FILMCRAFT

Interviews from the 80’s

By

Michael Ventura

Copyright by Michael Ventura, all rights reserved. 2

for

James “Big Boy” Medlin who knows the answer to “Why not?”

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These interviews, originally published in LA Weekly, were conducted between 1980 and 1985. They document a fruitful period when filmmakers of vastly varying styles worked in the mainstream or just at its edge – as such, this volume is part instruction manual, part time capsule. We hear Francis Ford Coppola say, in 1982, “I don’t feel I’ve really begun” – but his greatest work was behind him. Richard Rush, Peter Bogdanovich, Nicolas Roeg and Jeanne Moreau were essentially finished as major directors and didn’t know it. John Cassavetes would direct his last significant film the year after our interview. Candy Clark, that unique actress, would never again get the opportunities afforded her in American Graffiti and The Man Who Fell to Earth. On the other hand, for Stephen Spielberg and Martin Sheen, among others, much of their best work lay ahead of them. The technologies of filmmaking have changed since the 80s (as Coppola predicted they would), but the essentials of filmcraft have not. These artists have much to teach anyone interested in cinema. I’ve arranged the sequence to create an interplay between these conversations. Sometimes I’ve cut or revised my original introductions, and/or trimmed the interviews, sometimes not. They are dated as originally published. Ginger Varney and I spoke with Richard Rush; our interview is used with her permission.

Michael Ventura April, 2008

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Table of Contents

John Huston……………………………. 5

Jack Nicholson…………………………. 9

Stephen Spielberg……………………… 15

Peter Bogdanovich…………………….. 24

John Cassavetes……………………….. 29

Gena Rowlands……………………….... 38

Peter Falk………………………………. 42

Vanessa Redgrave……………………… 46

Dennis Hopper………………………….. 50

Jeanne Moreau…………………………. 54

Richard Rush…………………………... 58

Bertrand Tavernier & Philippe Noiret.. 66

Nicolas Roeg……………………………. 72

Peter Weir……………………………… 77

Louis Malle…………………………….. 83

Martin Sheen…………………………... 89

Francis Ford Coppola………………… 95

Robert Altman……………………….. 105

Candy Clark…………………………. 113

5

John Huston

24 July 1981

“He was very tall, with the immense lean frame of an old giant who has for long stooped to hear men talk.” The words are Ford Madox Ford’s, describing W.H. Hudson, but they serve very nicely for a description of John Huston, stepping with his slow, stooped walk into the living room of his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, graciously greeting a stranger – the practiced graciousness of a gentleman used to coming upon a fool or a devil in his suites. The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle, The African Queen, The Roots of Heaven, The Misfits, The Man Who Would Be King, Wise Blood… tales of fools and devils. It is hard to come across anyone in the John Huston gallery who lives a normal life or would want to. The stories he likes best to tell begin long after his people have left the average run behind. Danger is a given in his films, not so much the danger of flying bullets as the danger of wanting more than you’re expected to want, whether it’s looking for a treasure in the Sierra Madre or looking for something like love somewhere like Reno. Houston, at 75, speaks slowly and deliberately, with the care of a stylist. In the last two years this old gentleman has made Wise Blood, Victory, and is now at work on the Hollywood extravaganza Annie. At home with big budgets or small, at ease in or out of fashion, and working in his age as hard as he when he began, Huston has the air of someone who could not be made afraid. Which doesn’t mean that that he would not be frightened in a falling elevator, but that he has seen it all and is still eager for the game.

VENTURA: There’s a big nostalgia among many filmmakers for the Old Hollywood – for crews that have been together a long time, for producers that would say to a director, “That’s the script I bought, that’s the one I want to see on the screen!” It’s easy for us to be nostalgic but I want to ask you, do you miss it?

HUSTON: The Old Hollywood? Yes. And I was as big a bellyacher as anyone at that time. The things that are deplorable today had their equivalents then, I suppose, but… let’s say the lines were a bit better drawn. The process of putting a picture together today is especially painful and one that I have as little to do with as possible. I see people trying to put [and here his voice was distaste itself] ”packages” together. It’s a kind of shameful proposition. Humph! Depending on so many factors. They get a script – whether they write it or not write it, whether they buy it or not buy it – but they get hold of a script and then want to interest some actors. So they go through the roster of actors. This is usually the producer I’m talking about. And he may pretend to be looking for exactly the right actor for the script – but he’s not. I mean the truth is, the bald, unvarnished truth is the poor bastard is looking for a name that will enable him to get financing for the picture. Well, now he’s got the actor. Sometimes he adds a director to it. They’re not quite so particular about who directs a picture as they are about who acts in a picture. And presently, when he thinks he has a combination that is viable, commercial, he submits it to a studio. And for the most part, the people who are in sway are ex-accountants or 6 bookkeepers or gamblers of one sort or another in stocks and bonds, or they may even have a background in the Mafia.

