Shohreh Aghdashloo: The Hollywood Interview

Actress Shohreh Aghdashloo


SHOHREH AGHDASHLOO CASTS NO STONES
By
Alex Simon


Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo made history as the first Middle Eastern woman to be nominated for an Academy Award, when she received a Best Supporting Actress nod for her work in House of Sand and Fog (2003), opposite Ben Kingsley. Born in Tehran in 1952 to an upper middle class family of intellectuals, Shohreh spent her youth performing with various avant-garde theater companies during the country’s period of social and artistic freedom under the rule of Iran’s Shah. Most prominent among these groups was the renowned Drama Workshop of Tehran. Based upon her work with the latter group, Shohreh was cast by the two leaders of Iran’s New Wave filmmakers—Abbas Kiarostami and Ali Hatami—to play starring roles in Gozaresh and Sute-Delan, two seminal films of the period, both released in 1977.



The following year, 1978, changed everything with the Islamic Revolution and the deposition of the Shah by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei, and his band of extremist Shiite Muslim followers. After relocating to England, where she earned a B.A. in Political Science, Shohreh’s planned transition from actor to politician ended before it ever started when she was cast in Rainbow, a landmark play about the Iranian Revolution and its discontents. She hasn’t stopped working since.

After House of Sand and Fog, Shohreh’s body of work has been varied, from prestige TV productions such as 24 and HBO’s House of Saddam, to features such as The Nativity Story, The Lake House, American Dreamz, and X-Men: The Last Stand. Shohreh’s latest film promises to be the landmark of her career, not only for its skillful production and her fine performance, but for the timeliness of its release.

The Stoning of Soraya M., based on Freidoune Sahebjam’s best-selling book, tells the true story of an Iranian woman in 1986 who was buried to her waist in the square of her rural hometown, and stoned to death by her fellow villagers. What led up to this heinous act supplies the drama of this harrowing, unforgettable film, made all the more prescient with the real-life drama unfolding on the streets of Iran today, following the controversial re-election of right wing leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over his popular, more centrist opponent, Mir-Hossein Mousavi. In the rioting that followed in the streets of Tehran, a 26 year-old woman named Neda Agha-Soltan, who had no politcal affiliations, was gunned down by a Basiji sniper on June 20. When the video of her death spread across the Internet, awareness mixed with outrage around the world at the brutality of Iran’s current government—a palpable parralel to the story, and message, of Soraya M. Co-written (with his wife Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh) and directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh, The Roadside Attractions release also stars Mozhan Marno, superb as Soraya, and James Caviezel as Sahebjam. It arrives in theaters June 26.

Shohreh Aghdashloo sat down with us recently to discuss this remarkable film and her equally fascinating life.

This is one of the first films in years I’ve attended where the audience just left in stunned silence. It reminded me of the climax to Bonnie & Clyde. Was it equally emotional during the shoot?
Shohreh Aghdashloo: It was hard, but actors tend to have their own fun time to break the tension. So we told jokes, and just tried to comfort each other. The stoning scene took six days to film, which was really hard. Day after day, we had to see these angry men, screaming for Soroya to be stoned, shouting “God is great!” with the dust in the air, and voices choking in their throats. At one point I opened my eyes, I was crying, and realized that it’s really hard to tell the difference between cinema and reality now. All of the extras in the village were real villagers. It was really hard to tell the difference. I’d never had an experience like that before, working with non-actors in that kind of intimacy.

How long a shoot was it?
A month and a half, one month of which was in the village in Cyprus. I’m a Method actor, so it was wonderful to be immersed in that setting.

Was it easy or difficult to step into the shoes of your character, who is such an outspoken woman in a repressive society?
Zahra is very much like I am. She’s not afraid of telling the truth. I was proud of what I was saying and proud of this woman’s character, who I believe was a product of the Shah’s reign, as am I. She has the strength she has and as she also says, she was once somebody in the town, when she was married to the Mayor. One day she had a voice and the right to choose, and then one day she didn’t, but she chose to keep her voice, even though as the character of Ebrahim warns her, “This is not the Shah’s reign anymore.”

Were you familiar with the practice of stoning before doing the movie?
When I was living in Iran, nothing like that happened during the Shah’s reign. I had heard about it happening in the past, and then saw one on video tape, in the ‘80s. That involved two young men who were stoned to death because they were homosexuals. A friend of mine gave it to me, and warned me “Don’t watch it during the evening.” I put it on at eleven in the morning. What we show in Soraya is a condensed version of how long and brutal a process stoning is. It goes on for a long time before the people actually die, which is part of what makes it so horrific. I couldn’t eat or sleep for days after watching it. So I was familiar with the subject matter. I was a reporter at the time, for the local Iranian TV station in Los Angeles, so I felt it was my duty to watch the tape, both as a journalist and as an activist who cares about her birth country.

Shohreh and Mozhan Marno in The Stoning of Soraya M.

Were you familiar with the book before you did the film?
No, strangely enough, I had no idea about the book. Cyrus was introduced to me by one of my favorite producers, Joel Surnow, the producer of 24. When Cyrus called and told me about the subject matter, I took a long pause and said ‘Where were you? I’ve been waiting for you for 20 years.’ I read the script twice that night, and just loved it.

What are you hoping people will take away from the film?
To see for themselves what kind of a barbaric punishment is still being committed around the world, the Islamic world. I would hope that this film will be shown not just in the countries that oppose this kind of brutality, but in the villages where these kinds of things still occur. I hope they put a print of the film on a donkey, send it up into the mountains into these small villages which are full of people who have never seen television, project it onto a white sheet, and let them see and decide for themselves how inhuman this is.

Are you concerned at all about the film garnering a negative reaction in its portrayal of Iranians?
Yes, I’m very afraid. I had negative reactions with 24, which was a lot milder than this one is. I’m sure there will be negative reactions, particularly those who don’t read their holy books. Pious people truly read their holy books and understand what is written. But there are people who are ignorant and get their viewpoints from others, and have no idea what the content of that holy book really is, who think that stoning is part of the Islamic religion, which it is not, really. In Islam, we have Qur’an, which is a holy book. We have Hadith, which are stories told after Mohammed’s time, and we have Sonat, which means traditions and superstitions. Stoning is in that latter category. One needs to be really educated and read his or her holy book to understand that this is not part of religion.

You obviously have a real passion and verve for the film and the subject matter, in spite of it being so devastating. You have an enthusiasm for getting this message out.
Yes, absolutely. Every time I talk with a journalist like yourself, I feel happy. I feel proud. I feel like…I have an odd feeling, to be honest, when I sit and speak with you. I feel like I am fulfilling Zahra’s wish. This was her wish, for the whole world to know and now, when I tell you, you will tell the world. So it’s very close to my heart, very close to home for me. And of course, by shedding light on the injustices, I am doing something I am passionate about. 30 years ago when I left Iran, I promised myself that I would never aiding helpless, voiceless women and children, no matter where they are. Things like this happen not just in Iran, but in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, all over. So it’s not only a story that begs to be told, but it’s told with such skill and such style, that audiences everywhere are being affected by it, deeply. It is our job to put it out there, and not be afraid of the ramifications or the consequences.


Have you been back to Iran since you left, and do you think you could return at this point?
No, it’s been almost 30 years now and I’m quite sure I could not go back.

Because you’ve been so outspoken?
Yes.

What was it like growing up in Tehran during the Shah’s reign?
It was beautiful. We used to call it “the Paris of the Middle East.” We had a lot of tourists, especially from the U.S., particularly hippies, who traveled through Iran to get to the Silk Road, which went to China. We would see them out and about in the street. I have a little brother, who is now a doctor, and every week we’d be having lunch, and he’d bring a hippie home my mother would give him lunch. My mother would give them food, but not the soda, and my brother would buy them soda out of his own pocket. (laughs) He loved anything that was American. Anyone he’d see with blue eyes, he’d say “Blue eyes, are you American?” (laughs)

Then came the Islamic Revolution in ’78. Do you have any specific memories of that?
Well, I was quick and I got out and luckily missed most of the turmoil of the Revolution. I wouldn’t be a good witness for you. I saw the writings on the wall and people burning the Shah’s pictures, setting car’s tires on fire, but nothing major happened while I was there. After I left, I heard a lot and read a lot about what happened.

Then you moved to England?
Yes, I didn’t want to be an actress anymore. I was already on my way when the Revolution started, so I decided this time I’m going to become a politician and I studied political science and international relations. As soon as I got my B.A., a dear friend of mine who was a playwright came to me at my graduation, and said to me “I have a new play and I want you to be the lead in it!” And without hesitation I said ‘Why don’t you bring it around and let me read it?’ To this day, I still don’t know where that voice came from. (laughs) The play, Rainbow, was a political play and I realized that I could help my people more by raising awareness through the theater and the arts than I could by being a politician. So the play was a sold-out hit in America, and I made a bit of money, and it allowed me to move to Los Angeles, where I’ve been ever since. That’s how it all started.

After you got out of Iran, did the rest of your family follow?
No, but I eventually helped my other brother get out when he was accepted to study at Oxford. He got his PhD there.

Do you see the portrayal of men in the film as being emblematic of men who hold these extremist views in the Middle East?
The portrayal of men in this film, more than being realistic to me, is very metaphorical. When I read a screenplay or a theatrical play, I always try to read between the lines. So their portrayal shows, I believe, how in a corrupted society men can use divine law for their own benefit. Metaphorically-speaking, they did it.

Life imitates art imitating life: Above, the shooting of Neda Agha-Soltan on June 20, 2009. Below, Soraya M. is led to her death by fellow villagers in The Stoning of Soraya M.

What are some of your impressions regarding post-election Iran, and what’s been happening there?
It’s amazing. I’m so proud, as are all Iranians living abroad, of these people fighting in the streets, literally bare-handed against militia who are armed to the teeth. The pictures we’re seeing are very heroic, and now with Neda’s picture, we’re all devastated. Until the photos of her death were released, I think we were all very cautious about not getting too involved (as ex-patriots) directly. After Neda’s picture was released, I think the general feeling was “Okay, we’ve had enough. Words are not enough anymore.” If Neda’s picture isn’t a call for action, then I don’t know what it will take to pull the trigger next, so to speak. Everything is changing before our eyes, and it is changing by minutes! Sometimes I try to update myself between interviews on what is happening so I will be prepared, but when I arrive at the interview 20 minutes later, things have changed so much. It’s hard to keep up with it all. But it’s happening, and it’s amazing that this timeless film has now turned into a timely film, and (the themes) that the film suggests: change, reform, reversal of the injustices that are going on in this village, have now become the mantras in the mouths of Iranians, whose political movement suggests the same things. It was beyond anyone’s imagination that things would work out this way. The film turned out to be prescient, especially if you look at the parallels between Soraya and Neda. As I said earlier, it’s almost like the line between reality and cinema has become blurred into one.



Trailer for The Stoning of Soraya M.

Read more!

Jennifer Lynch--The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker Jennifer Lynch


JENNIFER LYNCH TURNS HER EYE ON SURVEILLANCE
By
Alex Simon

Few filmmakers have survived the professional excoriation that writer/director Jennifer Lynch had to face with her film debut Boxing Helena, in 1993. In spite of being nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, the film was universally massacred by critics and tanked at the box office (it has since garnered an impressive cult following, with more than a few of its naysayers penning re-evaluations of the film and its merits). Having penned the script of Boxing Helena at the age of 19, and seeming to be washed up in show business by 25, Lynch spent the next decade and a half surviving a near-fatal car accident which left her with severe spinal damage, adjusting to life as a single parent with a young daughter, and getting sober after years of alcohol and drug abuse. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that there is no second act in American life, but Jennifer Lynch is living proof that if there is no second act, perhaps there are nine lives for certain humans blessed with that particular feline gift.




Jennifer Chambers Lynch was born April 8, 1968 in Philadelphia, the daughter of then-neophyte filmmaker David Lynch and painter Peggy Reavy, who divorced when Jennifer was six. After attending Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, Jennifer moved to Los Angeles at 19 to be closer to her father, who by then was an Oscar-nominated director of such films as Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune, and Blue Velvet. At 22, Jennifer wrote the best-selling book "The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer," a tie-in to her father’s hit TV show Twin Peaks, a landmark of the medium in the early ‘90s.

Now, after years spent putting the pieces of her life back together, Jennifer Lynch has returned to the cinematic fold with Surveillance, one of the boldest, most unsettling thrillers since Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. Telling the Rashomon-like tale of two FBI agents (Bill Pullman, Julia Ormand) interrogating material witnesses (Pell James, Ryan Simpkins and French Stewart) to a brutal series of killings in a rural section of the Midwest, Surveillance gives the audience a mind-bending ride, combining thrills, dark humor and several twists that will shock even the most jaded of filmgoers. Co-starring vet actor Michael Ironside, Cheri Oteri, and Kent Harper (who co-wrote the script with Lynch). The Magnet release hits selected theaters June 26.

Jennifer Lynch’s third feature, a supernatural thriller entitled Hisss, won Lynch a Best Director prize at this year’s New York Horror Film Festival, marking the first time a woman has captured the honor. Jennifer Lynch spoke with us recently about her remarkable life as a filmmaker and show biz survivor. Warning: spoliers ahead! Read on…

This film unsettled me more than any film since Natural Born Killers. How was this story born?
Jennifer Lynch: Through a series of strange events. Admittedly, I had quite a bit of time off from the business, during which I was raising a daughter on my own, getting sober and having three different spinal surgeries. I was re-evaluating my life. A doctor said to me, unfortunately in front of my child, that I would probably never walk again. It occurred to me at that moment that not only would I walk again, but that I really wanted to make movies, because I couldn’t take what my daughter’s face looked like when she heard the doctor say that. So I’ve always loved a good serial killer story, but I’d never really seen the perfect one, the one that I’d always wanted to see, that raised and/or answered certain questions I had: What do good and bad really look like? How much dark fun would it be to be that serial killer? And why do we kill? Why do we hurt other people? What kind of hurt has been committed against people who go on to cause other people pain, because I honestly don’t think (serial killers) are born. I believe they’re made. As much as I want to believe Jeffery Dahmer’s parents were nice people, I just don’t buy it.

Jennifer Lynch and Bill Pullman on the set of Surveillance.

Yeah, or something really twisted happened to him outside the home.
Yeah, something out in those woods changed things. I don’t think anybody innately wants to harm other people. So I really wanted to play with the part of the human condition that made us think certain people were good, and certain people were bad. So I built some characters based on those things. So that’s where surveillance came from. That, and having raised a daughter, I was reminded of certain memories of being in the backseat of a car during a cross-country trip, where I saw things and wanted to be heard (by the adults), but wasn’t. We forget how smart kids are. They’re not concerned with “Am I thin enough?” “Will I get laid?” “Will I get the job?” They’re just in the moment and see all of us for what we are.

David Bowie summed it up with the great quote “And these children that you spit on…” in “Changes,” didn’t he?
Yes, exactly! I’m thrilled you used that quote because all the best things come through that child’s eye perspective. It’s universal. And that’s why I wanted the kid to be the one to figure it out in the film. It’s not a child’s nature to become hysterical. Children pitch fits if they know it gets them what they want. But in real crisis, children are the calm in the storm, because they’re looking for anything to hold onto that’s real. And that ability to take hold of what’s real helps Stephanie figure out what’s going on.

She winds up being the touchstone for every character in the movie, doesn’t she?
Exactly. You’ve got Bobbi the drug addict. You’ve got Julia’s character, who was that sad little girl once. Everyone has been that small child. Regardless the level of our catastrophe, we’ve all had them. It’s what has constructed us. I found this kid in Ryan that wasn’t just a child actor, but was a kid, a real kid. My daughter was so pissed off that I didn’t just use her. (laughs) I said ‘Look Syd, if you want to give me the finger when you’re 18 and say you want to be an actress, go ahead. But I’m not going to put you through that right now.’ Ryan is lucky: she’s the product of a beautiful environment. She’s not a showcasey sort of child actress. She comes from a very loving, supportive family. Ryan and Syd got along great together on the set and I made it very clear to Ryan that she was playing Syd. I was also very careful not to show Ryan any of the violence during the shoot. With children you don’t need to say “You see this horrible fucking thing!” You can just say “It tastes bad,” “You feel bad,” like that. Kids innately know what that hollow feeling is. It’s not necessary to suffer in order to relevant or potent, or even real. I think that’s horseshit. It’s an alcoholic’s excuse for being an alcoholic. But I do think there are genuine human emotions we can all feel, and I knew that I didn’t need to give Ryan Simpkins nightmares in order to do that. And at the end of the film, I’d love for people to discuss over coffee whether Ryan’s character chooses the side of light or the side of darkness after what she’s been through.

Bill Pullman in Surveillance.

Earlier you mentioned something about how suffering isn’t necessary to make one complete. You’ve been a true survivor, both personally and professionally. You survived the firestorm of Boxing Helena, of a near-fatal car accident, and you’ve been sober eight years. Haven’t all those elements given your work more depth?
Well, to clarify, there’s no reason to mask one’s self or dramatize or make more important any situation in order to become creative. Life provides us, as can be evidenced by my life, with enough drama naturally. We don’t need to create more of our own. I’m so tired of hearing people say “I sat up all night drinking and wrote four pages I loved.” I want to respond ‘Okay, but you probably would have written six pages you loved if you hadn’t stayed up all night drinking.’ And it’s not that I don’t see the value in everybody’s dysfunction because, trust me, my favorite characters are fucked up.

French Stewart and trouble lurking over his shoulder in Surveillance.

Train wrecks are compelling to watch.
Totally. House is one of my favorite shows. If that character ever stopped taking Vicodin, he wouldn’t be the same! (laughs) I love a human flaw. I love someone who’s clinging to something that makes them vulnerable.

Sure, that’s what makes a character compelling, are their flaws. That’s why I think the most boring character in American pop fiction is Superman, because he’s fucking flawless!
No shit! And I’m going to tell you, not that I wouldn’t sleep with the guy, but what is that guy gonna do for me that Bob Geldof isn’t gonna do for me? Seriously. Superman vs. Bob Geldof. Superman can take me flying around, but who needs that when I’m already floating listening to Bob Geldof play guitar, or anything recorded by Pink Floyd.

Dark Side changed my life.
The Wall changed mine. There isn’t a word in that album that I don’t know.

Are you a fan of Alan Parker’s film of The Wall?
Oh God! Give me a fucking break! To have been a fly on the wall during that shoot. Please!

Anyway, we digress. Let’s get back to your film. I pray at temple of Kurosawa, and I’m sure you know that the Rashomon conceit has been used by storytellers ad nauseum since that film came out, but you had a very original take on it here, the way you incorporated technology and made it a metaphor. Can you talk a bit about that decision?
I’d like to think that certain things are conscious, but I have to admit that other things are completely unconscious. There’s no doubt in my mind that what’s in operation here is that the voyeur in me was enjoying watching others know they were being watched. I’m a child born of both non-technology and the birth of technology and a need to make use of the fact that there this technology to observe each other, and there is in men and women a very different response to being observed. Men want to be one thing, and women want to be another.

What are those two different ways, as you see them?
I think men want to come across as stoic and informed, and women want to come across as very delicately knowing the truth. In a very casual, sensitive way, we want to deliver the truth, and we want to make sure that everyone sees that any mistakes we’ve made, we’re aware of. Men want to know that any mistakes they’ve made are not really mistakes they’ve made. (laughs) They’re choices they’ve made. Women would also rather open their blouse and show you half their breast than men would rather open half their zipper. There’s a nudity about being on camera, even when you’re fully-dressed.

I’m a fan of Boxing Helena, and have never understood why both you and the film got slammed with the vitriol that you did.
I would love to know why people were so mad at me for telling a crazy fairy tale. I’m the first to say I didn’t know what I was doing. I did the best I could at 19, and all these crazy things happened. The idea that the film was faulted when everyone involved worked so fucking hard and believed in me, and there were these adults believing in me, who was essentially a child…when the National Organization of Women slammed me, that was sort of the final straw. It was no wonder I put my legs behind my ears and got pregnant. (laughs) Not that I didn’t love sex before then, but seriously. It was my child, essentially, who saved my life.

Sherilyn Fenn and Julian Sands in Boxing Helena.

So it really hit you hard when that happened.
It really fucking hit me hard. I mean, I was born with these terrible clubbed feet. They put me in casts the day I was born. I was operated on when I was four. I was sat at the base of the statue of the Venus de Milo and was fascinated by how people looked at her as if she was beautiful, even though she was broken. And that sort of helped give birth to the basic idea of Boxing Helena. Then I had my own sort of dysfunctional relationships in junior high and high school. I was the last of all my friends to lose their virginity and had had all sorts of experiences and influences, from my father’s movie sets to my mother’s paintings and sculptures…and all of the sudden people were saying I didn’t deserve to be loved because I’d made this film, and I thought ‘Oh my God, everyone is finally seeing something I was afraid they were always going to see (about me), and it’s the truth. I’m not worth it. They’re right. I’m done.’ Then I got angry. Either you like the film, or the painting, or you don’t, but what does that have to do with the artist? Kubrick made films I adore and films I hate, but that doesn’t mean he was a bad person or a good person.

