(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.”
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Thursday, April 30, 2009
Do You Wanna Dance? Allan Arkush Remembers ROCK 'N ROLL HIGH SCHOOL
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Tuesday, April 28, 2009
DOUBT DVD Release: Interview with Viola Davis
ShareDoubt 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
ShareDoubt 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
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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
Shareby 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)
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