah, which is not actually inconceivable if the daytime queen herself sees this show. The reality show nightmare provides a strong spine for the material, which is offset nicely by the sweetness provided by the ongoing love story of Silver and her husband-to-be, who is an off-stage supporting character in the narrative. Something worth mentioning to the industry types that read this site: there is an obvious feature-length narrative film that one could see coming out of this material, as a romance set against the backdrop of a known reality television show. It worked for Slumdog.
One of these days we’re all going to wake up in a version of The Truman Show and find that every moment of our lives is being taped for the daily entertainment of others, watching anonymously somewhere on a hi-def television, computer screen, or iPhone. We may be there now. Privacy is seemingly dead and no one cares. Intellectual property copyright…likewise. And when we all do wake up with a laugh track going in the background constantly, we can also thank reality television for firing the first shots which helped break down those walls of decorum and dignity which were part of society’s fabric since civilization seemingly decided that throwing slaves to the lions in the coliseum was bad for everyone involved. Trust me, we’re all just a few innocent missteps away from appearing on our own version of “Bridezillas.” See that pimply kid on the sidewalk who looks like he’s just playing with his camera but sort of focusing it in your direction? Watch out for that little bastard. It might be going a bit far to say that Cynthia Silver is our Spartacus in this particular fight, but the sight of legions of exploited reality television participants standing up and saying, “I’m Bridezilla!” is an unscripted show I’d make time to watch.
Check out Cynthia Silver’s MySpace page for “Bridezilla Strikes Back” at
http://www.myspace.com/bridezillastrikesback
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Our SUMMER MOVIE PREDICTIONS at Movie Blips!
Sunday, April 12, 2009
HUNGER: Steve McQueen's Fresh (17 1/2 minute) Take
(Director Steve McQueen and actor Michael Fassbender, as Bobby Sands, in Hunger.)
With his debut feature, the filmmaker reminds us that rules of movie-making are ripe for the breaking.
By Terry Keefe
This article is currently appearing in this month's Venice Magazine.
Steve McQueen was first introduced to Bobby Sands, the subject of McQueen's feature film Hunger, via a news photo of Sands, which McQueen vividly remembers from when he was 11-years old. Sands was the leader of the 1981 IRA Hunger Strike which took place in the notorious Maze Prison in Northern Ireland and the first of ten men who would ultimately die during the protest. Recalls McQueen, “This image of a man appeared on television, with a number. I thought it was the person’s age, but then my mother told me it was a hunger strike.” The number indicated how many days Sands had been starving himself. McQueen also remembers that the concept of a hunger strike resonated with him even as a very young man, because refusing to eat is a relatively common way for children to show their anger. “A child’s life is so dictated by his parents, and then if he refuses to eat, it’s the first time that he has taken control of his person. That stuck with me,” he elaborates.
McQueen has already had a stellar career as a visual artist, with his work acquired by the likes of the Guggenheim and MOCA. Some of his work have been films, although those were shorts. With his first feature, McQueen breaks many of the so-called rules of both screenwriting and filmmaking and simultaneously demonstrates those rules to be guidelines at best, because Hunger works on every level (except as an easy film for the squeamish to watch - the walls of the protesting prisoners are sometimes lined with feces and assorted filth, and buckets of urine are used as a weapon of protest as well.). The presumed lead character of Hunger, Davy Gillen (Brian Milligan) is a young IRA member and prisoner who we meet during his first days in the Maze Prison. We only hear of his IRA superior Bobby Sands (Michael Fassbender) at first and then see him briefly, but some time into what is ostensibly Act Two, the shift to Bobby as the lead focus happens and Davy Gillen is barely seen again. The centerpiece of the film, where we first really get into the guts of Sands’ character, is a 17 ½ minute long take in a locked-down two-shot, between Sands and the character of Father Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham), in which Sands explains his reasons for the upcoming hunger strike, as well as the childhood experience which taught him that he had nerves of steel. McQueen is nonchalant about the tinkering with traditional narrative that he has done and says, “The [medium of] film is only 115 years old. If you think about art, painting is 1000's of years old. As long as something works, it works. The form of film is up for grabs as long as it makes sense to the audience. So, it’s a gold mine out there, for film." _0_preview.jpg)
(Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands, above. This shot is one of the first cutaways which finally break up the 17 1/2 minute take between Fassbender and Liam Cunningham.)
The shooting of the long take between actors Fassbender and Cunningham was done in 4 tries and McQueen says that the actors nailed it pretty quickly. “What was so wonderful about that scene, was that it was like an avalanche the first time they did it. It was like a toy and you let it go and it was wound up and they really got it,” he says. The two actors did rehearse extensively, but often during days when McQueen was largely occupied with other parts of the shoot. He explains, “I was shooting as they were rehearsing. They were in a room together all day. I would just come in during the morning and evening to give notes.” 
(Actors Michael Fassbender and Liam Cunningham during the wide 2-shot which goes on for 17 1/2 minutes in Hunger.)
Fassbender becomes disturbingly gaunt during the course of the story, and there is no doubt he was really starving himself. McQueen, while full of praise for his lead actor, notes that it was an understood prerequisite for the role. Says McQueen, “The film is called Hunger. It was part of the job and he’s a professional. We shot for 2 weeks, broke for 6 weeks (for Fassbender to lose weight), and then we shot again."
When asked if he plans on shooting another feature shortly, McQueen replies, “I like the idea of it. Absolutely. But [the experience of making Hunger] was like being with my old lady for 5 years and I’m not just going to go on to the next chick yet.”
Kiyoshi Kurosawa exhumes the heart of a Japanese family in TOKYO SONATA
(Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa and actor Teruyuki Kagawa, during the shooting of Tokyo Sonata, above.)
By Terry Keefe
This article is currently appearing in this month's Venice Magazine.
For filmmaker Kiyoski Kurosawa, it wasn’t that big a leap from the horror genre to the domestic-style terrors of a family melodrama. Kurosawa made his bones on horror-based stories such as 1997’s Cure, but his newest, Tokyo Sonata, follows the dissolution, and partial rebirth, of a Japanese traditional family, with no supernatural elements in play. Kurosawa’s trademark evocation of creeping dread and anxiety remain, however, and you still are never sure about what is around the next corner in his new work. Says Kurosawa about stepping outside his more familiar realm of murders and the supernatural, “Obviously, since this wasn’t a horror film, one change was that I didn’t have to make it deliberately frightening. But the part of my process that was similar [from horror] is that I wanted to see how outside elements could affect the characters. And those elements could still be represented by motifs like wind and shadows.” 
(The family unit a'crumble in Tokyo Sonata: Kyoko Koizumi, Teruyuki Kagawa, Yu Koyanagi, and Inowaki Kai, above.)
In the first act of Tokyo Sonata, a businessman/father named Ryuhei (played by Teruyuki Kagawa) loses his office job because of outsourcing to China and joins the ranks of what are known as the “secretly unemployed,” recently downsized Japanese men who pretend to go to work each day in order to save face with their family and friends. Ryuhei whittles the work day hours away in parks and libraries, with scores of other downtrodden, but well-dressed, men who are engaged in the same deception. Part of the inspiration for the inciting incident of the story came from Kurosawa’s own childhood curiosity as to what his father did when he left the house in his work suit each morning, as the particulars of a father’s job weren’t discussed at home in a traditional Japanese family then, and in many cases, now. Recalls Kurosawa, “I really have no idea what my father did outside the home. I have faith that he did something useful, but it was possible that he was unemployed. This was never brought into the household though.”
Although the first portions of Tokyo Sonata follow the downwardly mobile journey of the father of the family, the story quickly expands to show the ripple effects of his actions on his wife Megumi (Kyoko Koizumi) and two male children Takashi (Yu Koyanagi) and Kenji (Inowaki Kai), and by the end of the film, it is Megumi who has become the true protagonist of the story. After running into her husband, who is now clandestinely working as a janitor in a shopping mall, Megumi falls into a period of melancholy, but is jolted out of her malaise when she is abducted by a knife-wielding male house thief (played by longtime Kurosawa acting collaborator Koji Yakusho) who ultimately turns out to be a fairly pathetic character driven by frustrations over his impotence in the grand scheme of society, much like her husband. Kurosawa explained to us that this mid-film switch of which character is the lead focus wasn’t his original intent, and that it came as sort of a surprise to him during the writing process, “I realized that, other than the mother, the other family members carry problems which are external to the family. But her problems are internal, in the family. I wanted to go further and further inward into the family and it was the Megumi character that allowed me to do that. Her story ultimately gets to a point where she must confront the question, ‘Who am I?’”
The shot compositions of Tokyo Sonata are so precise and seemingly fine-tuned, that it was a surprise to find out that Kurosawa works fairly loose on the set and doesn’t even storyboard, nor has he really ever used storyboards. “I just like to go into the locations and talk to the cinematographer and I find that storyboards can be more restrictive than anything.” Another interesting revelation was that Kurosawa also isn’t a big fan of rehearsals, although the performances in Tokyo Sonata feel as precise as his shot selection. He further explains, “I prefer to film the actors while they’re still free. Rehearsals start to lock down what they’re about to do and then they go through the motions. I like to capture the surprises of what they might do in a new situation.”
Tokyo Sonata is currently in theaters via Regent Releasing.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Arthur Penn: The Hollywood Interview
Director Arthur Penn.
THE LEFT HANDED GUN: ARTHUR PENN’S TICKET TO HOLLYWOOD… AND HIS TICKET BACK HOME AS WELL
by Jon Zelazny
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on EightMillionStories.com September 29, 2008.
In the 1960’s, Arthur Penn was one of the most acclaimed directors in the world, best known for his smash hits The Mircale Worker (1962) and Bonnie & Clyde (1967), each of which earned him an Oscar nomination.
He spent his early career directing theater and live television in New York, until he and three of his TV colleagues—producer Fred Coe, writer Leslie Stevens, and fledgling star Paul Newman—went to Hollywood to make a western about Billy the Kid.
Paul Newman takes aim as Billy the Kid, in Arthur Penn's The Left Handed Gun.
2008 marked the 50th anniversary of The Left Handed Gun, Penn’s now-celebrated feature film debut. We spoke by phone, ironically the day before Paul Newman passed away at age 83. The day after that was Penn’s birthday. He’s now 86.
Happy Birthday!
Arthur Penn: Thank you.
How are you feeling?
Well, considering what birthday it is, not bad.
Have you spent most of your life in New York?
All of it. We’ve always lived here, aside from a few brief periods in Hollywood. And when I was on location.
Before we get to The Left Handed Gun, I mentioned in my email that I finally saw your film Mickey One (1965) for the first time last Friday. There were about seventy people at the screening; the programmer asked how many of us had ever seen it before, and about five hands went up. Why has it remained so obscure? Is it true it’s never had a home video release?
Columbia never liked it. I made it for very little—a million dollars—so they could afford to just scrap it. Which is what they wanted to do as soon as they saw it.
Author's Note: "Mickey One" is an experimental feature film about a New York nightclub comic (Warren Beatty) who goes on the lam when he can’t repay his mob debts. He lays low in Chicago, starts working in clubs under the name Mickey One, and falls in love with a nice girl… but his paranoia regarding his past threatens to destroy his new life.
Even Warren Beatty in the lead isn’t enough to justify a home release today?
No. Maybe they would now, but I doubt it.
What I’d always read in books was that it was your ode to the French New Wave. There is a feeling of Godard about it, but my first reaction was that it was more in the spirit of Richard Lester, very whimsical and sassy… but as it got darker and darker towards the end, it really reminded me of David Lynch, especially the films I think of as his “dream stories.”
Everybody evaluates Mickey One for their own time. There was no David Lynch at the time I did it.
Paul Newman (L) as Billy the Kid in Penn's debut film, The Left Handed Gun.
Have you seen those works of his? Lost Highway, or Inland Empire? Did it strike you he was working along some of the same lines?
Those are his pictures. They’re his equivalents of Mickey One.
Were you trying to evoke the French New Wave?
No. They only called it French New Wave at the time because there was nothing else to compare it to.
The print we saw was gorgeous, by the way, and I think people really enjoyed it. I also like pictures where the director feels free to really experiment, to play with interesting visual ideas. Did you know Scorsese’s Boxcar Bertha?
No, I never saw it.
It’s a Roger Corman picture, a rip-off of Bonnie & Clyde really, but you can see the young Scorsese just using the opportunity to try every visual trick, and angle, and idea that he can possibly get in. Another one I like is Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey.
Yeah, I saw that one.
When I think of your first three films now—The Left Handed Gun, The Miracle Worker and Mickey One—it’s an amazing progression. Your confidence and dexterity with the medium really leapfrogged with each picture.
Yeah. It was all new to me. I was very captivated by it.
Paul Newman and Lita Milan in a rare romantic moment of The Left Handed Gun. Note the rather Freudian implications of Newman's pistol...
In researching The Left Handed Gun, I saw that you, Fred Coe, Leslie Stevens, and Paul Newman all knew each other from these television dramas in New York. Were all these shows you did free-standing stories?
Yes, they were. The first one I ever did was about a Korean war soldier coming back. That was all live TV. You know… well, you probably don’t know.
The only one of those I ever saw was Requiem For a Heavyweight with Jack Palance. I never saw any of yours. What was a schedule like for one of these shows? Were they all done in studio?
Sure. They were live. There was no tape. What we shot went right out on the air. That was television in the early days. I did one every third week for NBC. We’d rehearse them in a hotel ballroom with just the actors, no cameras. We’d plan how we were going to shoot it, and after about seven days of these rehearsals, we’d go into the TV studio. We’d rehearse one day with the cameras, the next day was a final dress rehearsal, and we went on the air that evening. And the pictures that were going out, we cut them ourselves, in the control room. And not only were we choosing the shots, we were choosing how long those shots would last—based on how the actors were performing! That was live TV.