But Kubrick was vilified in the UK after A Clockwork Orange came out, and he actually pulled it from theatrical release there. He was able to come back from it because he was “Stanley Kubrick.” In your case I think there were many factors at play: you were the daughter of a famous director and that you were a girl, not a woman, because you were so young.
I’ll tell you what happened. I was reading poetry at a fucking nightclub before I was old enough to drink. This person came up to me and said “I have this screenplay I’d like you to write about a woman who is cut up and put into a box.” I said ‘I won’t do it.’ They said “What would you like to do?” I said ‘I’ve always had a fascination with the Venus de Milo, who has no legs and no arms. I have a story I’d like to tell based on that.’ But I didn’t think in a million fucking years—I mean I was reading goddamn poetry, which is the most schmaltzy fucking thing you can do in LA—and I never fucking thought it would go anywhere. I was 18 when they approached me, 19 when I finished it. I was trying to pay the rent by fucking doing fucking phone sales for Vegas trips, cleaning houses, and thinking how am I going to pay my fucking rent, and everyone thinks my father is paying the fucking bills, which wasn’t the case, and then all of the sudden, Madonna was interested, and Ed Harris was interested. Madonna backed out, but paid us all the money back, and was so wonderful, I have nothing but nice things to say about her. Then Kim Basinger came in. I have nothing but nice things to say about her, but it was her agency, when she switched agencies, that said “We can’t have her do this movie.” Then I was forbidden to speak with her. I kept saying ‘I don’t care if she doesn’t want to do it now, just don’t tell me she didn’t have plans to.’ I had effects and prosthetics and an entire set built, so don’t tell me she didn’t have intent. It was this complete rollover and I was like ‘Are you kidding me?’ I was this kid stuck in this world of men in suits who were berating me in a way I had never expected, and all I had tried to do was tell a story. If you will, if I can be very graphic, it was like masturbating for the first time, being discovered, and then being criticized for it. That will fuck your shit up! All I was doing was discovering and playing and the idea that you’re going to tell me that I’m bad for it, that’s going to fuck me up for the rest of my life. Why don’t you see that I’m just being me? I didn’t do this to hurt anybody. I’m grateful that out of all of this, my daughter has learned not to be bamboozled by the same sorts of people I was, and also knows who her grandfather is, and sees him as the guy who tucks her in sometimes or reads her a story. She’s much more grounded than I ever was as a teenager, or maybe than I ever will be. (laughs)

You’ve obviously inherited a lot of your father’s artistic sensibilities, which are evident in both your films, but you definitely possess your own voice, so much so that apparently your father was really horrified by the ending of Surveillance. Is this true?
Yeah, he was completely horrified. He said “You’re the sickest bitch I know. You can’t have the forces of darkness triumph over the forces of light.” He challenged me to write a different ending for the film, which I did because a daughter always wants to make her daddy happy—and I don’t mean to sound sexual when I say that. I shot both endings, and the alternate ending will be on the DVD. I kept saying ‘Why are you calling me sick, when I’m just following the idea of what my characters do? It’s not about dark and light. It’s about humanity. It’s not as simple as black and white. We’re in the gray area here.’ My father and I had very different childhoods. His was idyllic. He literally grew up in the Midwest behind the white picket fence with two amazing parents, two beautiful siblings, perfect education, total support. He was interested in the darker side of things, however. Contrary to popular opinion, I did not grow up around darkness. I grew up in a beautiful environment with a minimum of eight different people in the house at a time, all of them artists, who inspired, thrilled and challenged me as a child. I was made curious by the things I was made familiar with, the darkness being one of them. I am fascinated by what we don’t talk about and where I would go if I were given the opportunity to flee from my own life and the values I was given in my upbringing. Certainly the character of Stephanie is who I was. Julia’s character is who I was afraid I was going to become and Pell plays the girl that I was at one point, for sure. So somewhere in there, lies Jennifer.

Ryan Simpkins in Surveillance.

Was making this film a cathartic experience?
Totally. Again, talking about what do good and bad look like, I’ll be the first to say even when I look at You Tube and see all the horrible things that are said about me, I want people to know that I am as naked as I know how to be in my work. I don’t profess to know the right or wrong way to do things or the right or wrong way to see things, but you will never catch me lying to you—ever. Ever.


Trailer for Surveillance.

Read more!

Julia Ormond: The Hollywood Interview

Actress Julia Ormond


JULIA ORMOND IS “IN HER ANIMAL”
By
Alex Simon

Julia Ormond made an auspicious debut as an actress in the landmark 1989 British miniseries Traffik, on which the Oscar-wining Steven Soderbergh film was later based, playing the drug-addicted daughter of a member of Parliament. By 1994, Ormond was being touted as the next Audrey Hepburn, with her old school glamour and classically-trained acting chops, earned at London’s prestigious Webber-Douglas Academy of Dramatic Arts. High-profile turns in big studio pictures like Legends of the Fall and First Knight suddenly propelled the young, working actress into superstar status, with all the baggage that accompanies that much sought-after, and ultimately regrettable moniker.

With her turn in Sydney Pollack’s ill-fated remake of Billy Wilder’s classic Sabrina, in 1995, it all seemed to turn 180 degrees for Ormond, who suddenly found herself excoriated by the press that had built her up the year before. Fine work in such art house fare as Smilla’s Sense of Snow and Nikita Mikhalov’s epic The Barber of Siberia got her on the good side of a handful of critics, but did little to re-establish her as a movie star.

Rather than bemoan her return to “regular actress” status, Ormond took some time off, married, had a baby, and threw herself into philanthropic work, including work with The United Nations and founding FilmAid, a non-profit that, according to their own mission statement, “uses the power of film and video to reach the world’s most vulnerable communities with messages that inspire them, address their critical shared needs, and effect social change.” She also did fine work in such varied cinematic fare as The Prime Gig, Iron Jawed Angels, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire. Julia appeared in two of last year’s highest-profile films, David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Steven Soderbergh’s epic Che.

Ormond reinvents herself with her turn in Jennifer Lynch’s Surveillance, playing FBI agent Elizabeth Anderson who, with her partner (Bill Pullman), must interrogate three material witnesses to a brutal series of murders in a rural Midwestern town. Ormond offers a complex, double-barreled performance that’s a testament to the adage that artists, like fine wines, just get better over time. Julia Ormond sat down with us recently for a chat about film, the nature of violence in our society, and the beauty of being a survivor. Warning: spoilers ahead!


So tell us about going on this wild ride with Jennifer Lynch at the wheel.
Julia Ormond: It was really an amazing ride. It was right from the start, in terms of reading the script, I was aware of how clever it was, and what I believe it says, but of course they’re not going to consider me for it. (laughs) It’s just not the sort of thing I get cast in. Then she let me come in and audition, and beg for the role, and when I got the role, she asked me “Because of the nature of the film, do you think you can afford to take a risk on something like this?” My response was ‘I don’t think I can afford not to.’ Then when I actually got to work with her, I discovered this amazing force, who was so open and so…I think it was just the fact that she’d been so burned by the whole Boxing Helena experience and how indicative that was of what can happen to a filmmaker who steps out with something wholly original, then ends up being misunderstood, and then how deeply personal that response is for somebody. To come back with something like Surveillance, that is so out there and risky and be completely behind it, and not to cave to deliver something that’s more traditionally palatable or what’s “expected” from a woman director, just has to be admired. She made sure that everybody on that set felt respected and nurtured, from the cast to the drivers, and that helped get the best out of them. I wish it was something you saw more of in this business.

Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond in Surveillance.

You brought up something interesting in terms of Jennifer’s story of being a survivor. When I spoke with Jennifer earlier, we talked about you in that sense, as well. When you first “arrived” so to speak, you were being touted as the second coming of Audrey Hepburn, even before the remake of Sabrina. You were a movie star overnight, then after Sabrina, it was like the press turned on you, many of whom were really nasty to you. So you took some time off…
Yeah, I did. I had a baby and did some other things, but what I think happened to me is I believe I’m pretty grounded, and in the maelstrom of what was going on, hype is something that happens externally from you. It’s not something you generate yourself, and so you have your own perspective from within, and my sense was that when somebody is built up that high, particularly if it is movies that are not banking on you—I mean (Sabrina and First Knight) were made because of Harrison Ford and Sean Connery and Richard Gere being in them, not because of me. Until you have that legitimate grounding, that’s the point when everybody in the business recognizes you can make some claim. Up until that time, it’s just hype. What happened for me was that after I’d had the opportunity to do these movies that were high profile, I had the opportunity to do smaller films, like Smilla’s Sense of Snow and Barber of Siberia, and the experience of shooting the latter for a year in Russia really kind of wiped me out. What I perceived about myself was, aside from being creatively exhausted, I’d somehow gotten into a rut in terms of typecasting. I thought I was doing all these different movies: a cowboy film, a breezy romantic comedy, an Arthurian adventure, they all felt like they were different genres, but people would say “Oh, you’re the woman stuck between two guys, or three guys.” And I kind of had to admit, ‘Yeah.’ And that wasn’t good. So you throw that into the mix with everything else, and especially being British, you have the feeling that if you’re built up that much you have nowhere to go but down. So yes, there were people who said some nasty things, but there were also people who said some really amazing things, that were equally untrue! (laughs) I had to look at it from that perspective and what has been sort of a hard graft was stepping away from all that and doing some different stuff: having a kid, investing a lot of time in philanthropic things: building FilmAid International and doing work with the U.N. to raise awareness about human trafficking, also wanting to come back in at a certain point and do things differently, to take on roles that deliberately cut against that rut I found myself in. I’ve had a lot of people say to me “You turned your back on Hollywood,” and I never really felt that. I only felt grateful that I’d been given the opportunities that I’d been given and it took me a bit of time before I realized that the choices I’d made are what created my own rut. What has been really nice is that during the down time there has also been aging during that time (laughs) and wondering am I still going to be doing this in my forties? I breathed a big sigh of relief that I’m still employable (laughs), which was the first part of it, the second being that I find it really liberating in terms of what you’re cast as at this point in your life. So I’ve been enjoying the different range of work I’ve been doing for the past few years.

Ormond in the original Traffik, her film debut.

It makes sense that you would have made those decisions at those points in your life. We’re contemporaries, so when I look back at decisions I made in my 20s and 30s, they’re choices that I would never make now, given the perspective that I have. On the flip side of that, is the character of Elizabeth Anderson one that you would have wanted to play when you were 28?
Yes! But that stuff wasn’t coming my way. Part of stepping back is about saying no to the stuff that is coming your way, that maybe career-wise is what other people would like you to do, but I’m fortunate now to be surrounded by a team that are in synch with what I see as a creative trajectory that I want to follow. What I also found was that it took me a while to process the fact that if an actor’s career is a journey and you from point A getting into drama school, point B getting your Equity card, Point C getting a lead in theater, point D getting a role in a film. The things that you relied on, your own resources that got you from A to D are not necessarily the things you want to stay with. You have to look at what’s going to get you from L to M and being an actor is the same as anything else in that it’s a craft that you learn and you grow in, and it’s sort of easy to believe that that’s what my success was founded on, and I needed to fall back on that. And feeling that I was stuck in a casting rut, that was something I had to let go of.

Julia Ormond in Sydney Pollack's remake of Sabrina.

What I hear you saying is that throughout the course of one’s life there are reset buttons. And you have to be willing to push the reset buttons.
Yes and there’s a lot of risk involved in that.

This is a risky film on many levels. Jennifer said that one reason she thinks she was so vilified was that she was a woman who was tackling this dark material, whereas if a man, like Quentin Tarantino or even her father, tackle a dark subject honestly, they’re held up as being innovators.
I think there’s a lot to that, but I would say this: it speaks to how we see violence and I think a big part of what this movie is about, is how we’re anesthetized to violence and part of what works about the movie for me is that it uses humor to provoke you to laugh at something that your brain is kind of saying “That’s bad!”

This film reminded me of two of my favorite movies for that very reason: A Clockwork Orange and Natural Born Killers, both of which were satires that employed black humor to get their very serious points across.
Okay, I see it being very close to both of those films, but also Reservoir Dogs in how you’re laughing at something that is threatening to a character within the piece. I really want this film to be something that people will go to see, then walk away from it without analyzing it to death, which is something I could definitely be criticized for (laughs), but there’s something it that says violence is something that exists within all of us, and we kind of have an approach to it globally where we’re looking to put a face on it. We’re looking for symptoms of evil. It’s like we have this fairy tale approach of still expecting to see the wicked, evil stepmother or the villain in the dark cloak, and I don’t think they exist. I think it’s much more the fact that it’s something within all of us, and until we recognize that, we can’t really tackle it. So we don’t expect something like this to come out of a woman. People also don’t like to see strong sexuality in a woman.

In terms of the woman being the seducer or the aggressor, you mean?
Yes, there are still a lot of areas in which men and women don’t have equality and to me, part of that equality is gained when I will celebrate the day when a woman directs the next Bond film. Then we’ll be in a position to be treated as equals. At the moment, the expectations of us are still somewhat in a box, and what I love about Jen is that even after all that stuff she went through in her life, she knows how to make a film. With her contacts and resources, she could have picked up any number of more conventional scripts, executed them brilliantly and done a great job. But she didn’t. She stuck firm by her artistic voice and what she wanted to say as a human being, and that to me takes a great deal of courage. I like the fact that all of us are flawed, all of us make crazy choices. Some get stuck in a pattern where they’re consistently doing it (laughs). But what does that say about our capacity for violence? And when somebody is under surveillance and they’re doing something that is perceptively dubious, what does that then lead people to think of as our connection to it? So often, when you look at abuse, and this is a story about violence that has come from abuse, it’s right there close to us where we least expect it. We’ve sort of normalized violence as it’s seen culturally. Explosions. Guns. Legends of the Fall, violence. A situation that is violently dealt with, but nobody is outraged by that. It was deemed as heroics. Look at kids’ films today. How many animals use force, bash each other over head…

Julia Ormond and Anthony Hopkins in Legends of the Fall.

But that’s always been the case, going back to the old Warner Bros. cartoons.
Right, it’s always been the case, even earlier, with classic fairy tales, the poisoned apple. So I think how we see violence is blurred and distorted and normalized. And by losing the capacity to own it, we lose the capacity to see it. And the child in this story is the center of it all. Because she is still innocent, she is able to see.

I thought it was a really brilliant touch that the child was the touchstone for every very disparate character in this film. Each person who came in contact with her had a different take on what had happened. They all met different fates and different epiphanies in the process. I also liked your character’s backstory of abuse.
Yes, exactly. I don’t want to give too much away because there are so many great twists and turns in the film, but the way I describe her is usually ‘I play an FBI agent who has to go in and find out who saw what, who knows what, and then deal with them appropriately.’

That’s both a very honest and very ambiguous answer.
(laughs) Why, thank you.

You said something interesting in the press notes about Jennifer “being in her animal” during the shoot. What did that mean?
She’s on her game. It’s like she was in her stride. I think she is somebody who has done a great deal of work on herself, knows herself, is still growing, still speaks of that, but it using herself in a totally full-blooded way to draw herself forward. It’s a very powerful thing when you see somebody hit their sweet spot as an artist. It’s very infectious and it rubs off on other people.


Trailer for Surveillance.

Read more!

Pell James--The Hollywood Interview

Actress Pell James


PELL JAMES TAKES A HOT ROD TO THE DARK SIDE IN SURVEILLANCE
By
Alex Simon

Virginia native Pell James hit the ground running following graduation from NYU’s drama school in 1999, mixing TV and stage work, then landing her first high-profile part in 2005’s The King, co-starring with Gael Garcia Bernal and William Hurt. Since then, James also made impressive turns in Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers and David Fincher’s Zodiac, in one of the film’s most unsettling scenes, as one of the notorious Bay area killer’s victims.

Pell James shines in an entirely new light as Bobbi, a drug-addicted drifter who comes face-to-face with evil incarnate in Jennifer Lynch’s Surveillance, a smashingly original thriller hitting theaters June 26 from Magnet Releasing. She also appears in Shrink, a tableaux-like satire of life in L.A., starring Kevin Spacey, which arrives from Lions Gate on July 24.

Pell sat down with us recently to discuss life, film and motherhood. Warning: spoilers ahead!

Tell us about taking a ride to such a dark destination. Does it stay with you after the director says “cut”?
Pell James: It’s funny because we were just talking about this. When you shoot these movies, and you’re literally stepping over pools of movie blood and Ryan (Simpkins) was talking about how the actor who plays her brother was eating the macaroni that was supposed to be his brains, and it’s all over the road (laughs)…no, it doesn’t stay with you. I see fake blood. I see macaroni. I see “cut.” I remember the boom guy being really stinky on a certain day. When you watch the movie all cut together, I’m only going to see the film in that context, which is really hard. So many of the films I’ve done, I’d love to watch with a sort of amnesia from my involvement with them, so I could just enjoy them as a regular audience member.

Pell James in David Fincher's Zodiac.

Even Zodiac didn’t stay with you? In a movie full of disturbing scenes, I think yours was the most unsettling.
See, I find it all so not disturbing. I’m sure it is, obviously, and many people have told me that. A lot of my friends and family haven’t watched it for that reason. But it’s the same thing. I remember (David) Fincher gave me knee pads because my knees were getting wrecked from doing so many takes of being hog-tied on my knees. We weren’t cracking jokes between takes on that particular film, because we were trying to be respectful, but you often do crack jokes during the down time on a really dark film. On this, we were just laughing the whole time we were shooting.

There is an undercurrent of dark humor in this film, like in A Clockwork Orange or Natural Born Killers.
Especially French Stewart’s character. You can’t help it: you just look at him, and you laugh.

So by and large then, it’s just a job for you. Another day at the office.
Yeah, more or less. There was one hardcore Method actor on set, who will remain nameless (laughs), but most of us, I think, shared the same work ethic.

What was having the one Method actor in your orbit like? Did it add or subtract from the process?
It was a little uncomfortable. When I got the gun shoved in my face, that was a little uncomfortable. I didn’t think it would go that far.

It sure got a realistic reaction from you.
(laughs) Yeah, it sure did.

If anything, it thought the humiliation scenes with the cops were tougher to watch than the splatter scenes, mostly because so much of the splatter was so gleefully over-the-top.
Yeah, exactly. Even in the room, seeing the blood packets go off, there were such conspicuous amount of blood coming out, we had to be careful not to step in the puddles and make footprints on the floor.

It was like Sam Peckinpah blood.
(laughs) Yeah, exactly—Straw Dogs. They’re remaking that, you know.

Pell James as Bobbi in Jennifer Lynch's Surveillance.

They were also trying to remake The Wild Bunch, which thankfully I think they’ve given up on, setting it in present day South of the border, with Mexican drug cartels instead of revolutionaries.
Just change the name and slightly change the story. I really hate the idea of remakes. There are so many great, untold stories out there.

Yeah, you can’t remake perfection.
They’re also remaking Bonnie & Clyde—with Hilary Duff. (laughs) Sorry.

Yeah, I hear you. Supposedly they’re going to stick closer to the real facts of the story, like the fact that they weren’t lovers, that Clyde was gay.
Yeah, but I even got that he was gay in the original.

No he wasn’t gay. He was impotent.
I know, but he seemed gay to me. Did he not to you?

No, he even at one point says “I don’t like boys.” Warren Beatty, apparently, wouldn’t play him as gay.
Oh, that’s why. Okay, that makes sense, then. I always thought he was gay, and that line was just an excuse.

No, I think they portrayed him as being more or less asexual until he and Bonnie consummate their relationship in that field right before they’re killed.
It’s funny, I heard that Shirley MacLaine was originally supposed to play Bonnie. That wouldn’t have worked! (laughs)

There was a whole string of actresses that they wanted: Natalie Wood, Tuesday Weld. Truffaut and Godard were each attached to direct at one point. I think it was Godard who wanted to cast Bob Dylan as Clyde. Can you imagine?
(laughs) No, no. Oh God…that’s bizarre.

On the subject of movie violence, I think Jennifer presents violence in a very honest way in this film, and that it didn’t have a happy ending. Sometimes the forces of darkness need to triumph in stories because they so often triumph in life, don’t you think?
Yes, I do, and we actually shot several different endings, but I’m glad she went with this one, too. It was interesting, because I kept texting her, asking which ending she was going to use, because her father was really pushing for her to keep Bobbi alive at the end. It’ll be interesting to see how people react. I did a movie called The King, which also had a really dark ending where there was no hope.

I really liked that film.
I loved that film! That’s my favorite of all my films, so far. I loved working with James Marsh, who just directed Man on Wire. Did you see that?

Yes. Big fan of that film, too.
I love that movie.

Gael Garcia Bernal and Pell James in The King.

I thought The King was an unheralded film.
Those movies are really hard to push. My husband works at Lions Gate and it’s really hard to get people to go out to movies now. It’s tougher and tougher to make “smaller” films. People are still making them. We did Shrink, and it was just tiny, a really tough shoot. But it’s hard to get people to show up now unless it’s an “event” movie. I hope that changes.

You’ve always done small movies, though. Your first screen credit was for James Toback’s Black and White.
You know, I never even appear in that film, yet it’s listed on my bio on the IMDb and I still get residual checks for it!

That’s not something I’d be complaining about!
(laughs) No, I’m not, trust me. But it was just this thing I showed up for in New York when I was still a student. It’s so odd how these things happen sometimes.

You grew up in Virginia, but went to school in New York?
Yeah, I went to NYU, at the Tisch School, for acting.

When did you know you wanted to be an actor?
I don’t know that there was one moment. I just always did plays and loved the theater and was sort of surrounded by it, going into D.C. a lot, which has a great theater scene.

What do your parents do?
My dad’s a lawyer. My stepfather works for The State Department. My mom is a substance abuse therapist.

That’s interesting. Did you consult her for your research on Bobbi?
(laughs) I did, but it’s hard to get advice from your mother. It kills me saying that, because I know I’m going to have loads of advice for my sons. It was very quick. I read the script on a Saturday, and had to have an answer for them that night. I had a six month-old, and had been in a nursery for six months, so I was itching to get out, and shooting a movie in Canada sounded great. Plus, the opportunity to do a movie this good doesn’t come along every day. Most of the stuff actresses get offered tends to be pretty boring, so I don’t do it. But anyway, I emailed N.A. or some kind of online anonymous narcotics treatment group. I emailed them and said ‘I’m an actress and I’m researching this part I’m about to play as a drug addict. Could you answer these few questions for me or send me a packet of information about these questions. Thank you very much.’ So they email me back: “Thank you for talking about your addiction with us. We’d like to speak with you further. Call me. Craig.” (laughs) So I wrote back, saying ‘No, no, no. I’m an actress. I’m researching my new part.’ And I get another reply: “Thank you for reaching out to us…” It wasn’t an automated response from this guy. We were literally emailing back and forth, and he thought I was being in denial. And I continued to get emails from him months after we finished shooting, so I sent him the link to the IMDb page saying ‘Look buddy, it’s really a movie. See? It’s online.’ I haven’t heard from him in about six months.

Maybe he’ll go see the movie and think how authentic you were.
(laughs) Exactly.

