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Aspen Institute Italia – Aspenia n.9 GLOBALIZING THE IMAGINATION Conversation with Shimon Peres and Sydney Pollack © New Perspectives Quarterly (Shimon Peres, former Prime Minister of Israel, is currently Barak’s Minister for Regional Development. Sydney Pollack has directed over twenty films, including "Out of Africa", "Tootsie" and "Three Days of the Condor.") The influence and the cultural effects of the entertainment industry in a meeting between a Statesman and Nobel Peace Price winner and one of the greatest contemporary film directors. Shimon Peres Today the American Dream is exported globally through Hollywood films. Yet, the American Dream was really born in the rest of the world – in the hearts and minds of immigrants who came to these shores looking for a better life. Through its mass culture and English idiom, American tastes and aspirations are shared around the world, often at the expense of local national cultures. Is America’s pervasive cultural presence globally, then, a good thing or bad? Sydney Pollack The first filmmakers in America, of course, were immigrants. They were all looking for a way to speak to everybody, to find a lingua franca of stories and images that all Americans could relate to despite their linguistic and cultural backgrounds. So, the first films were always basic kinds of morality plays, fables really, that pitted good against evil. There was always a hero and a damsel in distress. From those beginnings the vast movie industry was born, flourishing first in America and now everywhere in the world. There are good and bad sides to this new reality. The world has gotten so small we need some kind of lingua franca to communicate without having to penetrate the complicated depths of culture that insulate us from each other. American popular culture has done that now across the world. But this development is also alarming. Alarming, because the power of the American industry pushes out the local films and flattens indigenous cultures into a kind of homogenous mash. In country after country – with the exception of India – the huge majority of film revenues come from American movies. In places like Greece or Germany, up to 80 percent of films in theaters are American. People are abandoning their local cultures at the box office. How to deal with this situation has been a major debate within the American film industry and ministries of culture around the world. We have had many seminars, arguments and fights with the French on this. You don’t want a situation where the government becomes the adjudicator of culture with taxes or quotas on American films. The only way to realistically deal with the American presence is not by cultural Aspen Institute Italia – Aspenia n.9 protectionism, but through encouraging the survival and vigor of the local film industry. In the end, what film to see has to be the choice of the audience, not of the minister of culture. The irony of the situation is that American filmmakers were radically influenced by foreign films. When the first wave of European cinema hit the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, it provided a new impulse to American film, a new dose of creative blood like we had not seen in a long time. The films of Antonioni, Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut, Godard and Kurosawa became very popular, especially among college kids. Oddly enough, today, the cultural pendulum in America has swung the other way completely. On Friday night college kids will go out and rent an old American film from the 1930s, looking at it as a "camp" experience. Shimon Peres There is a message in the medium of American pop culture: anti- authoritarianism, sometimes even disrespect for authority. This message has much resonance in places less free than America. Sydney Pollack Though it’s hard to generalize about so much film product, there is, I think, an essence of truth here. The prototypical hero in American films is going up against the odds and challenging authority. He or she is irreverent. These are admirable traits, especially to young people who feel stifled in more traditional cultures. But it can also instill an irreverence not just toward illegitimate authority, but any authority from parents to teachers to political leaders. Shimon Peres This is true. In many ways, the media today makes dictatorship impossible. But it also makes democracy intolerable. It seems to me, though, that there is also the message of fairness and opportunity. America projects two faces: the rule of law under the Constitution that protects the differences between people, and the dream that, because of that rule of law, everybody can make it. Even the poor can escape their condition Sydney Pollack The message is that everything is possible. That is dramatic. American film says to people everywhere, "You don’t have to be high and mighty to have a dramatic life." Your life is movement, mobility. You may be a grade-school kid with braces on your teeth in some small town who dreams of getting out and having an adventure and making it in life. You see that reflected in the movies. The movies tell you it is possible. This is perhaps the most appealing part of the American message, and it comes across as the subtext of so many films: You can write the narrative of your own life. In a very fundamental way, that is what America is really all about. Shimon Peres Is it a good thing that so much of a child’s education in life these days comes from movies instead of books? Sydney Pollack Absolutely not. It is a completely different experience to be shaped by a group consciousness – a film made for a certain common denominator – instead of your own consciousness. Reading a novel is a completely private experience in which everyone is his own producer. No matter what is written on the page, you supply all three dimensions in your head. If the worlds "he was very handsome" is written, you make up what is handsome. But when a film producer chooses an actor, the choice is completely taken away from the viewer. Everything that is part of the novelist’s art – the vocabulary, the syntax, the rhythm, the Aspen Institute Italia – Aspenia n.9 pace, the punctuation – is given up in a film. A film ends up being the producer’s imagination. So, by definition, nothing is left to the imagination of the viewer. In a novel, you can get inside someone’s head and track the way they think. You can’t do that in a film. When reading a good novel, we always say, "This is too interior, you won’t be able to adapt it." Especially in an age where audiences have become acclimated to fast- moving, action films, being too "interior" is something filmmakers worry a lot about. When making a film from a novel you are really just borrowing the superstructure, the plot, like the steel beams of a building. That is all. The beauty of the writing gets lost. That is why it is much harder to make a good picture out of a good novel than to make a good picture out of a bad novel. Shimon Peres Is the American film industry, then, bound to be about the manufacture of bad novels into films? Must this bad taste be inflicted on the rest of the world? Censorship is not the answer, as you said. Supporting local culture may be, but then people flock to American films anyway, don’t they? Sydney Pollack In some way, this question goes to the heart of the matter in the consumer democracies. What kind of culture can you have in a society that celebrates the common man but doesn’t like his tastes? In a democracy, at the end of the day, everybody’s opinion is equal. So, is it really possible to say, "This is a society in which we won’t tell you what to see, or what to do, you, the hero, the proletarian, the middle class, the common man – but boy are you dumb and tasteless. Left to your own devices, you will pick the pulp novel and the worst movie." A filmmaker must live with that constraint. And, in a certain way, it does shape what Hollywood does. As an industry, it tends to pick for its projects what appeals most and offends the least. The least challenging and the least provocative movie is the safest bet. There are exceptions. In my opinion, "The Godfather" series of films were great as artistic achievement, culturally accurate, but also very popular. Every once in a while there is a congruence between real art and popular acceptance. Shimon Peres Can you raise standards? Sydney Pollack It is hard to say. It is not impossible to make mainstream films which are really good. Costa-Gavras once said that accidents can happen: good films can be made in Hollywood. And that is not an extreme statement. But the problem is, you can’t just sit down and say, "I’m going to make a great movie instead of an ordinary one." It is pretentious to say, "I am going to make great art today." It doesn’t work that way. Everybody making a film today is trying to make a great movie. And you can make a terrific work of art by trying to entertain yourself and others. That is what a novelist does. It is what a painter does. It is what a filmmaker does. You can, in the process, try to create higher levels of taste in people.

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