I had to direct like that once in college. It was incredibly difficult.
We did it. Show after show.
It must have been the greatest training ground imaginable.
It was wonderful.
I saw you first worked with Paul Newman on a TV drama called The Battler in 1956. When did he first come to your attention?
I saw him on the stage, very early on. In Bus Stop. I knew him from The Actor’s Studio.
And you directed a Leslie Stevens TV script called Invitation to a Gunfighter in 1957. Was that your first western?
Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it wasn’t much of a western. It was all done in the studio.
But it had cowboys in it?
(chuckling) Yeah, it had cowboys. Not so many horses!
So who had the idea that you, Fred Coe, Leslie Stevens, and Paul Newman would make this western for Warner Bros.?
Fred had the rights to the play. And he’d talked to Newman about it. And they approached another director, Delbert Mann, but he wasn’t available. Then they went to Bob Mulligan, but there was some falling out there, so then Fred came to me. I said I wanted to rewrite it with Leslie, so that was the deal.
And who was it at Warner Bros. that decided to take a chance on four TV guys from New York?
Jack Warner. Our first day at the studio, he took Fred and me around on a tour of their facilities. And introduced us to his son-in-law, who was starting to produce some TV there. See, they were finally coming around to the idea that the future was in working with TV, not against it. Up until then, they just kept hoping it go away. But it had gotten so popular that it had cut deep into their audience. So they thought, “Well, let’s get some of those television guys to work for us.” That’s how we really got there.
Most Hollywood westerns, before and since, have been made by these very rugged, Western, California kinds of guys. Did anyone think it was funny, you New York theater types coming out to make a western?
Well, the cameraman sure didn’t like me! (laughs) Because I came in with this idea that I was going to make sort of a ditzy Western, y’know? With a different twist to it. And he wanted to drag me into a kind of conventionality. Then I started using camera angles he didn’t want to do. So he put up this clapboard at the head of all these shots. It said, “Photographed Under Protest.”
You’re kidding.
No. That was for the executives, so when they saw the dailies… y’know, he didn’t want them to think he’d lost his touch! But he worked for them. He was under contract to Warner Bros. Everybody was in those days. You worked at one place.
I looked at it again last week. It seems to me the basic idea was to take a '50s juvenile delinquent story and put it in the Old West. Was that about how you saw it?
Yeah. It was also based on the idea that as the West was expanding, there was this yellow journalism back east, where they more or less invented these stories about people just to sell cheap dime novels. So there was this kid named Bill Bonney, who had this bad reputation out west, and they named him Billy the Kid, and wrote up this whole legend about him. Nobody knows what’s really true. They’re pretty sure that one photo of him is authentic, but now it’s come out that it was actually a reversed image. That picture was the sole reason people believed Billy the Kid was left handed, but it turns out that wasn’t really the case.
The iconic photo of the real William Bonney, aka Billy the Kid, circa 1880.
I think your staging of that photograph is one of the best scenes in the movie. Now that idea of modern technology intruding on the West became a major element for Sam Peckinpah. He loved putting cars, or other modern inventions, in his westerns to show time was moving on. Did he ever acknowledge you as an inspiration for that?
He did.
Another '50s director I really admire is Anthony Mann, who I think started taking Westerns into riskier psychological terrain: you could make the case that it was the emotionally unstable heroes Jimmy Stewart played for Mann that set the stage for Paul Newman’s really unstable Billy. Was Mann someone you paid attention to at the time?
Oh, yeah. I think we were in the same camp. I never met him, but I wish I had. I really admired his work.
I noticed Billy and his buddies are supposed to be around twenty years old, but Newman and the other actors look about thirty. Did anyone say that at the time?
No. Because most of the movie stars back then were fifty or sixty!
So he really did seem like “a kid” to a 1950s audience. I’m going to guess they gave you twenty-five days to shoot the picture?
I think it was twenty.
That’s pretty tight. Or did it feel luxurious compared to those TV shows?
Oh, yeah. TV was so frantic, it made this seem like a vacation.
Did Paul Newman enjoy all the rugged playacting you have in westerns that you don’t have in theater? Riding horses, gunplay, all that?
Sure. He was very committed. He’s a real actor.
A cinematic moment that really stands out his murder of Bob the deputy, when the man collapses to the street in slow motion.
It’s actually half slow motion and half fast motion.
L to R: Gene Hackman, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in Bonnie & Clyde.
You’d expand on that technique in Bonnie & Clyde, and then it became pretty standard in Hollywood action sequences. Was that an effect you invented yourself?
No, I picked it up from Kurosawa.
That’s right. I forgot he’d done it as well. Did The Left Handed Gun do well?
It didn’t do well at all. The studio didn’t like it. They put it out on the bottom half of a double bill with some stinker, and it didn’t do anything… until it opened in France. A man named Andre Bazin—he was sort of the intellectual father of Cahiers du Cinema—he saw it, and he wrote a very good piece about it. And then other filmmakers looked at it, and picked up on it, and it became a big hit in Europe. It won the Belgian Film Critic’s Prize for the Best First Picture.
The Left Handed Gun trailer.
Warner Bros. had certainly read the script. They knew who was in it. What was it they disliked so much about the finished film?
The unorthodoxy of it. It was simply not what they expected a western to be.
That’s hard to understand fifty years later. Was it the way Newman played the character?
There was that. It was the way it was shot, the way it was written. The Hurd Hatfield character—this journalist who holds Billy up to this god-like position, and then when he’s sort of rejected, ends up betraying Billy—that was a whole new kind of character. That was like Gene Hackman’s character in Unforgiven. I think that character was a steal from Left Handed Gun.
Did you get other film offers after that?
I went back to New York. I got pissed off when Warner Bros. wouldn’t let me edit it. The day we finished, a guy walked up and said, “I’m going to edit your movie.” And there was no court I could appeal to that might change that decision. He was the studio cutter. It was just a disgraceful process because it was so industrialized. Later, the studios lost a lot of that power, in the good period of the late 1960s and early '70s. Now they’ve regained it, and they’re right back where they started.
Are there changes you can still remember wanting to make?
The ending. It was supposed to end with Billy dying, when he collapses and rolls off those carts. It looks like slow motion, but it’s not. Instead, they stuck on this ending with Pat Garrett’s wife saying, “We can go home now.” They wanted a happy ending.
Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft in The Miracle Worker.
They did love a sunny tack-on back then, didn’t they? So you went back to Broadway, and did The Miracle Worker? And because that play was such a hit, you were able to do it as your next movie?
I did Two For the Seesaw on Broadway first, and that was a big hit too, but Ray Stark bought the movie rights, and he didn’t want any of us involved. And boy, he really fucked up that movie. Hired what’s-his-name to direct… “The hills are alive/With the sound of music… ?”
Robert Wise.
Yeah, Bob Wise. And they got Shirley MacLaine, but it was just a terrible film. So the next hit we had, when they came around for the movie rights, we said, “Hell, no. We’re going to do it, or you can’t have it!” And United Artists agreed. So Bill Gibson, who wrote the play, wrote the screenplay. I directed it, Fred Coe produced it…
…and the rest was history!
It’s a pretty damn good movie.
Yeah, I was knocked out when I saw it. I think it’s still one of the best adaptations of a stage play I’ve ever seen. And it holds up so well.
It really does.
One last question: you said at the top that you’ve almost always lived in New York. Was there ever a time—say, following your Oscar nominations—when you felt like you’d really become a Hollywood director? That you were a part of this community?
No. I wasn’t that impressed by those nominations. I didn’t even go to the ceremonies—no, I did go the first time, but not the second or third. Because I was more interested in theater at that time. I thought Hollywood movies were always going to be like the experience I’d had on The Left Handed Gun, which was unpleasant. But The Miracle Worker was fun. And we did it right here in New York. So I never gave any more thought to going back out to Hollywood.
Roger Spottiswoode: The Hollywood Interview
Director Roger Spottiswoode.
Neglected Gems of the 1980’s: Roger Spottiswoode Remembers Under Fire
by Jon Zelazny
Editor's Note: The following article appeared on EightMillionStories.com in 2008.
The name may not ring a bell, but Roger Spottiswoode has been directing feature films for nearly thirty years, including popular hits like Turner and Hooch (1989), Air America (1990), and the James Bond adventure Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), as well as outstanding made-for-cable dramas like And the Band Played On (1993), Hiroshima (1995), and Noriega (2000).
2008 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of his remarkable third feature Under Fire, which starred Nick Nolte and Gene Hackman as journalists covering the 1979 revolution in Nicaragua.
It’s generally a given that every Hollywood movie endures a long, tortuous road to find financing, but not Under Fire. It had a long, hard road as well… but only after the film had been completed. Roger Spottiswoode and I spoke by phone:
You began your career as an editor, most notably for Sam Peckinpah, whose films were famous for their highly distinctive editing. Were you expected to match, or to conform to that style?
Roger Spottiswoode: No, but that style really emerged from the way he shot. What he wanted was to tell his stories from multiple perspectives, so you were always cutting to points of view from different characters, and even from the onlookers in the scene. He shot an immense amount of coverage, and he wanted you to use it—not because he liked lots of angles, but because those multiple perspectives shifted our perception of the story. Beyond that, Sam was fascinating because he told the editor almost nothing. He’d never say to make a shot longer, or to cut here, or cut there. He’d say, “You haven’t made it live enough,” or “I know what the character who’s speaking thinks; I want to know what everyone else thinks.” That’s how he talked to actors as well. He wouldn’t tell someone to cry, he’d say, “They’re thinking about their worst nightmare,” and let the actor figure out how to express that… or let the editor work out how to portray that through the editing.
Director Sam Peckinpah.
Were there things about Peckinpah that you really picked up on, that you’d use in your own work?
Well… you know what he was like, right?
Aside from the drinking and brutality?
(laughter) He was an enormously complicated and difficult person to be around, but we learned a lot from him. He was often cruel to people, but he was also very good in the sense that he wanted to get the best out of his crew, and gave us a remarkable amount of freedom. I was ludicrously young when I started with him: I was 27, and I worked with Bob Wolfe, who was 41… and Bob was probably the youngest editor in Hollywood! But Sam was very supportive of me. And very tough. If you asked him how he wanted something, he’d say, “If I have to tell you how to fucking cut it, pal, I’ll put you back on the bus, and let your fucking assistant do it! I know how I’d cut it; I want to know how you’ll cut it!” He really expected you to bring something to the party.
Let’s jump ahead a decade: you became a director, and Under Fire was your third film. I watched it again last night, and it’s amazing to think someone actually put up the money for a contemporary drama about foreign political turmoil. What was the main factor that appealed to the financiers? What made this a “go” project?
It got made because Ron Shelton wrote a really great script. And because of Arthur Krim and Eric Pleskow, who were the heads of Orion, and had been at United Artists. And Mike Medavoy, who was their west coast person. I’d met Eric when I worked for Karel Reisz, and he was always very nice. He said to come see him when I became a director, so five years later I sent him the Under Fire script. Hackman and Nolte had both committed, and we had a budget worked out. I sent Eric the script on a Thursday… and Saturday morning he called me to say he’d read half of it, thought it was wonderful, knew he was going to say yes, and he’d call again on Monday. Nobody ever does that!
Nick Nolte in Under Fire.
Was it because of Nick Nolte’s success in 48 Hrs. (1982)? Had that even come out yet?
No, it was being made at the time. And I’d helped write that as well. But Nick was already enough of a name, and the money wasn’t high; we budgeted Under Fire at $8.4 million. So when Eric called back Monday morning, he said, “We’re going to do it, but we’re only going to give you $8.4 million. That’s what you asked for, and that’s what we’ll spend, but no more.” I agreed, and he told me to think about it, and then give him my word that I would stay on budget. I said he had my word. He said, “No, I want you to really think about it. This is a personal commitment. We’ll talk tomorrow, and if you’re sure you can do it, then give me your word.” So next morning I gave him my word, and he said, “Fair enough. We have a deal.” He said, “We’ll send you some story notes. You don’t have to use them, but just think about them. We’ll send you the money, and we’d like to see the film in about a year. Have a great shoot.”
I think it’s safe to say that’s almost entirely unheard of.
What an extraordinarily decent way to run a company!
And did you keep your word?
(laughing) Absolutely! I would have anyway, but they were such gentlemen. Here’s an even better story: a year later, the film was finished, and we were previewing it in Venice. It hadn’t tested particularly well, but they hadn’t asked me to change it. There was a bar next to the screening room, and Eric invited me to have a drink before the film started. We sat down, and he said, “Look, I love Under Fire, we all do, but I have to tell you we’re pretty sure it’s not going to do very well. Americans aren’t interested in politics; they’re going to say it’s left wing, and here in Venice, it’s probably going to be attacked as right wing because it’s not Marxist. But I think you should know that when you committed to us, we put aside $8.4 million, and another $5 million for publicity and advertising, and then we wrote the whole thing off. We knew it wouldn’t make any money.” He explained, “We make films like The Pink Panther, and the Bond films, and they make a lot of money, and we’re very lucky, but the other films we make because we want to make them. If they make their money back, that’s great, but we make them in such a way that if they don’t, that’s fine as well. Under Fire is a film we believed in, and we’re extremely proud of it. And if it doesn’t make a penny, we just want you to know that’s okay.”
Joanna Cassidy in Under Fire.
That had to be one of the greatest moments of your career.