“You’re too authentic. You should reach out!”
(laughs) That would be the ultimate great review, wouldn’t it?

Tell us about working with Jennifer. I hope this film will finally give her the recognition she deserves.
She’s so gung-ho. Every day she woke up she was so grateful, and her attitude was infectious. It was great to be around that kind of energy. She also cast a lot of her friends in the movie, so there was a very relaxed feeling on the set and everyone was very happy to be there. She’s very thoughtful that way, giving people chances. It was great to work with her.

You mentioned earlier that there aren’t that many interesting parts out there for actresses.
Well, not for the number of great actresses that are available, no. There’s so much talent out there, and not enough good parts to go around.

If there’s one actress whose career you could emulate, who would it be?
I love Faye Dunaway.

Pre-Mommie Dearest Faye Dunaway?
(laughs) I love Mommie Dearest. She directed a short a few years ago, based on a Tennessee Williams story. It was good. I’m such a huge fan. I met her around the time The King was at Cannes, and I saw her at a party out here. I was pregnant with my first son, and she pointed at my stomach and said “When is this going to be done?” (laughs)

What’s your favorite part she played?
Probably Network. I mean, where’s that part now? There’s no Diana Christensen parts out there now.

Well, there’s no Paddy Chayefsky now. I don’t think they make writers like that any longer, and with Sidney Lumet behind the camera. That movie was world-class for a reason.
That’s true. I was lucky enough to work with Sidney Lumet once. My part got cut, but everyone’s part got cut. It was this thing for HBO called Strip Search. Maggie Gyllenhaal and a bunch of other people were in it. This was back around 2004. I was so excited to work with him. I had this scene with Tommy Guiry, who was in Blackhawk Down, and I was terrified. It was one of my first jobs, and I had to kiss Tommy. We got to rehearse it in the Polish dance hall in the East Village where he’s rehearsed all his movies for years and years, with everything blocked out on the floor with tape. He told us stories and was very methodical and thoughtful and even though I just had a small part, he really made me feel a part of the process and made me feel important.

Let’s talk a bit about Shrink. Were you actually pregnant, like your character, when you shot the film?
I was. My best friend, Tom Moffett, wrote the script. Originally the character wasn’t pregnant, but then when I was, everyone was like “We’re going to have to recast,” and Tom said “No, we’re not.” He just added it into the script, which added a lot to the character. It was a very simple fix, that wound up working out really well.

Pell James in Shrink.

So Tom wrote the part with you in mind?
Yeah, he did. And my husband worked on it, and my friend Braxton Pope produced it. My 2 ½ year old plays Saffron Burrows’ son. It was very homegrown. A lot of it was even shot in my old house. The intervention scene was shot in my old living room. It was very “guerilla,” stealing locations left and right. It’s funny, I worked more when I was pregnant than I ever did when I wasn’t. Hmm…maybe a sign? (laughs)

Surveillance took you into its own world, whereas Shrink was very immediate and very real, almost too close for comfort in some ways.
(laughs) Yeah, I really loved Dallas Roberts performance, because he reminded me of so many agents—not mine, by the way—that I’ve sort of met in passing: very neurotic, crazy, self-involved. I thought Dallas really nailed it.

How was Kevin Spacey?
He was great, so much fun. He’s an amazing mimic, and kept us entertained during the whole shoot.

Now that you’ve seen Surveillance in its final form, what are your thoughts and hopes for the film?
I’m very proud of it. I think everyone does their best work in it, especially Jennifer. I hope people finally recognize her and she makes many more movies after this.


Trailer for Surveillance.

Read more!

John Lithgow: The Hollywood Interview

Actor John Lithgow


John Lithgow: Confessions of a Actorholic
By Ben Braddock

Veteran performer John Lithgow is a member of the impressive cast of Confessions of a Shopaolic. The zany comedy revolves around shopping crazy Becky Bloomwood(Isla Fisher), who can’t resist temptation when it comes to shopping. Whether it’s dresses or accessories, this irrepressible young woman has no self-control and will get out her credit card at every possible opportunity. She cannot pass a shop window without walking in and buying something.



Hoping to get a job on a leading fashion magazine – she ends up instead landing a job on a financial publication and actually becomes successful – helping readers to sort out their money problems, even though she cannot stick to a budget herself. Hugh Dancy plays the magazine editor; John Lithgow is the powerful boss. Witty and charismatic, the actor hits just the right notes in the film, directed by P.J. Hogan, which arrives on DVD and Blu-ray June 23.

Lithgow grew up in Ohio in a theatrical family - the son of a classically trained actor and college professor. He won a prestigious Tony Award just weeks after his 1973 debut in The Changing Room on Broadway. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in 1967, followed by a Fulbright scholarship to study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Since then he has appeared in dozens of plays, and over 80 film and televison roles.

On screen he earned Oscar nominations for The World According to Garp and Terms of Endearment. On TV, Lithgow has won four Emmys - one for an episode of Amazing Stories, three were for his role on the hit series 3rd Rock From the Sun- he has been nominated for Emmys a total of ten times and has had a distinguished career in every area of the entertainment industry. Lithgow recently starred in the Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's All My Sons. He has also written several best selling children's books and composed CDs for children. The delightful, amusing and fascinating actor sat down recently in New York to discuss his latest adventure before the cameras.

What was the appeal of this film and story to you?
John Lithgow: When I heard about the film I was impressed by the wonderful list of people already involved, and I wanted to be a part of that group. I love the work of P.J. Hogan and I think Isla Fisher, Hugh Dancy and Kristin Scott Thomas are so talented, also John Goodman and Joan Cusack, they are formidable names and I respect them all. Isla and Hugh remind me of young versions of Irene Dunne and Cary Grant – they are a throwback to that wonderful era, with great characters sets against a glamorous back drop.

What did you like about the story?
When I read the script I knew it was going to be a beautifully acted and timed piece of work and a wonderful comedy. The subject matter took me by surprise, I think it is a great subject that everyone can relate to.

Can you describe your character?
Edgar West is the head of the publishing company, he would be someone like the CEO of a company such as Condé Nast, the head of the entire magazine empire, in charge of many different magazines. He is not a fashionista at all, he is at the very pinnacle of the magazine publishing world and he is extremely powerful. As I figured out his character, I see him as a man with a twinkle in his eye. He sees and absorbs everything and he is involved in the big reversal, the surprise at the end, that is all him – he is the one who surprises Hugh Dancy’s character. He likes keeping things secret.

John Lithgow in Confessions of a Shopaholic.

Can you talk about his journey in the film?
Whenever you have a big boss like Edgar West, he represents sheer power, everyone quakes when he walks down the hall, it’s an easy part to play because everyone else has to do all the acting and respond to him.

How do you play it?
I play him fairly straight, with that twinkle.

Lithgow and Debra Winger in Terms of Endearment.

What was it like working with P.J. Hogan?
I hadn’t met him before showing up to work on the movie and he is my kind of director, he is wonderful and creates a terrific atmosphere on the set. He makes movie making seem fun and movie making is not fun, it is hard drudgery as I am sure you know, you wait around for hours and hours.

Most people think it is glamorous and fun?
Oh it is tedious. If you like waiting in an airport for an entire day, you might like it, you will love being on a movie set. That said, within a whole hour you may have a minute of wonderful fun and of course that magical minute of filmmaking is all you will see, the results of those special minutes are put together into a two hour movie and it looks like it was ecstatic fun making the film, but that is not quite true. Of course you meet wonderful people. I have become such a good pal with Fred Armisen, he makes me laugh so hard and it is great working with Lynn Redgrave.

Do you interact with her?
No we don’t interact, but we are old pals, we worked together on Broadway, Good God it was about 30 years ago for an entire eleven month run, so we are very good friends. It was great to see her; I didn’t even know she was in the movie till I arrived to start work. What a lovely surprise.”

Lithgow in The World According to Garp, his first Oscar-nominated role.

What do you think of Isla and Hugh, who are rising stars?
They are a terrific combination. Isla is just perfect for this part, she is bursting with manic ideas, she is just lovely, she is so talented and funny and Hugh is a very, very attractive and talented guy, you just root for them as a couple. I think the whole film is fantastically well cast.

Your career is so varied and extensive, what do you look for these days in terms of work?
I really love meeting fabulous, new, talented people. It was such a thrill to meet Kristin Scott Thomas. I sat next to her for a whole scene, so basically we became like old friends and she is a marvelous person, that is the kind of thing you look forward to making movies.

In general how do you choose your projects?
If you’re very lucky you get a project that challenges you and interests you. This is just a wonderful little ‘bon bon’ for me, a real treat, it is a small part in a very endearing movie. I recently created a one man show that was fantastic, called Stories By Heart (tracing my history as an actor and story teller) and did Arthur Miller’s play All My Sons, which was very exciting.

Do you prefer theater to TV and film?
As far as the actual process and activity is concerned, theater is much more exciting for me. I love film, but you are there with the audience in theater so it is much more satisfying. I guess it is because I grew up in theater that I like it so much, it always feels like the real thing to me. Everything I do in movies and television stems from my work and background in the theater. I did the TV show 3rd Rock From the Sun for six years which was so much fun, but the downside was that it made me extremely public and well known for one thing, everybody got to know all my tricks and everything about me, it had a very big audience. Then as soon as it was over, my instinct was to go right back to theater and I have done five plays since then and have more on the way. So I enjoy going back to the smaller audiences, going back to my roots. Everything is cyclical though. Even though you get a bigger audience for TV shows and big films, I will never stop doing theater. If you are in a hit show on Broadway, a lot of people see you, but it is still just one percent of the people who see you on TV and in movies. I am lucky I can do it all.

Lithgow in his Emmy-winning role on 3rd Rock From the Sun.

You also do children’s entertainment; you write books and perform kids concerts.
I love doing my kids concerts, they are fantastic and not many people know I do them, I work with an ensemble of jazz musicians and the concerts are based on my kids albums. I think attention must be paid to kids. It is very important that they have great entertainment. But it is also purely for me at the end of the day, I do the kids albums and concerts because I love that part of my work and I am really good at. I keep the kids in the palm of my hands for a whole hour. It always seems to me to be such a challenge and such a joy. But it is exhilarating. It is more than a side line for me, it is central to my work.

Has fatherhood inspired you to write children’s books?
I doubt if I ever would have written for children, or entertained them for that matter if I hadn't had my own. My children have taught me what kids like to hear. They've also given me a sense of when I'm talking down to them and when I'm talking on their level. The authors of bad children’s books never actually got that straight I don’t think.

Are acting and writing linked at all for you?
Well for me, writing is a means to an end. I write the words to be spoken out loud, as all the best children's books should be. And I suppose I always intend to be the primary reader myself. So in a sense, I write to act, not the other way around.



Do you plan your career these days?
Not really, this business has a way of surprising you. They think of me for the most unlikely projects and I love these surprises. I love what I do. Sometimes I feel a little feverishly active, I never rest and occasionally I must say, I ask myself: what am I running from? But really my work is all so much fun.

Were you born with this gift and passion - is it drive and practice or is it in your blood?
It doesn’t seem that special to me. It comes very naturally to me. I did grow up in a theater family so it certainly it was a huge part of my life growing up. My dad was a Shakespeare fanatic. He created Shakespeare festivals and produced them in Ohio when I was growing up. And he was also a great storyteller and a reader of stories to all of us kids. 

It was just there in our household, and of course, I did a huge amount of acting as a young kid. I was in A Midsummer Night's Dream. I loved to act. Shakespeare really just washed over me like a warm bath as I was growing up.

So did you dream of becoming an actor?
Not at all, I never intended to become a professional actor as a child; I was more interested in painting. But I knew I would be doing something creative in the arts. I wanted to be an artist, a painter, but I went off to college and started acting and I realized I'd better give into it. It seemed to be my destiny. I still do painting actually and have a studio in LA; I wouldn’t show my art to you though (laughs) it is private. I respect really great painters too much to pretend that I am an artist.

How would you describe a perfect day?
A perfect day would always be spent with my wife and having my moments of creative fulfillment: that means curtain calls, finished paintings, perhaps unlocking the last puzzle of a piece of writing. But I actually think life is imperfect though very enjoyable.

And finally, your greatest achievement?
My greatest achievement is my children – definitely.


Trailer for Confessions of a Shopaholic.

Read more!

ARI FOLMAN: The Hollywood Interview

(Ari Folman, above, as the on-screen version of himself, in Waltz With Bashir.)

Our Waltz With Bashir Interview with the Oscar-nominated director, on the occasion of the film's release on DVD.

by Terry Keefe

“So, Terry, what is it you want to ask me?” queried Israeli film director Ari Folman, and there was exhaustion in his voice. It was on the Friday before Oscar Weekend, back in February, that I met Folman and he was understandably weary after having logged long hours on the vigorous awards campaign trail for his film Waltz With Bashir, regarded by many for months prior as the front-runner for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. When we had our talk, the ballots had long since been cast, but Folman still hadn’t tired of speaking about Bashir, physically worn out though he likely was. The Oscar ended up going to the Japanese entry, Departures, but although Bashir didn't make history by becoming the first Israeli film to win that particular award, it had already become a landmark creation, the influence of which will be felt for decades to come. As the first feature-length animated documentary to gain a relatively wide audience, Bashir also dazzled audiences with its unique blend of a harrowing real-life war story, the backdrop of which many western audiences were unfamiliar with, or had forgotten; a personal journey-style documentary; and searing animated imagery. For the still-uninitiated, the story of the film is that of Folman himself, as he attempts to retrieve forgotten and/or repressed memories from his days as a soldier for the Israeli Army during the first Lebanon War in the beginning of the 80s.

The DVD for Bashir features a standout Director’s Commentary, which is both entertaining, and highly educational from a filmmaking perspective, going into great detail about how various sequences were created, all peppered with Folman's somewhat self-deprecating style of humor (the Commentary begins with this quote, “My name is Ari Folman, and I’m kind of responsible for the film you’re about to see...”) Also of particular note is a special features section entitled “Animatics,” which breaks down a number of the key sequences of Bashir and shows how they were created by Folman’s animation studio, “Bridgit Folman Film Gang,” from the live-action guide images to the layers of animation which followed. The “Animatics” section is a must-watch for animation fanatics, and, particularly, for students of animation.

You’ve sort of started a new genre, that of the animated feature documentary, with Waltz with Bashir.

Ari Folman: Well, it is a new genre! It never was a feature film. You had "Ryan" (the 2004 animated documentary short by Chris Landreth about the Canadian animator Ryan Larkin), which was the short - and [now] the first feature-length film. But I don’t know if there’ll be a flood of animated documentaries, because it’s so expensive.

Yeah, and difficult.

And difficult. It takes so long to do. But you never know.

As a filmmaker on this type of project, it has got to be daunting, because even once you get the first part of production completed, you’re nowhere close to being done.
Not even done with half of the first part. You haven’t even started. It’s very frustrating, you know. The transformation from real action to animation for a director is incredible. It’s like, you know, for example, you have the shot of a couple of guys, like us, one of them is the interviewer, and the other is smoking a joint - [laughs] So you come to the studio, and it’s like, Sunday, the joint is here [indicates position] - Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday…weekend, Monday, Tuesday - and then, after two weeks you see they had somewhere a mistake, and it goes like this [make inhaling noise and the “joint” switches position abruptly] You know? And you have to start all over again. This is frustration. And two weeks are lost, just lost.

Did you have any technique for keeping yourself motivated during the long process?

Yeah, well, I consider myself a pretty cool guy. I was not like…once you realize there’s nothing you can do to control the pace of things, you relax. It’s…you just have to try to raise more money, this is it.

Do you have a favorite of the type of animations that you used? And least favorite?
I never got used to 3D animation. I like some of the Pixar films - the ones that have better scripts - but out of taste, I prefer 2D. It’s better. And even now, I see the original Peter Pan, it was done in the ‘50s, but it’s better than most Pixar films I see. It’s more gentle and it’s more beautiful. Not so violent.

I feel the same way. I wonder though if it’s because 2D animation was what I grew up on, and I prefer it for nostalgic reasons.

Yeah, yeah, but I try it on my kids now, and I give them a lot of 2D, and the classic "Looney Tunes" and everything, and they love it. They love it.

Something that struck me watching Waltz with Bashir was that animation is a perfect tool to do a war film with, because it allows for the easy incorporation of the hallucinatory elements of war.

Yeah, and you know, war is such a surreal thing, it’s the most surreal thing on earth, and animation can do it. Surrealism is perfect for animation.




(The rabid dogs at the beginning of Waltz With Bashir, above.)

There was also something uniquely striking about the use of pop songs in the film. I think it’s that 60s era rock and pop songs have been used in so many Viet Nam films that they’ve become a cliché. But the events in Waltz with Bashir we’ve only seen really in the U.S. as part of news footage with no stylization, and when you add Johnny Rotten singing over those events, this creates a time capsule of that moment and place which hasn’t existed in film before.

It is the beginning of the ‘80s, and that’s what he sang, right? [laughs]

Obviously, the making of the film was a therapeutic process for you, in terms of reclaiming memories. Did any new memories pop up after the production period, which you weren’t able to include in the film?

Yeah, during traveling for the film, I discovered more things that are not in it. I wish they were in the film. You know, for example, I read this article on one flight, in which this American soldier is telling how he comes back from Iraq, and I realized it took him six days, to get from the front, to somewhere in Oklahoma. And then I thought, “How long did it take us?” And then I realized that from the middle of battle in Beirut, to back home to Haifa in helicopter…it took us twenty minutes! Just think where you are, and after twenty minutes, you are in the middle of town, and all those beautiful girls [laughs]. It’s shocking, twenty minutes of transformation. It’s crazy. And I didn’t think about it while I was making the film, so that isn’t in the film. I wish it was.

Animation also seems to be a perfect medium for stories that are about revealing hidden memories, as memories can be so elusive, and, once again, surreal.

Yeah, definitely. It’s so flexible, memory. I totally agree. And animation, you know, with Persepolis and Bashir, hopefully, in the very near future, we’ll have more animation for adults, which I think is great.


Is there anything you want Americans, in particular, to take away from the film? (Special thanks to Saskia Smith for this question)

Just to let you know that wars, they have no glory, no glamour. Don’t believe Platoon and Oliver Stone films. And wars have no bravery and brotherhood of man. It’s totally bullshit. It’s all a useless idea. It’s a cliché. It’s like a Bob Dylan song. It’s like “Masters of War,” you know? Remember that song? It’s nothing more than that. It’s like, those people with big egos, behind desks, sending other people, very young people, to die for the cause of nothing - this is what war is, there’s nothing more to it. So I tried to put that in my film.

The film has recently been adapted to graphic novel form.

The first edition is sold out! The American work…they released it in eight countries as a graphic novel. But the work they did here is, by far, it has, it’s like, on a different scale -

Better?

It’s way better. It’s not just better, it’s a great graphic novel.

What was your involvement?

I had to cut all the text, and dub it. Had to arrange it, you know, as a graphic novel. It was exciting, and because I was mostly interested by graphic novels with this film, not by animation, I loved the process…and they did a great…it’s a beautiful piece of art, really what they did.

Do you know what you’re working on next?

Yeah, I am adapting a Stanislaw Lem novel - it’s called The Futurological Congress - of course, we call it only The Congress, and it’s about the world of an actress, she’s in decline because the studios just sampled her and they kept using her image, and she walks into the future, which is a world that is totally controlled by the manufacture of psychiatric pharmacology products. And the book is very crazy, and the film’s gonna be…less crazy. But very wild.

The Waltz with Bashir DVD can be ordered via Amazon.

FIN.

Read more!

The legend continues....Hotel Byblos and Les Caves du Roy: Cannes Festival-goers Find Solace in Quaint Riviera Town

(Jack Nicholson and Cher at the Hotel Byblos Saint-Tropez, above, during the 70s.)

We're going to be including the occasional film festival report at the Hollywood Interview in the weeks and months to come, and that includes the coolest places to stay and celebrate at. It doesn't get much cooler than the Hotel Byblos Saint-Tropez and the nightclub Les Cave du Roy, both longtime favorites - to say the least - of the crowd at Cannes. Our correspondent and publicist extraordinaire Nicole Muj reports on the ground from the legendary festival.

by Nicole Muj

Summer in the South of France has officially begun, marked by the season opening of the legendary Hotel Byblos Saint-Tropez and world famous nightclub Les Cave du Roy. Located on the stunning coastline on the Bay of Pampelonne, lined with sandy white beaches and sun-filled days, Saint Tropez is the home of this iconic hotel.

Without question, the Byblos is the premiere hotel of the Cote D'Azur, host to some of the world’s top stars over the years, including Jack Nicholson, Cher, the late Princess Grace and Brigitte Bardot. Mick Jagger proposed to Bianca on the balcony of a Byblos suite. Bardot still makes her home in the quaint seaside village. Offering recluse from the busy neighboring festival town, the Byblos invites Cannes VIPs a place to get away to relax and rejuvenate, away from the spotlight in the secluded, ultra luxurious residence.

(The view from the Hotel Byblos, above.)

Originally opened in 1967, the Byblos, the striking hillside hotel with its distinctive exterior painted in shades of rich terracotta and deep golds, is part of the Groupe Floirat, a collection of properties owned by the Chevanne family. This season, the Byblos unveiled the labors of an elaborate transformation project that included renovation of one third of the hotel’s rooms, refurbished in luxurious colorful fabrics that celebrate the uniqueness of the French Riviera and joy of the summer. Charming bathrooms extend the beach experience, with exquisite mosaics by Botticini, dramatic mosaic tiles mixed with polished pebbles. Designed with a subtle mix of Lebanese and Mediterranean styles, the hotel lobby warmly welcomes guests with inviting modern couches and chairs surrounded by traditional kilim rugs, a tribute to the hotel’s origins.

Dining at the Byblos offers a wonderful culinary journey. Guests may enjoy the poolside restaurant The B. featuring “light bites” or tapas, delights from the Mediterranean region with inspirations from French, Italian, Greek, Spanish and Lebanese dishes. For more formal dining, the Byblos serves up SPOON, the Riviera’s version of the popular franchise created by the globally renowned chef Alain Ducasse. Of course, the popular Provencal rosé wine, the water of Saint-Tropez, flows freely at every meal.

