(Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally, above.)
(Julianne Moore and Mark Wahlberg in the New Year's Eve scene in Boogie Nights, above.)
(It's A Wonderful Life, top, and then Gloria Swanson and William Holden in the New Year's Eve scene from Sunset Blvd., below.) 
Filmmaker Agnès Varda and friend.
Editor's note: "The Beaches of Agnes" opens in a limited run in New York and L.A. this week for Academy Award consideration. If you reside on either coast, do yourself a favor and run, don't walk, to "Beaches."
Agnès Varda Hits the Beach
By
Alex Simon
Born in Belgium in 1928, Agnès Varda is renowned for being the only female member of France’s legendary “Nouvelle Vague” (which also includes such luminaries as Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Varda’s late husband, Jacques Demy) school of filmmaking when, in 1954, she formed a film company called Cine-Tamaris for her first feature, La Pointe Courte. It earned her the title of “Grand Mother of the French New Wave,” at the tender age of 26.
Varda has made 33 films since then, alternating between shorts and features, fiction and documentaries. Some of her most famous titles include Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961), Le Bonheur (1964), One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977), Vagabond (1985), Jacquot de Nantes (1990), and The Gleaners and I (2000). Since 2003, Varda has completed two major video installations for the Venice Art Biennale and the Taipei Museum, as well as serving on the jury of the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.
Agnès Varda’s latest cinematic gem is the autobiographical documentary The Beaches of Agnes, in which Varda looks back upon the seminal experiences of her life: the people, places and films that shaped it. A fascinating blend of fact, fantasy and pure cinema, The Cinema Guild release hits theaters July 3. Still active as ever, the 81 year-old auteur sat down with us in the palatial Santa Monica home of friend and fellow filmmaker Zalman King to discuss her newest film, and remarkable life.
Tell us about how this film was born.
Agnès Varda: When I saw that I was about to be 80, I saw that number flashing in front of me, when I was on a beach in Noirmoutier. I realized how many other beaches had influenced my life. These beaches are the thread through which I chose to describe, to friends, family, and others, some of my work and the events of my life. When you reach a certain age, many feel the need to recount their lives. It sort of came like bubbles, on the surface of the water. I wanted to be precise about not only my life, but how I structured some of my films, so five or six times I’ll stop to say how I made a film, and how that reflected on what was happening in my life at the time. It’s not enough to tell a story. You have to find a way to make it cinematic.
Varda on the beach in Belgium.
And you really blended reality with fantasy seamlessly.
Well, that is because of my love of the surrealists and their work, like the image of me in the belly of the whale. And I’ve always given myself the freedom to go from one thing to another: from documentary to fiction, short to feature, reality to fantasy, so I wanted to incorporate all of these aspects of myself into the film. Not all of it is to be taken seriously. It’s my life, and sometimes I enjoy, not laughing, but smiling at myself. It was difficult to complete as a film because I had to integrate so many different things, and then rediscover it all over again during the editing.
Did it take a long time to edit?
Yes, we were editing for a very long time. I wanted to be able to tell some stories, and entertain people, simple as that.
Varda poses with circus performers in The Beaches of Agnès.
One thing that’s fascinating to watch is how the world changed through your eyes. I’m thinking of your trips to China, to Cuba, and your film about the abortion issue, Once Sings, the Other Doesn’t. Did you have the same feeling when you reflected back on these times and these films?
Oh yes, my God! You know, so many people said to me, “How could you go to Cuba?” But when I was there in 1961-62, it was the most exciting place politically on the planet. There was such an enthusiasm and passion, after being a bordello for America, Havana became this free city. It’s hard to understand now, fifty years later. But I was lucky to be able to have witnessed that, just like with The Black Panthers. I did a documentary about them, as well. The Party vanished, in a way, after two years, but at the time, they were very strong in their vision of what they wanted to achieve. I was in China during the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, in 1957. China wasn’t even accepted by the United Nations then. It didn’t even exist in the economic market. Can you believe it, when you see what’s happening there now? As far as the subject of abortion goes, there used to be groups of women who would go to Amsterdam to get abortions, because the Church had such a strict hold over society in France, for so many years, even into the ‘70s. There was such a stigma, and a shame attached to it. It’s remarkable the changes I’ve seen over 80 years, some for good, some not.
Jacquot de Nantes must have been a very personal experience for both you and Jacques Demy. What was it like making that, with Jacques?
Well, he knew he was dying when we did it. He didn’t have the strength to do it himself, which is why I directed it. It was an interesting experience making a film about somebody else’s childhood, almost like approaching a mystery, in a way. This is the part that can escape you, in a way, when you’re with someone for many years. So entering his childhood with his complicity, and his agreement, was an incredible experience. So my films have always been vital experiences for me. That’s why I made a career of it. Each film was born from a specific reason, bad or good, but growing organically.
Varda and her husband, the late Jacques Demy.
What was it like in with this film, to view your own life as a spectator, the same way you did with Jacquot?
It’s funny, one day I was filming my hands, and I thought, instead of ‘Oh, my hands look so old, with spots, I thought, that’s a beautiful landscape.’ It’s another aspect of being a filmmaker: my own age, my own life, becomes a landscape.
Was it difficult directing yourself, or could you just tune out when the camera was on you and “act”?
I was very conscious of the fact that there was a camera, and I was being filmed, and it was a very organized shoot, with shots either accepted or not by me. Two women were the cinematographers on this film, one in France, one in the U.S. for the Los Angeles sequences, and they were both wonderful, which helped a great deal. So no, it wasn’t hard. It felt quite natural after a time.
You and Jacques came to the U.S. at the height of the anti-war and hippie movement, in 1967. What were your impressions of that time in America, compared to what was happening in Europe?