VENTURA: I’m glad you said that.

HUSTON: Or some connection remote or otherwise. [At which he gave a chuckle, quite a knowing chuckle.] Well, certainly this is… to have to go through all that is a painful, embarrassing proposition. That isn’t the way to make pictures. Eventually we’ll decide for ourselves this afternoon what is the way to make pictures [that chuckle again], or it may taken even another day. But that sure as hell isn’t. And the old formula was, I think, infinitely superior.

VENTURA: How?

HUSTON: Well, a property was decided upon, their [the studio’s] actors were available – they were under contract; they could take the property and give it to writers, under contract as well, and the writers would turn out a script. In turning out a script they were perfectly willing to take all the time in the world for the simple reason that they were being paid by the week. Nowadays I’ve noticed that writers will write a script – the best writers will write a script – and will turn it over and want to get on to the next one, because that’s where their profit lies. So a degree of perfectionism existed before that doesn’t obtain today.

VENTURA: It’s often in the writer’s contract that you write it in six or ten weeks.

HUSTON: And that’s all that’s required of you. That’s hardly the way to get a fine script. I spent, one time I remember, and working very hard, most industriously, almost a year on a script. And this was not just me, but two other men. This was the script for Juarez [co-scripted with Wolfgang Reinhardt and Aeneas Mackenzie, produced in 1939 at Warner’s]. And we were defended during this period by Henry Blanke. That producer was our champion, and he kept the studio from riding us or getting on our backs, and kept reassuring them that something good would come out. And I think it was probably the best script that I ever had anything to do with. It took the better part of a year, and I remember our high moment – I got a note from Hal Wallis [Warner studio head] saying that he had just finished reading the script and it was perhaps the best script he had ever read. Well, you can’t imagine what this meant to us as writers. But things, however, could happen to a script even then, and did to this one. Stars, especially certain stars, were beginning to exert some degree of power, and Paul Muni wanted more lines and a bigger part in the script, and the thing was thrown off balance. One of the reasons I decided to become a director is that it wouldn’t have happened that way if I had been directing the picture.

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VENTURA: You hear a lot of stars now saying they want to be actors, they don’t want to be stars. Looking hard at old pictures to try to learn what the hell the craft is about, I see a lot of stars doing amazing acting. More technique than today. Did stars like Bogart, like Hepburn, consider themselves stars before actors, or actors before stars? Is that a distinction they were in the habit of making?

HUSTON: I think that the stars liked to think of themselves as actors. For instance, Gable. He wanted to be a fine actor. And he was – a very, very good actor. But Gable didn’t have many aspects. Gable played Gable, but did it superbly. Now Bogart was an excellent actor, an extraordinary actor. There were so many aspects of Bogart, so many departments, and you call up one, evoke one, almost press a button, and he would appear. I mean, for instance, the Dobbs in Treasure of the Sierra Madre has little relationship with Sam Spade or the man in The African Queen.

VENTURA: Do you think acting for a camera differs from acting on the stage before an audience?

HUSTON: You don’t have to be the thing itself to be an actor in the theater. You don’t have to be the real article. This was Olivier. Olivier is not Richard III; Olivier is not Othello. These are not aspects of Olivier. These are the results of extraordinary observation, cunning, invention on Olivier’s part, probably the superior of any screen actor’s we know. But to be a screen actor, you have to be the real thing. The camera sees behind the eyes of the person, it sees something – it sees deeper into the person than just an acquaintance would. The camera has… a discerning! If you’re sufficiently interesting, why, the camera moves forward, and if you aren’t … it pulls away from you. [And you should have seen him say that, spinning the word “interesting” to mean very much, moving forward on “forward,” arching the eyebrows on “aren’t,” pausing, then pulling away – being the point as well as making it.] And this is I think one of the faults of the bad director -- that he’ll have you, the audience, up so close to an actor that it’s embarrassing. It’s familiarity that’s uncalled for. Next thing you know you’ll be in a questionable relationship!

VENTURA: Do you rehearse actors?

HUSTON: You mean before a film ever starts? Only in certain instances. Where there’s a good deal of dialogue and where I want them to get into rhythms of speech and don’t have to think about saying lines. Then you come to a place where to go any further with the rehearsal would make it too automatic. You’d lose spontaneity.