After the sun goes down, it’s time for Saint Tropezians to come out and play. The Byblos is the home to Les Caves du Roy, perhaps the most famous nightclub in Europe. Year after year, Les Caves hosts a who’s who of the international celebrity jet set. Beyonce, Jay Z, Sting, Elton John and Bono all have walked through the doors of Les Caves that recently unveiled its first major facelift since the 1970s.

(The late Princess Grace at the Byblos, above.)

To help recover and rewind after an evening at clubbing or a day of play under the Provence sun, the Byblos Spa offers a haven of peace and serenity, featuring rejuvenating treatments and rituals exclusively by Sisley cosmetics.

(Christophe Chauvin, Antoine Chevanne, & Junior, of the Byblos, above.)

What's next at the Byblos?

Antoine Chevanne, the handsome, young General Manager/Director General of Groupe Floirat, has grand plans to expand the Groupe Floirat brand, with the recent opening of La Réserve, the first of a collection of charming, boutique hotels, and the October 2009 unveiling of The Black Legend Monaco. The lavish new nightclub dedicated to the sounds of Motown is just what the principality ordered. Plans to extend the “Riviera experience” across the pond are also in works. The company’s ambitious expansion strategy includes the opening of a new Byblos-inspired hotel and Les Caves nightclub in the US in the very near future. But until that happens, the legend of the Byblos remains…in Saint-Tropez.

(Check out the Byblos website here. )

Read more!

A chat with the cast of Woody Allen's WHATEVER WORKS

Patricia Clarkson, Woody Allen, Evan Rachel Wood, and Larry David at the premiere of Whatever Works, at The Tribeca Film Festival.


WORKING ON WHATEVER WITH WOODY:
Larry David, Patricia Clarkson and Evan Rachel Wood on orbiting the universe of Woody Allen
By
Alex Simon

Few, if any, figures in American film have had the career arc of Woody Allen. Born Allen Stewart Konigsberg, Allen cut his teeth on Sid Caesar’s TV landmark Your Show of Shows as a staff writer in 1950, while still in high school, and graduated to standup comedy. One of the nation’s hottest young comics in the early and mid-1960s, Allen wrote his first screenplay, What’s New Pussycat? in 1965, and also co-starred in the film, making his writing/directing debut with Take the Money and Run, in 1969.

Since then, Woody Allen has not only been one of America’s most beloved and unique voices in cinema, he’s been one of our most prolific, averaging a film (or more) per year, and gathering a respectable coterie of plaudits along the way, including three Academy Awards.

Allen delivers his 42nd film as a director to theaters this Friday, June 19th. Whatever Works tells the story of Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David), an aging curmudgeon whose once-promising career as a professor of String Theory at Columbia and marriage to a beautiful, successful woman is undone by his bitter, pessimistic view of life, and hatred of the human race. Now living in a dingy coldwater flat in lower Manhattan, Boris finds his life changed when a teenage runaway (Evan Rachel Wood) from the Deep South enters his life. When the girl’s ultra-conservative parents (Ed Begley, Jr., Patricia Clarkson) arrive, a domino-like series of events befall them all, resulting in one of Allen’s funniest and most charming films in years. If Whatever Works seems more reminiscent of “early, funny” Woody Allen, there’s a good reason: it was written by Woody in the late 1970s, who penned the lead with the late Zero Mostel (whom Allen co-starred with in Martin Ritt’s classic The Front, in 1976) in mind.

The film’s stars: Larry David, Patricia Clarkson, and Evan Rachel Wood, sat down recently to discuss working on Allen’s latest comic outing. Here’s what followed:



There was a lot of buzz about the fact that this film dealt with the relationship between a much older man and a younger woman. Were there any love scenes that were cut?

Larry David: Of course. Well, no, but there should have been. (laughter) No, everything we shot is there. There weren’t any. That was it. And I don’t think it’s odd. I don’t think anyone wants to see me having sex with anyone at the movies.

Evan Rachel Wood: I don’t know, I had an awful lot of people who seemed excited about the idea.

Patricia Clarkson: That was the first question my sisters asked me.

ERW: Remember in Harold and Maude, there was just fade to black! (laughs)

Woody Allen and Larry David on the set of Whatever Works.

Patricia, how was it going back to your Southern roots? It’s been a while since you played a Southern belle.

PC: Divine. It’s always nice to be home, in spirit, and with such a delicious character. She was a character that required all my Southern-ness in all its glory and all its fanaticism. (laughs) It was very, very nice. Sometimes I have to be careful about my accent, which can slip out when I get tired, and have a bourbon or two, not that I drink on the set. (laughs) But it was great, just to let it all hang out, so to speak. (laughs)

Patricia Clarkson in Whatever Works.

When you read the script, what was your first reaction to the story and your characters?

LD: I don’t really know. I just sort of memorized it, and said it. (laughter)

Do you think the character of Boris is negative, or realistic?

LD: Both. I think to be realistic is to be negative.

What was the experience of working with Woody Allen like? Patricia, this is your second time in a row working with him, so why don’t we start with you.

PC: It’s very theatrical in nature. He does big, long takes. You have to be prepared. You have to have done your homework. You have to be able to improv. I mean, an actor prepares, and you really do with Woody. There are no short takes. He does the entire scene. If it’s a ten page scene, he will shoot it from beginning to end, and if you’re at the second-to-last line and you screw it up, you go back to line one.

LD: Back to base.

ERW: It’s not like you say ‘Can I take that line again?’

PC: You don’t take a line again…

LD: Patricia came up to me one day and said (imitating Clarkson’s renowned throaty purr) “Honey, I did Blanche DuBois at The Kennedy Center, but nothing’s harder than this!” (laughter)

PC: Yeah, it’s hard, but it’s also character-building in the true sense of the word. You really have to know your character and know what you’re doing when you walk on the set every day. We get lazy as actors in film. We walk in after we’ve learned our page of dialogue. (whiny voice) “Ugh…where’s my coffee? Where’s my slippers…”

ERW: I don’t sound like that. (laughter)

PC: “And maybe we’re ready to shoot.” No, with Woody, you have to be ready.

ERW: And we were lucky because we were able to spend a lot of time together and run massive amounts of lines together. That was the best part, was picking it apart, finding out what worked, and all the “moments.”

Larry, getting back to the amount of dialogue you had to memorize, what was it like for you to work this way when, on Curb Your Enthusiasm, you’re used to working mostly unscripted and off-the-cuff?

LD: It was hard. It was hard.

ERW: I wish I could have seen the look on your face when you opened the script and just saw that first page! (laughter)

LD: I opened the script and saw the first page was all Boris, then I turned to page 50, and saw Boris on page 50! And then I went to the last page…

PC: And Boris again…

LD: And I went ‘Oy vey!’ (laughter) So yeah, it was kind of daunting to have to learn all of that, to tell you the truth. As far as the improvising goes, that was another aspect I found daunting, because I am used to improvising and making it up as I go along, and it was challenging, and I don’t really care for challenges very much. (laughter)

ERW: It was hard not to laugh, too.

LD: Yes, that too.

PC: Although we were all too terrified to laugh most of the time.

ERW: Yeah, I was terrified. (laughter)

Larry David, Ed Begley, Jr. and Evan Rachel Wood in Whatever Works.

So there was a huge intimidation factor for the three of you working with Woody, in spite of the fact that you’re all established, experienced actors. Can you talk a bit more about that?

PC: Sure. There was an intimidation factor. (laughter) You get over it and get past it…

LD: You want to please him.

PC: Yeah, because he is so mono-syllabic in his responses, and very judicious in his praise.

LD: You don’t want to be the one to screw up his movie.

PC: You don’t, and you don’t want to be the one to screw up a take. So as I said, it’s a different way of working than most directors, who can stop and start, and shoot in pieces.

ERW: It’s unpredictable. You could get it in one take, and then you’re done, but if it’s not, you could be there forever. My Southern accent is coming back just talking about it! (laughs)

Were there any specific moments of praise he gave that stick out in your memories?

LD: Yeah, he said to me once “It wasn’t horrible.” (laughter)

PC: He’s very kind. He’ll say “That was good!”

ERW: He said to me, quite often, “That was much better than I thought it was going to be.”

LD: He’s very sweet, really.

PC: He has great respect for us actors, and there is a euphoria when you get to those big takes. There is a payoff to it.

Evan, how did you and Larry establish your chemistry?

ERW: It was tough, because his character is such a miserable person.

LD: I have chemistry with pretty much everyone. Good or bad. I can tell right off. I really can. It doesn’t take me long to get to know somebody. There’s a very visceral reaction I have, very quickly. We were very comfortable with each other. With you, for example, I have a reaction to you. I can tell what I can say to you, and what I can’t. I know just by looking at people whether I can say something nasty to them, and how they’ll react, or whether I can kid around with them, or if they’re going to get it or not. I have a sixth sense like that.

How much did Woody work with you on your characterizations, and how much did you just develop on your own?

ERW: Well, luckily, I’m from the South, too. I kind of based my character on my stepmother, not IQ-wise, but just that sweet, Southern hospitality and the idea of always trying to be a good person. It was really hard. I didn’t want her to be annoying. I wanted her to be endearing. I wanted my accent to be right, because I’m Southern and it would drive us crazy if it was wrong. It just happened…

PC: And Woody wanted us to have very pronounced Southern accents.

ERW: Yeah, that was the most consistent piece of direction I got from him: “Bigger, more Southern. You should be in a potato sack with bare feet, with a Bible,” whatever that meant. (laughs) Once you get that hair goin’, and the nails, and the outfits, it’s hard not to become a different person. The tan was the hardest part.

Woody Allen with Evan Rachel Wood and Henry Cavill on the set of Whatever Works.

The title, Whatever Works, seems to refer to a specific philosophy that Woody Allen has always adhered to. Do the three of you relate to it, as well?

LD: It’s actually in conflict with my own philosophy, which is "whatever doesn’t work." (laughter)

ERW: That’s the sequel.

LD: That’s pretty much what I subscribe to. Anyone who finds me unattractive, that’s the one I want. (laughter)

Larry, a lot of people are saying that you’re playing the “Woody Allen character” in the film, and people have been comparing the two of you for years, since you started doing Curb Your Enthusiasm. So how are you different from the character of Boris, and how are you similar?

LD: I didn’t want to “do” Woody Allen, first of all. Boris and I are different in that I’m way more normal than he is. I enjoy life. I play golf. I like having sex. I have normal wants and needs. He’s insane, really. He’s really on the edge. Like I was telling somebody earlier, I don’t wear shorts, so that’s a huge difference. I’m a much better dresser than he is. We’re similar in that we both have some disdain for the human race, and we both come from similar roots. We both had over-booked Bar-Mitzvahs, I’m sure. (laughs)

ERW: God, I wish I could have seen that.

Do you think a lot of Boris’ misery was born from the fact that he’s so brilliant? Don’t you think that the smarter you are, the more difficult it is to be happy? And this question applies to all of your characters.

LD: Yeah, I think that’s probably true. I think religious people for the most part are much happier than atheists.

ERW: Though we get to have sex. (laughter)

LD: That’s true.

PC: I don’t know. I don’t know that there is a correlation. I think there are brilliant people who are very happy and really stupid people who are very unhappy. I think happiness is not intellect-driven. And I think that’s what Woody is saying with this film.

ERW: Sometimes I’ve known people to be so smart they’re stupid. They’re so in their heads and get so caught up in themselves that they miss out on so much, and it’s a shame. It really is. (laughter)

Conleth Hill and Patricia Clarkson in Whatever Works.

One great thing you all got to indulge in was the theatricality that goes into the performances of a Woody Allen film. Patricia, you especially really got to let ‘er rip with your character.

PC: That’s exactly it. And a lot of it has to do with the way he shoots. He puts the camera in such a way that he’s always shooting you at the right distance and capturing you in the right place. He makes you look good, and you don’t realize it in the midst of shooting it. He also gives you breath, and he shoots the body. The body never lies. That’s what’s beautiful about Woody: he shoots you in all your glory. Films so often are neck-up acting nowadays, there’s a lot that goes on south of the Mason-Dixon line that the audience can see. No pun intended. (laughs) The very fact of how he shoots it is theatrical in its own way.

Larry, how was it breaking the third wall, and talking into the camera?

LD: That was actually not as hard as communicating with the other actors. It was easier for me not to have to talk with anyone but an audience, to some degree, so I like that.

On the theatricality point, how did you keep yourselves from going over-the-top into caricature?

PC: We relied on Woody’s judgment. He’s Woody Allen.

ERW: He’ll tell you if it’s too much, and it’s usually too little for him. I’m used to doing such subtle stuff and he was like “Act up a storm!”

LD: You know you’re in good hands, so you don’t really think about it.

What’s next for you all?

LD: I just finished shooting the newest season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and I’m editing that right now.

Any plans to write something new?

LD: Yes, but I’m not sure what that is right now. I’m pretty sure it will be a comedy, though. (laughter)

PC: C’mon, we all want to see your take on Medea. (laughter)

ERW: I would love to see that! That’s a genius idea.

And Evan and Patricia, what’s next for you?

PC: I should say a new translation of Medea. (laughter)

ERW: That’s a good one! (laughs)

PC: I have two other films coming out this year, Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, and a beautiful film called Cairo Time. I just finished shooting a film called Main Street, which was Horton Foote’s final screenplay. I’m in that with Ellen Burstyn. I’m not sure what’s next, which is a good place for me to be in. I have a movie about Tallulah Bankhead that we’re in the process of getting going, so we’ll see.

LD: I could see that.

PC: Thank you!

ERW: What am I doing? I’m doing a couple episodes of True Blood, playing a vampire queen, then I’m playing Mary Jane in Spider-Man on Broadway…

PC: Which I will be at on opening night! Whoo-hoo!

ERW: Yeah, you will. And that should be up and running by February, I think.

Larry, do you plan on doing more film work now?

LD: That would depend on the people who are making the movies. I haven’t been inundated with offers yet, so we’ll see.


Theatrical trailer for Whatever Works.

Read more!

MARK RYDELL REMEMBERS KILLING JOHN WAYNE...AND BETTE MIDLER!

(Mark Rydell directing John Wayne in The Cowboys, above.)

By Jon Zelazny

(Note: This interview is also appearing at Eight Million Stories.)

June 11th marks the 30th anniversary of the passing of screen legend John Wayne. Most of the directors who made his classic films are of course long gone as well, so I was very pleased to sit down with Mark Rydell, director of The Cowboys (1972), the epic cattle drive saga most Western fans regard as Wayne’s last great starring role.

Rydell began directing theater in New York City in the early sixties, and went on to television and movies, including hits like The Rose (1979) and On Golden Pond (1981). We met at The Actors Studio in West Hollywood, where he and co-director Martin Landau continue to moderate acting classes.

JON: When did you first join The Actors Studio?

MARK RYDELL: The fifties. I went through the Neighborhood Playhouse in 1949; I studied with Sanford Meisner for two years, then I was very fortunate to be on "As the World Turns" for many years, so I avoided a lot of the unemployment agony so many actors go through.

The first time I auditioned for the Actors Studio, they turned me down. I was enraged that they would reject me… but Elia Kazan, Lee Strasberg, and Harold Clurman thought I needed a little more seasoning. Once I got in, I became Kazan’s assistant, and he was very helpful to me in my own career. He was simply the greatest director of actors I’ve ever been exposed to. There’s a new book out about him; it just came out a week ago, called Kazan on Directing. Wonderful book.

One passage I always remember from his autobiography is when he said that after winning the Oscar for directing his third movie (Gentlemen’s Agreement, 1947), he figured it was time he learned something about camera work. Apparently, all he did was work with the actors initially, and left the visual style entirely in the hands of his cinematographers.

It’s true. When you’re a theater director in New York, and then you come to Hollywood to direct a picture, suddenly you’re in charge of all these crews; the lighting people, the sound, all these technical things. Something I’ll advise young directors to do is go to museums and study paintings. You know, how do you create a frame that’s filled with dramatic tension? You learn about composition…

I’m always interested in how painters “light” things.

Sure. Look at any Rembrandt painting; see where the light source is, how it affects the subject, where the shadows are. When you direct theater, your main tools are the actors and the script; when it comes to movies, you have to expand your judgment to the various aspects of visual presentation.

Though I get the sense not a lot of movie directors are coming out of theater anymore. People coming in seem to be mostly from commercials and music videos.

And you know what the problem is with those commercial guys? They only know how to keep it alive for thirty seconds. They’re very skilled, these directors—staggeringly brilliant and sophisticated visually—but I find they rarely understand the depth of written material. So many commercials today don’t even tell a story, or have anything to do with the product; they’re literally just thirty seconds of dazzling images… so you’ll associate the product with something you found viscerally exciting.

Rydell’s debut feature film, The Fox (1967), was based on a D.H. Lawrence story, and won the Golden Globe for Best Drama. His second film, The Rievers (1969), was adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by William Faulkner.

That’s kind of unusual, starting a feature career with two prestige pieces. Most people have to start with trash.

I did plenty of trash. That was television: you’d get a script for something like "The Ben Casey Show" or "Dr. Kildare;" you read it, and you see it’s crap. So what do you do? You have to work. So you find something in the material that moves you, something private, and you let that private interest shape the rest of it, so by the time you’ve finished directing your "Gunsmoke" or whatever, you think it’s the best thing you’ve ever done.

I assume what generally moved you back then was working with the actors?

That’s probably my dominant skill. I think it’s a pleasure to work with actors; they’re so vulnerable, they’re so available, they’re so geared to do the right thing…

But being an actor yourself, you appreciate them because you know their process. I think a lot of directors regard actors like they’re space aliens. And I think it’s worse for men. It’s “cute” when women dedicate themselves to acting, but when a man does it… I think a lot of people see it as un-masculine.

Marlon Brando used to say that to me; that acting was a child’s game, and not for men. He was a very tough guy. Strong, sensitive, very competitive; an amazing actor—his ability to accept imaginary circumstances and behave within them was incomparable—but he was very unhappy. A sad, sad fellow.

And then there was John Wayne… How did you get involved in The Cowboys?

An agent walked in and put an unpublished novel on my desk. I sat down and read the first fifteen pages or so, and it was about this man who loses all his ranch hands to a gold rush. He’s got 1,500 head of cattle to get to market, and he walks into a schoolhouse. I knew I had a movie right there.

Did you have any particular affinity for Westerns?

I was from the Bronx; I’d never been on a horse in my life. I watched Westerns growing up, but I felt apart from them. It wasn’t my department. But doing all those "Gunsmoke" episodes—maybe a dozen or so—was a big help. We shot them in Thousand Oaks, which was really open country back then. Twenty minutes from L.A., and there wasn’t a telephone line in sight.

So I took that Cowboys manuscript to John Calley at Warner Bros., threw it on his desk, and said, “You’ve got 24 hours to make a decision on this before I go elsewhere.” He said, “Arrogant, Mark, aren’t you?” I said, “Absolutely. This is a big deal.” He called me an hour later, and said we had a deal.

So John Wayne wasn’t even involved yet?

No, and I didn’t want him; I wanted George C. Scott. But they had a deal with Wayne, and Calley said, “Let’s just go meet with him. He really wants to do it.” He was shooting in Mexico, so we got on the Warner Bros. jet…which I thought was terrific, but it was ultimately charged to my Cowboys budget. Nothing’s free!

I was absolutely stunned by John Wayne. I mean, he was the exact opposite of all my ideals—he was very right wing, one of the founders of the black list in the fifties—and I was this Jewish musician from the Bronx with pretty liberal views. So there I am sitting with him. He shook my hand—my hand disappeared inside his, it was so big—and he said, “I’d really appreciate it if you gave me the chance to play this part, sir.” I was completely seduced by him. I told him, “Let’s never talk about politics, let’s just talk art.”

And he was fabulous; the first guy on the set every morning, and the last guy to leave at night. This man I had loathed… I had disagreed with every position he’d ever taken, but I learned a lot from him, about determination, and commitment.

(Wayne and Rydell, above, on the set of The Cowboys.)


What I’ve read about his late career is that he surrounded himself with cronies, from the directors and writers on down. It sounds like that wasn’t the case here.

Nope. I had him alone. And he called me “Sir” for the whole picture! I was a kid, in my thirties, and he was a giant, a 6’ 5” walking icon. It was amazing. We shot it all around Santa Fe, and to walk into a restaurant there with John Wayne… everybody came over for autographs… and I never saw him turn away a single fan.

He certainly looks like he’s enjoying himself in the picture. So I guess, unlike Brando, he never tired of stardom. He really loved being John Wayne.

And he loved being with those kids. And they adored him as well; they climbed all over him like he was jungle jim. He also loved that I cast a bunch of people from The Actors Studio around him, like Roscoe Lee Browne and Bruce Dern. He was very keen to appear with them; he really wanted to show that he was as good an actor as they were.

Yeah, Roscoe Lee Browne is amazing in it. I can’t think of a Western that ever had a better role for a black actor. His presence, his voice... he was like Orson Welles.

I first directed Roscoe in a play called "Bohikee Creek" at The Actors Studio. He and Billy Gunn played these dirt poor clam diggers off the coast of South Carolina; for the whole play, they talked like, “We gone git dat boat, an’ den we gone do lahk…” Well, the reaction from the audience was tremendous, and the two of them came out afterwards to answer questions. When Roscoe began to speak in his own voice—these beautiful, melodious tones—people were just stunned. They couldn’t believe it.

(Wayne, far right, and the cowboys.)

So much was made at the time that Bruce Dern played the first villain to ever kill John Wayne in a movie. Is that actually true?

It wasn’t so much that he died, but that he got killed so far before the end. There’s still another whole act left to go.

The brutality of it is also pretty shocking, given that the tone of most of it is fairly benign. Then those bullet hits come… it’s like a scene out of Peckinpah.

Exactly. That’s what we wanted. That it comes like a slap in the face.

Also, when you think about that era—the early seventies—I’m sure a lot of John Wayne’s fans savored those moments in his movies when he kicked some hippie ass. I can just imagine all these tough guys going to The Cowboys… and sitting there in disbelief when this squirrelly, longhaired punk actually gunned down the Duke!