It was right before the ’68 movement, which now everyone knows about and romanticizes. But in ’67, France was really dull, and being in America, it was like this shower of freedom, counterculture, the way people spoke and dressed. There was all this loving and all these “happenings,” all these meetings, picnics with people, sharing things. It must be difficult for you to image how it was. It was so open, like everybody should love everybody. Even the studio people were wearing peace and love signs on the lapels of their suits. (laughs) I don’t know that they knew what it meant, but everybody had to be “peace and love.” It was really nice, and we were so delighted to be sharing in that at that time in our lives when we were about 40. It’s an age in which you can still discover new things, have an open mind, and not be stuck in a routine. I hope the film shows that. I made a film during that time, a hippie Hollywood film.
Agnès Varda, circa mid-1960s.
One thing you touched on regarding that time was how different it was trying to work within the American studio system compared with the freedom you had back home in France. Could you speak about that?
My friend had written a screenplay called Peace and Love, and the studio accepted the screenplay, but wouldn’t give me final cut. I was stupid. I should have said yes, and then asked to do a cut for Europe, or just for France. I was too stubborn. I should have made the film, and then negotiated, but sometimes we make mistakes. It was a subject I really liked and related to. I still relate to it now. (laughs) I tried another with EMI, with a step deal, and they called it off, ten years later. So who knows, maybe I would not have been so happy inside the system. So the films I did make here, that were completed, were made with French money and total freedom.
Jacques made The Model Shop around that time, for Columbia Pictures. Was he frustrated by it all, as well?
He wasn’t frustrated. He just wouldn’t play the game. He didn’t want to have a crew of 70 people in a parking lot shooting two people sitting in a car. He’d shoot it hand-held with a crew of maybe five or six people. He could have done a big musical, with a big crew. He had done Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort back in France, both muscials. The Model Shop is a beautiful film, but it’s a French film, not a Hollywood film. For some reason, he just turned his back on the system, and what was proposed to him.
It’s also a rather humorous side note that Jacques wanted to cast a young unknown named Harrison Ford in the lead…
Yes and the studio said they didn’t see anything in him, and the film would make no money if he was cast! (laughs) Harrison was nice enough to appear in Beaches and talk about this. But looking back, I think Jacques wished he would have done things differently. So when you ask what’s it like to look at myself, I ask the question ‘Maybe I should have done this differently here,’ but I didn’t do it, and life is what we did and what we do, not what we wish we had done.
Can you talk a bit more about the metaphor of the beach for the way you look at your life?
I think because growing up, when I was born in Belgium and then we moved to the south of France, my parents always took us to the beach. Jacques and I would always go to the beach. I’ve never been into surfing or swimming, or beach sports of any kind, but the beach itself is something that has always drawn me in. Full or empty, the beach is a beautiful landscape: the sky, the water, and the earth. You can understand the whole world there, as a landscape.
Sandrine Bonnaire and Varda on the set of Vagabond (1985).
I also thought it was an interesting metaphor, because the beach is where everything begins and everything ends, an appropriate place to be if you’re looking back over the seminal moments of your life, right?
Yes, it is true. I made a film called Vagabond. At the beginning, Sandrine Bonnaire comes out of the ocean, naked, and little by little she gets dirtier, and dirtier, and suddenly she’s full of mud, so it’s also a metaphor, as you say, for the beginning of the world, which is also so indifferent to us.
Corinne Marchand in Cleo from 5 to 7 (1961).
Something else you’ve always done is play with the concept of time in your films, which you do in Beaches, and you’ve done going back to Cleo from 5 to 7.
Cinema is light and time. We know that. The time element is the one you work on, the one you play with. Then you have the other aspect, which is duration. Time and duration, and they’re not the same. To tell a story with film, you must know the difference.
"Stand and deliver, sir!" Dennis Hopper in Philippe Mora's Mad Dog Morgan.
PHILIPPE MORA: BALLAD OF A MAD DOG
By
Alex Simon
Born in Paris in 1949, Philippe Mora is a member of one of Australia’s best known artistic families. His parents, Georges Mora and Mirka Mora, migrated to Australia from France in 1951 and settled in Melbourne, where they quickly became key figures on the Melbourne cultural scene. Georges, a wartime resistance fighter, became an influential art dealer, and in 1967 he founded one of the first commercial art galleries in Melbourne, Tolarno Galleries. The Mora family home and restaurants were focal points of Melbourne's bohemian subculture. As a result of this, Philippe and his brothers had what he has described as a "culturally privileged childhood."
Philippe moved to London in late 1967 to pursue painting and filmmaking. He was one of many important Australian artists, writers and others who moved to the UK in this period. He had met Sydney artist Martin Sharp in Melbourne and when he arrived in London, Sharp (who had travelled there in late 1966) invited him to move into The Pheasantry, the renowned artists’ colony in Kings Road, Chelsea. His room mates included a struggling musician named Eric Clapton, among other soon-to-be notables.
Mora gradually began to make a name for himself in London. He gained support from established figures such as Eduardo Paolozzi and the critic R.C. Kennedy, who championed him in Art International and included his work in a show called "Narrative Painting in Britain in the Twentieth Century" at the Camden Arts Centre in 1970. Artist Alan Aldridge also invited Philippe to contribute to his now-famous book "The Beatles Illustrated Lyrics", for which Philippe illustrated "I Am The Walrus" and "Good Morning, Good Morning".
In 1973, Mora began an association with producer David Puttnam and Sandy Lieberson which resulted in two award-winning films, both of which featured innovative combinations of documentary and newsreel footage, home movies and fictional films. Swastika (1973) depicted Hitler’s rise to power, and Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? (1975) is an acclaimed documentary on the Depression, both of which he wrote and directed.
Mora returned to Australia in the mid-'70s. In January 1974 he and his old friend Peter Beilby launched the periodical Cinema Papers, which has been Australia’s premiere film magazine for nearly three decades.