It was painful to hear, but also one of the nicest speeches I’ve ever heard. The epilogue to that story is we go in to the screening, the film starts, and it’s much too dark to see properly; the projector was just hopeless. A couple minutes went by and it wasn’t getting any better —and there’s 2,000 people in there—so I snuck out, and went up to the projection booth to complain… and Eric is already up there! The head of the fucking studio is arguing with the projectionist! The man showed us how the mirror in the projector was almost gone, and he didn’t want to burn it out, and Eric kept telling him to raise the level into the red zone. Well, he wouldn’t do it, so Eric finally pulls out $100 and waves it in his face. The man shrugs, takes it, turns up the voltage even though it may damage the bulb, and finally the film looks right. I headed for the door, and Eric said, “Where are you going?” I said it looked fine to me, and he said, “He’ll drop it again as soon as the next reel comes up! I’m staying right here, and you’re staying with me!” And we stayed there for the whole movie. And every time there was a reel change, Eric paid him another $100! That was Eric Pleskow. He and Arthur and Mike Medavoy had more understanding and respect for film than any other studio men I knew. The next day was the press discussion of the film. And just as Eric had predicted, the Italian press took us to task for making a biased, right wing, politically naïve American film! And when it came out in the US, it was indeed denounced as left wing, socialist, politically naïve, and overly favorable to the Sandinistas. Of the major critics, Pauline Kael and David Denby liked it, and wrote very thoughtful pieces about it, but other than that we got about five hundred bad reviews in America; some of them really just vicious. You couldn’t help but smile.
Gene Hackman in Under Fire.
48 Hrs. came out the year before Under Fire. Were you then considered hotter as a writer than as a director?
I wasn’t hot at all. At the time I was involved with 48 Hrs., I was completely broke because I hadn’t worked very much. Then I took a TV series to try and pay the bills while Ron was rewriting Under Fire. The series was at Paramount, who also happened to be making 48 Hrs., a script that had sat in a trunk for five or seven years. So Ron would come to Paramount for our Under Fire story conferences, and Nick Nolte was often at a table across the room. And he’d come over to us, with that smile, complaining, “Ahh, this 48 Hrs.! I signed on for it, but the fucking plot’s so complicated! I don’t know what the fuck’s going on!” Ron and I became convinced he was the only guy who could do Under Fire, so we gave him the script when we finished it. Actually, Nick was notorious for not reading scripts, so we had about fifty copies printed up, and got a friend of his to plant them all over his house, on top of every script pile. No matter what stack he reached for, the first two or three scripts were all Under Fire! So he read it almost immediately, and said yes. That was right before they started 48 Hrs. I gave him some cameras that belonged to my photographer friend Matthew Naythons, who had first taken us to Nicaragua. A lot of the incidents in the script were based on Matthew’s experiences during the Sandinista revolution: the actual hand grenade scene was something he had witnessed, as was the bus attack. So Nick had these cameras Matthew actually used in Nicaragua and a number of other wars, plus several hundred rolls of film, and while he did 48 Hrs., he kept them in his trailer and practiced with them when, he wasn’t on set. By the time we started shooting--and 48 Hrs. went a month over schedule--he literally had a weekend off before starting Under Fire— Nick could sit there chatting with you, shoot a roll of film and reload those cameras without even looking at them!
Nick Nolte and Jean-Louis Trintignant in Under Fire.
Was the initial inspiration for the project the murder of Bill Stewart, the ABC News reporter who was gunned down by a Nicaraguan Army patrol in 1979?
Yes, it was.
And everything else in the story sort of grew out of that incident?
That incident was in the original script by Clayton Frohman. I didn’t connect with that script very much, but I thought the photographer character was interesting, and the war itself. I’d also read an article about the war photographer Don McCullum, which made the point that some of those intense, sensitive war photographs we all know and admire were taken by photographers who were sometimes not that sensitive, sometimes politically naïve--there’s that phrase again--and sometimes not above faking their own photos!
Looking at it again yesterday, it struck me that your three leads—Nolte, Hackman, and Joanna Cassidy—make their characters more interesting than I imagine they were on the page. Do you feel that way?
I don’t know. I can’t really see it that way.
I mean, compared to, say, Salvador (1986), where James Woods practically bursts out of the screen. The leads in Under Fire seem more like part of the realistic fabric of that place and time. They’re not larger than life “movie characters,” they’re just people.
They all came from real people. Nick was loosely based on Don McCullum, and I knew the journalist Joanna played; she was based on a woman my sister worked with, a producer on a BBC program, “Panorama.” Hackman was based on someone as well, so Ron and I had a very real sense of who these people were, and he wrote excellent scenes for them. I think one of his gifts is his ability to write interesting dialogue that feels ordinary and credible on the surface, but is also rich and evocative.
Perhaps the key dramatic moment, at the midpoint of the story, is Nolte photographing the rebel leader. Was that based on an actual incident?
I’ve always been interested in photography, and the idea that images can be manipulated and even faked to serve various ends was one of our themes. It’s particularly true today but even before digital photography, there’s a long history of famous photographs being either modified or staged. The iconic power of these images and the ease with which they can be manipulated was one of the themes of the film. In fact, it was that aspect of the film that finally helped revive Under Fire. A year or so after it came out, Frank Rich, at NYU, thought it was an interesting film about ethics in journalism, so he made it part of their curriculum for the next three years! A lot of journalists heard about that, which motivated them to go back and look at it again, whereupon a number of them suddenly decided, “Oh my goodness, this is actually quite good.” Then it came out on HBO—there was no video or DVD at the time, so films would show up on HBO after a two or three year time lag. And it was reviewed all over again. It was very odd, because when it was well reviewed, people then just assumed it had been a hit when it first came out, when in fact it had been a major disappointment… just as Eric Pleskow had predicted.
Well, better late than never, huh?
(laughs) Yes. It was very surprising.
Jamie Lee Curtis in Terror Train.
I had a question about one of your collaborators. Under Fire was shot by the great John Alcott, who was famous for working with Stanley Kubrick. I was surprised to see on IMDb that he also shot your first film, Terror Train (1980). How did you get one of the most acclaimed cinematographers in the world to do your low-budget horror movie?
I was incredibly lucky. He had just finished The Shining (1980), and one of my producers knew him. When I met him, I was a little nervous. I said, “I have to warn you: we need to do about thirty camera set-ups a day here, and I just read in an interview that you only did one set-up a day on The Shining. Won’t this be a nightmare for you?” And he said, “That’s the reason I’m here. We did one set-up a day, and I was bored to tears! It’s always like that with Stanley; I love him dearly, but I’m always bored!” I had to shoot Terror Train in twenty-five days, most of it on an actual train, and Alcott saw it as an interesting technical challenge. He really enjoyed it.
So when it came to Under Fire, you had a pretty good working relationship?
We became friends on that first one. He knew I was still learning, but I did have a good sense about what I needed to shoot, and he liked that about me. I certainly respected what he was doing. He liked using this Nikon lens they’d adapted for Barry Lyndon (1975)—it was an f/0.9 or something, a very fast lens—which meant we could shoot with incredibly little illuminatio… often just a couple candles. Press photographers would come on the set and ask “When are you going to turn on the lights?” John was shooting, and they couldn’t even get a light meter reading! Sometimes I would literally beg John : “Please give me an f/1.8! Or an f/2! Can’t the actors have three inches to move in?” He’d say, “Calm down. Now, which eye did you want in focus here?”. You can have one sharp, but not both… and not his nose.?” He was so good. I liked him a lot.
Cinematographer John Alcott and Stanley Kubrick on the set of The Shining.
You shot Under Fire in Mexico. Was that with a local crew?
Yes, and they were very good. I knew them from Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1974), and I’d hired them to work on Karel Reisz’s Dog Soldiers (aka Who'll Stop the Rain, 1978).
That sort of leads to what I consider the most enduring aspect of Under Fire: the way you staged and shot the war scenes. They’re very non-Hollywood-looking. Combat is often described as long stretches of incredibly tense boredom broken up by bursts of sudden violence. I think you captured that as well as it can possibly be done.
I’m a great believer that you can get great drama out of reality. Like the bus scene: a bus attacking a tank; that really happened. So it looks messy, and awful. I like strange details that make little rational sense, but tell the audience this must have happened. I just did a film about Rwanda, and I was very fortunate to have someone with me who had been there during the genocide, and I listened very carefully to all the stories.
Were there films you looked to when planning your war sequences?
Z (1969). I’d always liked Z. And The Battle of Algiers (1966).
I just watched Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969) again. I think if you put some Under Fire scenes side by side with his riot sequence, anyone would be hard-pressed to say which events were real and which were staged.
Well, we spent a lot of time physically creating that world, and then just plunked the actors into it. We had about a square mile of that city dressed. The look was inspired by a wonderful book of photographs by Susan Meiselas: very bright-colored buildings under these very dark and ominous skies. That was kind of our palate. And we created it with almost no money: we bought a lot of cheap paint, and gave out it to all the residents, who were quite happy to get free paint. They painted the front facades of their homes, then we came along and “aged” it—sprayed a dirty water mixture onto it from trucks—which they could then wash off afterwards. Then we set fire to cars and tires in the streets, which you can’t do anymore. So we had this giant war zone, and we could pretty much drive through it wherever we wanted. I would be on the hood of the car, either directing Nick which way to turn, or he’d just make it up. It didn’t matter; we had soldiers all over the place. We’d made a great deal with the Mexican Army.
L to R: Nick Nolte, Joanna Cassidy, Jean-Louis Trintignant in Under Fire.
You talked about how the film initially failed, but had a resurgence. Were you surprised when this obscure little war you’d depicted likewise reemerged as a major American foreign policy issue of the 1980’s?
Well, what Reagan did with it was completely out of left field—supporting the Contras was very destructive to Central America. What didn’t come out of left field, and what I think Ron Shelton got absolutely right in the script, was the idea that once the Sandinistas gained power, they would run away with it, and become like everyone else. That took about two years to happen. So Jean-Louis Trintignant’s speech about what’s going to happen to the revolution was quite prescient. If you see the film today, you’d think that was written in hindsight, but it wasn’t. We made Under Fire a year after the revolution… and about a year before it all went wrong.
Robert Forster: The Hollywood Interview
Actor Robert Forster at West Hollywood eatery The Silver Spoon.
THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING: ROBERT FORSTER REMEMBERS CHICAGO ‘68
by Jon Zelazny
Editor's Note: This article originally appeared on EightMillionStories.com August 21st, 2008
When the Democratic National Convention begins next week, a deeply divided party will strive to reunify, and attempt to forge a nationally acceptable policy to extricate the nation from a failed war.
Forty years ago this week, the Democratic Party was in similar straits. But the political wrangling at the 1968 convention in Chicago’s International Auditorium was wholly eclipsed by the events happening directly outside: the heavily-televised spectacle of brutal, ongoing street battles betweens thousands of Vietnam war protesters, the Chicago police, and the Illinois National Guard.
Robert Forster was there. Best known for his 1997 Oscar-nominated role as bail bondsman Max Cherry in Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, the veteran actor covered the tumultuous ‘68 convention as a local TV news cameraman... except he wasn’t a real newsman, and his Channel 9 didn’t actually exist. Forster was working undercover; he was a young actor starring in his first independent feature film.
Medium Cool has endured for forty years as a landmark of freeform, neo-documentary style filmmaking, and a late sixties cultural and political touchstone.
I met Robert Forster at The Silver Spoon in West Hollywood.
You’ve been coming to The Spoon for a while now, haven’t you?
ROBERT: Since Schwab’s Drug Store closed in 1983. Which happened very suddenly: this whisper passed through the store—shocked faces everywhere—and they closed that day. Schwab’s had opened in 1941. It was always full of writers and directors, a lot of actors; horse players, hookers, and hangers-on. They would take messages for you there; it was just a great place. And when it closed, the regulars all scattered to the four winds. So some actors, myself included, went searching for another place to be in the morning—you have to be somewhere, right? We tried a couple places, then came here. Since 1984, I guess, I’ve been here on a near-daily basis. I used to sit inside with that bunch of actors, then my career got so lousy for a while, I started taking college classes, and moved out here to the patio so I could read and study. Then everything changed for me again after Jackie Brown; people wanted me again. So now I study my scripts and make calls out here. This has been my spot for about seventeen years. It’s nice to have a spot.
Robert Forster in Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool.
I’ve heard you talk about Medium Cool before, and you described a very seat-of-your-pants, heavily improvised production, with a constantly evolving storyline. What was the initial script like? The feeling of the material you first committed to?
I think the original title was… The Concrete… I dunno, Concrete something-or-other. It was this story about a young boy who’d come to Chicago from West Virginia with his mother. There was no father. And this nice news cameraman gets involved with him, and his mother. It was a love story. The politics were in there a little, but nothing like what the movie turned out to be. You know, a movie with a very strong political point of view, made by a man with very strong political views, Haskell Wexler. He’s best known as a cinematographer, which he’s won multiple Oscars for, but he’s only directed a couple things. This is the important one.
Was it the first lead role you were offered?
It was, in fact. I had supporting roles in my first two pictures, John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), and a western, The Stalking Moon (1968), with Gregory Peck. But this one required me to do all sorts of things I hadn’t a clue about, one of which was: even if there’s nothing written on the page, you’ve got to come up with something for the guy to say! It was a pretty big shock to me: I was still trying to figure out what a movie actor needed to know; you know, how you do it, and do it well. On Medium Cool we had all kinds of opportunities to improvise; some of them even led to new scenes. There was a dinner scene, and I told the boy that I boxed at the CYO, and maybe I would take him some time. It was just a passing remark; that boy had never acted before, so I was saying things as a way to engage him. A few days later, Haskell comes in and says he wants us to do a scene at a fight gym. We actually shot that scene at the gym in Chicago where Muhammad Ali trained. So we’re there, shooting our improvisation, and he walks in! Came up the stairs, and everybody just stopped whatever they were doing. Everybody wanted to talk to him. We were kidding around some, and I said it’d be nice if he came up again and walked through our shot. He laughed and said, “No, no. If I walk through that shot, you’ll have to give me first billing!”