VENTURA: On the set, do you rehearse before a take?

HUSTON: Oh yes.

VENTURA: Do you do lines, or blocking?

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HUSTON: What I do is tell the actors to show me. I don’t do anything about getting ready for the actors in the way of preparing the camera or designing the shot first. Not my first picture [The Maltese Falcon, 1941] . There I had everything designed first; I knew exactly what the shot was going to be. But then I let the actors do it after that. Find their way into the shots. And sometimes they didn’t, I had to put them into those shots, and other times what they did was better than what I had designed beforehand. But now, as I rule, I simply have the actors come onto the stage and go through the scene, and presently they’re doing it. And I won’t say, “You stand there and you stand there” unless they look hopeless and helpless and lost. Very often it takes a little while to work your way into the right staging of the scene that gives you – when I say “you,” I mean the director or the camera operator – an introduction to the scene. Either the inexperienced or the old hide-bound director makes what they call a master-shot. It’s something where the frame is wide enough to hold all the action, and the cameraman often enjoins young directors to make master-shots on the principle that they can always go back to the master-shot if they’ve missed something in the action, and that they’re covered in this way. Well, that’s not a very classy way to go about making a picture. Have you read my book? [An Open Book]

VENTURA: Yes. I thought the chapter on directing was one of the best and most succinct analyses of filmcraft I’ve read.

HUSTON: Thank you, very much. In the chapter on directing I was addressing myself to the young director who didn’t really know how to go about it. And helping him simply with the grammar of the thing, its syntax. It has its disciplines, and I wasn’t trying to get high-flown or into nuances or subtleties, but simply to explain what I’ve seen happen as an actor. As an actor, I’ve worked with young directors – who didn’t want any help from me, and God knows I didn’t want to give them any; they were finding their way. They would, for instance, do a master-scene and they would want to do it perfect – say a long scene, a scene that would go on for four or five minutes. And they’d shout, trying to get this scene perfect for hours. And then the scene, finally, would probably have no use whatever. There’s a way, if the young director can be patient enough, there’s a way into a scene, if it’s a good scene. There’s a route into the scene, I mean a first shot, and that’s the one for him to find. That’s the only difficult one, that first shot, which establishes the relationships of the people on the screen, and the emotion of the scene – and everything. Discovering that first shot is the important thing. And the others follow as predicates follow subjects.

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Jack Nicholson

8 June 1985

Jack Nicholson is a little guy – a surprisingly little guy – who walks in like a big guy. And he pulls it off, too. He comes into the room, greets you politely and distantly, sits his squat, square frame down, and looks at you with amused suspicion – or suspicious amusement, depending on the position of his eyebrows. With Prizzi’s Honor receiving critical acclaim and pulling in the best box-office receipts in the country, he’s happy – and it shows. His happiness is the satisfaction of a master actor who’s proven once again, to himself more than anyone else, that he can do the unexpected, pull a totally new characterization out of the hat, and not only get away with it but get applauded for it. Now he must try to keep his secrets, say as little as possible, and still give the necessary interviews. While Nicholson obviously doesn’t like to be interviewed, he just as obviously enjoys the challenge.

NICHOLSON: I noticed interviews got considerably worse with the invention of the tape recorder – the portables. First of all, you talk slower. You’re more guarded. You want to make sure that the sentences are grammatically structured. Once you’ve done some, and they come out, and you see that they’ve written it literally, the way you said it – it doesn’t look right. So the result is that you really don’t try to say anything.

VENTURA: Do you find it the most aggravating part of the filmmaking process?

NICHOLSON: What, interviewing? It’s, it’s – yes, it is. But it’s like anything – if you have to do it, you want to do it well. I maybe have done 3,000 interviews in my life, so you keep trying to do ‘em better, more to the point. They’re all about selling the picture you’re working on. Prizzi’s Honor, you know? It’s a way of helping. They had to spend millions trying to find just the right ad, to say it’s a comedy. This picture’s very subtle. If you know it’s a comedy going in, the comedy will play better for you.

VENTURA: In Prizzi’s Honor, working with John Huston, did you rehearse much to get that ensemble of mannered – and I mean beautifully mannered – portraits?

NICHOLSON: With John, in a lot of the bigger scenes, he’d let the actors rehearse by themselves and get ideas going. And then he’d come in and look at it and decide where the cameras should be, and make comments, and then they’d set up and do it. I love working with John because when you’ve got it, you’ve got it – you don’t overwork a scene. And that’s because of his control, and his strong belief that he knows what he’s doing by now. And you believe it. So it makes it very easy to work with him, because nobody’s running around saying, “Who’s this guy?”