In 1975 Mora wrote and directed the historical bushranger drama Mad Dog Morgan, starring Dennis Hopper and David Gulpilil. Based on the life of Daniel Morgan, a poor Irish bushranger who roams the Riverina and northern Victoria during the gold rush days of the 1860s. Morgan is driven to a life of crime as a reaction to a brutalising society and after witnessing a senseless bloody massacre of Chinese on the goldfields. With an Aboriginal youth, Billy (David Gulpilil), as his only ally, he is hounded to more desperate acts of retaliation by a sadistic police superintendent, Cobham (Frank Thring, excellent). It was the first Australian film to receive a wide American release and was instrumental in bringing Philippe, and the early films of the so-called "Aussie New Wave," to the attention of American studio executives.
After co-writing the screenplay for Phillip Noyce's acclaimed docu-drama Newsfront (1978), Mora became one of the first Australian directors to relocate to Los Angeles. Two years later he directed the horror film The Beast Within and many of his subsequent films have been in the horror or sci-fi genres.
In recent times, as well as his film work, Mora has contributed to Art Monthly Australia including an article detailing his observations on Australians in London in the Sixties, and an essay on the relationships between film and Australian Modernist art.
Mad Dog Morgan has been given a new DVD release by Troma Retro, available for the first time in North America completely uncut and uncensored in a two-disc edition featuring Interviews with Philippe Mora, Dennis Hopper and other members of the cast and crew. Philippe Mora sat down recently to discuss Mad Dog, the Aussie New Wave, and other varied subjects. Read on…
An early Australian poster for Mad Dog Morgan.
I’d only seen the truncated version of Mad Dog Morgan prior to this DVD release. In addition to it being more coherent, it’s much more brutal.
Philippe Mora: I’m obviously thrilled that the uncut version is being released. I’ve no idea why it was cut to pieces here. In those days, ’75 when it was released here, distributors would just cut stuff out without even telling you. There were no rights. Directors certainly didn’t have the rights they have now. We never really knew what was going on. But the original version was released in L.A. and New York. I remember this because The New York Post said “This film is so violent that everyone involved should be locked up, and the key thrown away.”
Pretty ironic, coming from The Post.
Well, they’re always sanctimonious, these hypocrites. But it performed really well here. Some of the reviews were great. Kevin Thomas, of the L.A. Times, was a big supporter, and that was really important.
The other thing that really made it stick out was the fact that you took a Neo-realist approach to the film’s production: you cast “real” people in a lot of the roles, as opposed to actors, many of whom had bad teeth, bad skin and looked like they lived in the Outback of the 19th century.
My head wasn’t there to make a glamorous picture at that point, because I was a documentary filmmaker up to that point, so my primary concern was ‘What was it really like (then)?’ I had made one underground movie in the in the ‘60s, in London, called Trouble in Molopolis, which was a narrative musical running 80 minutes starring Germaine Greer, best-known as the author of “The Female Eunuch,” a very famous feminist writer. So I had done a feature, but this was my first proper one, with a crew and everything, and my D.P. Mike Malloy, who was camera operator on A Clockwork Orange, among other films, was responsible for giving the film a really tremendous look. The only reason I was able to get him was that we were all mates, although he was a generation older than me. Mike had come to my father’s restaurant in Melbourne when I was a kid. He was a newsreel cameraman and I really looked up to him. He’d just been to Vietnam, and I just thought he was the coolest guy I’d ever met. He’d held real cameras, which was a big deal for me. And John Seale, our camera operator, became very famous, won the Oscar for shooting The English Patient. Jeremy Thomas, who produced it with me, won the Oscar for producing The Last Emperor. So we were all Mad Dog veterans. (laughs)
Philippe Mora in London, standing before one of his paintings, circa 1970.
One interesting, and chilling, touch in the film was the idea that criminals were somehow biologically-different from normal people, and people sought to literally dissect them and take souvenirs from their bodies.
That’s all based on fact, this twisted sort of Darwinism gone mad. The idea of making the tobacco pouch from a man’s scrotum derived from when they used to make them from kangaroo scrotums. But once this notion, which was very sort of pre-neo-Nazi, was that criminals had different-shaped skulls and brains, not to mention other bits of their anatomy, and if a notorious criminal was killed, they’d sever the head, and it would be sent to scientists and biologists and hospitals and universities, who’d then dissect and “study” them. Really scary stuff.
It is reminiscent of the Nazis, with people like Mengele taking it to the next level 75 years later.
They sure did.
The scourge of Nazism is something that’s always fascinated you, and was the subject of one of your first documentaries.
Yes, it was called Swastika, and what happened was, we located Eva Braun’s home movies in The Pentagon in 1973. That color footage is now in every single documentary on Hitler and the Nazis that’s ever been made. All of that is the stuff we found, which in ’73 had never been seen before. So it caused a sensation. It premiered at Cannes and when Hitler came on in color, in close-up, people started fighting in the theater. Someone screamed out “Assassin!” People were really disturbed by seeming him in color, because before they’d only seen him in these black & white, controlled images, controlled by the Nazis, by the way. But in these images he was just this “guy,” with this kind of funny girlfriend. The film was blackballed in Germany. They said it was “Anti-German,” and “dangerous,” blah-blah-blah. Last month, it was shown for the first time in Berlin, where it opened the Biberach Film Festival, and it was an incredible experience for me. I was literally bombarded by young Germans, under 30, who said “Look, we’d seen clips of this, of the camps, of Hitler’s speeches, but we’d never seen one narrative that explained how the Nazis took control of people’s minds.” So they were thanking me for this movie, which was quite moving. At the same time, I felt bad for them; because I could see they felt guilty about something they had nothing to do with.
Charles Blackman's 1956 painting of Mora's father, Georges.
Your father was Jewish, right?