You look pretty good in that scene. Did you box?
Nah. I just used to hit the bag a little. At the YMCA in Rochester, New York.
Feature film cinematographers generally don’t get too involved in working with actors. How did Haskell Wexler treat his first film cast?
Very generously. I mean, he really had his hands full there. It was a small movie, and he was trying to get it shot. Once in a while there was a second camera working, but he shot most of it himself. I think he expected the actor to read the script, understand it, and bring something to it. He expected them to know what they were doing. And I had to rise to that professional level.
Felton Perry (second from left) and friends in Medium Cool.
One of my favorite scenes is when you and Peter Bonerz go to meet all those black guys… and they start hassling you!
Fully improvised.
I thought so. It’s just a… y’know, everybody in it is so good!
How about Felton Perry? When he does that talk right to the camera at the end?
It’s like what Spike Lee did twenty years later: having his actors break the fourth wall like that. I just love the visible discomfort of you guys. I can’t imagine people had seen that in a movie before: black people just dressing down and taunting white people like that. Medium Cool has a lot of that: a lot of anger and disbelief is expressed, all related to the social turmoil of the times. Yet your character is disconnected from it all. He doesn’t relate very well to the events he’s witnessing. Did that at all reflect the way you were at that age?
I surely had no political point of view when I started that movie. I tried to get into that character through his professional point of view: a cynical news cameraman who’s just there to get the story. Doesn’t matter if someone’s bleeding; that’s somebody else’s job. He’ll call an ambulance, but only after he gets the pictures he needs. That’s the job, and that’s who he is: the unaffected one. I think that’s what Haskell intended him to be. And again, the picture was completely restructured after it was shot. We shot an enormous amount of scenes, and the movie only uses maybe a quarter of them. We’d started out making a movie about a boy from West Virginia, and it became this political movie about the Democratic National Convention. It was actually supposed to open with us interviewing Bobby Kennedy. We were supposed to see him in Washington on a Thursday, I think, and that Tuesday, my mother-in-law—we were living with my in-laws then—my mother-in-law yelled up to us in the bedroom, “They’ve shot Bobby Kennedy!” Within hours I got a call saying our trip was off, but then Haskell called and said we’d still go. So we were in Washington; four, five days after the assassination, and we actually filmed the preparations for his funeral. Those scenes of Bonerz and I going around the city in a taxi, watching the TV crews setting up, those towers they’re building; that’s what all that was for. That happened just as we started the movie, and the convention and the rioting happened right at the end. So those two events did a lot to shape the picture.
So you started in June. There were already a lot of people very worried about what would happen in August. A lot of the radical groups were publicly announcing their intentions to disrupt the proceedings. Was Wexler already aware, already imagining that the convention could be a key backdrop to the story?
Oh, by all means. It was in the script, right at the end: one of those quarter page descriptions that doesn’t tell you a lot, but you know it’s going to take eight days to shoot it.
So the assumption that there was going to be civil unrest was part of his planning? Absolutely. All those guys—The Yippies, and so on—they said what they were going to do. And they did it.
L to R: Peter Bonerz, Peter Boyle, and Robert Forster in Medium Cool.
Were you getting nervous at this point?
Nahh! You know, we went up to Minnesota; we shot that stuff of the National Guard practicing riot control. But it was a yuk; you see those guys are kidding around—
Yeah, but everything they do comes back for real around the convention.
Yeah. Remember at the end, you hear someone in the crowd yelling to the TV crew, “Don’t leave us! The whole world is watching!” That might have been the moment that phrase was coined. I’m not sure of that, but it might be.
The protests and street battles began on Friday, August 24th; the convention itself opened on Sunday, and ended on Wednesday. How many of those days did you spend filming around there?
All of them. We shot in the convention itself for a very short time. I can’t remember the details, but I think we could only get two credentials to get on the floor. I found out much later from Haskell that it was Warren Beatty who got them for us. He was thick with the Democratic Party then, and he arranged for those two passes.
What kind of credentials were they? Press?
Yeah.
So you were actually in there as a real reporter?
Yeah.
That’s what it looks like, but I wondered.
We could only use them for an hour or something. It was a very brief thing; just Haskell and I on the floor. I was shooting the convention, and he was shooting me.
You were shooting film in that scene?
I believe that was the only scene where Haskell put real film in my camera. Then he told me what to shoot, where to shoot. We were standing right next to each other. I’m not sure if he used any of my footage though.
Did you train as a cameraman before you took the part?
No. But I’d held that camera a lot by then. And I knew what these guys did. How they held it, how they looked for a shot.
L to R: Director Haskell Wexler, Val Ward, and Felton Perry on the set of Medium Cool.
WAITRESS: Robert, you want more coffee, honey?
I’m good for now, sweetheart. Thank you.
You must have had press credentials when you shot the National Guard as well?
Those were pretty easy to get. It was just a training exercise.
But again, you went in posing as real journalists?
Yeah, they thought we were journalists. We presented ourselves that way. I mean there might have been some people who thought, “Hey, what is this Channel 9?” It was a phony channel.
So you’ve got a real camera, Bonerz has real sound equipment, and Haskell is shooting. Who else is there with you?
Haskell’s camera assistant. Maybe one or two others. But all of us look like we’re an actual news crew.
Did anyone get wise to what you guys were really doing?
Well, Haskell wasn’t shooting me every minute. He was shooting off me, panning to the subject, panning from the subject back to me. He knew how to do it.
You don’t appear in the most dangerous scenes, like the police action in the park. It looks like Wexler is about ten feet away from getting his head cracked open.
I wasn’t in any of the scenes where Verna Bloom is wearing that yellow dress. I wasn’t there that day, but there was all kinds of chaos. We were sitting in the hotel once, we’d been waiting for some time, then Haskell came running in and said, “You won’t believe what’s going on down on this street!” And we all up and hustled down there to see what we could make from it. It was a lot of that kind of thing.
That was a great decision, by the way, putting Verna in that bright dress. No matter how deep in the background she is, you can always pick her out.
Exactly.
How could she just keep going up to all those people? Wasn’t she terrified?
I don’t know how she got through that day. I do know one thing, though: every actor, when they’re in front of the camera, they feel invulnerable. You really do feel like you’re Superman.
Original theatrical trailer for Medium Cool.
Did anyone in the cast or crew get hurt?
I don’t think so. Not to my knowledge. Now, what’s interesting is the moment when the police throw down that tear gas, and that crewmember yells, “Look out, Haskell! It’s real!” That to me is really something, but I’ve also read articles where people claim that line was added in later.
Oh, I don’t think so. I just watched it again last night. It sounds entirely too spontaneous to be a dub. You know, he’s using natural sound throughout the sequence; you hear people in those crowds yelling all kinds of things.
I don’t think it was made up either, I just know some people say that.
Author’s note: I still had the rented DVD, so I watched the scene again, this time with the commentary track… where Wexler acknowledges that the line was put in later. D’ohh!
A lot of famous media names either covered the convention, or were protesting. Did you ever cross paths with Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Phil Ochs, or Allen Ginsberg?
All those guys were there? I didn’t see any of them. The one guy I remember being around was Studs Terkel. He helped us out with some things. He got a credit on it.
When did you first see the completed picture?
It was out here, I think. It was a screening. It was…
What did you think of it?
Honestly, I didn’t know what to think. It was a very different kind of movie. Certainly very different from the other two I’d done. I remember it opened around the same time as Easy Rider (1969), and there were some similarities between them, I guess. They kind of played the same way. But Easy Rider was a huge success. This one really didn’t do that well.
"The whole world is watching!" Director Haskell Wexler poses a rhetorical question in Medium Cool's iconic (and ironic) final shot.
When did it hit you that Medium Cool was becoming something of a classic?
As the years went by. I’d hear people talk about it. And I’d read things about it, here and there, magazines, books. It really impressed certain people. I’ve even had a couple cameramen come up to me over the years—major guys—who told me that was the movie that inspired them to become cameramen! And, you know, there’s the whole historical aspect of it. It really is like a time capsule, or a newsreel, of those times. I’m still not a person with strong political views, but I’m proud of it. It’s a wonderful picture.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Gabriel Byrne: The Hollywood Interview
Actor Gabriel Byrne.
GABRIEL BYRNE: TALK TO ME
By
Alex Simon
Editor's Note: The following article appears in the April issue of Venice Magazine.
Gabriel Byrne was born in Dublin May 12, 1950, the eldest of six children. After schooling under the stern tutelage of The Christian Brothers and five years in Catholic seminary, Byrne attended University College in Dublin, where he studied linguistics and archeology, as well as honing his love of soccer, playing with the renowned Stella Maris Football Club.
Byrne discovered acting late compared to most of his peers, spending his 20s working in a variety of professions including schoolteacher, where his students inadvertently helped him discover his true calling (see below for more details). Since then, he has starred in over 45 films for some of cinema's finest contemporary directors both in the US and Europe (John Boorman, Costa Gavras, Michael Mann, Ken Loach, David Cronenberg, and the Coen Brothers, to name a few). Byrne produced the controversial and Oscar-nominated drama In the Name of the Father, as well as the fantasy Into the West, in which he also starred. On Broadway, Byrne was nominated for a Tony Award for his portrayal of James Tyrone in the acclaimed revival of Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten. Also on Broadway in 2007, Byrne won the Outer Critics Cirlce Award for Best Actor for his work in A Touch of the Poet by O'Neill, and was awarded this year's Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Television Series, Drama for his work on HBO's In Treatment, where Gabriel Byrne takes on what he calls his most challenging role, as Paul Weston, a psychotherapist whose weekly sessions with a disparate group of patients provide the drama for the series. In Treatment has its second season premiere Sunday, April 5 on the venerable cable network.
I was originally scheduled to speak with Gabriel Byrne by phone from his home in New York on March 16, the day his close friend Natasha Richardson was fatally injured while skiing in Canada. Understandably not feeling up to chatting with a journalist, he rescheduled our talk for the following week. What followed were three different conversations over a period of three days. Gabriel Byrne proved himself to be a true man of letters and great intellectual curiosity during our talks, covering topics ranging from history, to religion, to politics, to film, and much more. In this case, words speak louder than action. And so…
I was thinking while watching In Treatment that it must be an interesting exercise for an actor to play a therapist since, as an actor, you have to be both a good listener and introspective.
Gabriel Byrne: That’s true. I think one of the challenges in the role for me is trying to find ways to deal with the different energies of the different characters that I work with. For example, it’s very difficult to let the audience know what you’re thinking, but not let the “patient” know what you’re thinking. You have to be constantly aware of that delicate balance between being a therapist and an actor. A lot of therapists have to act in a way, as do we all, in whatever job we do, we have to adopt a certain persona, even someone who checks you into a hotel. I’d say this is the most difficult role I’ve ever played since I did A Touch of the Poet and A Moon for the Misbegotten. It requires the same kind of stamina. It’s a very complex role, and is really much more a theater actor’s piece than it is a film. Essentially, it’s a one hour play every night.
That’s one thing I love about it. I find it very Bergmanesque.
It’s interesting that you should say that, because I remember years ago seeing Scenes from a Marriage, and he was really the one that starting the whole technique that blurred the line between reality and fiction.
And it’s such a refreshing experience to have that to watch nightly instead of things blowing up every five minutes or stories about horny teenagers trying to get laid.
Yeah, that’s very true. (laughs) I think we’re so used to action now and the language of plot that we’ve forgotten how to really listen. I think the challenge and the achievement of this program is that it makes people listen and watch a little closer, which allows you to get caught up in the complexity of human behavior. There’s nowhere to escape for these characters. There’s no liquor cabinet, no cigarettes you can light, no car you can escape in. You have to depend completely on the emotional connection between the characters.
Byrne and Melissa George in a scene from season 1 of In Treatment.
I never thought of it that way, but you’re absolutely correct: you’re literally a captive audience with Paul and his patient.
In fact, you’re in the room with those patients; therefore you have the notion of eavesdropping on something that’s very private. But what’s deceptive about it is, that if you were to film a real therapy session, for it to be compelling to eavesdrop on, it would have to be dramatic, but it would have to be acted in such a way to seem like a real therapy session, and most therapy sessions aren’t very dramatic in real life. They’re a bit more subdued and unstructured, and they’re certainly not framed with any sort of dramatic plotting.
Well, when we reach an emotional catharsis, we don’t explode, we implode, and this show captures that beautifully. It’s a show about implosion.
I think that’s very well-put. There are constant moments of revelation, both with the audience and the characters themselves. I think the role of the viewer is complicated in a good way, in that you can empathize with these people, but you can also judge them. You can say ‘Well, they should do this, and they should do that.’ But you can also say ‘Well, I’ve done this, and I’ve done that.’ To see all those experiences of the patients, we might not be able to relate to them all directly, but we still empathize with the feelings behind them.
It’s been interesting you mention judging the patients, because at first I found myself really judging them, and the things they did, for example the Hope Davis character. My gut reaction to her straight off was “This woman is nuts!”
(laughs) Yeah.
But then I tried to put myself in Paul’s shoes by listening to her without judgment, which was a very challenging exercise in trying to be empathetic with another human being, which we probably don’t do enough of.
One of the challenges that I like in playing this part, I never ask for the script before the day that we shoot, because I don’t want to know where the other character is going. I don’t want to know what the arc of the other character is. So there’s a part of me that wants to find out, meeting-by-meeting, what’s going on with this person. That’s deliberate on my part to keep removed, and to keep from knowing what’s going to happen, and that keeps me from judging the characters before we shoot the scene.
I also find it fascinating that your character uses his position to avoid any real intimacy with the people close to him in his life.