VENTURA: I’ve found that acting is very hard to discuss. There’s something secret in every art, but acting seems a particularly secret, private process.

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NICHOLSON: Yeah, I never tell anybody what I’m doing, even the people I’m working with. I think secrecy – and this is why I don’t do television interviews, for instance – is a very important tool to the actor, both in the dynamic of playing a part and in the way it’s perceived.

VENTURA: When you say you don’t tell the people you’re working with what you’re doing… I’m trying to think how to form this into a question without prying into the secrecy…

NICHOLSON: You wouldn’t be able to anyway.

VENTURA: I didn’t think so.

NICHOLSON: Nobody can. That’s my training. In the most academic sense, say you’re doing a very private choice about something. Well, if you know one other person knows what you’re doing, you feel revealed – and you won’t feel the scene as well. It’s not unlike saying, “Here’s what I’m gonna do when my ship comes in.” And then when your ship comes in, it doesn’t feel the same way because you’ve already exposed your desire.

VENTURA: You’ve played everything from a hit man [Prizzi’s Honor] to a Nobel Prize winner [Reds] – do you feel there’s still much ground left for you to cover?

NICHOLSON: Sure. Your life goes on. Things change, the world changes. The actor is his own instrument. So everything should be, if you’re functioning properly, unique – I don’t care what it is you’re doing – and that’s what I strive for. When I first started, my feeling about acting was that the actor was the most modern writer, the most modern literateur, in the sense that no matter what goes into a film, the product can only become objective through the actor’s individuality. You’re the person that’s going to do this gesture. You can take a scene that says “I love you” and turn it to “I want to pick your peaches.” The actor is a writer in that sense. In the area of screenplays, the guy typed, and that was that, and he had his experience of writing, but that’s not the product, that’s the blueprint. So since most of what is literature today for most people actually comes through cinema, in that sense an actor is a modern writer, because he actually gets it on, objectifies it, and makes final what the concepts are. You know, a certain thing in every artist asks, “Why am I doing this?” After all, there have been quite a few nice books written. Why am I writing another one? And in the era of the Beat Generation, the recommendation was to not. Don’t further pollute the presses. If, in the Nietzschean sense, you had something that was going to actually be written in your blood, go right ahead. But other than that, get a job at McCall’s. I felt that the actor is not doing it in the old way. This is all just youthful thinking, but it’s another tangent for you, for this interview, what I think of as the actor’s role. It’s as a kind of writer. But those are just thoughts. I’ve always approached every job, every character, like I’ve never done one before. In fact, the anxiety you feel is usually those couple of 11 days just before shooting, when you wonder, “What is it that I actually do in my work?” And then, in the first 10 minutes that you start, it all comes – like riding a bicycle – it all comes rushing back to you.

VENTURA: That impresses me. You really approach each job as if you’d never done it before?

NICHOLSON: Yeah.

VENTURA: That’s a gift.

NICHOLSON: It is a gift. It’s also a craft. Secrecy’s part of it. All the things that I can’t talk about, it’s all part of that craft. It is, after all, the most competitive occupation in the world.

VENTURA: It’s a craft and it’s a gift, but at the same time it’s also a business.

NICHOLSON: That’s part of the craft, which is a commonly misunderstood thing. There’s no point in thinking that you’re an actor in Elizabethan England. You’re a 20 th -Century film actor. Understanding that is as liberating in the craft sense as knowing how to create an apple when there’s a peach there. A lot of people incorrectly view the business aspect; they constantly think it’s something to be avoided, circumvented. I think it’s something to be understood , as deeply as you can, and to be used to the ultimate benefit of the project. The business part of it is one of the crafts of acting. One of the most obvious ways this is true is you can look around and know, “Hey, I’ve got to get this by lunch,” or by 5 o’clock, and if you don’t know that, you mightn’t get it – what you’re after. That’s the most superficial way of describing it. How fast can you get the film printed, developed. All those things that most people think have nothing to do with acting have everything to do with it. I really started learning a lot about film when I started editing the first picture I directed. Once you’re in an editing room, it’s tremendously informative. It’s as simple as this: If your takes match, the editor has the freedom to exercise his talent and cut the film any way he wants. If you don’t match, 95 percent of the time he’ll only cut what matches. So without knowing it, you’ve dictated to him how he has to cut your performance. And you’ve dictated it in a negative way, against your own purposes. I’m sure that 80 percent, or maybe a higher number, of actors – forget about the public, but just working actors – don’t really understand this.