Yeah a German Jew, from Leipzig. I found out when I was there, which is mind-boggling, is that there were 14,000 Jews in Leipzig in 1938, and by 1945 they’d all been murdered, except for 300, among whom were my family, who escaped to Paris in 1938. My dad’s mother was an aristocrat, but when the whole thing started he joined the Communist party because they were the only ones fighting the Nazis, in the street, because he wanted to get into it. His name got put onto a list and when the Nazis came to power in 1933, they were after him, so he fled to Paris, then got his parents out in 1938. My father became very high up in the French Resistance, because he could speak German and looked French, so he was very useful.
“Mora” sounds like a very French name.
Morawski was the family name. My father was a really amazing guy.
Legendary French mime Marcel Marceau.
You should make a movie about him.
I plan on it. His partner in the Resistance was Marcel Marceau, the mime. They used to smuggle kids across the border and Marcel would keep them quiet by miming to them. If they made a noise, they’d all be dead, so he was literally miming for his life. I think in that situation, we’d all be good mimes. (laughs) Then after the war, my dad survived, and wanted to get out of Europe because he thought there might be another war involving the Russians. In 1951, he immigrated to Australia with my mother and me.
Let’s get back to Mad Dog Morgan. What was the atmosphere like in the Aussie film community at the time? If you look at the documentary Not Quite Hollywood, it sounds as though it was a major cultural revolution Down Under.
The completely different thing about it was the Australian character itself, which was gung-ho and go out and do it. We didn’t really know what we were doing, so we just improvised. I mean, the catering on Mad Dog was just cooking a whole sheep. (laughs) That year that Mad Dog was made, 1975, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Caddie, Devil’s Playground and Mad Dog were all released. None of us even knew each other—me, Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi, and a guy called Don Crombie. We didn’t get to know each other until later, but we all just went out and made films at the same time. The atmosphere was exciting, very exciting. We were young, working in the Bush, playing with cameras. We shot for six weeks, there was no national film school at the time, and we just flew by the seat of our pants.
Mad Dog was probably the first non-exploitation Aussie film to be released, right? Because the films prior to that all had kind of a drive-in feel to them, like that biker movie, Stone.
Yeah, I suppose that’s right. I love Stone, that’s a wild, wild film.
Aussie icon Jack Thompson in Mad Dog Morgan.
One of the many recognizable Aussie actors who’s in Mad Dog, and became Australia’s biggest star, is Jack Thompson.
Yeah, Jack is like our version of Robert Redford. He’s an Aussie icon: every Aussie male’s idea of what he should be like, and the man every woman wanted to be with, at that time. It was a very exciting time then, because it was before the government started getting involved. They saw how much money you could make with films. Their primary concern at that point was tourism, and they about had a heart attack during the first screening of Mad Dog, thinking that it wasn’t going to do much for the tourist trade, what with men being raped in prison, and the like. (laughs) I was a real smart-ass in those days, and told them “Wrong. You’re looking at the wrong demographic: this is going to really increase tourism!” (laughs)
Mad Dog is still a brutal film by today’s standards.
Yeah, and I have a theory about that: Vietnam was still fresh in our minds at that point. We’d been used to seeing incredible violence being broadcast into our living rooms when they’d show footage from the war. And keep in mind, there were a lot of Australians who fought in Vietnam.
Actually one of my favorite Vietnam movies is an Aussie film called The Odd Angry Shot.
Oh, that’s an excellent film! I love that film. The guy who wrote that, Bill Nagle, became a very good friend of mine. I also directed a film he wrote called Death of a Soldier, starring James Coburn. But, we digress…so the violence on television was pervasive, but you couldn’t address the war directly in movies, unless it was The Green Berets, or something like that. So guys like Peckinpah with The Wild Bunch and Robert Altman with MASH, were, in my opinion and many others’ as well, were really addressing what was happening in Vietnam, and my generation was really affected by all those images, as well.
Peckinpah, Altman, Lee Marvin, Sterling Hayden, this whole generation of actors and directors were WW II vets who’d seen the darkest deeds humanity could produce.
Yeah, and it shows in their movies. We don’t really have that sensibility anymore in our filmmakers or our actors, do we? I do find the crop of actors now, some are really good, but they certainly don’t have that toughness and strength that came across with the WW II generation. There’s a theory that since the invention of the Pill, there’s an abundance of estrogen in the water supply, and it’s doing something to the males of the population. (laughs)
Tell us about working with Dennis Hopper in the mid-70s. This was long before he’d gotten sober.
Jeremy Thomas and I came to L.A. and met Martin Sheen, who wanted to do the lead—everyone actually wanted to do it—and Marty would’ve been great. Jason Miller, who’d just done The Exorcist, wanted to do it. So we ring up Dennis Hopper’s agent to see if he was available, and his agent’s head nearly popped through the telephone, like in a Tim Burton movie: “Yeah, he’s available!” So we took this little plane down to New Mexico, in Taos, and we get out of the plane, and there’s Dennis at the end of the runaway, dressed in tattered Levis, holding a rifle, just standing there and I remember thinking ‘That’s our Mad Dog!’ (laughs) So he takes us to his house in this battered old truck, which was riddled with bullet holes. And I said ‘Dennis, what’s with the bullet holes?’ He said “Oh, the Indians have been shooting at me. And that reminds me, you better be in your hotel when the sun goes down, because that’s when the shootings starts. Ha, ha, ha!” I mean it was just out of control in Taos back then: the booze, the guns, just crazy. We were in the one hotel in the center of town, and sure enough, when the sun went down, the shooting started. Dennis was still trying to cut The Last Movie and told us he’d like us to look at the latest version. So he drives us to the local cinema, which he owns, and all it shows is cuts of The Last Movie. (laughs) I found it very interesting, but obviously not commercial by normal standards. So Dennis agrees to do the film, and I mean, he was drinking, but I thought, so what? We were all young and drinking a lot back then, and had a lot more tolerance, not that I’m recommending every film crew should get shitfaced, I’m just saying that it wasn’t that big a deal. We did what we did, and we still got the film done. You know the famous stories about John Ford, that he alternated “wet movies” and “dry movies”?