I think we have an expectation of people who are in the healing profession, a higher expectation of their behavior than we do our own. No therapist would deny that they’re not human beings, or that they’re a saint outside that room. I think what’s interesting about that character is that he is a human being and he is gullible to an extent in his own life so that when it comes to relating to his patients, he has an objectivity and an empathy and compassion, but doesn’t necessarily feel compassion for himself. He’s very hard on himself.
And given his back-story, that’s understandable.
Yeah, we really lay out the emotional roadmap of his life this season, where Paul asks himself “Am I a rescuer because I’m trying to repair something in my past because of my mother’s death, therefore I go through life now with a job where I attempt to rescue everybody, because I couldn’t rescue my mother?” A lot of his private world is tortured, whereas when he’s in that chair in front of people, I think he has a more defined existence.
There’s an amazing supporting cast on the series, most of whom have strong stage backgrounds: John Mahoney, Dianne Wiest, Hope Davis, Laila Robins.
Yeah, they’re terrific, aren’t they? Most of the writers and directors have strong stage backgrounds, as well, which is what I think the producers of the show really wanted because again, we’re really doing a series of short plays each week, as opposed to something more cinematic.
Byrne and Dianne Wiest in HBO's In Treatment.
The segments that have affected me the most are the sessions between your character and Dianne Wiest, who plays Paul’s therapist.
Yeah, what a good psychotherapist can do is help you to revisit the nerve center of your own experiences, of your own childhood, and try to make sense of them, because we all tend to distort and reimagine our childhood and our formative experiences. And what my character is trying to do, ultimately, is figure out why he is the way he is. So the room of the other psychotherapist becomes a sacred place for him, where he can communicate in all honesty and come to terms with his past.
Ultimately, I think that’s something we all try to do if we choose to live our lives with some semblance of self-awareness.
Right, I mean can you ever move forward until you’ve come to terms with the past? I don’t think so. You can only dwell in the past for so long, but you can’t look back on it without looking at how it helped form you into the person you are today. If you choose not to engage in that, then it seems to me to be a pretty empty exercise. If you’re open to it, it’s quite a rewarding path to discovering why you are the way you are.
I think the key is to come to terms with your past without living there.
It’s an ironic contradiction, if you think about it. We can’t really live in the past again, but we still have a need to make sense of it. So Paul’s journey into his emotional past is a brave one.
Let’s talk about your background a bit. You were born and raised in Dublin, the eldest of six children. What was life like for you as a child?
Both my parents worked. My father was a laborer and my mother was a hospital worker. We were a solidly working class family that was pretty typical of Dublin in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
Who did you get the artistic side from?
I can’t say, really. There were never any actors in the family. Probably more from my mother.
A pre-teen Gabriel Byrne, circa early 1960s.
You were educated by The Christian Brothers, who are known as the Marine Corps of the Catholic Church. What was that like?
They were pretty hardcore. They were a combination of Catholic Victorian morality, which believed in eternal damnation, and a spare the rod, spoil the child kind of philosophy. So we got beaten around quite a lot. The result was I do not believe in corporal punishment, because I’ve suffered it. Corporal punishment degrades and humiliates. It teaches fear and radically affects self esteem. I think anyone who has been a victim of corporal punishment would be in a difficult position to put up a proposal for it. To be hit for something that you don’t understand is one of the great humiliations of life. I didn’t understand most of what they were talking about in terms of mathematics and language or whatever they were lecturing about. There were 35 of us in a class, and they could pick on you at any time. They could ask any comprehensible question about any comprehensible topic, and if you didn’t know the answer, you got beaten. Sometimes you got beaten anyway, just for sitting there. And when I say ‘beaten,’ I mean hit, really hard. So to me, corporal punishment is not an effective form of education.
It sounds like you were in a constant state of fear.
Yes, I think that most kids who went through that kind of schooling were.
I know you spent five years in seminary, so you spent a good portion of your early life training to be a Church-ordained therapist in many ways.
That may work in some advantage to the role I’m playing now, but I’m really just acting and I doubt whatever I learned anywhere else, outside of theater and film, has a great deal of bearing toward what I do in that chair when I’m playing Paul.
Byrne (second from right) graduates from college, circa 1973.
Still, the fact that you were so in touch with your humanistic side at an early age, I’m wondering if this quality led you to discover that you were an actor, rather than a priest.
I don’t think they were related. I didn’t become an actor until I was nearly 30 years old. I was a school teacher during most of my 20s, teaching Gaelic and Spanish literature, and I was always going to the theater, but I didn’t know that you could make a living at it. The students came to me one day and asked if we could start a drama club, and that’s how I got interesting in acting as a form of expression.
After that you got involved in the Abbey Theater.
Yeah, I got involved with the Abbey and Focus Theaters for a few years, did some theater in Dublin, and then I left and went to England.
Byrne as Uther Pendragon in John Boorman's Excalibur, his feature debut.
The first film I remember seeing you in is one of my favorites: John Boorman’s Excalibur. That was your big break, just as it was for people like Liam Neeson, Patrick Stewart, and many others.
There had been very few films made in Ireland of international standing up until then. None of us had any experience in making films. John Boorman found a bunch of us at the Focus Theater that he put into the film, along with a group of amazing actors from England like Helen Mirren, Nicol Williamson, Patrick Stewart, all these great Shakespearian actors. We had no idea what we were doing. It was a really bewildering experience for an actor from the theater. It was a very different technique and it took forever to get used to it. I couldn’t wait to get back to the theater, to tell you the truth. (laughs) But there was very little work at the time, and to be put on a big, international film like that, was a very big deal. But ultimately it was the theater that took me to London, to The Royal Court and National Theaters.
What was John Boorman like to work with?
John was an exotic ward of filmage as far as we were concerned. (laughs) He was really generous and kind to first-time actors, and knew what he wanted. But what he wanted and what we saw at the time we were shooting it was totally different. It was only after we saw the finished film that we realized what an amazing vision he had. Moment-to-moment, day-to-day we became more aware of how complex his vision really was. I think he wanted to capture some of the brutality and the primitive quality of myth in that film. So the combination of myth and magic that he infused the film with are really timeless things, and Boorman is someone who is obsessed with mythology and really understands the very close relationship between mythology and cinema.
Byrne in Defense of the Realm.
The next film I saw you in was Ken Russell’s Gothic, which was Natasha Richardson’s film debut. If you’re not comfortable talking about Natasha yet, let’s address Mr. Russell, who I understand is a force of nature.
Yeah, working with Ken was another huge break for me. I’d done a film in England just before that one called Defense of the Realm, which I think was one of the best films to come out of Britain in the ‘80s. Based on that film, I was offered Gothic. Ken was still, even at that time, the enfant terrible of British cinema. He was so controversial, that people would protest outside cinemas when Ken Russell films would show up during the ‘70s and ‘80s, that’s how incendiary some of his work was. He asked me to play Lord Byron and Natasha played Mary Shelley.
Julian Sands, Byrne and Natasha Richardson in Ken Russell's Gothic.
Are you comfortable talking about Natasha, or should we leave that?
(pause) I think everyone who knew her is obviously very sad. My memory of her is very personal, to me. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained with me commenting in a general way about her. It was a privilege for me to work with her in her first film. Her magnetism was incontestable, both as a person and as an actress. When you’re working with somebody you see them in a very different light. I just knew she was special. I think we’d better leave it at that.
Fair enough. I know that you and Liam Neeson go back to your theater days in Dublin.
We go back to ’76 together in The Project Theater. It was basically a tiny theater in the center of Dublin. Stephen Rea, Colm Meany, Liam Neeson, myself, Jim Sheridan, Neil Jordan, Ciaran Hinds, we were all working there together for about forty dollars a week. There was also a band of spotty kids who would practice there who were trying to hustle gigs around town at pubs and things. That band was U2.
My God, all that zeitgeist under one roof!
Yeah, pretty amazing, isn’t it? (laughs) When I look back it’s all bit surreal to think how well we all did and how lucky we all were. Why things happen that way every so often, I have no way of explaining.
Back to Gothic. Was Ken Russell’s reputation justified?
Oh yeah, he was very much a moment-to-moment guy. Looking back on it now, he was about taking risks. His notion, which was quite ingenious, was that Byron and Shelley were the Keith Richards and Mick Jagger of their day. He wasn’t comparing them as artists, but was saying that the milieu in which they existed was very much like the ‘60s, and that Frankenstein and a lot of their poetry was written under the influence of drugs. A lot of the poets of that time wrote under the influence of opium. So the film had the feel of a modern-day video, and I don’t know if that dates it, or not, but the idea was that the so-called counterculture of the ‘60s was nothing new. That environment had been around for a very long time.
The next film we have to discuss is Miller’s Crossing, another favorite of mine. Tell us about the Coen brothers and their universe.
Well, there was pre-universe, during it, and post-universe. (laughs) When I read that script, I was just like anybody I think who read it, just really impressed by how visual and literate and how complex those relationships in the story actually were. When you unravel what that movie is about, it’s even more audacious that someone could base a storyline on that single conversation between Steve Buscemi’s character and mine at the bottom of the staircase. All the twists and turns, the betrayals…
Byrne in the Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing.
Everyone betrays everyone at the end of that film.
Yeah, they do. I think the film was really about the idea of who can you really trust.
And can you even trust yourself at the end of the day?
Exactly. Nobody ever really knows anybody.
I loved your character of Tom Reagan.
Yeah, he’s a watcher and a mover and shaker and really quite ruthless and deadly in the end.
I just finished college when the film came out, and had written a paper on Machiavelli, and it struck me that what the Coens did was to take Machiavelli, put him in a gangster picture in the 1930s, and make him an Irishman.
Well, yeah. (laughs) There were certainly Machiavellian traits in the character and as much as the film is about gangsters, it’s also a film about big business and about the nature of morality. I think when the film came out it was really underrated.
Original trailer for the Coen Brothers' Miller's Crossing.
The other element that defines it, as with all the Coens’ films, is its incredible sense of humor. It’s a very satirical film.
Oh, its humor is terrific. There’s laugh out loud moments in that movie, whereas on paper, it didn’t necessarily read that way. When Albert Finney turns around says “They took his hair, Tommy. They took his hair!” (laughs) And of course, we’d just seen the kid run off with the guy’s rug in the earlier scene. I asked the Coens what their inspiration was to write the film, and I forget whether it was Joel or Ethan who said to me: “You always see gangsters in the street, but you never see them in a forest.” I just thought that was so brilliant. Plus, there’s so much amazing imagery: the hat floating by the camera through the forest, which is one of the most original images in film history.
They also pay homage to some of my favorite films, especially the ending, which is a nod to The Third Man.
Yeah, there’s The Third Man, there’s also The Glass Key in there, the original Scarface with Paul Muni. I remember looking at those old gangster films and thinking ‘What can I steal out of here that won’t be too obvious. And I think it’s in Scarface where Paul Muni lights the match off the policeman’s badge. It’s just a throwaway bit, but in order to set up that shot in Miller’s Crossing, it was this really complicated process, where we had to fix the cop’s badge with sulfur and all kinds of props for that bit to work. And it was this wonderful, Coen-esque cop character: “I’m just speculatin’ about a hypothesis, Tom!” (laughs) It looked like a throwaway moment, but it really helped establish Tom’s disrespect for the law, and everything, really.
You got to work with the great Albert Finney in that film.
Yeah, we shot that in and around New Orleans, and I think if they’d had an election for Mayor that year, Albert would’ve won it, hands-down. He led the St. Patrick’s Day parade and was up and down Bourbon Street every night. The last thing you’d think of Albert after talking with him was that he was an actor, which is the greatest compliment I can give him. You’d talk with Albert about race horses, football, politics, what was going on down the road. I never heard him talk about acting, and I’m not someone who likes talking about acting, either, or talking about the business. We had many great conversations. I remember after we shot that scene in the park, we were two hours from New Orleans, and myself and Albert came back together in the van. We didn’t have separate cars in that film, everyone just went in the van together. It was great. Coming back, I just sat with Albert for two hours and he told me all about where he was born, and where he was brought up, what working in England was like in the 1950s and ‘60s…he told me how he turned down the lead in Lawrence of Arabia. I said ‘Did you regret it?’ He said “No Gabe, I didn’t regret it, because the next year I won the Oscar for Tom Jones.” (laughs)
He was part of that first group of working class Brits that made it as actors and artists: Finney, Michael Caine, Joe Orton, The Beatles. They were all real renaissance men, because they had to be.
Yeah, when you grew up in the UK in the ‘60s, as I did, those were the guys you watched. Of course I saw American films, but to me British films had more of an accessibility. I could recognize the people, the buildings, the world they lived in. It wasn’t America, which seemed very far away. You could take the boat or the train from Dublin and be in a place like Manchester. So they were making films about people I knew, who didn’t speak in American or British “toff” accents of the ‘40s. They were actually speaking with their own accents, which to me, was remarkable. Albert Finney, Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, Alan Bates, Richard Harris, all those guys didn’t let go of their working class credibility and they weren’t sort of precious actors, either. British films had been very staid and predictable, then suddenly people like Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz were making films about the people who I lived next door to. It was a revelation of sorts, hearing these people speak in their real accents, unashamed. And I don’t know that that’s happened with American actors yet, to tell you the truth. That would be a primary criticism I’d have of American cinema, actually: that it’s not representative of the diversity of American culture for the most part. It tends to still be a white man’s cinema, and with that a white man’s values and a white man’s perspective of the world.
Specifically a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant view.