Bruce only half-jokingly said it ruined his career; that people just thought of him for years as the psycho who killed John Wayne.

Of course, psychos were already his stock in trade; he’d been doing it in those biker movies for years. I’m guessing The Cowboys was probably the first time a lot of mainstream America really noticed him. And he’s absolutely riveting; one of the greatest Western bad guys of all time I think. And he doesn’t even have that many scenes.

But he sure makes the most of them. That scene where he’s dunking the kid in the water… see, Bruce was very smart: he never got friendly with any of those kids. He was very cold to them, so of course they all felt intimidated by him. “Why doesn’t Bruce like me?” So when it came to that scene, where he threatens to drown the kid, or later, when he crumples the glasses—there’s not a lot of acting there; that boy was scared.

They say you should never work with children or animals. How hard is it keeping control over a herd of cattle and a cast full of kids?

The cattle drive was really quite complex. We had maybe twenty outriders, ready to come in and rescue somebody in case there was a problem. The kids really were herding those 1,500 head of cattle, and John Wayne insisted on doing everything himself; he had no stuntman. Even in the beginning, when he’s fighting that horse—that’s all him. All that tough riding; he did it all. He was an amazing guy; he just blew my mind. I consider it a major privilege that I spent those 102 days with him. And he was so pleased with the picture.

I haven’t seen that many of your films, so I rented The Rose (1979) last weekend as well. I was really surprised. I mean, when rock fans talk about the great rock ‘n roll movies, no one ever mentions it. But they should. What was it that attracted you to that story?

This woman turning herself inside out. The rise of an extraordinary talent—it was based on Janis Joplin.

Did you listen to rock music?

Not as much as jazz. I was a professional jazz piano player before I became an actor; I’m really the generation prior to rock ‘n roll. But I’d met Janis.

But she must have been gone before you had much sense of who she was.

Yeah, but even if you didn’t like rock ‘n roll, when she performed… I mean, you see it in the various films that were taken of her.

Have you seen people self-destruct like that?

I have indeed. I’ve been around long enough to see drugs destroy a lot of people. Many of my closest friends. As a matter of fact, I escaped by the skin of my teeth.

You sound like you were such a together guy.

That’s a function of psychoanalysis. In those days, I wasn’t so together. In the early days, drugs were present, and I experimented as well. But somehow I escaped. I never let myself go the distance, like so many people did in the sixties.

I think even more than drugs, Rose’s most tragic flaw is her insecurity; her insatiable craving for any kind of love and acceptance… it just breaks your heart. I’ve never been that crazy about Bette Midler before, but man, she was just…

She’s amazing. And it took ten years for Fox to accept her in the role. They offered me the picture, and they wanted a number of stars I could mention, and that we’d loop all the singing.

They didn’t want to go with an actual rock singer?

They wanted a star. Like Jessica Lange, who was big at the time. I said I wanted Bette Midler because I’d seen her performing in the gay baths in New York, and she was brilliant beyond belief. I knew she was the only person who could do it, but they didn’t know who she was. So I walked away.

You really have to fight against conventional thinking when you’re a director. Because people with less imagination automatically go to what’s comfortable. Nobody wants to be responsible for doing something daring, so you’re always fighting mediocrity with many, many people in this business. They’re the people who are all about success; who want to hang on to that corner office, and the fancy car. For them, mediocrity is safer.

So three or four other directors came and went from The Rose, and finally when Bette emerged as a star with her nightclub act, and the studio people saw it, and they knew I was right, they came back to me and said, “Okay, we’ll do it with her.”



I expected she’d be good in the scenes where she’s performing on stage, but she’s exceptionally good in the intimate scenes as well.

Unafraid of revealing every intimate moment of her personality. She’d never really acted on camera before, but with the slightest bit of encouragement, she was ready to expose it all. I found her to be a miraculous talent. I’ve only known three or four geniuses in my time, and she’s definitely one of them.

And Hollywood never knew what to do with her after that. She got an Academy Award nomination for The Rose, but they just kept putting her in these dumb comedies, and her career really disappeared. I had a couple great projects I wanted her for, but they didn’t want her. They wouldn’t finance them.

I’ve never seen Frederic Forrest in a better part either. He reminded me of Sam Shepard. But I thought Alan Bates seemed a little unsure of himself.

That was by choice. He was an extremely focused actor, and he loved playing that part. You didn’t think his performance was successful?

What I sensed was some hesitancy… like he wasn’t sure how mean that guy was supposed to be. Like he’s trying to be the good cop and the bad cop at the same time.

Exactly. But he’s in control. Tough when he had to be.

His character was an invention, right? That wasn’t based on Janis’s manager?

No. Janis was with Albert Grossman.

And Bette’s manager at that time was a guy named Aaron Russo. This bear of a guy; vulgar, crude; a nightclub manager in Chicago. The first day of shooting, we were doing that penthouse scene in New York. I started to walk over to Bette, and I feel this arm on mine. It’s this thug, and he says, “What are you doing?” I said, “I have to talk to Bette.” He said, “You talk to me, and I’ll talk to Bette.” I turned to my A.D. and said, “May I have the police, please? This guy is never to be on the set again.” I told Bette, “You have two seconds to decide. He can only get you a bigger trailer; I can make you good in this movie, and I don’t want him around.” And the cops took him away.

And the picture was another huge success. That was a great decade for you.

There’s nothing better for a director than a financial success. They don’t much give a shit out here if it’s any good, so to have both—a picture that’s good, and makes a ton of money… but I had a lot of success in my early career, as an actor and a director.

Now they’re kind of retiring me. They’re more interested in those directors who can dazzle you. All the pictures I made… I don’t think I could get any of them made today. The market is so different; they’re not interested in substantial, human dramas. That’s what attracted me to become a director in the first place: the dramatic interaction between people. Now it’s about spectacle, and explosions, and special effects—I’m waiting for people to get fed up with all that.

I just spoke with Walter Hill, and he offered a very similar assessment.

He’s a brilliant guy… and a very good writer as well.

He thinks it’s going to turn around though. That people will eventually come back to good stories.

I hope he’s right... I haven’t got much time left!

####

Read more!

Chris Lemmon: The Hollywood Interview

Actor and author Chris Lemmon.

CHRIS LEMMON SHEDS LIGHT ON JACK LEMMON: THE MAN BEHIND THE MAGIC
By
Alex Simon

Contrary to popular belief, not all movie stars’ offspring had dysfunctional lives filled with drug abuse, domestic violence and self-destruction. Some children of stars have even gone on to live “normal” lives outside of LA-LA land, and hold their famous parents in high esteem. Take the case of Chris Lemmon. Born June 22, 1954 in L.A., Chris is the son of two-time Oscar winning actor Jack Lemmon and actress Cynthia Stone. Although his parents divorced when he was young, Chris remained close to both throughout their lives and penned a tribute to his father, (who passed in 2001) called A Twist of Lemmon in 2006, published by Algonquin Books.



A successful actor in his own right and a graduate of Cal Arts, Chris Lemmon most recently has collaborated with Sony Pictures Home Entertainment on a new boxed set of DVDs featuring five of his father’s earliest films, spanning his salad days beginning in 1954, to his pinnacle as the nation’s top box office draw in 1964: PHFFT!, Operation Mad Ball, The Notorious Landlady, Under the Yum Yum Tree, and Good Neighbor Sam all arrive from Sony June 9 in The Jack Lemmon Film Collection, which also features a brand new documentary, hosted by Chris, entitled Jack Lemmon: The Man Behind the Magic.



Chris Lemmon sat down with us recently to share memories of his father, his fathers’ films, and his own journey of self-discovery.

After reading your book and watching the documentary that’s included with the DVD set, I felt I saw some different sides of your dad, whom I’ve admired since I was a kid. Why don’t we start out with you just sharing some reflections about your father that come to mind.
We had a terrific relationship, and as I tried to portray in the book, there were some bumps in the road—it wouldn’t have been a real relationship if it weren’t—but he wasn’t just my father. He truly was my best friend, and I think that’s one of the most difficult things I’ve had to deal with since he left. Maybe that’s the reason it’s been so rewarding for me, the most rewarding endeavor I’ve ever undertaken, writing the book, and now to see it transform, hopefully, into one of its interreges into this terrific box set and documentary.

Jack Lemmon and Judy Holliday in PHFFFT! (1954)

Was that your primary impetus for writing the book: to explore your relationship with your dad on a psychological level?
No, not at all. I truly wrote the book as a catharsis. It was strictly a defense mechanism. As I say in the book, I sat next to my dad in the hospital during those final months when he was there, but he wasn’t. I’d gone through the same thing with my mom years earlier, and I did the same thing with him as I did with her: I held his hand and just remembered. After he left, there was a great disparity in my life, and I started writing to combat that, literally as a defense mechanism. As I wrote these memories down, other ones would just open up, so it was a bit like peeling an onion, I guess. I began to realize that not only did it heal those broken areas, to paraphrase Hemingway; it started to turn into something more than just that exercise. I started writing about fathers and sons, about relationships and love and loss, loss of innocence, our journeys in life and finding our paths. I started to think that this had become something more than I was just doing for myself, and to give to my kids so they could know that side of Jack Lemmon that only I knew. Then I felt compelled to share that side of dad that only I knew with all those people out there who I knew loved him, too. To this day, I applaud Algonquin Books for having the guts to put out a “star’s kid” book that didn’t have any wire coat hangers in it. (laughs)

L to R: Jack Lemmon with daughter Courtney and son Chris.

And it became a best-seller, reprinted into paperback.
Yeah, the response just seems to keep on going, two years later. It’s been so positive and heartwarming and rewarding for me, so I want to keep Pop going as much as I can and for as long as I can. And obviously, all this has been tremendously rewarding for me, as well, writing this. So when Sony found out a year ago that I had been trying to develop a boxed DVD set of Pop’s films with the book as its core, they came to me and said “Look, we have five very special films we’d like to put together.” I love Sony SPE to being with. They’ve done a terrific job on all the collections they’ve done. They’re a class act, so I was immediately intrigued. Then when I looked at the titles they’d chosen, I thought ‘Wow, this is a ten year period of my father’s life, 1954-64, and they fall one every two years, and are really almost a biography in themselves, and look at the artist, who at the beginning is an up-and-coming star, and at the end of those ten years, becomes the number one box office star in Hollywood. It shows a cross-section of his work as an actor, and also a cross-section of his growth as a person, because he imbued so much of what he did with himself, and that, married with the concept of the book, allowed us to produce the DVD that we did, and that’s something that I don’t think has really been done before. It really is a cut above. Seeing this finished product, I think we did it. I couldn’t be more pleased. To use one of Pop’s favorite expressions: “I’m tickled pink.”

Lemmon and Kim Novak in The Notorious Landlady (1962).

Plus, these titles represent some of his lesser-known work, which are now available to a new audience for the first time in decades.
Absolutely, because most of these aren’t the kind of films you were going to find. To have them bring these out, clean them up, and put them onto DVD so, baby, they’re gonna be there forever, it’s gonna open up a whole other area that most people haven’t seen. For those people who adore Pop, you couldn’t ask for a better collection. And even individually, all these films rock.

Lemmon (second from left) in Operation Mad Ball (1957).

It was fascinating to watch this really early work of your dad’s—I discovered his work when he was middle-aged. The China Syndrome was the first film of his I saw in the theater—and what struck me was the fact that someone really blew it by not casting your dad and Tom Hanks as father and son in a film. Tom Hanks must’ve studied your dad’s early work voraciously as a young actor, because when you look at his work when he was this age, late 20s to mid-30s, their energy, their mannerisms, even their vocal inflections, were eerily similar.
You know it’s interesting you bring Tom Hanks up. Tom came to Pop’s memorial at Paramount after he’d passed away. My wife and I had a chance to visit with him and Rita (Wilson) for quite a while, and he’s just such a genuinely fine man, and I get asked a lot if I think there are the same kinds of stars and icons these days that are of the same caliber as my Pop, and there’s a few names that come to mind, with Tom certainly being one of them. So yeah, I agree with you. I think it would have been a hell of a good show, and they have a lot of similarities.

Chris Lemmon poses with dad's first Best Actor Oscar for The Apartment, in 1961.

One of my favorite stories in your book is when you and your dad chased his escaped Standard Poodles through Beverly Hills.
Walter and Virgil, yes. They were infamous. As with all the stories in the book, there was an underlying message that I was trying to tell humorously. The underlying part of that story was the fact that I had decided to not necessarily follow in my dad’s footsteps, because nobody wants to follow in King Kong’s footsteps, but that life had seemingly forced me to follow in my father’s footsteps, by deciding to become an actor so it was a very confusing time for me. So when I tell that story, that’s the underlying current. It was one of my favorite memories. There was Pop and I, and at that time, he enjoyed a wee bit of the grape, as they say. He later went AA and admitted he had a drinking problem, by the way, but at this point, we had gone out to a nice dinner, with some good wine, and some good fatherly advice and we went back to do the thing we loved to do together the most, which was play the piano. We could jam together all night long. Unfortunately, we’d forgotten to close the front door and Walter and Virgil, seizing upon the opportunity, immediately fled. We were summarily sent out into the night by Betty, the maid, to find them, which we did in typical Lemmon form, which was Pop driving about 3 miles per hour in his thunderously huge, old Mercedes, and me sitting on the hood yelling ‘Walter! Virgil!’ Then it occurred to us that they’d gone to the same place they always went to: James Coburn’s house next door. (laughs) So we parked the car, snuck onto Coburn’s property, thrashing about the place, falling into puddles and pools, falling into cacti, again in typical Lemmon form, because I’m just like my dad, in that I’ve got that whole bumbling, bewildered fall over the finish line head-first thing. Finally, we were just a mess by the time we got to the back of the house, covered in dust and ripped to shreds. We finally see them and they start running from us and we chase them, and finally we stop, and are gasping for air. My dad is bent over with his hand on my shoulder and he suddenly stops, and says “I think somebody’s looking at us.” And we both stopped and turned around, and there’s Coburn, God bless him, all six feet-four inches of him, standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling window of his bedroom in this huge, long robe. He looked like this fierce lion, with his arms crossed over his chest, staring at us. Pop and I then both pointed to each other simultaneously and said ‘He did it.’ (laughs) True story.

Chris and Jack enjoying dinner at Seattle's iconic Space Needle, 1962.

You got to spend a fair amount of time on your dad’s sets as a kid. Was there one shoot you remember most fondly?
I have tremendous memories of The Great Race, which to this day is one of my favorite films of Jack Lemmon. I was about ten or eleven when that film was made, so going to that wonderland was just amazing. I remember riding around in the Fatemobile with Pop. I have memories of Tony Curtis giving me fencing lessons when he was in the famous scene with his shirt off with Ross Martin. So I was there fencing with The Great Leslie. Blake Edwards made golf carts that looked just like all the cars they drove in the race, and he insisted that everyone race to lunch every day from whatever location they were on in the golf carts. So I remember racing in Pop’s Fatemobile golf cart against Blake, whose golf cart was, of course, the Pink Panther. That was one of the classic moments of my life because Pop, as you may remember from the book, was a horrible driver.

Lemmon (L) and Tony Curtis in Blake Edwards' The Great Race (1965).

Yeah, it sounded like he trashed ¾ of the exotic cars ever made.
Yeah, pretty much. He took ‘em all out. He literally did back a Jag XKE over the back of a parking structure. He took Bill Bixby’s old MG-TC and wrapped it around a tree up in the Hollywood Hills. And the underlying element of all those car anecdotes in the book was to give you a chronology of Pop’s films. It was basically giving his credits because he crashed one car per film. Basically the final line of the book was, he may have been a lousy driver, but boy was he a great actor.

Lemmon and Mike Connors (aka Mannix) in Good Neighbor Sam (1964).

In looking at your dad’s credits on the IMDb, he has 97 credits just as an actor. I don’t think we’ll ever see, at least given the way the business is now, another actor that has as large, or varied, a body of work again.
Maybe not. It’s tough these days to compare the industry in those days, because it’s so much tougher to get films made today, for a lot of different reasons. Again, one of the themes of the book: things change, loss of innocence, and that’s just the way it is. I think there are certain comparisons that can be made, again going back to that question about whether there are any actors of the same ilk today as there were in my dad’s generation. I certainly think Kevin Spacey belongs in that category, but there are a few out there that have the class, and the distinction and the great taste that my Pop had, and as a result, I think most if not all of them will have a list of credits like that at the end. So even as we move on and march to a different beat, we still have all those great actors that will live on in their films, in all their shining glory.

Jack Lemmon and Chris Lemmon playing father and son in Blake Edwards' That's Life (1986).

Tell us about your dad’s mantra of “magic time.”
As Kevin so eloquently says in the forward to the book, and I tried repeating throughout the book, when pop would say “Magic time” before each take or before going out on stage, it was more than just a calling to his muse. It was a real statement of his character. He was a human leprechaun. He was a Munchkin. Being around him was a magical experience, so when people ask “What is the most important thing your father ever gave you?” it was exactly that: those wonderful memories we shared together. And that’s what he’s given to anyone he’s ever touched in person or on screen, in equal amounts: magic. That’s who and what Jack Lemmon was.

Read more!

Sam Mendes--The Hollywood Interview

Director Sam Mendes.


SAM MENDES HITS THE ROAD WITH AWAY WE GO
By
Alex Simon


Sam Mendes is one of the rare hyphenates who remains active directing on the stage and in film, in a time when the two worlds have become largely segregated from one another. Having been lauded with virtually every prestigious award for stage and screen by time he was in his mid-30s, Sam Medes was a wunderkind almost from the start.

Born August 1, 1965 in Reading, Berkshire, England to a university lecturer father and a mother who authored children’s books, Mendes’ parents divorced when he was five. Upon reaching Cambridge University, he quickly fell in love with theater and film, joining the Chichester Festival Theater after graduation in 1987. Soon, he was directing Dame Judi Dench in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, winning the Critics Circle Award for Best Newcomer. Following work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Mendes became artistic director of the reopened Donmar Warehouse in London, and later directed the Broadway revival of Cabaret, which won four Tony Awards, including Best Actress for the late Natasha Richardson.

Sam Mendes hit pay dirt with his first feature film, American Beauty, which swept the 1999 Academy Awards, taking home five statuettes, including Best Director for Mendes who, at the tender age of 34, was now a major player in Hollywood. Mendes followed Beauty with a stellar body of work: the Depression-era drama Road to Perdition, the Gulf War epic Jarhead, and last year’s adaptation of Richard Yates’ iconic novel Revolutionary Road, which starred Mendes’ wife, 2008’s Oscar-winner for The Reader, Kate Winslet.

Sam Mendes’ latest feature film is a departure for the director, whose previous cinematic efforts have been painted on broad canvases. Away We Go tells the story of a happily married couple (Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski) who, upon discovering their first child is on the way, travel cross-country to find the perfect place to settle down, encountering friends, family and some new perspective on the way. Reminiscent of some of the ‘70s’ greatest road pictures, Away We Go was written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, and features stellar support from a dream cast, including Allison Janney, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jeff Daniels, Catherine O’Hara, Chris Messina and Melanie Lynskey, to name but a few. The Focus Features release hits theaters June 5.

Sam Mendes sat down with us recently during an LA stopover to discuss his latest film and remarkable career. Here’s what followed:

This film reminded me of some of my favorite road pictures from the ‘70s, like Harry & Tonto and The Last Detail. Is that what struck you when you initially read the script?
No, what struck me was the script itself, and it actually felt very contemporary to me, as opposed to something that was a throwback. It’s a very “generation Y” story. It reminded me of the period, in our thirties, when my friends and I really made the decisions that informed the rest of our lives: we got married, had kids. Very few of us got married in our twenties and started families. That doesn’t happen as much anymore. So I thought it captured that very well, and I love the road movie genre and the road movie format. I like the simplicity of it: Start at A. Got to get to B. And the audience knows where you’re heading because they’ve got the itinerary. It’s like chapters in a book. The other thing I loved about this movie is that people keep trying to label it a “romantic comedy,” which it isn’t. A romantic comedy is “boy meets girl, boy loses girl,” and so on. This is not that at all. This establishes very quickly that this couple is in love and they’re going to remain in love. There’s no crisis in their relationship like there would be in a classic romantic comedy. Throughout the movie they’re like a unit, almost like one character. The movie is about what they see, and what they learn. So I saw it much more as a road movie, first and foremost.

John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph in Away We Go.

What movies did you study before you shot it?
I immediately thought of all the great Hal Ashby movies, The Last Detail being the primary one. There was a simplicity in his work stylistically, and also the way he used music, was years ahead of its time. His films are almost more inspiring now than they were when they came out, or even 10-15 years ago. Now you’ve got all these great directors like Spike Jonze, Judd Apatow, Cameron Crowe, all saying that one of their biggest influences was “the master, Hal Ashby.” So I watched The Last Detail several times, and thought ‘It’s so simple in its presentation, yet so complex in the way the characters are presented, and the people that they meet,’ and how unafraid he is to meet someone and move on. There’s no tying up “loose ends” and having the characters come back in the end for some kind of payoff. The whole idea of an “arc” that every character has to have is just absurd. The Last Detail presented human encounters as they usually happen in life: you meet someone, you have the encounter, and you move on.

Like The Last Detail, Away We Go also has the characters encountering very specific cultural archetypes, that could only exist in the time and place that the film takes place. There are very contemporary characters in this film, as you said, just as there are characters in The Last Detail that you would only meet in 1973.
Right, right, and yet they stay with you, don’t they? And the sign of a great writer is to make all the characters familiar to you, archetypes as you said, but unique and sometimes strange in their own way. When I was reading the script, every character there reminded me of someone that I knew, yet they weren’t exactly like them because we’re all unique. That really was my way into the movie, and it didn’t change from that moment to now. I love the characters of that couple, and I feel that I really cast them right, and when that happens, two plus two equals five. When we did the first preview of the movie, there were about 25 people in the focus group, and literally everyone in the room loved the leading couple. If they hadn’t, I knew that we’d be in big trouble.