No, I’ve never heard this.
Well, Ford was a raging alcoholic, and everyone dreaded getting on a dry movie, and John Wayne and all his cast of regulars would go off to Europe or something to avoid being around Ford on one of his “dry” movies, because he was so miserable when he wasn’t drunk. (laughs)
Then his “wet” movies must be most of his classics.
Well, they’re all good, but it’s a topic worth researching, certainly. I know the John Wayne movies were all alternate between wet and dry, and there was one dry movie, I think it was The Searchers, where Wayne showed up on the set one day, obviously hung-over, and Ford was really pissed off about this, and they’re shooting in the desert, in Monument Valley. So he tells Wayne “Duke, get on your horse, and just ride straight out there, and we’ll flag you down when you’re done.” So like, 40 minutes later, they flag Wayne down and he rides back, drenched in sweat from the hundred-plus degree heat, and Ford says “Sorry Duke, the camera fucked up. We gotta do it again.” (laughs)
Dennis Hopper as Daniel "Mad Dog" Morgan.
Let’s hear some more about Dennis Hopper.
Well, Dennis arrived in Australia, and he was arrested almost immediately over some sort of incident in a bar. (laughs) The reality was that Dennis was incredibly famous as Mr. Counterculture and Mr. Easy Rider. He made Easy Rider and it was still playing in cinemas at this point, so every drug dealer and hippie in Australia gravitated to Dennis. They’re almost parachuting in to meet Dennis Hopper. (laughs) And Dennis, this is one reason why I’d rather emphasize his art rather than his personal habits. For me as a director, as soon as I said ‘action,’ he was totally locked in, and even if I knew he’d had a few things or whatever, he was incredible on things like continuity. I said to him ‘How do you do that? How do you remember all that?’ And he said “Well, I signed a contract with Warner Bros. when I was eighteen, and they put us through the equivalent of Marine training on technique.” So he was like clockwork, no matter what. I let him improvise a lot, which I enjoyed, because he’d always come up with great things. For me, it was a joy to work with someone who was that good. He told me a lot about James Dean, because he obviously loved James Dean, and could actually do this uncanny thing where he’d actually turn into James Dean, his face would change and it was just really weird. That’s how well he knew him. I also remember him telling me that because of his very traditional training at Warner Bros., when he got on set with James Dean for the first time, he couldn’t understand what Dean was doing. When the camera was running, that’s when Dennis learned about the now-cliché of “being in the moment.” I think Dennis had come from doing Shakespeare down in San Diego, and then what he saw Dean do, it just put him into an entirely different frame of mind. I’m probably biased, but I think his performance in Mad Dog is really extraordinary. I think he identified with the role, with people thinking he was that crazy.
I thought the film was really a social commentary about Imperialism and the class system and, like Bonnie and Clyde a century later, Morgan was the product of the times that created him.
Yes, exactly. He became famous because he didn’t go after the little guy, really. He wasn’t the typical outlaw. Then the political aspect of that turned later into the outlaw Ned Kelly, who was much more famous later on than even Morgan was. Twenty years later, Ned Kelly would ride into battle screaming “This is for Mad Dog Morgan! This is for Dan Morgan!” Ned Kelly got the social aspect of what he was doing. In fact, I shot a scene of little Ned Kelly looking at a waxwork of Mad Dog. I don’t remember why it didn’t make it into the final movie.
David Gulpilil in Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout.
We should also talk about David Gulpilil, the famous Australian Aboriginal actor, who is wonderful as Morgan’s sidekick.
I cast David because I’d seen him in Nic Roeg’s Walkabout, and thought he was fantastic. He was like magic to watch because he was so…close to the earth is the best way to put it, I suppose. I’ll tell you a funny story, ten days into shooting, David asks me “Can I go for ten minutes?” And I said ‘Sure,’ thinking, yeah man, take ten minutes, no worries. Then, David disappears. The second most important character in the movie, gone. It was a nightmare. So we called the police and they said that the only way to find him was to bring Aboriginal trackers in to go look for him in the Outback, and they brought these old Aboriginals in, guys in their 60s with these incredible faces and white hair. The Australian Aboriginals talk in an exaggerated, very fast, clipped form of Australian English like “Where’s ‘is bed at, mate?” And they’d go into his room, and sort of go into all this mystical stuff and pick things up, and then they left. Two days later, they come back with him, after literally just walking into the bush, and we’re talk major bush here, uncharted, tough terrain. And I said to David ‘Mate, you can’t just leave when you’re making a film,’ because I knew he didn’t understand. When he said “ten minutes,” they don’t know ten minutes from ten years. He was pretending to talk our language. So I said ‘Why did you leave like that?’ He said “I had to talk to the Kookaburra birds, which are snake eating birds who laugh, and I had to ask the trees about Dennis.” And I said, ‘Oh, and what do they say about Dennis?’ because I was really pissed at this point. And in all seriousness he said “They say Dennis is crazy.” (laughs) I said ‘David, I could have told you that.’ (laughs) From then on, they got on famously, because Dennis was mortified that he’d somehow upset David. They even slept in the same room together, so they got very close, and that’s reflected in the movie. Australia was so racially screwed up at the time, still, that they wouldn’t serve the crew if David was with them. And the crew wouldn’t have it, so David ate with us. I mean, it was out in the Bush, but not that far out, you know?
What was it about Mad Dog Morgan that made it so uniquely Australian when it came out?