Yeah, exactly. The truth about it is, until the leading actor in an American film happens to be a Korean simply because he’s a terrific actor and the best person for the part, and not because his last film made $800 million or that the part is specifically written for a Korean, American cinema will never be representative of how diverse the country really is. If you live outside of America, odds are that you will be inundated with American film and television. That’s just the way it is. And with that comes certain perceptions and viewpoints that will form as the result of being exposed to all this media from an early age. You ask people outside the U.S. what their perception of an American is, they’ll say things like “A cowboy,” or “One of the guys from Goodfellas.” (laughs) I think the reason certain societies thrive while others don’t is the society that is open to new ideas is going to thrive, while the ones that don’t, that oppose any outside or opposing cultural influences, those are in trouble, and I think America has done the latter over the past 20 or more years. The worse it is for America, the worse it is for the rest of us. That cultural isolation and political isolation that’s occurred over the last eight years has led to a separation from the rest of the world, not just culturally and politically. When American television and films don’t reflect complex ideas, and the theater scene is dying, where are the new ideas going to come from? I did a play by Eugene O’Neill called A Touch of the Poet on Broadway a few years ago. I remember looking out into the audience at one point, and the theater was packed with wealthy, white-haired people. After the curtain call I turned to one of the other actors and said ‘Theater is dead.’ He laughed and said “That’s a good one.” I said ‘No, seriously, theater as we’re doing it now is dead. There’s not audience. There’s no one under 60 out there. They’re all white. And they can all afford $300 for a night.
The point you raised earlier about accents and the homogenization of American media provides a perfect segueway to a question about In Treatment, which is that I found it a fascinating choice that you decided to play Paul with your own Irish brogue. Was his back-story that he emigrated in his early teens?
Yeah, the back-story I wanted to give him was that he emigrated to the States in his early teens and that he went back to Ireland to study at university. I find it interesting that there’s no reference to the fact that he’s Irish at all, but you still picked up on it, which is precisely why I did it that way. I wanted to make a point that you can be Irish and still have as valid an emotional viewpoint as someone with an American accent. At one point, a person who worked on the show asked me “Do you want to play this with a different accent?” I said ‘Why would I do that?’ He replied “Well, you might not be understood.” (laughs) I said ‘I don’t think so. And by the way, if you think I have an accent let me ask you: do you think you have an accent?’ He said “Well, no.” I said ‘You have what’s called an American accent.’ (laughs) I think nationalism can be a wonderful and instinctive thing but it can also be very isolating. As John Lennon said “Imagine there’s no countries.” The notion that nationalism is unequivocally and universally a good thing, I take to be something of a challenge. America is such a diversification of cultures; it can’t be defined as one particular thing. So that’s the point I’m trying to make, playing Paul that way.
Kevin Pollack, Stephen Baldwin, Benicio del Toro, Byrne, Kevin Spacey: The Usual Suspects.
We have to talk about The Usual Suspects. I remember seeing it premiere at Sundance in 1995, and also having it confirm what I always felt about Bryan Singer, who was a classmate of mine in college, that he would be a major filmmaker.
It’s interesting working with people like Bryan and the Coen brothers. As you got to know them, you knew what a unique cinematic vision they had. They have such a command of the language of cinema. It’s interesting to me that Bryan was not interested in becoming the next Fellini or Antonioni. He was interested in becoming the next Spielberg. He could’ve continued making sophisticated independent films, but that was never his ambition. His ambition was always to join the mainstream. The Usual Suspects was only his second film, but his total command of the medium was really inspiring to be around. Sometimes when you work on a film, around the middle of the shoot, your worst suspicions get confirmed. But on The Usual Suspects, I think we all knew right away that, at the very least, this was going to be a very interesting and powerful small film, but nobody had any idea of the impact that it would have, even though we knew we were a part of something very special. 1995 was an amazing year at Sundance, actually. Lots of great films came out that year.
You got to work with Wim Wenders on The End of Violence. What was that experience like?
Well, that’s a funny story, actually. I was at The Viper Room, watching this great big band play. I was standing next to this guy and we started chatting. He said he was from Germany and we started talking about German cinema and people like Fassbinder. And I said ‘And I love this film Wings of Desire by a guy named Wim Wenders. Have you ever heard of him?’ And he sort of paused and said “I am Wim Wenders.” (laughs) I had no idea! I had never seen anyone with a jacket on like the one he was wearing. It had so many zippers on it, you could’ve made it into a tent, or something. (laughs) Then I started listing off all his films that I loved, and said ‘If you’re ever stuck for anybody to cast in one of your projects, please give me a call.’ And he said “There’s a part in my new film that I think you’d be perfect for.” And that was The End of Violence, so there you are. And I got to have a scene with another one of my favorite directors, Sam Fuller. And Sam had just had a stroke, and couldn’t speak. So we just improvised the scene and Wim filmed it, and there it was in the final product. I learned from Wim Wenders that sometimes you just have to go with the moment, whereas filmmakers like the Coen brothers have everything storyboarded and planned months beforehand. But Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch were both very much about being in the moment.
Byrne in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man.
Jarmusch is another favorite of mine. What was the experience of Dead Man like, with Johnny Depp and Robert Mitchum?
Working with Jim was a real pleasure. To be in a black & white western that was Robert Mitchum’s last film, there was something very cathartic about that for me, that took me back to my childhood watching Mitchum in black & white westerns, never imagining that I’d wind up acting in one with him. It was very sentimental for me, and also a really original take on the genre, and a very spiritual film, as well.
Did you get to know Mitchum at all?
A little bit. When we first met, he turned my head to the left, then to the right. Then he turned to Jim Jarmusch and said “He’ll do.” (laughs)
You worked with another original, David Cronenberg, on Spider.
Yeah, that was a very interesting film. 9/11 happened while we were shooting it. I remember walking onto the set and seeing people gathered around a TV, watching what I thought was a clip from the film, then what appeared to be a plane crash that just happened. Then we got the news of what had really happened. David arrived, took it all in, then said “Okay, let’s get to work.” I thought later about that mixture of not comprehending what was going on and his auto-practicality—it wasn’t callousness on his part, he just knew that we had to move on—and then the pain of what had just happened, we found the key to making the film. He’s absolutely fascinating, Cronenberg. There was one point where I was having some questions about my character, and I spoke with David about it. The first A.D. came up and said “We’re ready to go, Mr. Cronenberg,” to which David replied “Hold on, this is more important.” The A.D. gave him a rather quizzical look and David said “You’re fighting for the light, he’s fighting for his character.” He made the decision for my character, rather than the light. I’ll always remember that moment. Not every director will wait for the actor to be ready to go.
Byrne and Miranda Richardson in David Cronenberg's Spider.
You’ve just made an important distinction between the two types of directors working today: you have filmmakers, who are more geared toward the actors and the story, and you have shooters, who are all about the look and staying on-schedule.
Yeah, exactly. There are some directors who can never understand the acting process. You’re at an immediate disadvantage as a director if you don’t understand what it is an actor does. You’ve got to know more than the technical language of film to be an effective filmmaker, in my opinion. I think all directors should have the experience of being on stage or being in front of a camera, just take a scene study class or something similar. Cronenberg said to me once “Without a performance there is no film, and without the script, there is no performance.” They’re all interdependent, and it’s the job of the director to be like a great orchestra leader, and bring out the music that the writer wrote, through the instruments, which are the actors.
But as we spoke about earlier, studios aren’t making those kinds of films anymore. It’s not about story, it’s about product, which more often than not involves blowing things up and making action figures of the characters that do the blowing up.
Yes, and the question is, is it the chicken or the egg? Are the studios actually giving people what they want, or are people going to see these movies en masse because that’s all that’s being offered?
It’s like the film Soylent Green: if all you give the people to eat is Soylent Green, then that’s all they’ll demand. What else do they know?
And that raises a bigger question: if movies still have as big a power to influence as they do, what is the ultimate effect of redundant and unimaginative cinema on the public? That’s a question that probably can’t be answered in one sentence, but it’s certainly something I sometimes think about, because what we’ve become addicted to as an audience and what we’ve been given, is an addiction to action, an addiction to sensation. It’s also true of television, where something like Celebrity Big Brother and American Idol have been built to supply sensation after sensation after sensation. There’s nothing in between. There’s only people getting rejected or winning. When you’re addicted to action, there’s no room for any kind of subtlety. Action has affected the pacing of everything. I showed Dog Day Afternoon, which was made in 1975, to a group of 15 year-old kids, who said it felt dated to them. They said it dragged. I asked them why they felt that way and they said “Because everything happens too slow.” When I dug a little deeper, I realized what they were talking about was the way the film was edited: the takes, for their sensibilities, lasted too long before they cut to another shot. Editing and action go hand-in-hand. If you cut for emotion, which is something I always talk about during In Treatment, you’re cutting a different film than when you’re cutting for action, because when you’re cutting for action, you’re not asking the audience to feel and think for the most part, you’re asking them to react to a sensation.
The line-up scene from The Usual Suspects.
I wonder if you showed that same group of 15 year-olds The Wild Bunch, which was made in ’69 and is cut for both action and emotion, with some of the greatest action set pieces ever filmed, that they’d feel the same way?
Good question, and again, it raises a bigger one: what is the modern language of film? What worked in 1969 for The Wild Bunch, which was made by Sam Peckinpah and single-handedly redefined movie violence as we know it, and what worked for Sidney Lumet in ’75 for Dog Day, can that still work today? I remember seeing Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen during its first run in 1962 and remember thinking to myself ‘Wow, 70mm is amazing!’ I remember seeing Omar Sharif appear for the first time, riding across the desert. I remember experiencing that in a crowded cinema, that experience of being in awe of what you were seeing with a group of total strangers, and I don’t know that cinema means that to an audience anymore.
Movies like Watchmen give me hope that that isn’t the case. To me, it encompasses some of the best revisionist sensibilities that were present in films of the ‘60s and ‘70s and marries it with 21st century technology. Have you seen it yet?
No, I haven’t, but I want to, because the idea of a revisionist super hero movie really appeals to me. The idea of a super hero is something that’s been around in primitive literature since the world began. The idea that we’re now questioning the idea of a super being that’s indestructible, which is a very American idea and ideal about itself, maybe the fact that we’re questioning that shows that America is questioning itself as a “super hero” power.
I think that’s correct, but there’s a big dichotomy that still exists: we’re the country that elected Barack Obama, but in the state of California, we also voted yes on Proposition 8. So we still have a long way to go in my view in terms of what we perceive to be the righteousness of our moral fabric.
Yes, absolutely. The problem is that when a small group of people decide what other people do or see, you have to question that. Whose ideals and values do they reflect? Whose politics do they really reflect? So it’s hard to know if cinema as we know it now will be around in another 50 years. The notion that people will queue around the cinema for a week to see a picture, I just don’t know that in the age of immediate gratification that will exist or does exist anymore.
I’d argue that it will simply because there are so few communal experiences left in our society: Church attendance is dropping off. We’re increasingly isolated by technology that we have in our homes. What other communal experience is left to us, but going to the movies?
That may be true, but one thing I’ve been noticing lately is that everything I took for granted for so long has now been challenged.
Like what?
I never thought when I was growing up there would be such a thing as the abolition of albums and CDs, and that downloading music would be the new way people would listen to music. People can communicate directly and immediately across the Internet. But the big question, again, is where do we go to get our stories from? I hope that some version of sitting around the fireside telling a story, which is what the movie house is: a dark room with everyone sitting around watching their imaginations projected onto a screen by a storyteller. That’s very similar to what we did in the caves. We need that kind of rest for ourselves as human beings, and we’re not going to get it over the Internet. We need, as you say, to get it communally. I think we’re living in a real revolution now: a political, cultural, social and economic revolution. And the difference is, in the past during a revolution we attacked the castle with our spears and went after the lord of the manor. Now, we have a really profound, hopefully non-violent, revolution happening, which is affecting how we communicate and tell our stories. It’s a very exciting time, and I don’t know where it’s all going to end, but I do know that it’s a great time to ask questions.
DVD Playhouse: April 2009
DVD PLAYHOUSE—APRIL 2009
By
Allen Gardner
MILK (Universal) Sean Penn deservedly captured his second Best Actor Oscar (and Dustin Lance Black a statuette for his original screenplay) in director Gus Van Sant’s portrait of San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to hold public office in the U.S. Alternately heartbreaking, infuriating and very funny, a film that both captures a bygone era and is still very timely. Fine support from Josh Brolin, Victor Garber, James Franco and Emile Hirsch. Also available on Blu-ray disc. Bonuses: Three featurettes. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 5.1 surround.
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE (20th Century Fox) The Best Picture of 2008 is a kinetic, clever audience-pleaser about a determined lad (Dev Patel) from the slums of Mumbai, who has his chance at literal and financial redemption as a contestant on India’s version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. Best Director Danny Boyle dazzles with an eye that captures the horror and beauty of modern-day India. Terrific filmmaking, acting, and storytelling. Also available on Blu-ray disc. 2 disc set bonuses include: Commentary by Boyle and Patel; Featurettes; 12 deleted scenes; Short film; Music video; Digital copy of the film. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 5.1 surround.
DOUBT (Miramax) John Patrick Shanley adapted and directed his Pulitzer and Tony-winning play for the screen, telling the story of a stern nun (Meryl Streep, never better) in a Bronx Catholic school, circa 1964, who suspects a popular young priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) of molesting the school’s only black student, putting a young nun (Amy Adams) sympathetic to both sides in the middle of their tug-of-war. Emotionally-shattering film will stay with you for days. Viola Davis shines as the boy’s mother. Bonuses: Commentary by Shanley; Featurettes. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround.
THE READER (Weinstein Co./Genius Products) Stunning adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s best-seller about a teenager (David Kross) whose affair in post-war, 1950s Germany with a mysterious older woman (Kate Winslet, Best Actress 2008) leads to life-changing altering events for both over the next 30 years of their lives. Nary a false moment in this story of how moral ambiguity and true evil are synonymous in us all. Fine support from Ralph Fiennes, Also available on Blu-ray disc. Bonuses: Deleted scenes; Featurettes; Interviews with cast and crew; Trailer. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround.