Mendes on the set of Away We Go.

The focus group experience must be like going for a dental checkup to the Laurence Olivier character in Marathon Man for any director. Is that true? Do you just dread it?
(laughs) That’s very good—like your teeth being pulled. You know, since I’ve done so much theater, I really like sitting with an audience watching my work. I like the feeling of being able to watch where they switch on, where they switch off, where they laugh, where they cry. The focus group, though, once you’ve gone through the first two or three questions and you’ve established that they like it, that’s when you want to leave, because then they’ll start trying to fish for all the reasons they don’t like it.

Kevin Spacey and Mena Suvari in American Beauty, 1999's Best Picture.

Wasn’t something like twenty minutes of American Beauty cut after a focus group screening—the sequence involving the back-story of Chris Cooper’s character?
No, that was me that cut that. It had nothing to do with a focus group. The movie never changed really after the first preview, aside from about a minute that I cut from the cheerleader sequence. The changes I made to that movie were long before an audience ever saw it. The only other person that ever saw it in a longer form was (screenwriter) Alan Ball, and the two producers.

And we’ll never see a “Director’s Cut” DVD release that restores that sequence?
No, the director’s cut is what’s out on DVD. I’d like to do a director’s cut of Jarhead, though.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard in Jarhead.

How was that film compromised?
I took the politics out of it.

Why?
I don’t know. Because it felt wrong at the time, I think. I was too close to it, and I couldn’t give it a context. We were in the middle of the height of the Gulf War, and people were determined to make the film into something that was political, and I felt that I wanted it to stand on its own, and be timeless. The thing I regret, which I didn’t have to do on Away We Go, was that I didn’t have a chance to be away from it for a while. I shot Away We Go, then did a play, then came back to the film and did post. So that gave me some objectivity with it, whereas with Jarhead, I was working on it right up until its release date. I had a strange experience during the premiere of Jarhead, I was watching it and thinking ‘Wait a minute, they’ve skipped a scene! Where did that scene go?’ Then I realized, I’d cut the fucking thing! (laughs) And that shouldn’t happen to you as a filmmaker. You should know the landscape of your movie intimately. That just shows you that sometimes when you don’t have the time, you can really compromise your own material without meaning to.

You were in post on Revolutionary Road when you started Away We Go, right?
Yes, I was. Revolutionary Road was long. We were supposed to release it the previous year, but we couldn’t get it together in time. In this case it was good for me to go from one to the other because I was able to work much more instinctively on this. Usually I’ve gone from movie-play-movie-play. And sometimes a year or two will go by between the play and the movie, which causes you to sort of lose your “movie muscles,” and you have to take a couple weeks to build them back up, so to speak. So I was really in the groove when I started this, and was making decisions very instinctively, from my gut. I think the movie really benefited from the fact that I didn’t over think, and over plan it.Revolutionary Road was threading a needle, whereas this was painting a canvas with warm colors.

This is a completely different kind of film for you. You usually paint on a huge canvas, whereas this was a small canvas, painted with what felt like watercolors. Was that your intention?
Yeah, absolutely. I’m glad you got that, and it was a great feeling to be working on a smaller canvas, so to speak.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road.

Speaking of Revolutionary Road, I was very happy to see one of Richard Yates’ stories finally adapted for the screen. Are you familiar with his short story anthology, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness?
Yeah, wonderful stories. John Frankenheimer actually had wanted to film Revolutionary Road in the early ‘60s, but wasn't able to, because the subject matter was a bit too frank to be filmable in that time. There’s a story in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness called “Saying Goodbye to Sally,” I think, which was about Yates going to Hollywood. It was nakedly autobiographical, and the character of the young director was based on Frankenheimer.

You mentioned the theater earlier. You’re one of the few directors today, Mike Nichols being the other, who goes back and forth between film and theater, whereas years ago, it was more commonplace. Talk to us about the different processes between working with actors in theater versus working with them in film.
Well, I used to think it was completely different, and when you’re shooting it is very different from doing a play. But I’m finding increasingly that the two are much closer together. I find that as I get more comfortable with film, I find myself working very much the same way and in the same atmosphere as when I’m in rehearsals for a play. The difference is that rehearsals for a play are everything, and rehearsals for a movie are not. You rehearse a play to the very end, and then when you put it up, it’s either going to work, or it’s not. With film, every day is a challenge which can make or break the film. Then you have to remake it again in the editing room. I’d say rehearsals for a play and the editing room for a movie are my favorite places to be.

Do you like to rehearse before you shoot?
Oh yeah. I like to rehearse every movie, sometimes for quite a long time. We rehearsed this for a total of about three weeks over a couple of months: five days here, three days there, just to keep the energy going and also because I knew the center of the film was John and Maya, and if they didn’t have an easy relationship with each other, and their chemistry wasn’t perfect by the time we shot, the film wouldn’t work.

Allison Janney and Maya Rudolph in Away We Go.

The other thing I noticed was you used different color palates for the different locations they traveled to.
Yeah, that was all intentional, and the other thing we did was allow a lot of improvisation in the movie. The scene with Allison Janney in Phoenix, where she’s calling her child over and over again, and he ignores her, that was all improvised. Allison did it during one take and I said ‘That’s great, just keep doing that.’ She thought I was being funny, and I said ‘No, I’m serious, just keep doing that.’ And then I told the kid to just ignore her. To be able to be that loose was great. I like to be able to get to the point with the actors where I can just throw stuff back and forth like that.

L to R: Maya Rudolph, John Krasinski and Maggie Gyllenhaal in Away We Go.

Maggie Gyllenhaal, I think, should be nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Living in Southern California you encounter so many pretentious, overbearing New Agers like her character.
(laughs) I know, wasn’t she great? She’s channeling something there, to be sure. That character is a great creation by David and Vendella, but taken to another level by a great actor.

Paul Newman and Tom Hanks in Road to Perdition.

My favorite film of yours is Road to Perdition. I was a fan of the graphic novel, but I loved the way you reinvented what was basically a John Woo Hong Kong film set during the Great Depression, and turned it into something completely different, basically an original work. We also need to talk about two people you worked with in the film: Paul Newman and Conrad Hall, two of my heroes.
They’re both very easy people to talk about. I suppose they were two of the biggest pleasures of my professional life, the more important relationship of the two being Conrad. We were really close friends, and he influenced everything about how I make movies. There isn’t a day that goes by on a set when I don’t think to myself ‘What would Connie do here?’ or just about the fact that I miss him. He was just a wonderful human being. They both were just great people who transcended their skills as artists and went into that very rare realm of just being great human beings. They were both able to keep their lives separate from their work. Conrad was the greatest lighting cameraman of the last 30-40 years, along with a handful of people like Gordon Willis, Haskell Wexler, Sven Nykvist, and just set the agenda for all the cinematographers that followed him.

They’re like a school of painters almost, aren’t they?
Yeah, they are. That’s exactly what you become a part of when you have that level of skill, and when you see the work, you realize what goes into it and that it’s very special. Newman was that way, too. I wrote an article about him after he died, and I knew him for such a small period of his life, but I think he influenced future generations of actors just as Connie did cinematographers. Plus, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who lived a better life than Paul did. He committed so much of himself to things outside of acting and set the standard in them all: charity, auto racing, entrepreneurship. Then, when he’d lost his leading man/movie star status, he was perfectly comfortable just being a great actor, doing character roles, and never lost his dignity. He wasn’t one of these people who clung onto fame with his fingertips, because I don’t think he cared.

Mendes and cinematographer Conrad L. Hall on the set of Road to Perdition.

Having Conrad Hall as your D.P. on your first feature must have been akin to being schooled by Yoda.
(laughs) Yes, it was. That’s exactly right. I was so in the dark as a filmmaker, I had to ask him ‘When do I say “action”?’ (laughs)

Was it less-daunting to have someone like that in your corner when you were starting out?
Yes, but on the other hand, it was also more daunting, because you’ve got someone who’s worked with John Huston, and shot Cool Hand Luke and In Cold Blood. It was like ‘Jesus Christ! What the fuck am I doing with this guy in the room with me?’ (laughs) And he also always wanted to direct, so I always had this voice in the back of my head with him saying ‘This kid’s got this job that I’d really like to be doing. Can he do it?’ And for the first couple weeks, he was probably wondering if I could, as I was finding my feet. But then we found a way of talking and being together that really worked. I miss him, still.

Let’s talk about your background. You were born and raised in and around London?
Yeah, London and Oxford.

Then you went to Cambridge.
Right, went from one university town to another.

Was your father a professor?
No, he was a lecturer at a university in London.

Did you discover the arts through him?
Both my parents, actually. I was always surrounded by books, so I’d say it was a combination of books and TV that fueled my interest, movies not so much then.

British TV was great then, with the Play of the Week series, and the like.
Yeah, exactly, plus the comedy was great: Monty Python, Fawlty Towers. So those were my major influences. Movies and theater didn’t really enter my life until university.

Was there one epiphanous moment where you knew that this was your calling?
Yeah, seeing Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas. It was a real epiphany. The further I get away from it, the bigger I think it was, actually. The main epiphany was the realization that you could make a movie in contemporary America that had a mythic scale, that dealt with big themes, and did so almost wordlessly. Everything about it was just perfect. I watched it three nights in succession. So that was a big moment for me, and might explain why I ended up making American films, as a Brit. And I still don’t quite know why I continue to do that. It’s just worked out that way.

Fate stepping in, perhaps.
Yeah, and now we live in New York because both Kate and myself are working so much in the States, we didn’t want to leave the kids behind in England. But we both love America, so it’s great.

Natasha Richardson as Sally Bowles in Mendes' Tony-winning production of Cabaret.

I interviewed Natasha Richardson five years ago and, like everyone who knew or got to meet her, was saddened by her passing. You directed her in her Tony-winning performance of the Cabaret revival. What are some of your memories of Natasha?
Yeah…you know it’s a terrible irony that so many of the things she wanted in her life were things that were given to her after she died, speaking professionally. Her fame rocketed after she died, and I remember thinking to myself ‘Why the fuck didn’t you all write these things about her while she was still alive?’ It was very frustrating in that respect, because she was such a wonderful person with a large, large heart and an amazing presence. She had a “force of nature” quality about her, and was just massively intelligent, as well. She had her dad’s theater instinct, with very precise taste and was very observant, which she also inherited from her mum. It’s just tragic that she won’t be here to contribute all that she was blessed with any longer, and worse, that she won’t be able to see her kids grow up.

Did you ever read her father, Tony Richardson’s, autobiography, The Long Distance Runner?
Yeah, great book, brilliant book. He was such an amazing, acerbic, intellectual man.

I saw your production of Cabaret in New York, and I imagine it must’ve been rather intimidating to step into the giant shoes that had interpreted it previously. But, as you did with Road to Perdition, you really reimagined and reinvented it to a large extent.
Yeah, someone said to me at the time “We’ve invented a new word for what you’ve done with Cabaret. We’re calling it ‘a revisal.’” (laughs) That is what it was, because it wasn’t really a revival of the original script. We included two songs from the movie, and one from the ’85 stage revival. It was a real patchwork of the different versions of the show. It was a very happy experience, that, and ran for a long time, for five years.

What are you working on now?
I’m doing two more plays with my company, The Bridge Project, and we’ll start rehearsing in the Fall, so I’ve got Summer off, which is great. And I’ll try to do a movie next year. I’m developing various things, so we’ll see what emerges. I’m always asked that, at this stage of the game after I’ve just finished a film. I always very foolishly say ‘Next I’m going to make this kind of movie,’ sounding very determined, and I always do the opposite. (laughs) I literally have no idea, and that’s part of the fun: flying blind for a while.


Trailer for Away We Go.

Read more!