I think because it wasn’t trying to be English. So many Aussie films before that were trying for that BBC, Masterpiece Theater, drawing room drama genre, and our film was gritty, shot on location in the Outback, and unapologetically Aussie to its core. At the time, being the smart ass that I was, I said that Mad Dog was Hanging at Picnic Rock. (laughs) But Hanging Rock is a terrific film, so I feel bad about that comment now.
The real Daniel Morgan, post-mortem.
What was the reaction in the U.S. when you brought the film here?
Well, United Artists practically interrogated me because they couldn’t believe we’d done the film for $350,000. They were also very impressed by the amount of horrific bloodletting in the film, so being studio executives, they said “Let’s give him a low budget horror film to direct,” and that was The Beast Within.
Mora (right) and fomer flatmate Eric Clapton in London during a recent retrospective of Mora's art work.
Looking at your filmography, you’ve dipped your toe into every conceivable genre from period western, to horror, to sci-fi, to satire, to courtroom drama.
Well, I never wanted to make the same movie twice, so I made the decision not to be typecast, which it turned out was not a good decision career-wise. Career-wise, you better get typecast as a director. But it takes so long to get a film made, I would just assume not be typecast, ever.
(Anna Kendrick and George Clooney, above, in UP IN THE AIR.)
(Anna Kendrick, above, in UP IN THE AIR.)
(Kendrick, above, right, with Nicholas D'Agosto in ROCKET SCIENCE.)
You eventually found your way to Manhattan where you started more intense acting training. You were cast in Dead Man Walking and then you were cast in The Man in the Iron Mask.
(Peter Sarsgaard in AN EDUCATION, above.)
by Terry Keefe
(Currently appearing in this month's Venice Magazine.)
Like a seal of approval, it’s always a good sign of a film’s merit to see Peter Sarsgaard in the opening credits, because he chooses his projects well, whether it has been in a leading or supporting role. For a few years now, he has been in a strong enough career position that he could opt only to play leads, even if those were in smaller films, but from his film choices, he has also clearly been more interested in the quality of role, and not necessarily the size of the part, or the paycheck. As Mark, the uniquely resourceful slacker best friend of Zach Braff in Garden State, and as Clyde Martin, the protégé in Kinsey, and in his portrayal of real-life New Republic editor Charles Lane in Shattered Glass, and as rapist John Lotter in Boys Don’t Cry, to name some of the most prominent examples, Sarsgaard has brought star-level quality, preparation, and intensity to smaller roles, and raised those films up a significant notch overall as a result. He has also been slowly taking on leading roles more frequently, such as his work this year in the thriller Orphan. An apt career comparison can be made to that of Philip Seymour Hoffman, who, some ten years ago, also scorched across a number of films such as Boogie Nights and Almost Famous in key supporting roles, building a reputation to the point that when he did step up to the top of the credit roll as the star, it felt like he had been there all along. Sarsgaard is reaching a similar career point now with his new film, An Education, for which he is a likely Oscar nominee in his leading role as David, the sophisticated older man who seduces Carey Mulligan’s 16-year old British school girl Jenny in early 60s London.
An Education was directed by Lone Scherfig, from a script by Nick Hornby, who adapted from a short memoir by journalist Lynn Barber about her first love affair. The story takes place right before the Swinging 60s actually begin, and the thirty-something David arrives almost like the advance guard of the era to come, sweeping both Jenny and her family off her feet, through a combination of charm and deception. It’s a character that required an actor who could bring significant added depth to David, so that we too are seduced by his childlike energy and can’t hate him, even when he deserves it. Sarsgaard creates that complexity for the character in his strongest work to date.
Your character of David in An Education seduces Jenny, but the reverse is also very much true. She seduces him, or at least her youth does. Was that something you gave much thought to?
Peter Sarsgaard: Oh, yeah. If you think about what his own youth must have been like, when he was sixteen, so 1940, presumably? Around there. It was a difficult time to be a child, and so I think he’s trying to find that joy and happiness in his life now.
David grew up during the war. He was also Jewish. Did you create much back story other than that?
I thought about it. But I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, because he doesn’t. But I thought that period…it was all bombing, then the food-rationing, and I looked at a lot of pictures of that time, and the ‘50s, and, you know, London…it was just a place where people were so desperate to have fun. They had these, like, little fairs during that time, which were the only source of escape for people. And I think that David is emblematic of a lot of the feelings that Brits had during that time. And, you know, his being Jewish…I’m an American playing the role, and fundamentally an outsider [in England]…so even though I’m not Jewish, a lot of the feelings of not quite belonging are there. That’s the part of the role that’s probably the most difficult to play. You know, you can’t really play “being Jewish” without being offensive…
There had to have been some concerns about the Jewish aspect of the character, because you could go very easily too far in one direction or the other in terms of your choices.
You could, you could. You could also just play it like it was a lie, which I thought was a possibility.
It’s definitely a possibility with David.
It’s a possibility. I was concerned when they first offered me the role, because I wanted to do it so badly because it was so well written…but I felt that I didn’t understand why they wouldn’t cast a British Jew. Maybe [they didn’t] because it would be too comfortable for him. As an actor, you make everything make sense on your own terms, and you don’t try to pretend something isn’t there that is, i.e. I’m an American Catholic. You just incorporate all those things. And it worked quite well for me. So, if you know, even at the start of the film, you’re watching the movie, and you think, “Oh, Peter is playing a Jewish Brit, and he’s neither,” then you start watching the movie, and maybe that goes away, and you forget that I’m doing an accent. But that little thread of “He’s a fraud” works quite well for me in this movie.