JCVD (Peace Arch/Gaumont) Fading action star Jean-Claude Van Damme finds himself in the middle of a real-life bank robbery while back in his native Belgium, with the local cops believing he’s the mastermind! Fun, clever satire/drama owes a big debt to Dog Day Afternoon, and has more than a few plot holes, but is great fun. Van Damme is a revelation playing a less-than-flattering version of himself, with his “confession” being one of the best moments of screen acting in 2008 (seriously). Also available on Blu-ray disc. Bonuses: Theatrical, French and English versions of the film; Deleted scenes; Trailer. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround.
FROST/NIXON (Universal) Peter Morgan adapted his award-winning play for director Ron Howard, about the landmark interview between celebrity journalist David Frost (Michael Sheen, excellent and overlooked by Oscar) and disgraced former President Richard M. Nixon (Frank Langella, in the performance of his career) in 1977. Fascinating mental and verbal chess between the two characters, and a terrific rendering of mid-70s zeitgeist. Also available on Blu-ray disc. Bonuses: Deleted scenes; Commentary by Howard; Featurettes; The real Frost/Nixon interviews. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround.
NICKELODEON/THE LAST PICTURE SHOW (Sony) 2 disc double feature of two Peter Bogdanovich classics, the real news being the release of the “director’s cut” of Nickelodeon, featuring three extra minutes of footage, and the entire film, a riotous comedy about the fledgling days of the movie business, in black & white instead of color, as Bogdanovich originally envisioned it. Picture Show is the Oscar-winning story of death and redemption in a small Texas town, circa 1953, featuring stellar turns by Jeff Bridges, Timothy Bottoms, Cloris Leachman, and Cybill Shepherd, in her film debut. Bonuses: Commentary by Bogdanovich; Featurettes; Interview with Bogdanovich; Trailer. Widescreen. Dolby 2.0 mono.
MAX FLEISCHER’S SUPERMAN 1941-1942 (Warner Bros.) 17 animated short cartoons featuring the Man of Steel, Superman, as penned by the great animator Max Fleischer. Gorgeously produced in early Technicolor, loaded with wartime propaganda and still exciting to watch 60+ years later, these gems are sure to delight young and old alike. 2 disc set. Bonuses: Two featurettes; Sneak preview of The Green Lantern. Full screen. Dolby 1.0 mono.
SHAKEN AND STIRRED James Bond, agent 007, returns to DVD with a vengeance this month, led by the latest Bond outing, QUANTUM OF SOLACE, Daniel Craig’s second turn at the wheel of the Aston-Martin finds the story taking up where Casino Royale left off, with Bond hunting down the group responsible for the double-cross, and death, of his great love. This time, he teams up with a Latina firebrand (oddly cast with Russian actress Olga Kurylenko) who seeks revenge against the same group. A few terrific set pieces, including a slam-bang opening sequence that will be hard to top, with a nice turn by Mathieu Amalric as an oily (pun intended) villain. Fine entertainment, but nowhere near in the same league as the last film. Also available on Blu-ray disc. Bonuses: Four featurettes; Music video; Trailers and teasers. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 5.1 surround. Sean Connery donned 007’s tuxedo for a final time in 1983’s NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN, an unnecessary, but nevertheless very fun rehash of 1965’s Thunderball, with Bond taking on a supervillain (the great Klaus Maria Brandauer) bent on global domination. Connery is still in fine form, at age 53, as Bond, with fine support from a youthful Kim Basinger and Barbara Carrera. Also available on Blu-ray disc. Bonuses: Commentary by director Irvin Kershner; Three featurettes; Trailer and photo gallery. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround. JAMES BOND BLU-RAY VOL. 3 arrives, boasting three Bonds, from three different eras: Sean Connery stars in the series’ biggest hit GOLDFINGER, from 1964, which has 007 trying to stop a madman (Gert Frobe) from irradiating the gold supply at Fort Knox. Still one of the greatest popcorn movies ever made. Roger Moore stars in 1979’s MOONRAKER, regarded by many fans and critics alike as the series’ nadir, with Bond doing battle in outer space with another madman (Michel Lonsdale) bent on world domination. A great aerial sequence opens the film, but it’s all downhill from there. Finally, Pierce Brosnan finally got his legs as Bond with Michael Apted’s THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, from 1999, which has 007 locking horns with a nuclear-obsessed terrorist (Robert Carlyle). Dame Judi Dench shines as the venerable M, but Denise Richards is unfortunately cast as a nuclear scientist (!), which keeps this from being one of the best entries in the series. Still well-worth seeing. Bonuses on all: Filmmaker, cast and crew commentary; Retrospective Documentaries; Featurettes; Photo and ad galleries; Trailers and TV spots. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 5.1 surround.
PRE-CODE HOLLYWOOD Universal releases six titles released between 1929-34, before the infamous Hays Code of censorship was established, that push the envelope with sex, violence and subject matter: THE CHEAT stars Tallulah Bankhead as a compulsive gambler who will do literally anything to pay off her debt; MERRILY WE GO TO HELL stars Frederic March as an abusive drunk whose tryst with an old flame pushes his wife (Sylvia Sidney) over the edge; HOT SATURDAY follows a scandal that erupts after a young woman innocently spends with night with notorious playboy Cary Grant; TORCH SINGER stars Claudette Colbert as a sultry nightclub singer searching for the illegitimate child she gave up for adoption years before; MURDER AT THE VANITIES follows a murder investigation backstage during a sexy music revue; SEARCH FOR BEAUTY tells the story of Olympic swimming champs (Buster Crabbe and Ida Lupino) who find themselves in hot water after mistakenly endorsing a racy magazine. Bonuses: Documentary featurette on the production code. Full screen. Dolby 1.0 mono.
THE DORIS DAY COLLECTION (Warner Bros.) Four early Doris Day musical comedies: IT’S A GREAT FEELING features Doris as a waitress trying to break into movies, with cameos from big names such as Joan Crawford, Edward G. Robinson, Gary Cooper, and others. TEA FOR TWO stars Day and Gordon MacRae in a musical version of the stage play No, no, Nanette; STARLIFT has Doris in a patriotic romp that features an all-star cast that includes James Cagney, Gary Cooper, Virginia Mayo, Jane Wyman, Randolph Scott, and many others. APRIL IN PARIS stars Doris as brassy chorine Dynamite Jackson, who’s mistakenly named goodwill ambassador to France. Will diplomatic relations ever be the same? Finally, TUNNEL OF LOVE stars Doris and Richard Widmark as a couple dealing with the trials and tribulations of adopting a child. Directed by Gene Kelly. Bonuses: Vintage shorts; Classic WB cartoons; Trailers. Full and widescreen. Dolby 2.0 mono.
CAPRICA (Universal) Smart, scintilating blend of sci-fi and social commentary tells the story of feuding families led by rival patriarchs (Eric Stoltz, Esai Morales) who vie for power in a future ruled by human and mechincal engineering. From the creators of Battlestar Galactica, this is a worth addition to the genre of thinking man's sci-fi. Bonuses: Commentary by director Jeffrey Reiner, exec producer/writer Ronald D. Moore, exec producer David Eick; Deleted scenes; Video blogs. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround.
THE LOST COLLECTION Lions Gate releases some favorite titles from the '80s that have faded into obscurity over the years. HOMER & EDDIE stars James Belushi and Whoopi Goldberg as "odd couple" friends who make a final, Picaresque road trip together. HIDING OUT stars Jon Cryer as a youthful investment banker marked for death by the mob who uses his appearence to hide out in a local high school, where he finds little has changed since his own less-than-joyful formative years. IRRECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES stars Drew Barrymore as a nine year-old who sues her constantly bickering parents (Shelley Long, Ryan O'Neal) for divorce. Funny, seemingly autobiographical script by Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers. SLAUGHTER HIGH is a respectible entry into the '80s slasher oevre about a nerd who, after being disfigured during a prank gone wrong, returns to school to wreack havoc on his former tormentors. Uncut version. REPOSSESSED is a slightly funny Exorcist take-off with Leslie Nielsen and Linda Blair. Keanu Reeves stars in THE NIGHT BEFORE as a hapless lad who wakes up the day after prom with no memory of the previous night, but a host of problems that await him. Jon Cryer stars again in MORGAN STEWART'S COMING HOME about a rebellious blue blooded teen (Cryer) who tries to repair his relationship with his stodgy parents by helping to clean up dad's senatorial campaign. Finally, MY BEST FRIEND IS A VAMPIRE stars Robert Sean Leonard as a teen who finds himself bitten by the love bug, literally, after a hot date turns into an entry into the land of the undead. Bonuses: Trivia tracks; Trailers. All are full screen. Dolby 5.1 surround.
CLEOPATRA 75th ANNIVERSARY EDITION (Universal) Cecil B. Demille’s 1934 epic is the version most film historians agree is the best, with Claudette Colbert sizzling the screen as the Egyptian Queen of the Nile, who plays Roman leaders Julius Caesar (Warren William) and Mark Antony (Henry Wilcoxon) like grand pianos. Still a stunning achievement today. Bonuses: Three documentaries; Commentary by films scholar F.X. Feeney. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 mono.
PILLOW TALK 50th ANNIVERSARY EDITION (Universal) The granddaddy of all 1950s sex comedies stars Rock Hudson and Doris Day as mismatched lovers who connect when their party line (shared phone line) results in overlapping conversations, and lives. Tony Randall plays the ‘50s version of “the gay best friend” (ironically enough) to Rock. First Day-Hudson pairing remains the best and holds up quite well today. Bonuses: Two featurettes; Commentary by film scholars and historians; Trailer. Widescreen. Dolby 2.0 mono.
DANTON (Criterion) Andrezej Wajda’s lacerating portrait of Georges Danton (Gerard Depardieu) and Maximilien Robespierre (Wojciech Pszoniak), two of the French Revolution’s key figures, one a humanist, the other an icy Jacobin extremist. Wajda draws not-so-subtle parallels to the Polish Solidarity movement, which was going strong at the time of the film’s release (1983). Outstanding historical drama, and piece of political propaganda. Two disc set. Bonuses: Trailer; Interviews with Wajda and crew; Behind-the-scenes documentary. Widescreen. Dolby 1.0 mono.
TALES OF THE BLACK FREIGHTER/UNDER THE HOOD (Warner Bros.) Nifty companion pieces to the Watchmen feature film: a 30 minute animated adaptation of the gruesome “comic-within-a-comic” that ran in the Watchmen graphic novel, and a “mockumentary” look at the original Nite Owl (Stephen McHattie) and the origin of the original, WW II-era “Minutemen” group of superheroes, and their backstories. The former is a fun, grisly EC Comics style tale of the supernatural, while the latter is a near-brilliant blend of satire and character development, which would have fleshed out the feature even more, had it been included in the theatrical release. Perhaps director Zack Snyder will include it on the Watchmen DVD, which, rumor has it, will be a nearly-four hour cut. Bonuses: Featurette; Watchmen motion comic; BD-Live features. Also available on Blu-ray disc. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround.
IL GENERALE DELLA ROVERE (Criterion) Roberto Rossellini’s gripping 1959 drama stars fellow neorealist director Vittorio De Sica in a rare turn before the camera, playing a wartime opportunist whom the Nazis force to impersonate a dead partisan general. Once they throw him in prison, they force the con man to extract information from fellow prisoners, and a crisis of conscience develops. Bonuses: Interviews with Isabella Rossellini, her siblings, and film scholar Adriano Apra; Visual essay; Trailer. Full screen. Dolby 1.0 mono.
BOLT (Disney) Delightful animated fun from the Disney camp about a dog named Bolt, star of the most popular TV show in Hollywood where he plays a canine blessed with super powers, only this Method actor thinks it’s all real! When Bolt gets separated from his beloved owner and lost on the mean streets of New York City, he quickly learns that it takes more than make-believe to survive in the big city. Fun, clever and visually-dazzling. Nice voice work from John Travolta and Miley Cyrus. 2 disc set. Also available on Blu-ray disc. Bonuses: Featurettes; Deleted scenes; Music videos; Games; Animation galleries. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 5.1 surround.
THE HAIRDRESSER’S HUSBAND (Severin Films) Patrice Leconte’s comedy of manners about an aging Frenchman (Jean Rochfert) whose childhood obsession with a local hairdresser finds itself projected onto a present-day hair sculptress (Anna Galiena) with whom he falls passionately in love. Hailed by critics and audiences the world-over as a modern erotic classic. Bonuses: Two featurettes. Widescreen. Dolby 2.0 surround.