DVD Playhouse--June 2009

DVD PLAYHOUSE—JUNE 2009
By
Allen Gardner

THE INTERNATIONAL (Sony) An Interpol agent (Clive Owen) joins forces with a Manhattan D.A. (Naomi Watts) to bring down an arms dealing ring and a corrupt global banking cartel that’s funding them. Superlative thriller was oddly ignored by critics and audiences alike, but expertly blends intelligence (courtesy screenwriter Eric Warren Singer’s masterfully-crafted script) and full-throttle action (director Tom Tykwer stages one of the great film shoot-outs in New York’s iconic Guggenheim Museum), making this dynamite thriller reminiscent of the best work from masters such as John Frankenheimer and Robert Aldrich. Armin Mueller-Stahl is wonderful as a world-weary covert op. Bonuses: Extended scene; Featurettes; Trailer. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround.
THE JACK LEMMON FILM COLLECTION(Sony) Five films from the two-time Oscar winning actor, focusing on his early career: PHFFT! is a zippy comedy from 1954, one of Lemmon’s earliest films, in which he and wife Judy Holiday find they’re having second thoughts after divorcing. Great script by George Axelrod. OPERATION MAD BALL (1957) stars Lemmon in a wacky military spoof about a bored private who attempts to throw a wing-ding of a party under his stuffy commanding officer’s nose. THE NOTORIOUS LANDLADY (1962) pairs Lemmon with Kim Novak, playing an American diplomat who unwittingly stumbles into jewel thieves, intrigue and murder in London. UNDER THE YUM-YUM TREE (1963) stars Lemmon as a perennial bachelor who finds that his newest, comely tenants might be even more than his libidinous nature can handle. Based on Lawrence Roman’s hit play. GOOD NEIGHBOR SAM (1964) has Lemmon as a very married ad exec who poses as the husband of a single girl to help her land a big inheritance. Funny stuff. Bonuses: Documentary hosted by Lemmon’s son, Chris; Vintage photo gallery; Lemmon in early episode of “Ford All-Star Theater”; Trailers. Widescreen. Dolby 2.0 mono.
GRAN TORNIO (Warner Bros.) Clint Eastwood delivers what may be his finest performance as Walt Kowalski, a retired auto worker whose once-blue collar, lily white Detroit neighborhood has been repopulated by Hmong immigrants, much to his bigoted dismay. When a local gang threatens a young man whom Walt reluctantly takes under his wing, the grizzled Korean war vet finds his values, and character, put to the test. One of the few "mixed bags" that Eastwood has ever made. While the film shines from his terrific performance and steady master's hand behind the camera, Clint the director also makes the near-fatal mistake of casting non-pros (real Hmong immigrants) in key roles, and their lack of experience before the camera is glaring. In addition, writer Nick Schenk's script is a one-note affair, populated by two-dimensional characters and predictable payoffs throughout. At turns both entertaining and frustrating. Worth watching just to see the great Eastwood at work, a true American treasure. Also available on Blu-ray disc. Bonuses: Featurettes. On Blu-ray: The Eastwood Way, a documentary that looks at Clint's creative process. Widescreen. Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround.
THE STRANGE ONE (Sony) Ben Gazzara and George Peppard made their film debuts in this riveting, surprisingly frank 1957 drama about a sinister military school cadet (Gazzara) who seems to have an inexplicable hold over his fellow cadets. Censored upon its initial release, this is the uncut version of the film, which remains faithful to Calder Willingham’s play, “End as a Man.” Fine support from Actor’s Studio grads such as Pat Hingle, Mark Richman and Larry Gates. Widescreen. Dolby 1.0 mono.
WALTZ WITH BASHIR (Sony Classics) Filmmaker Ari Folman recounts his horrific experiences in the Israeli army during the first Lebanon war, all told through animated vignettes. Scenes of haunting beauty mix with some of the most repellent images in recent memory. A truly unique work that drives home the folly of war and the high cost we all must endure from it. Also available on Blu-ray disc. Bonuses: Commentary by Folman; Featurettes; Interview with Folman. Widescreen. Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround.
FRIDAY THE 13th PARTS V-VII Paramount releases FRIDAY THE 13th PART V: A NEW BEGINNING, FRIDAY THE 13th PART VI: JASON LIVES, and FRIDAY THE 13th: THE FINAL CHAPTER, although “final” could hardly apply to a series that continued ad infinitum, even after every conceivable way of hacking up fornicating teenagers had been milked dry by the splatter genre’s sickest scribes, not the least of which was the remake of the original, which squirted across screens earlier this year. These “Deluxe Editions” feature cast and crew commentary, featurettes, documentaries on the films’ productions, as well as deleted scenes and original trailers. Beautifully restored and remastered picture and sound, but in the end, what’s the point? They were scarier on your older brother’s battered, grainy, ‘80s-era VHS. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround.
WOODSTOCK: THE DIRECTOR’S CUT (Warner Bros.) 40th anniversary edition of Michael Wadleigh’s landmark documentary of the 1969 Woodstock Music Festival in upstate New York, which signified the peak of the hippie movement, ‘60s rock, and a freewheeling idealism that was soon to be shattered with the tragedy at Altamont Speedway, escalation in Vietnam and Watergate. But enough naysaying: sit back and be enthralled at the pure genius of Jimi Hendrix, The Who, Janis Joplin, Crosby, Stills & Nash, and a who’s-who of iconic ‘60s bands and performers, all caught like lightning in a bottle in this remarkable cinematic document. Note: Martin Scorsese was one of the film’s editors. 2 disc set. Bonuses: Retrospective documentary. Bonus disc featuring extra performances. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround.
DEFINANCE (Paramount) True story of the Bielski brothers (Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell), scrappy farmers who led their fellow Jews into the forests of Eastern Europe and managed to build a formidable resistance army to occupying Nazi forces. Terrific story is a sort of Semitic version of Spartacus, but is undone almost as soon as it starts, by ham-fisted direction and writing (and don’t even get me started about the overbearing musical score) that makes most movies-of-the-week look subtle in comparison. Too bad, because there’s some fine work here, particularly by Craig. Bonuses: Commentary by director Edward Zwick; Featurettes; Trailers. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround.
VALKYRIE (20th Century Fox) Tom Cruise (oddly cast, but still effective) stars as Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who masterminded an assassination plot against Adolf Hitler during the waning days of WW II. Fascinating history lesson is also a terrific adventure film, with some truly nail-biting suspense, courtesy of director Bryan Singer. Fine supporting cast of iconic actors such as Terence Stamp, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, and Tom Wilkinson. Two disc set. Also available on Blu-ray disc. Bonuses: Commentary by Cruise and Singer, co-writers Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander; Featurettes; Documentary. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 5.1 surround.
LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD AND OTHER STORIES (Malaprop Productions) Underground classic starring a then-16 year-old Christina Ricci in a twisted version of the classic fairy tale, gorgeously photographed and narrated by Quentin Crisp. Packs a wallop for a 30 minute short! Stylish, scary and subversively sexy. Bonuses: Commentary by director David Kaplan, folklore scholar Jack Zipes; Short films by Kaplan. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 mono.
MAN HUNT (20th Century Fox) Classic Fritz Lang thriller from 1941 about a British big game hunter (Walter Pidgeon) who is determined to bag his era’s most sought-after prey: Adolf Hitler. After being captured by a wily Gestapo agent (George Sanders), Pidgeon must trust in a beautiful street waif (Joan Bennett) to help him escape. Crackerjack suspense film, holds up beautifully today. Bonuses: Commentary by film scholar Patrick McGilligan; Featurette; Trailer; Restoration comparison; Ad, artwork and photo galleries. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 stereo.
EDEN LOG (Magnet) Riveting French thriller about an amnesiac man who awakens in a subterranean cave, trailed by a mysterious creature, desperately trying to find his way to the surface. Claustrophobic, atmospheric and truly creepy thriller will get under your skin and stay there for days. Also available on Blu-ray disc. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 5.1 surround.
TAKEN (20th Century Fox) Liam Neeson stars as a former intelligence operative whose daughter is kidnapped while vacationing in Paris. Determined to find the girl at all costs, he uses a unique set of deadly skills few can compete with, turning the City of Lights upside down in the process. Neeson is the whole show in this utterly preposterous, but completely entertaining thriller. Features both PG-13 and unrated versions of the film. We vote for the latter. : ) Also available on Blu-ray disc. 2 disc set bonuses include: Commentary by filmmakers; Featurettes. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 5.1 surround.
SINNER (Matson Films) Intriguing drama about a Catholic priest (Nick Chinlund) who finds himself in a mid-career, and mid-life, crisis when a grifter (Georgina Cates) enters the scene, using her seductive charms to prey on celibate priests. When the priest grants her sanctuary in the church rectory, the two form an uneasy alliance, where each reveals dark secrets to the other. Solid character study, well-made with a fine cast. Widescreen. Dolby 2.0 mono.
HE’S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU (Warner Bros.) Fine ensemble cast (Ben Affleck, Jennifer Aniston, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Connelly, Scarlett Johansson, and others) try to bring comedic cohesion to a film version of the runaway best-seller that was embraced by women the world-over. The result is a mildly amusing romp with a few laugh-out-loud moments following a group of seemingly desirable women who just can’t figure out why Mr. Right hasn’t dropped into their laps yet. Your level of enjoyment might also correspond with your level of estrogen. Those of us with a preponderance of testosterone might want to give this one a wide berth…Also available on Blu-ray disc. Bonuses: Additional scenes with commentary by director Ken Kwapis; Featurettes; BD-Live features. Widescreen. Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround.
SPRING BREAKDOWN (Warner Bros.) Three late-thirtysomething women (Rachel Dratch, Amy Poehler and Parker Posey) have always dreamed of being cool, but never outgrew their geeky, awkward phases. When Posey gets the opportunity to chaperone daughter Ashley (Amber Tamblyn, a hoot)’s spring break trip to South Padre Island, the three ladies try to make up for lost time and join in on the fun. Mixed bag of very clever physical comedy and absolute comedic bricks. Worth watching for the good parts, but definitely “a rental.” Also available on Blu-ray disc. Bonuses: Commentary by Dratch and director Ryan Shiraki; Additional scenes; Gag reel; BD-Live features. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround.
TWO FILMS BY WAYNE WANG (Magnolia) Iconic indie director Wayne Wang presents a double feature of two though-provoking films: A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS follows a woman in her early 40s who moves from China to the U.S. to start a new life, only to have her father visit, confronting her about her recent divorce. As the skeletons tumble out of the family closet, a startling portrait of a culture and people emerges. THE PRINCESS OF NEBRASKA focuses on an 18 year-old Chinese student in the States who, finding herself pregnant, leaves her studies in Nebraska and travels to San Francisco to sort out her options. Both films are fine character studies, quiet, yet completely engaging. Bonuses: Interviews with cast members; Photo galleries; Featurettes. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround.
EDDIE MURPHY DELIRIOUS: 25th ANNVIERSARY EDITION (Anchor Bay) Comic Eddie Murphy was an ‘80s icon, with his edgy, vulgar brand of humor defining what was then the cutting-edge of comedy. 25 years later, watching then-22 year-old Murphy strut the stage at Washington DC’s Constitution Hall in his red leather outfit, punctuating every other word with some form of “fuck,” this reviewer found the laughs few and far between, and saw instead a cocky, very talented, but hugely insecure kid struggling to keep his composure, and his monologues, straight. Murphy grew into his enormous talent beautifully as he got older, evidenced by his Oscar-nominated work in Dreamgirls (and other solid work), but his puppy paws trip him up more than once in this fascinating, and very dated, time capsule. Bonuses: Extra footage; Interview with Murphy; Featurette. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 mono.
REVOLUTIONARY ROAD (Paramount) Fine adaptation of Richard Yates’ period novel about young marrieds (Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) struggling to make sense of their seemingly meaningless lives in a 1950s suburban bedroom community. Director Sam Mendes puts his fine eye for detail to good use here, accentuating the heartbreak and desperation felt by people who realize too late that they’ve played by the rules past the point of no return. Fine work from Michael Shannon and Kathy Bates in support. Bonuses: Commentary by Mendes, screenwriter Justin Haythe; Deleted scenes with optional commentary; Featurette. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround.
UNE FEMME MARIEE (Koch Lorber) Early New Wave classic from Jean-Luc Godard about a married Parisienne (Macha Meril) who drifts between her artist lover (Bernard Noel) and bourgeois husband (Philippe Leroy), unsure if she loves either of them. Intriguing story is full of Godard’s signature imagery and is quite frank for its time (1964). Full screen. Dolby 1.0 mono.
BLU-RAY TITLES MGM/Fox releases more classic 007 to Blu-ray this month, starting with 1974’s THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN GUN, Roger Moore’s second outing as James Bond, and where he finally found solid footing in his portrayal of the suave British agent, here on the trail of an enigmatic assassin (Christopher Lee, terrific) who has marked Bond for death. Maud Adams and Britt Ekland provide some nice scenery, along with the international locales. 1989 brought Timothy Dalton’s second, and final, appearance as Bond in what many fans consider a high point in the series, LICENCE TO KILL, a tough, mean revenge tale that has Bond in hot pursuit of the drug kingpin (Robert Davi) who maimed his best friend. Look fast for Benicio Del Toro as one of Davi’s goons. Bonuses: Cast and crew commentary, including some charming anecdotes from Sir Roger Moore; Featurettes; Deleted scenes; TV spots and trailers; Documentaries on the films’ production; Music videos. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 5.1 surround. THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY is the Farrelly brothers’ classic comedy, perhaps the funniest film of the ‘90s, about a loveable schlub (Ben Stiller) who tries to win the heart of his unrequited love (Cameron Diaz) from high school. Raunchy, clever, and near-brilliant in its comic sensibility. Nice support from Matt Dillon, Lee Evans and Chris Elliott, with terrific musical support from the great Jonathan Richman. Bonuses: Theatrical and extended cuts of the film; Commentary by the Farrellys and co-writers John J. Strauss and Ed Decter; Animated title sequence; Featurettes; Music video; Outtakes; Karaoke. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 5.1 surround. FARGO is the Coen brothers’ blackly comic masterpiece about a pregnant sheriff (Frances McDormand, Oscar winner for Best Actress) in small town Minnesota investigating a series of brutal murders by two of the most incompetent criminals (Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare) in film history. William H. Macy scores as a dim-witted car salesman who opens the Pandora’s box. Bonuses: Commentary by cinematographer Roger Deakins; Featurette; Trivia track; Photo gallery. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 5.1 surround. BIG made a star out of Tom Hanks, with his portrayal of a 12 year-old who gets his wish to be “big” and wakes up one morning as a full-grown man. Much-imitated film has never been equaled, with a near-perfect blend of humor, heart and pathos. Bonuses: Theatrical version and extended cut; Audio documentary by screenwriters Gary Ross and Anne Spielberg; Deleted scenes; Featurettes. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 5.1 surround. THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY marked the third in director Sergio Leone’s “Man with no Name” trilogy starring Clint Eastwood as a gunslinging anti-hero, here joining forces with bandit Eli Wallach to find a cache of Confederate gold before an evil ex-army officer (Lee Van Cleef) does. Beautifully shot, directed and edited, a true masterpiece of the genre. Fully restored extended version. Bonuses: Commentary by film historians Richard Schickel and Christopher Frayling; Documentaries; Featurettes; Deleted scenes; Trailers. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 5.1 surround. SETH MACFARLANE’S CAVALCADE OF CARTOON COMEDY (UNCENSORED) is a series of hilarious animated shorts from the creator of Family Guy and American Dad! Smart, raunchy and twisted sometimes beyond belief, this adults-only cartoon fest is sure to have the most jaded viewer rolling in the aisles. Bonuses: Red carpet premiere footage; Still galleries. Full screen. DTS 5.1 surround. S. DARKO is a so-so follow-up to the cult hit Donnie Darko, picking up seven years after the first film ended, with Donnie’s sister (Daveigh Chase) taking refuge in a desert town that finds itself plunged into chaos when a meteorite strikes nearby, plunging the world toward Armageddon. Bonuses: Filmmaker commentary; Deleted scenes; Featurettes. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 5.1 surround. Lionsgate releases a fantastic Blu-ray edition of James Cameron’s T2: JUDGEMENT DAY—SKYNET EDITION, with its groundbreaking CGI effects that still hold up quite well nearly 20 years later. Story picks up 15 years after the original Terminator, with a teenaged John Connor (Edward Furlong) being protected this time by Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger, against uber-Terminator Robert Patrick. Linda Hamilton reprises her role as Sarah Connor, reinvented as a sinewy, feral, feminist warrior. Dynamite! Bonuses: Multiple versions of the film; Commentary by Cameron, co-writer William Wisher, cast and crew; D-Box Metadata audio track; BD Live features including picture-in-picture behind-the-scenes video and multimedia galleries, Storyboard-script mode; Quizzes and games. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 EX and DTS 6.1 surround. Universal releases Spike Lee’s thriller INSIDE MAN, starring Denzel Washington as a clever NYPD detective, playing a cat-and-mouse game of wits with bank robber Clive Owen. Well-made, with a dream cast that includes Jodie Foster, Christopher Plummer, and Willem Dafoe, but Russell Gewirtz’s script is ultimately about the fact that it’s clever, and nothing more. Bonuses: Commentary by Lee; Deleted scenes; Featurettes; BD Live features. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 5.1 surround. Sony releases AIR FORCE ONE, starring Harrison Ford as the President of the United States, who must revert to his military training when his plane his hijacked by terrorist Gary Oldman, and his wife and daughter are taken hostage. Director Wolfgang Petersen provides plenty of suspense and pyrotechnics, but enough already with the “Die Hard in a…” formula! Bonuses: Commentary by Petersen. Widescreen. Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround. GLORY is the epic tale of 54th Massachusetts regiment: the first black military unit in U.S. history, formed during the Civil War. Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington (Best Supporting Actor, 1988) head a magnificent cast that make up one of the ‘80s’ best films, a masterpiece worthy of David Lean. Bonuses: Interactive battlefield map; Documentary; Featurettes; Filmmaker commentary; Deleted scenes. Widescreen. Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround. FINAL FANTASY VII: ADVENT CHILDREN, COMPLETE is an eye-popping CGI animated adventure about a young warrior who is forced to defend his planet from an impending invasion. Extended director’s cut features 26 extra minutes of footage. Bonuses: Animated film; Featurettes; Story digests; Trailers. Widescreen. Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround. Blue Underground releases FAST COMPANY a change of pace for director David Cronenberg made in between his horror hits Rabid and The Brood, focusing on the world of dragstrip racing and the fringe characters that make it up. Starring B-movie stalwarts William Smith, John Saxon and the late Claudia Jennings (in her final role), film is a fun, fascinating look into a pre-NASCAR subculture. Bonuses: Commentary by Cronenberg; Interviews with Smith and Saxon, cinematographer Mark Irwin; Trailer; Early films by Cronenberg. Widescreen. Dolby and DTS 7.1 surround. Paramount releases Blu-ray editions of two hit films by Adrian Lynne: FATAL ATTRACTION changed the face of the “date movie” as we know it, with yuppie Michael Douglas foolishly engaging in an extramarital tryst with psychotic Glenn Close. Terrific up until the final scene, which is over-the-top in the extreme. Bonuses: Commentary by Lynne; Cast and crew interviews; Featurettes; Rehearsal footage; Alternate ending; Trailer. INDECENT PROPOSAL is a preposterous, but entertaining, drama about a rich businessman (Robert Redford) who offers a struggling young couple (Woody Harrelson, Demi Moore) a million dollars for one night in the sack with the wife. Interesting moral drama has as many misses as hits, but Redford is magnificent and somehow, the film still works in spite of its flaws. Bonuses: Commentary by Lynne. Widescreen. Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround. FRIDAY THE 13th PART 2 AND PART 3 (3-D) feature more hack and slay gruesomeness from everyone’s favorite hockey mask-wearing psycho killer, Jason Voorhees, who always manages to come up with new and inventive ways to dismember fornicating teenagers. Blu-ray really brings those gory make-up effects home, however, if that’s your cup of Joe. Part 3 comes with 2 pair of 3-D glasses. Other bonuses: Featurettes; Trailers. Widescreen. Dolby TrueHD 5.1 surround.
DON’T TOUCH THAT DIAL! Acorn Media releases classic titles from the other side of “the pond,” starting with CALLAN: SET 1, starring Edward Woodward as a British intelligence agent cum assassin whose grubby existence is a harsh counterpoint to the glamour of 007. The BAFTA-winning series, which ran from 1970-74 was a landmark in British television for its frank depiction of violence, language and sexuality, not to mention its openly-critical stance against the British government and their policies. Owes much to the work of John Le Carre. One of television’s finest hours, dated only by its use of early video as opposed to film stock. 3 disc set bonuses include: Trivia; Biography of Woodward. Full screen. Dolby 1.0 mono. AGATHA CHRISTIE’S POIROT: THE MOVIE COLLECTION SET 4, features the inimitable David Suchet as the Belgian sleuth whose love of crimebusting is matched only by his passion as an aesthete. Three disc set. Bonuses: Documentary on the series’ production. Widescreen. Dolby 2.0 stereo. LIFE ON MARS: SERIES ONE, is a mind-bending policier in which a present-day Manchester detective finds himself transported back to 1973 after being hit by a car, where he must resume his role as a policeman in a man’s world, ruled by hard-drinking, two-fisted cops who have little regard for policy, procedure or any of the CSI-style crime-solving technology that exists today. Clever, funny and tough, a truly unique addition to the genre that spawned a short-lived American remake. 4 disc set. Bonuses: Audio commentary by cast and crew; Documentary; Featurettes; Gag reel. Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround. E1 Entertainment releases THE HUNGER: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON, a creepy horror anthology series from 1997, exec produced by Tony and Ridley Scott, featuring stars past (Karen Black, Margot Kidder) and present (Daniel Craig, Jason Flemyng, Timothy Spall) in 22 episodes on 4 discs. Nice blend of the horrific and the erotic. Bonuses: Featurette. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 mono. Universal releases LAND OF THE LOST: THE COMPLETE SERIES, Sid and Marty Kroftt’s ‘70s Saturday morning classic about a family transported back into prehistoric times, where they must do battle with man-eating reptiles one day, and beings from another dimension the next. Features all 43 of the series’ episodes housed in a reproduction of a classic LOTL lunchbox! Bonuses: Featurette of the new Will Ferrell Land of the Lost feature film. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 mono. Paramount releases CANNON: SEASON TWO, VOL. 1, featuring more adventures of LA’s most formidable detective (William Conrad). 3 disc set features ten episodes from the 1972 season. Bonuses: Episodic promos. Full screen. Dolby 2.0 mono. THE CLEANER: THE FIRST SEASON stars Benjamin Bratt as an extreme interventionist who has devoted his life to rescue addicts from their battles with drugs and drink. 4 disc set features 13 episodes. Bonuses: Cast and crew commentary; Featurettes; Gag reel; Deleted scenes; Widescreen. Dolby 5.1 surround. PERRY MASON: SEASON 4, VOL. 1 features more courtroom drama from Raymond Burr’s intrepid defense attorney, who always gets his man (or woman). 16 episodes on 4 discs from the 1960-61 season. Full screen. Dolby 1.0 mono.

Read more!

Ron Shelton--The Hollywood Interview

Writer/director Ron Shelton


Ron Shelton: From the Red Wings to Bull Durham
by Jon Zelazny

Editor’s note: this article first appeared at EightMillionStories.com on December 12, 2008.

I’ve never been a sports fan, but I’ve long considered Bull Durham (1988) one of my favorite movies. And I’m not alone: Bravo ranked it #55 on its list of 100 Funniest Movies, the American Film Institute ranked it #97 on their similar 100 Years—100 Laughs list, and Sports Illustrated called it the #1 Greatest Sports Movie of all time.

I’d always wanted to meet Ron Shelton partly because he spent a portion of his own minor league baseball career playing for my hometown team, the Rochester Red Wings. Their Silver Stadium (1929-1996) was a few blocks northwest of the Polish neighborhood where both of my parents grew up, making the Red Wings a cherished piece of the fabric of the lives of so many of my relatives.

Ron Shelton and I met at an L.A. landmark, The Pacific Dining Car.

RON SHELTON: I played for the Red Wings about a year and a half. I’d been a utility guy; I made the jump from A ball when one of the middle-incomers from AA got hurt in Dallas, so they sent me down there to play, then the next year I came up to triple-A in Rochester. My second season was especially great because we had a championship team; so many great guys, like Don Baylor, and Bob Grich, and the late Johnny Oates. You always have warmer memories of the seasons when you were winning!

I got to see so much of America playing baseball, and I loved all those industrial, working class, eastern cities—Columbus, Ohio; Syracuse—because they were so different from where I grew up. I loved the old bars. Great old bars. As a kid from Santa Barbara, California, though, I was used to warmer weather. I’d never been in snow until I played baseball in Rochester… we had games that were snowed out! I remember one July day, it was beautiful; everybody was out working in their gardens… and that was it! It was like you got a one-day summer up there! So I realized I was a little spoiled.

I lived in a boarding house a few blocks from Silver Stadium. I had an old bicycle that I bought from Herman Schneider. He’s been the head trainer for the Chicago White Sox for the past thirty years, but back then he was the Red Wings’ 20-year-old assistant trainer. I’d ride my bike to the stadium about four o’clock in the afternoon, stop at Dunkin’ Donuts or the sub/sandwich shop, and when the games got out around eleven–thirty or so, I’d work my way down to Seneca Lanes, hitting all these bars that were around the ballpark… until I could hardly ride the bike anymore!

One of my favorite Rochester stories came from their announcer, Joe Cullinane. It was about a Kennedy Night. We used to have all these crazy “nights.” We had Hot Pants Night, where you got in free with short pants, and Hippie Night, when you got in free if you had a beard. So one time it was Kennedy Night, and Peter Lawford was there as the guest of honor—he was the Hollywood actor who was married to JFK’s sister. He showed up with this woman everyone assumed was his wife, so they started interviewing her… but she was just some bimbo he’d picked up at the airport! He brought her to the ballpark, and she was actually trying to answer the questions as if she was a Kennedy! They got pretty far into it before people started whispering, “That’s not her!”

A postcard from Red Wings Silver Stadium, circa 1970s.

Bull Durham gives the impression that the minor leagues are packed with young guys who think they’ve got a shot at the majors, and a few older guys who are sort of on their way down. Is that accurate?
It’s pretty true. In the low minors, you’re just trying to move up the ladder to the next level… and once in a while we did get a triple-A guy or a former big leaguer come down to A ball to mentor a promising young prospect—the kind of mission Crash Davis had. And when you’re in A ball, it’s like meeting some exotic guy who’s been to the Land of Milk and Honey. “Hey, tell us about it! What was it like?” The big leagues seemed so far away.

So even a lowly player in the majors is like a king compared to guys in the minors?
Yeah, in the sense that they’ve tasted the good life. When you get up to triple-A, though, everybody more or less has some version of major league ability. You may not be a star, but a lot of triple-A guys could be regulars in the big leagues, they’re just—

Waiting for that opening?
Yeah. And being the farm team for Baltimore was so tough. We had Mike Ferraro, for instance, who I believe was a four-time International League All-Star third baseman… and he was basically insurance for Brooks Robinson! This poor guy just couldn’t get into the big leagues. You’d see a lot of that. And then you’d see some weak organization, where a guy who couldn’t have made the Rochester Red Wings was now going up to the big leagues for the old Montreal Expos. You saw a lot of that too.

Generally, though, the players got better the higher you went. I found it easier to hit in triple-A, because in the lower leagues, you were dealing with a lot of Nuke LaLooshes: guys who could throw 96 mph, but the first one was way over your head, the next one was on the outside corner, and the third hit the mascot in the ass! How do you hit against that? In triple-A, like in the big leagues, it’s more a battle of wits. Occasionally, you’d get overpowered, but generally you understood what they were doing, and they understood what you were doing. And, by the way, the lights are much better in triple-A than in A ball. The lights were so bad in the minors, it was scary! I think they’re better now.

Was Rochester the last stop in your minor league career?
It was. I thought I could make it to the big leagues if I hung in there; like a lot of guys, I was really hoping I’d get traded… but you couldn’t get traded. And the Orioles were just too loaded with talent, so there was very limited opportunity to move up. Then in ‘72, the strike hit. That was the baseball strike that ended the Reserve Clause, and led to higher salaries, and led to players choosing their own teams after five years. All of that happened in 1972, and I was one of many players who simply couldn’t sit it out. If you were living hand-to-mouth, like most minor leaguers were, you had to make a choice.

What to do with the rest of your life?
People always ask how I went from baseball to the movies, but it wasn’t like I changed my life; it was an evolution. When that strike hit, I was married and had a kid, and it just seemed like it was time to start a new career. I’d been an English major in college, but my real passion was painting and sculpture. So I went to graduate school for that, and that was my dedication for the next two years. I moved to L.A., and showed some work there, and the visual arts led me into film, which is a visual art as well.

Were you a big moviegoer?
When I was playing baseball, I went almost every day. You were on the road for about nine months a season—and even when you were home, it wasn’t really your home—so guys just sat around the hotel playing cards, or watching soap operas. (That was a sequence I wanted to squeeze into Bull Durham. If I ever do another baseball movie, I want to show the guys watching soap operas!) But I couldn’t stand those shows, so I’d duck out of the hotel or the motel and go to the movies. Especially in the Southern League, or the Texas League, where it was hot and muggy—you go to the movies just to sit in the air conditioning!

And I went indiscriminately. I wasn’t a “trained” moviegoer, so I would check out just about anything: rated G, rated X, or anything in between; new movies, old movies. And I didn’t follow the critics back then, so I really approached everything with an open mind. Even if I didn’t like the movie, I liked the experience of going. And then I started to see some movies that really got under my skin.

Such as… ?
I remember back in the Texas League, I saw this De Palma movie—I can’t remember the name of it—but I thought it was very interesting, so I talked a bunch of the guys into going to see it with me again the next day… and they hated it! (laughs) They were so literal! They got angry at the characters in the movie, and angry at the movie, and angry with me for taking them to the movie!

It must have been one of De Palma’s early experimental films, Greetings (1968) or Hi, Mom! (1970).
I think it was Greetings. It was very political. There were black radicals in it.

I’ve seen them both, but I get them confused.
I do too. I don’t know if it was even that good, but there was obviously some real filmmaking going on there. You know what I mean: I’d rather watch a movie that doesn’t quite work by a guy with a strong point of view than something that just connects the dots.

Later that season, we were in Little Rock, and I saw the movie that absolutely changed me, which was Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969.) It just took my head off; I was like, “What was that?!” I went to see it several more times over the next few days. I took some guys to see it too, and they liked it because there were big shoot-outs… but they didn’t like it the way I liked it.

When did you start writing?
Like everybody else in L.A., I started writing screenplays on the side. And there weren’t any screenwriting classes in those days, or books to tell you how to do it. You just started writing.

Had you written short stories, or short pieces?
Odds and ends. I was always interested in words. I published three or four short stories in some quarterlies.

Were they sports-oriented?
Oh, no. I never dreamed I’d be stuck with the sports world! I wish I wasn’t, but I am.

So it’s a shackle for you at times?
It’s a shackle in that the only financially successful movies I’ve made have been about sports: Bull Durham, Tin Cup (1996), White Men Can’t Jump (1992). Blaze (1989) was moderately successful; at least that wasn’t about sports.

Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes in White Men Can't Jump.

Did you ever consider Ring Lardner an influence? He’s the only other fiction writer I really admire who wrote a lot about sports.
I read him a little. But I grew up in the sixties, so his writing seemed kind of old fashioned. To be a teenager back then… there were a lot more pressing things going on: the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, the whole counter culture. The writers we were reading were Richard Brautigan, and Donald Barthelme, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Those guys sure weren’t interested in sports.
Yeah, sports was out. Athletics was considered kind of a capitalist thing… and I was a jock. I believed in sports, I believed in competition; I was a ruthless, competitive athlete… but I also marched against the war, and for civil rights, and my politics were left of center. But I felt like the left was full of shit about some things, and the right was full of shit on other things, so I often felt like a man without a party. And when I started playing professional baseball in the late 60’s, that was a very conservative world.

Writer's Note: Shelton’s first produced script was the gritty foreign correspondent drama "Under Fire" (1983), directed by Roger Spottiswoode. He then wrote "The Best of Times" (1986), also directed by Spottiswoode, which stars Robin Williams and Kurt Russell as former small town high school football players who decide to reassemble their old team and replay the big game they lost fifteen years ago.