There’s the scene where I’m talking about going to see C.S. Lewis, and I’m with Jenny’s family, and I say that I’ve gone to Oxford, and Jenny comes and sits down, and we’re sort of in it together at that moment, she and I, in tricking her family. And I had a complete meltdown that day, where I couldn’t - it started out I couldn’t remember my lines, even though I knew my lines. And then I felt kind of cold-sweaty…it was anxiety. And I don’t know if that even wound up registering in the scene, because I just took a minute and got it together, and I played it. But I am covering anxiety in that scene…that is genuine actor anxiety.
It probably helps your performance in that scene.
And it probably helps, and it’s probably something that David feels so much in his life, so much of the time, because anyone who’s living in deception like that…it’s not a very comfortable place to be. I think a lot of people think that if a man is dating three different women, and none of them know, they think “That lucky guy!” [laughs] No-- 
(Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard, above, in AN EDUCATION.)
In his own mind, does David think of himself as a good guy?
I think he thinks of himself as a person with good qualities and bad qualities. I certainly don’t think he has the venom for himself that some people have expressed toward me after having seen the movie.
Have people expressed venom towards him?
It’s interesting. A lot of men.
Really? Okay. Because your character is getting away with something they’d like to try, maybe?
Exactly! [laughs] Because it looks nice until you do it. And also because maybe they’ve done it. And they have the self-loathing of someone who’s done it. But for a lot of women, they’re like, “Oh, I knew a guy like that.” [laughs]
You were cast before Carey was. Did you read against Carey, as well as other girls, to help find the right Jenny?
There had been a different incarnation of the movie. It had a different director who wanted to go do a bigger film first, and then come back to this one, but, you know, if you snooze you lose on a movie like this. And we said, “Thank you very much,” and it ended up being a blessing. I’m sure that director would have done a fine job, but when Lone came on, I didn’t actually read with any of the girls with her. Carey had read in the previous incarnation, and I didn’t really enjoy doing that. I sort of thought, I mean…I don’t want to have any say, because I have to put my faith in other people. Otherwise, every movie I do will be the same. And that’s the way that I’ve had difference in the movies that I’ve done, not just in terms of character, but in terms of tone, in terms of everything overall, is because I put my fifty cents in, but, I really try to adopt other people’s viewpoints and ideas, down to wardrobe and everything.
That can be scary though, because you’re putting yourself so much in the hands of others.
I mean, I’ve had it before on a movie, where I said, like, “Honestly, none of this looks right to me.” And that’s a big drag, because they’ve brought out all that stuff.
So there is a point where you’d cut things off if it feels completely wrong.
Yeah, or I’ll just go…first I’ll say, like, “Well, tell me why you think this is right.” You know? And sometimes it’ll be just a matter of this reason or that. “But I’ve wanted to wear this other thing.” Sometimes I think the combination of the two [ideas] might be good. And that’s the way I’ve worked well with anyone, and Lone is certainly like that. You know, Lone…has just a very easy way of directing. She doesn’t give you a lot of detailed notes. You know, there’s no “Make sure you hit this, make sure you hit that.” I mean, occasionally there will be, and I usually know that it’s for story reasons, because she wants it to be clear, and I’m all for that, because I’ve been allowed as an actor before on different movies to just do whatever I wanted, take all the time I wanted, make any choice I wanted, and I get nervous then…because I know that no one is minding the store.
Somebody has to make choices somewhere.
Yeah, and a lot of actors think things like, “I wish that John Cassavetes could direct me in every single movie that I ever do.” But he [Cassavetes] had a specific quality, a specific sense of humor. He had very specific talents. A lot of actors just think it’s like, “One, two, three, go!” and it’s free jazz. I think, a lot of actors believe that “John Cassavetes” equals, “I can do whatever I want,” which I’m sure was not true.
David is based on a real person from the original memoir by Lynn Barber. Where there any specific things that you took from the memoir in terms of his mannerisms?
I learned that his accent was a strange thing, that it went in and out of different accents. And I was really wanting to do that. It would have been really hard, but even if I had done it, exactly how do you do it? Everybody knows that I’m an American actor, and they wouldn’t have been able to accept it, because they would have just thought my accent was awful. So that’s the benefit of casting a Brit, he could have done that, he could have done this varying accent. But I did tell myself, I mean I put it in my noggin, and I said, “All right, well, if my accent falters in a scene, it’s totally fine.”
(Peter Sarsgaard, Natalie Portman, and Zach Braff, above, in GARDEN STATE.)
Let’s talk a bit about your early years. You were born in Illinois, is that right?
Yeah, Scott Air Force Base in southern Illinois. It’s right across the river from St. Louis. My dad was in the Air Force, but my dad was also with IBM. I moved to St. Louis, and we lived in a number of different places. And then, when I was ten, we moved to Oklahoma City. During this time I would go down to Memphis quite a bit, and I’d go to Mississippi quite a bit, and I’d go to Arkansas quite a bit, because I have family there. My parents…my mother’s from Memphis, my dad’s from West Point, Mississippi. So I felt a lot of Southern influence in my life. And then for high school, I moved to Connecticut and went to a Jesuit high school in Connecticut, and then I went back to St. Louis for college (Washington University). Then I came to New York in ’93.
What was the experience of attending a Jesuit high school like for you?
It was probably the first time that anybody ever told me I was smart. I’d been kind of a very poor student, I mean like a shockingly, shockingly poor student, and was not allowed to even take a language class, because they thought that I couldn’t handle it. In junior high. Actually, that was a big experience for me: They said, “Take a reading class.” Which was basically…I just read books for an hour every day, and that’s all the class was, you could read any book you want. And I think that was probably a very significant experience, because I did extremely well on the entry exam into this high school, especially on the lit part. And I was put into this thing called Honors Humanities which had like five other kids. But I still always felt like I was misplaced somehow, because I still had the identity of not being the smart kid. These kids all acted like smart kids, and I mean, they all looked like smart kids. And I was a soccer player, so I was really the only athlete that was in this program. Then I went to college at Bard, for one year, and a little trick-or-treat over at Bard College for Halloween, and then went back to…I just missed St. Louis. I think if you’ve moved around as much as I have, sometimes there’s just one place that you choose to call home. And it’d probably make more sense if I called Connecticut home, because I went to high school there, and my parents live there now, but Connecticut just never quite got me. Long Island Sound. I can’t quite do Long Island Sound.