THE HORROR, THE HORROR. More titles that promise to make your flesh crawl arrive on DVD this month starting with THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT: UNRATED COLLECTOR’S EDITION (MGM/Fox) Two teenage girls on their way to a rock concert are kidnapped by a Manson-like gang of depraved lunatics, only to get their just desserts from the girls’ parents later on. Director Wes Craven’s 1972 exploitation take on Bergman’s The Virgin Spring broke new ground in its depiction of brutality, and remains tough to watch nearly 40 years later, but does that make it a good film? You be the judge with this splatter classic, and with the remake, which hits theaters this month. Bonuses: Commentary by cast members; Featurettes; Unfinished short film by Craven: Deleted scenes. Widescreen. Dolby 1.0 mono. 8 FILMS TO DIE FOR: AFTER DARK HORRORFEST III Lions Gate releases eight more horror titles as part of their continuing series. SLAUGHTER tells the gruesome story of a young woman who moves in with her best friend on the family’s farm, soon suspecting that they’re slaughtering more than livestock in the barn. AUTOPSY finds a group of college grads getting more than they bargained for after an accident during a final road trip takes them to a rural Louisiana hospital where the doctors practice unconventional medicine. PERKINS’ 14 tells the story of a father whose son vanished years ago, the final in a string of 14 disappearances. When a stranger appears in town that bears a resemblance to the description of the kidnapper, the father seeks revenge! DYING BREED tells the gory tale of four adventurers in Tasmania seeking a rare tiger, who soon finds themselves the hunted ones when they stumble across a town of cannibals! VOICES, an import from Korea, tells the terrifying story of a young woman who seems to be followed by death, as those around her die in gruesome ways, or seem driven to kill her. Some unsettling images. THE BROKEN stars Lena Headey as a successful radiologist who finds herself haunted by her double. THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT 3: REVELATIONS tells the supernatural story of a man who has the power to travel through time to help police solve cases, with the caveat that he isn’t allowed to alter the future when he goes back. FROM WITHIN tells the grisly story of a small town besieged by suicides. When young Lindsay is afraid she may be next, she decides to investigate. All feature Miss Horrorfest webisodes. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround. Magnolia/Magnet Video release DONKEY PUNCH, an intense exercise in claustrophobia as a group of young Brits find themselves at odds after a wild party on shipboard goes too far. Attractive young cast; Very well-directed. TIMECRIMES is a mind-bending thriller from Spain about an average Joe (writer/director Nacho Vigalondo) who finds that he's literally at war with himself when he travels back in time and encounters his double. SPLINTER starts out as a kidnapping drama when an ex-con and his equally twisted girlfriend carjack a young couple, but the true horror waits for them all at a remote gas station that is being preyed upon by a deadly predator. Bonuses on all: Featurettes; Filmmaker commentary; Outtakes; Short film; Photo galleries; Trailers. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround.
BLU-RAY TITLES MGM/Fox releases THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, winner of five 1991 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. One of the great procedural thrillers ever made, Jodie Foster stars as a precocious FBI trainee who enlists the aid of a jailed serial killer (Anthony Hopkins, in his iconic turn as Hannibal Lecter) to track down a predator who’s on the loose. Hang on! Bonuses: Five featurettes; Deleted scenes; Anthony Hopkins phone message; Outtakes; TV spots, teasers and trailers. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround. THE PRINCESS BRIDE is Rob Reiner’s film of the William Goldman novel (which the author adapted for the screen) that tells the dual stories of a grandfather (Peter Falk) reading his grandson a bedtime story, and that story, about a brave lad (Cary Elwes) rescuing a fair maiden (Robin Wright, pre-Penn) from the clutches of an evil king (Chris Sarandon, excellent). Terrific pastiche of fantasy, romance and satire, with a supporting cast that dreams are made of. Bonuses: Commentary by Reiner and Goldman; Featurettes; Video diary from Elwes. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 5.1 surround. THE ROBE: SPECIAL EDITION, is a grand, albeit dated Biblical epic starring Richard Burton as a Roman centurion who finds his life changed when he wins Christ’s robe during a dice game at the foot of the cross where he lays crucified. Bonuses: Introduction by Martin Scorsese; Commentary by composer David Newman and film historians; Isolated score; Three featurettes; Audio interview with screenwriter Philip Dunne from 1969; Picture-in-Picture features; Fox Movietonews; Photo galleries; Interactive press book. Widescreen. Dolby 4.0 surround. Sony releases John Carpenter’s GHOSTS OF MARS, stars Natasha Henstridge as a tough cop on the Martian colony, circa 2025, who finds the human population of the planet in trouble when miners unleash some nasty spirits that take over unwitting humans. Scary, funny and very sick! Bonuses: Commentary by Carpenter and Henstridge; Three featurettes. Widescreen. Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround. UNIVERSAL SOLDIER: THE REUTRN stars Jean-Claude Van Damme, this time returning to action to take on a rebellious ultra-warrior (Michael Jai-White) bent on killing its creators. Bonuses: Featurettes; BD Live enabled. Widescreen. Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround. THE THIRTEENTH FLOOR is an intriguing thriller about two scientists (Craig Bierko and Vincent D’Onofrio) who create a virtual reality program of 1937 L.A, then find themselves in a real “film noir” type murder mystery. Some great effects and clever moments, but doesn’t all add up in the end. Bonuses: Commentary by filmmakers; Music video. Widescreen. Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround. Jet Li stars as THE ONE, playing a dual role of police inspector and universe-hopping assassin. Fun, if a bit confusing at times. Bonuses: Commentary by cast and crew; Four featurettes. Widescreen. Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround. A&E releases PRIDE & PREJUDICE is an epic miniseries adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic novel starring Colin Firth, Jennifer Ehle, and Allison Steadman. 2 disc set. Bonuses: Four featurettes. Full screen. PCM 2.0 stereo. Genius Entertainment releases three nature documentaries: THE WORLD’S BIGGEST AND BADDEST BUGS takes an in-depth look at nature’s plus-sized pests the world-over. Fascinating and really icky! AFRICA’S ELEPHANT KINGDOM takes an intimate look inside the world of elephant’s and their very human-like levels of socialization and family structure. Beautifully shot, originally for IMAX theaters. Finally, not everyone will appreciate THE BEAUTY OF SNAKES, but they’ll surely come away captivated by this magnificently-made documentary about some of the world’s rarest, and most colorful, reptiles. All are widescreen, Dolby 5.1 surround. Acorn Media releases 3 MO' DIVAS, a visually stunning record of a concert in Denver given by three of the world's greatest Sopranos: Nova Y. Payton, Jamet Pittman and Laurice Lanier. From gospel, to jazz, to show tunes, these ladies cover all the musical bases. Bonuses: 29 minutes of bonus performances. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround.
DOCUMENTARY TITLES Microcinema releases Sophie Fiennes’ THE PERVERT’S GUIDE TO CINEMA, PARTS 1, 2, 3, a unique musing on the power of cinema itself from guide and narrator, Slovenian scholar Slavoj Zizek, who delves into what the subtext of certain films tells us about ourselves. Fascinating stuff, and a must for cinefiles. Widescreen. Dolby 2.0 mono. GRACE HARTIGAN: SHATTERING BOUNDARIES, takes a look at the woman who was a groundbreaking figure in the Abstract Expressionist movement in American art, a friend a disciple of such iconic figures as Jackson Pollock and Willem deKooning. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 mono. Koch Lorber releases DESERT VICTORY: THE BATTLE OF EL ALAMEIN, winner of the 1943 Oscar for Best Documentary, is a stirring look at the British army’s clash with Rommel’s Afrika Korps. THE TRUE GLORY: FROM D-DAY TO THE FALL OF BERLIN, won the 1945 Oscar for Best Documentary, and details the allies’ victory in Europe, from the invasion of D-Day to the fall of Berlin. Both are two-disc sets that each feature four bonus documentaries on WW II. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 mono. NICKELBACK: LIVE AT STURGIS 2006 is a rousing and rowdy document of the band’s show at Sturgis’ “Rockin’ the Rally.” Shot in high-def video, the concert features 12 of the band’s greatest hits, plus behind-the-scenes looks at life on the road. Bonuses: Featurette; Photo gallery; Sturgis 101 vignette; Music video. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 5.1 surround. Purple Turtle Films/PBS release BLUE GOLD: WORLD WATER WARS, which examines the idea that the wars of the future will be fought over water rights. In a similar vein as An Inconvenient Truth, and just as powerful. Narrated by Malcolm McDowell. Widescreen. Dolby 2.0 mono. Acorn Media releases PETE SEEGER: LIVE IN AUSTRALIA 1963, a beautifully-shot record of the folk legend’s first concert Down Under. Seeger sings some of his greatest hits. Bonuses: Extra Seeger concert footage; Interviews and performances on Australian TV; Photo and home movie galleries. Full screen. Dolby 1.0 mono. Magnolia releases AMERICAN SWING a no-holds-barred look at the notorious Plato's Retreat in New York City, a mecca of swinging group sex in the pre-AIDS mid-70s. Not for the prudish among us, but a fascinating look at a time long gone. Bonuses: Deleted scenes;. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround. A&E releases THE TEMPLAR CODE, a fascinating look at the Knights Templar and the lore that surrounded their secret society. A History Channel production. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 stereo. WOMEN IN THE WHITE HOUSE is a 2 disc set that contains two full-length documentaries: All the President's Wives takes an in-depth look at some of the country's greatest First Ladies, from Martha Washington to Hillary Clinton, and First Mothers chronicles the lives of the women who raised some of our most iconic leaders. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 stereo.
DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL! Paramount releases HAWAII FIVE-O: THE SIXTH SEASON features more tough island crime fighting from Detective Steve McGarrett (Jack Lord) and his men. 24 episodes on 6 discs. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 mono. MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE--THE SIXTH SEASON is another 6 disc set featuring all 22 episodes from the 1971-72 season, featuring Peter Graves and his group of counter-intelligence operatives battling some of the world's most dangerous villains. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 mono. THE FUGITIVE: SEASON TWO, VOL. 2, 15 episodes on 4 discs, following the continuing adventures of falsely-accused wife killer Dr. Richard Kimble (David Janssen), his flight from dogged police detective Gerard (Barry Morse), and his search for the “one-armed man” who really killed his wife. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 mono. RON WHITE: BEHAVOIRAL PROBLEMS is the raunchy comic's latest Comedy Central special in which he tackles subjects ranging from alcohol abuse, the war in Iraq, and other pointed pieces of social commentary. Bonuses: Extra concert footage. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround. JIM GAFFIGAN: KING BABY is another hilarious record of the stand-up comic’s biting humor, featuring 30 minutes of footage not shown on his Comedy Central special. Bonuses: Featurettes; Interviews. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 mono. DYNASTY: THE FOURTH SEASON, VOL. 1 brings us more soapy antics from the mega-rich Carrtington clan, led by patriarch John Forsythe, wife Linda Evans, and ex Joan Collins. Oh, so ‘80s! 3 disc set features 14 episodes. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 mono. BEVERLY HILLS 90210—THE SEVENTH SEASON, has the alum of West Beverly High now finishing their senior year of college at California Univeristy, or C.U. 7 disc set features 31 episodes. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 stereo. WINGS:THE FINAL SEASON is the swan song of Sandpiper Air’s Joe Hackett (Tim Daly) as he marries long-time love Helen (Crystal Bernard). 23 episodes on 3 discs. Full screen. 2.0 stereo. HBO releases RICKY GERVAIS: OUT OF ENGLAND, a hilarious record of the comic master’s performance during his sold-out American tour. Irreverent, smart, and thought-provoking. Bonuses: Interview with Gervais. Widescreen. Dolby 2.0 mono. A&E releases ROOKIES: THE COMPLETE SEASON ONE a Southern-fried slice of reality TV that follows green police recruits in Louisiana and Florida learning the ropes during a 12-week street patrol. 16 episodes on two discs. Bonuses: Extra footage. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 stereo. 7 SIGNS OF THE APOCALYPSE takes a scientific look at the Book of Revelation and its relevance, and possible truth, today. Interesting blend of conjecture from scholars, theologians, and laymen. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 stereo. SHADOW FORCE: THE COMPLETE SEASON ONE, follows an elite group of Special Forces operatives as they battle some of the world’s deadliest terrorist and criminal cartels. Eight episodes on two DVDs. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 stereo. GANGLAND: THE COMPLETE SEASON THREE takes an intimate look at the nation’s most vicious street gangs, giving a decidedly human perspective to their menacing exterior. Interviews with past and present gang members, police, psychologists and other experts on the subculture make this fascinating viewing. Bonuses: Additional footage. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 stereo. SEVEN DEADLY SINS examines the impact of the seven deadly sins on mankind from before the dark ages, through modern times. Fascinating blend of myth, fact and fiction. 2 disc set. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 stereo. 20th Century Fox releases THE RICHES: SEASON 2, starring Minnie Driver and Eddie Izzard in the series’ final season, playing con artists on the run with their children, hiding out in a seemingly idyllic suburban paradise, where their ruse is catching quickly up with them. Two disc set contains all seven season two episodes. Bonuses: Featurette. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround. VOYAGE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA: SEASON FOUR, VOL. 1is a three disc set containing 13 episodes of the 1967 series that follows the crew of The Seaview, the world's most powerful nuclear submarine on their underwater adventures. Produced by Irwin Allen. Full screen. Dolby 2. 0 stereo. Acorn Media releases HALLELUJAH! THE COMPLETE COLLECTION, the beloved British sitcom from the early ‘80s about a zealous Salvation Army captain (Thora Hird) who refuses to go gently into the night of retirement. 15 episodes on two discs. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 mono. Charles Dance and Emilia Fox star in this miniseries about a psychotic beauty whose brain moves backward in time to try and figure out where it all went wrong. Fascinating look at what goes into the making of a monster. Bonuses: Featurette. Widescreen. Dolby 2.0 stereo. PIE IN THE SKY, SERIES 1 is a three disc set containing the first season of the British hit about a veteran police inspector (Richard Griffiths) who is burned out on policing and dreams of opening a restaurant. Unique blend of mystery and culinary adventure. Bonuses: Interviews with cast members. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 stereo.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN! Coming soon...
This trailer went on to win the SXSW/Robert Rodriguez Grindhouse Trailer contest. The director is now shooting a feature version, in Canada. Go to www.myspace.com/hobowithashotgun for more info, or email jasoneisener@hotmail.com
THE ARCHIVE:
- December (12)
- November (12)
- October (11)
- September (6)
- August (4)
- July (8)
- June (13)
- May (10)
- April (22)
- March (8)
- February (11)
- January (11)
- December (6)
- November (20)
- October (10)
- September (8)
- August (5)
- July (5)
- June (8)
- May (11)
- April (12)
- March (48)
- February (69)
- January (27)
- December (5)
- April (1)