What inspired The Best of Times?
In the early 1980’s, California had cut way back on school funding. My high school, Santa Barbara—which has a very strong sports tradition: Sam Cunningham, Randall Cunningham, Eddie Mathews, Keith Wilkes, and Al Geiberger all went there—anyway, their athletics budget was drastically slashed. So they were coming up with ideas to raise money, like, literally, bake sales, and then they tried something that seemed ridiculous, but turned out to be wildly successful: Santa Barbara and our biggest rival, San Marcos, got all these guys together who hadn’t played for ten, fifteen years—

They actually did that? Trained up their old teams to replay a classic rivalry?
It wasn’t quite as dramatic as in the movie. The amazing thing was that it sold out! Something like twelve thousand people came to see it; they filled the local college stadium. For a few years it was really successful, but then I think some guys started getting hurt.

So the story had nothing to do with your professional career.
It was an anecdote I heard about my high school. I thought the universal in it was that everybody has a moment in their life they’d like to replay, sports or otherwise.


Trailer for The Best of Times.

Is that common among athletes? That they’ll obsess over particular plays that may have made or broken them?
I only remember my failures. The ball I should have hit, the ground ball I should have fielded, the game we lost.

Are those memories still vivid today?
I think of myself as a complete failure as an athlete. I played for five years professionally, made it to triple-A, and then walked away. Some people might think that was a decent career, but to me… no, I failed. And athletes… whenever you talk with real athletes, they never talk about their successes, only their failures.

Was Preston Sturges an influence on The Best of Times? I wondered because Robin Williams kind of reminded me of Eddie Bracken in those two pictures they did.
No. I was pretty late in discovering Sturges. I knew Sullivan’s Travels (1941), but not any of his others. Actually, it was after Bull Durham that people started talking to me about him. That’s when I started studying him. The other thing was, you couldn’t get his films on video or DVD for a long time, because there were legal problems. Now I’ve seen them all. I wrote a blurb for his autobiography that was recently discovered. His family has given me an award, and I know his son Tom.

Though I wouldn’t describe Bull Durham as Sturges-like. I put it more in the realm of Billy Wilder.
I was a big Billy Wilder fan. I liked Billy Wilder and Sam Peckinpah!

Did you ever get to meet Wilder? I imagine he would’ve loved Bull Durham.
A few months after it came out, I was having dinner at a restaurant called The Imperial Gardens. A man came up and asked if I was Ron Shelton. I said yes, and he said, “Somebody would like to meet you.” So I followed him—I didn’t realize at the time it was Stanley Donen, the director—and he brought me over to his best friend, Billy Wilder. Wilder looked up and said, “Great fuckin’ picture, kid!” I said, “Mr. Wilder, that’s the best review I’ve ever had!” I had this musical transition I was trying to figure out for Blaze, so I asked him how he intercut those scenes in Some Like It Hot (1959) between the yacht and the hotel, and we chatted about that.

My favorite moment in The Best of Times is Kurt Russell’s monologue about his glory days. It’s very moving. He knows he’s got this legacy behind him, and he enjoys it on a certain level, but he doesn’t buy into it.
Because he’s moved on. He’s a fully evolved adult male.

And he was the champion. Robin Williams, who was terrible at football, is the one who’s obsessed with reliving it.
Because the true athlete is prepared for life. I run into people in education all the time who say the greatest administrators they knew, or the greatest college presidents, were former athletes. I do believe athletics prepares you for everything.

Another theme you explore in a lot of your pictures is the difficulty of relations between macho men and their wives or girlfriends. It’s like what Michael Mann does with cops; you do with athletes. You both depict men who function best in very masculine atmospheres. And then they have to step out of it and deal with women.
I hadn’t thought of that as a theme. I have to step back and analyze that… I think my male worlds are also filled with very strong women. From Rosie Perez, to Susan Sarandon, even Dr. Molly in Tin Cup.

Kevin Costner in Tin Cup.

Was that an issue you ever dealt with personally?
I grew up in a very male-oriented family. I had a very powerful, loving, and generous mother, but I was the oldest of four boys—I couldn’t figure out how to talk to girls until I was about 35! After I had daughters! But I’ve always worked easily and closely with women; I have many close women friends, and I have a great marriage, but… yeah, as a kid, I was a bit bewildered by it. I do think men grow up at a different rate than women. But I’m also not one to idealize women. Women know things men don’t know, and men know things women don’t know. At the end of the day though, in White Men Can’t Jump, the two men—one white, one black—despite all their arguments, and trying to hustle each other—they still communicate better with each other than either of them can with women.

A lot of themes you explore in The Best of Times come back—stronger, and with more clarity—in Bull Durham. It’s almost like reading a rough draft.
I suppose that’s true. There are some things I would have done differently from Roger. Mostly, when you have a script that’s working, directing is like conducting music. You want to get the accents right, and the beats right, and not oversell the wrong things, and comedy is a very delicate thing. There was a whole epilogue to The Best of Times that got left out. Roger and I had a big fight about it. The way it ends now, at the stadium, it’s about football. And I argued the story is not about football. It’s about growing up.

It seems like a rather brutally edited movie anyway.
We did have to take a character out because of length, but in defense of the director, he was really badly treated by the studio and the producer. You cannot believe what they put him through. Some producer on another matter got in this lawsuit with the head of Universal, and they took it out on this movie, and on Roger. Then they did the worst campaign, and… it was a very unpleasant experience.

Another work The Best of Times reminds me of is John Updike’s Rabbit series. Have you read those?
Yeah, I read the first one in college, and as they came out. I haven’t read the last piece yet. The novella. I thought it was great, though, someone of his caliber actually writing about an athlete, because nobody else did. And still, almost nobody does.

Robin Williams and Kurt Russell in The Best of Times.

Yeah, it’s kind of The Lord of the Rings of faded athlete sagas. I met Updike’s agent one time, and asked if anyone’s talked about filming them. He said there’d been some approaches, people vaguely circulating, but nothing ever—
They did the first one, Rabbit, Run (1970). With James Caan.

Yeah, and Carrie Snodgress. I’ve never seen it. It’s really obscure.
I saw it when it came out.

You’re the only person I know who’s seen it. His agent hadn’t even seen it!
It was a zillion years ago, but I remember thinking it didn’t really work as a movie.

It’s not one of the stronger books. The one I used to daydream about adapting was Rabbit is Rich, the one with the wife swapping. Then when Ang Lee did The Ice Storm (1997)… y’know, there it was. How could you do any better? It’s a great film, it looks beautiful, and it nails that Updike vibe better than anything I’ve ever seen… but god, it’s such a bummer! You’d never want to sit through it again. So that killed my Rabbit dream. Anyway, the only point I was going to make here was that if any producers try to get those going, you should be on their list. You’d be great for it.
With a series like that, the question is where does the movie begin and end? It’s interesting what you said about The Ice Storm. I hadn’t realized it, but you’re right: there’s Updike, right there.

Tim Robbins and Kevin Costner in Bull Durham.

Was Bull Durham already in the works when you were making The Best of Times? Was there an overlap between those projects?
I wrote a very early script about minor league baseball; the only thing it had in common with Bull Durham was that it was about a pitcher and a catcher… because they have a kind of synergistic relationship. You can’t make a movie about a left fielder and a first baseman! Then I decided to see if a woman could tell the story. I dictated that opening monologue on a little micro-recorder while I was driving around North Carolina. My first marriage was on the rocks, and I was wondering if the minor leagues had changed. Because the majors had changed a lot.

I’m not a sports guy. Can you briefly explain how?
Big money got into baseball. Which I’m all for, on a certain level. Then the television deals started, it got very corporate, players began making insane amounts of money, and they became… well, baseball players had always been the sportswriters’ favorites. They were available, they were funny… they’re still funny. But they became very aloof. “Talk to my agent.” “Talk to my rep.” They became a bunch of jerks. And it was the 1980’s. Y’know, pre-steroids, but cocaine was everywhere. It just got very…

Big money corrupted it.
It really did.

I tinkered with doing something about the early days of stock car racing, and the story’s the same: in the old days, the racers were these daredevils and obsessed loners, but as NASCAR solidified, and big money came in, the sport got very corporate, and…
Exactly. I’ve been working on a piece about the European side of that. Anyway, I went back to the minor leagues, and found it hadn’t changed a bit. When I got back to L.A., I listened to that monologue again a few weeks later, and just started typing. I named the woman Annie because baseball groupies were called Annies, and I had this matchbook from the Savoy bar, so she became Annie Savoy, and I wrote the whole script, without any notes or outline. It took about twelve weeks, and that was it; that’s the only draft that exists. I guess it was in there, just waiting to get out somehow.

Susan Sarandon and Kevin Costner in Bull Durham.

I want to talk about the main characters. Three very strong characters… all in the same movie!
For me, Crash Davis was a guy who loved something more than it loved him. We all have something like that, whether it’s a thing, a profession, a person, a family, or whatever. And, but for the grace of God, he could have had more than a 21-day major league career. He had talent. You don’t hit 247 home runs in the minors if you don’t. Like Mike Ferraro in Rochester. I also thought of Crash as a classic American cowboy: he goes from town to town—he’s a hired gun. He has no past, he has no future; all he really has is today.

And it beats working at Sears.
It beats working at Sears. And he really does love what he does, and he’s good at it. But it’s passed him by.

The guys you knew in his position; were they as… well, something I find very moving about Crash is his resigned sadness. But he’s stoic about it. Do most guys bear it that well? I imagine some of them are just broken by it.
Some are. But most of them have some of those qualities he has. That attitude of “I’m gonna quit this fucking game! What time do we play tomorrow?” That love of the game really does finally carry them through. The interesting thing about the guys I played with in triple-A is that most of them—well, one of them is dead; I think he was shot in a nightclub—but everybody else went on to be successful in their lives. Some in baseball; some in sales, or education, or—

If you have that caliber of character, you’re going to be fine?
If you can make it to triple-A, and last awhile, you’re strong, you’re focused, you’re disciplined, you can deal with loss, you can deal with disappointment. But, yeah, there is a sadness about Crash. That’s why he gets Annie!

Kevin Costner as "Crash" Davis in Bull Durham.

I like how you compared him to a Western hero. I never thought of that. I’m a big Anthony Mann fan, and Crash is like one of his classic drifter/loner heroes.
Yeah, Anthony Mann’s great. Even closer for me though is Bill Holden in The Wild Bunch. Y’know, where did that guy come from?

Let’s talk about Annie. The thing I like about her is that she’s so much more—so much richer a character—than just the team floozy. I mean, her sense of herself is incredible. Where did her point of view come from?
Part of it is my hating how women had been portrayed in sports movies, and from my love and respect for women. I’m not threatened by women. I knew women who… well, I didn’t know any woman who was just like Annie; she’s kind of a composite.

Was there anyone who stood out in your memory as you were conceiving her?
When I was playing A-ball in Stockton, California, a few of us had babies, and there was this woman who used to babysit. Her nickname was Froggy, but she didn’t look like a frog; she was very attractive, and yet the wives were completely unthreatened by her. She was with this really good-looking catcher, but she didn’t sleep around. She was very classy, and… you could just tell there was a lot going on there.

I thought a woman guide, this High Priestess, could lead us into a man’s world, and shine a light on it. And she would be very sensual, and sexual, yet she’d live by her own rigorous moral code. It seemed like a character we hadn’t seen before.
I once did the “Fresh Air” radio show with Terry Gross, and she asked, “Isn’t Annie a male fantasy?” I said, “When I was growing up, a male fantasy was a bimbo who forked over sexually, bent to the man’s will, never challenged him, had no thought of her own, no worldview of her own… and in the third act, they either apologized for their behavior, or found Jesus. So since I invented a woman who’s smart and determined, has a worldview, takes no guff from anybody, sets her own rules, and apologizes for nothing, will you at least give me credit for raising the level of male fantasy?” She kind of backed off.

Susan Sarandon as Annie in Bull Durham.

“Male fantasy” is the last term I’d think of for Annie.
It’s stupid! If anything, she’s a female fantasy! Every woman wants to be like her!

I relate to her very personally. When I was in my twenties, I spent four years with a much older woman, and, y’know, it was the greatest thing. To be with someone who’s a guide, who knows the world...
Every young man should have that.

I read on the internet that Nuke LaLoosh was based on a real player named Steve Dalkowski.
These things on the internet can be so far out of proportion. Steve Dalkowski was a legendary minor league thrower who played for twelve or so years for the Baltimore organization, but everywhere I went in the minor leagues, people would tell stories about him. Ted Williams said he was the hardest thrower he ever saw.

But you actually knew him?
Yeah, but other than the fact that he had a God-gifted arm, and a bit of a five cent head, there’s no relation between him and Nuke. Dalkowski had a drinking problem, and it took him twelve years to get to triple-A because he was so wild. He’d average something like fourteen strikeouts and fourteen walks a game. I’m not making that up; his numbers were beyond belief! Cal Ripken, Sr. was his catcher.


So he finally got to triple-A in Rochester, and they roomed him with this mature, older guy, Joe Altobelli, who was kind of like his Crash Davis. Joe was my manager for three years, and he would always tell me “Dalko” stories. So I thought about that: a wild, out of control young guy, who’s matched with… y’know, that’s all I really used for Bull Durham.

It’s amazing how you make it believable that both of these guys could be involved with the same woman. If that wasn’t convincing, the whole thing would fall apart.
And I really had to fight to cast Tim Robbins. The studio really, really, really didn’t want him. I had to threaten to quit...

Who did they want?
Anthony Michael Hall.

Hmm… I don’t think you’d buy that. Him and Susan Sarandon. He was very young then, wasn’t he?
He was twenty. But it was just so wrong. Tim has gravitas. Even when he’s playing the goofball, you know there’s something there. But Nuke was based on so many guys. All these guys who had a gift, but never knew what to do with it. Or didn’t know they had a gift, or eventually figured it out, but by then it was too late.

Though Bull Durham suggests Nuke is going to be okay.
Right, which you know from the scene where he’s doing that interview in the big leagues, and he’s kind of winging it, repeating the clichés, and trying to pick her up—you know he’s getting it.
I think part of the picture’s greatness is that it has that hopefulness for all of them. You never take the negative route. You show it’s there, but… Isn’t that the American dream? Hope and promise? We can’t promise you’ll get there, but…

Here’s a question from my wife, Jenn. She loves Annie’s shrine. What was the inspiration there? Who designed it?
I’ve always had little shrines, unconsciously, for this and that. Maybe less the older I get, but it was just a natural… when my friends saw it, they said, “Oh, Ron, it looks like your house!” Actually, my wife Lolita and I just set up a Dia de los Muertos shrine last week. We took a corner of a room and set up pictures and candles for our lost friends, and relatives, and animals. The kids all participated. I think its High Church. Because in the Protestant faith, you didn’t have shrines, so… I like them.

Something that hits me every time I watch Bull Durham is how very early on—maybe it’s five minutes in—you introduce Nuke screwing Millie in the locker room. It’s a shock, because you’re not expecting something so crude to immediately follow Annie’s very romantic voice-over. Did the studio ever try to get you to tone that down?
No. They knew this was going to be an R-rated movie. And that’s the scene that tells you this isn’t going to be like other movies; that one of the guys we’re going to be rooting for has his pants around his ankles, he’s bare-assed, and he’s supposed to be out on the mound! And by the end of the first act, he’s tied up, and a vibrator comes out—

That first scene prepares you for that. Having seen that, now you know anything could happen—
And it wouldn’t work unless you see both of them are stark naked.

Aside from Bull Durham, the only other sports movie I really love is Slap Shot (1977), which also happens to be about a minor league team. Do you think there’s greater drama in the minors because the players aren’t superstars?
Yeah, I think people trying to get into the spotlight are much more interesting than people in the spotlight. That’s why I think Tin Cup is a really well conceived and executed movie, because it’s about a guy who’s trying to get there. And when he gets there, he doesn’t know how to stay there. I think stories about movie stars or great athletes are almost always boring.

Yeah, because it’s hard to make people relate to that. Or it just becomes a total fantasy. So how come we don’t see more movies about the minor leagues?
I think the financiers don’t understand… y’know, it’s why movies like The Wild Bunch are hard to get made. “What? It’s about fat guys chasing bad guys?” Yeah, and at the end of the day, you’re going to care about all of ‘em! That’s just the limits of the simplistic, simple-minded, reductive world of trying to sell ideas in the marketplace. “You mean Roy McAvoy isn’t going to win the U.S. Open?” No, he’s going to shoot a 13 on the last hole. “Kevin Costner doesn’t make it to the big leagues?” No, but he gets the girl. “Rosie Perez is really gonna skate away?” Yes! And every time, the audiences were so happy that Rosie skated away! Audiences can smell these things out.

That brings me to my next point: you’ve always been very good at avoiding the sports movie cliché of the climactic “big game.”
Oh, I’ve had a couple “big games,” but you don’t get it all. If you win the game, you’re gonna lose the girl, I guarantee you that!

Do you get studio executives asking you that? “But Ron-- where’s the big game?”
Always! They always do!

(laughter)

Are you a rock ‘n roll guy?
Not really. I grew up with jazz, R&B, and gospel music.

Which is what you use in your films. The songs in your soundtracks often harken to earlier times.
I got into Elvis about six years ago. I was way late in discovering rock ‘n roll… and then it was mostly stuff like Chuck Berry.

What was it about Ty Cobb that made you want to make Cobb (1994)?
He was a fascinating guy. A brilliant, brilliant athlete—

But before your time, right? You never saw him play?
No. He was a guy we always heard about. And when I was fifteen years old, I took the money I made mowing lawns and bought my first hardcover book: Ty Cobb: My Life in Baseball, by Al Stump. I knew who Al Stump was because he was living in Santa Barbara at that time, even though he was a national figure—the highest-paid sportswriter in America. My dad used to point him out to me around town.

So I read the book, and even at age fifteen I felt, “Something’s not right here.” Because Cobb was portrayed as… kind of a tough guy, who’s an athlete, but… Anyway, many years later, Stump published an essay in the magazine True called “The Last Days of Ty Cobb,” which was the true story of that car ride they took down the mountain. So I looked up Al Stump, thirty years after I bought that first book. He wasn’t in great health. He told me, “For thirty years I’ve been writing a real biography, trying to get that other piece of shit out of my head.” I asked him what happened. He said, “I spent the last year of Ty Cobb’s life with him, but my publisher gave him final editorial control over it!” So Stump spent the rest of his life writing the definitive, actual, Samuel Johnson-type version. He finished it just before his death, right around the time the movie came out.

I loved the idea that this guy’s trying to tell Cobb’s story, and trying to come to terms with what Cobb meant to him. He’s like the narrator in The Great Gatsby, or Marlowe in Heart of Darkness. So it isn’t so much about Cobb, it’s about Al, and all of us. Why do we need these guys to be… y’know, why can’t we allow them just to be great ballplayers? All those kinds of questions… which nobody gives a fuck about, because nobody went to see the movie!

When I did all the interviews for it, the critics asked, “Was Cobb really that bad?” Actually, he was much worse… but you wouldn’t have believed everything! I couldn’t show him beating the shit out of his old lady. But he was also brilliant intellectually—with his stock trading, and serving on the board of directors of Coca-Cola and Ford, and all that. Most ballplayers of his time were fourth grade dropouts!

I just saw it this weekend. What I really wondered was what Al Stump actually liked about Cobb, or loved about him? What did you like or love about him?
Oh, a lot. He did have his demons. His mother was unfaithful to his father, and his mother’s lover killed his father. He’d held his father up in his mind as this great man, then found out at age seventeen that he really wasn’t; that it was all a lie he’d bought into. Cobb played hurt, he played with pain, he played against the gods; he willed himself to fame in a way that was inspiring. I’m not saying he was heroic; he was very troubled.

Robert Wuhl and Tommy Lee Jones in Cobb.

When the press covered the film, some of them said, “With all the TV coverage in sports, and all the press attention today, no celebrity could get away with behaving like that.” Really? It couldn’t happen today? I said, “Who’s the biggest musical star in the world? Is he a child molester?” Of course it’s happening today! And people back then knew Cobb was a prick; he’d killed two or three people! But he hit .367! If he’d hit .267, he’d have been in jail, but .367? He’s in the Hall of Fame, and he’s rich.

Roger Kahn, who wrote the The Boys of Summer, loved the movie. We had lunch one time, and he said, “You know, what happened to Al Stump happened to me too.” He’d written this biography of Pete Rose, and he got pretty much all the way through it, dug up all this dirt on Pete Rose, and then learned from his editor that Pete Rose had final cut!

That newsreel at the beginning says people thought Cobb had psychotic eyes as a child, but you don’t come back to it. Was there something seriously wrong with him?
He terrified a lot of people. Was he a clinical sociopath, or was it just this deep rage, coming from that tiny southern town… ?

Lolita Davidovich in Blaze.

That’s another thing I wanted to ask: many of your best stories—Bull Durham, Blaze, Cobb—all have deep roots in the south. Do you have ties there?
My father’s side was from the south. They were all Texas dirt farmers; very poor. They split to come out here to work in the oil fields in Bakersfield, and in the cotton fields. My mother’s side drifted out as well; pretty desperately poor. And I spent time with my grandparents and other relatives. All Southern Baptists, with other traits of the deep south: everyone was a storyteller; very verbal, very musical, very conservative. And that peculiar kind of racism, where if I brought three black friends to my grandparents’ house for dinner, they wouldn’t notice they were black, but if Martin Luther King came on TV, they got upset. That strange southern dichotomy.

Do you feel a kinship with other southern writers? Can you hang with Larry McMurtry?
Yeah, sure. I don’t know him, but I am going next Thursday to the Faulkner Festival, as I always do. This year I’m talking about “The Influence of Gatsby and the Great American Dream on American Film.” Everybody else there is pretty literary, and I’m the film guy. Some years they cover the classics; sometimes they’ll do Walker Percy, another year it’ll be a Tennessee Williams scholar, but it’s always really interesting.

Very cool. I’m glad to hear you’re respected in that quarter.
I have to go there or Vegas to get any respect!

Read more!