I remember, actually, when I first came to Connecticut, I was on the road with my mother, and we were carpooling to school, and I saw a pheasant on the side of the road that’d been killed, and on the way home, I tried to convince everybody to stop to let me bag it. I had gotten a bag at school, because I tied flies, and you can use pheasant feathers to tie flies, for fly-fishing. And that’s one of those moments where you can feel how profoundly different you are than everyone else. Everyone was like, “What are you doing?” I mean it was a rather eccentric thing to do in any place - in Oklahoma it would’ve been slightly eccentric, but there at least they would’ve known what tying flies was. In Connecticut, they were like, “You’re going to tie flies…with a feather? Is this a poem you’re telling us? What are you doing?” Anyway, I went home, and my mom and I came back, and we bagged it, and we skinned it - actually, my mother skinned it for me. And I tied flies with it. [laughs]
Had you tried acting during your younger years?
No, I didn’t act. I mean, I played Linus, in a play in Oklahoma, but it was like a school thing.
“You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” ?
Yeah, “Don’t worry, we’ll get the kite out of the tree.” In one way or another, I’ve been playing Linus for a long time [laughs]. And then, in college at Washington University, the soccer just kinda deteriorated, and I just wasn’t enough of an athlete. I’d played since I was a boy, and I had the feel in my mind for the game, but just, you know, at a certain level…because Washington University had a great team, I started playing, and I went and practiced with them, played a few games, and I just couldn’t keep up with it. And so I looked for something else to substitute, and it was acting. And I just did it on a lark, really, you know, I thought it’d be a good place to meet girls, and it is [Peter holds up his wedding ring, laughs].
Did acting feel “right” immediately as you started doing it?
Uh-huh. I remember being in this gymnasium where we had acting classes, which was a weird place to have an acting class, because it had a basketball court. And I got assigned, I don’t even remember what the text was, and I memorized something and spoke it for the first time. It was me and this other guy. You know, when you first go to do it, it’s like being in a dream or something. It doesn’t feel that way now, and I actually feel that that’s not a preferable way for it to feel, you know, but some actors have this idea that, you know, to get lost in it, and somehow not remember what you did, is good. Well, I can tell you a lot of things that we did in here over the last couple of minutes, and I think, for me, I try to have it feel as much like that as possible. I’d like to remember that I drank this [indicates tea] and you didn’t. You know what I mean? But I did have that [dream] feeling with acting at first, that I was maybe reveling in emotional states that I had never allowed myself to feel, that I was connected to another person, in a way that I didn’t allow myself to feel in life, so that you are suddenly really kind of hyper-connected to someone. But then you, as an actor, you start to realize, of course, it’s not always like that, so you look for different types of connections, than just feeling, say, like your first falling in love. I’ve seen young actors just sob. Sob, sob, sob, sob, sob through a scene. And I think, god, that must feel amazing. You know? But you don’t want to do that all the time. 
(Sarsgaard, with Hilary Swank, above, in BOYS DON'T CRY.)
I think I was cast in that movie because someone thought I sounded like John Malkovich. I play his son in the film.
Did you discuss that with him at all?
Yeah, they talked about it all the time. I’m aware that I have some quality in my voice, and he, you know…he has a unique voice. So, we have unique voices. But that was great, because I got to live in Paris, and do very little work actually, and just learn a lot. The same thing is true in Dead Man Walking. You know, it’s great when your first roles are roles where you are observing other actors acting most of the time. When I was doing Dead Man Walking, there was this scene where [director] Tim Robbins suddenly thought, “It would be really great if you sat in for Sean and did his lines in this scene, after he does them.” So Sean did the scene, and then I sat there and I acted the scene with Susan Sarandon - playing Sean - playing my character, but it was like the dead guy and suddenly the murderer turns into the victim. And that was very informative, to realize just by doing it right after he’d done it, how awesome Sean was. Because you just go, “Oh.” [laughs] So I had lots of great early experiences like that as an actor where I got to actually learn, versus a lot of actors now. There’s always been this lust for youth, but, you know, at this point, taking young, young actors who haven’t done many films, and putting them in enormous films with enormous amounts of responsibility, and then expecting them to perform…I’m just so glad that didn’t happen to me. Because I worked a lot, and I did plays, and I did television, and I did the odd movie, but until Boys Don’t Cry (in 1999), I had many years there of just working anonymously. And by the time I did Boys Don’t Cry, I was more fully formed as an actor, and I knew what I was doing in that movie, and I felt ready to go.
I’ve been successful at it sometimes, and not, since then. It just depends on the scenario and who you’re working with, who the collaborator is, but I really, really just try to trust everyone I work with a certain amount, even if in the end it would’ve been better had I not listened to them. You know? Because you gotta go down swinging. I don’t want to play safe as an actor through a bunch of movies, and so, that’s how I wound up on this one. There’s probably only a third of the movies that I’ve done that I would be interested in watching, but I feel like that’s…for a baseball player, that’d be a pretty good average.
(Vera Farmiga, right, and George Clooney in UP IN THE AIR.)
(George and Vera compare frequent flier and travel mileage point cards.)"I love the silent moments. I cherish the silent moments in film. It’s even more important and telling of a character what they don’t say, what they choose not to say…and what they may be thinking but don’t say."
"I find with Alex...she’s a sexual adventuress, the things that she says are demanding and liberal and unapologetic, and yet the key was to find a dignity in delivery...That was the key to Alex. "