VENTURA: And then there’s the side of the business of just getting a film made…

NICHOLSON: Also part of the state of the art. Look, if the object is to express yourself, to have some creative control over how the things you want to say are expressed, there’s only one way to do that. That’s to get in a position of execution, where you have the power to get the projects together. If you don’t have that, everything else is 12 theoretical. Everything else is what you think you might do, in some room, when you’re not actually doing it. That’s okay in painting, because you can paint at home. But I’m not a painter. I’m a 20 th Century film actor. And in that context, the camera is paint, the financing is paint, the script is paint, the lights are paint, the make-up is paint – it’s all paint. And the painters are the actors, and the director. Don’t misunderstand me, it’s not imperative that everybody who’s going to be a good actor knows this. But in real reality, my feeling is that you’re better off understanding it and attempting to move in some vital way to what you conceive to be your desires, then just kind of having an adversary, at-bay position of ignorance about it. But when someone says, “Hey, I just walk in there and say the lines and go home,” I always know that what that person is saying is, “I don’t want to talk about the way I work.”

VENTURA: Jumping subjects a bit, is it disturbing to have such a good idea of what you look like? I mean, you’ve seen yourself be crazy on screen, you’ve seen yourself kill people, you’ve seen yourself die – does this have some kind of long-term effect?

NICHOLSON: No.

VENTURA: You take it for granted.

NICHOLSON: It’s an alter ego. I’m always watching him, when I’m watching. I’m never watching me.

VENTURA: That separation is part of the trade then.

NICHOLSON: Yeah – it’s like drawing lines, or typing neatly.

VENTURA: Who were your models as an actor, when you were starting?

NICHOLSON: Brando, and Dean, and Montgomery Clift – that was the time period when I started. I’ve been a movie fan all my life, so I can go back to Charlie Grapewin, Walter Huston, Walter Brennan, Steve Cochran.

VENTURA: You get a lot of points for pulling two names out of the hat that I don’t know.

NICHOLSON [very pleased] : Yeah.

VENTURA: I’ll have to look them up. [Note: Charley Grapewin was a grizzled character-actor of the ‘30s, notably in Grapes of Wrath. Steve Cochran was a B-movie – make that, Z-movie – leading man of the ‘50s.] Anybody else?

NICHOLSON: There’s lots of them. The other day I finally caught up with George C. Scott in a horror movie he once did – and I’m always astounded by his work. 13

The guy can make more silk purses out of sows’ ears than anybody I’ve seen. He’s tremendous. But I love acting. I’m a big fan – of my friends, like Harry Dean Stanton, and of actors I’ve never met. Or the actors in Prizzi’s Honor . This is one of the most evenly played ensemble pieces. Bill Hickey, Anjelica, John Randolph – Hickey and Angelica are copping all the Oscar mentions, so…

VENTURA: Actually, Angelica Huston wasn’t mentioned in about three L.A. reviews, which I thought really odd. In many ways, she’s the soul of that picture.

NICHOLSON: Vincent Canby, today, gave her the Oscar nomination – and that, believe me, is going to make my life a lot happier in the future. [Laughs.] And she deserves it, too. Because Prizzi’s Honor was hard to do. It’s easy when everybody’s being naturalistic. But when you have something that’s in such an extreme style, then it’s harder to work for all the pieces fitting together.

VENTURA: You mentioned Clift, Brando, Dean…

NICHOLSON: Now, I didn’t take these guys as models. In fact, they were so preeminent that one of the things I definitely tried to do was never do anything like what they did. I mean, I did a couple of movies early on when I wasn’t aware of it, I was – like every young actor then – imitating one of those three guys, but pretty soon I came to realize, well, they’ve already got them, they don’t need any more of these people, who are as great as it gets. So in that way I was influenced by them, in that I elected very early on not to go into their territory.

VENTURA: What territory did you go into?

NICHOLSON: Everything else.

VENTURA [laughing at the evident self-satisfaction with which Nicholson is just sitting there, half-smiling to himself, waiting for the inevitable next question]: You want to be a bit more specific about that?

NICHOLSON [smiling more] : No.

VENTURA: I didn’t think so.

NICHOLSON: Look, I may have said things wrong in interviews before, but I’ve never said anything I didn’t want to. Nobody’s that good a reporter, I can guarantee you that.

VENTURA: The American male actors of your caliber and your generation – DeNiro, Hoffman, Pacino – you seem to have attained stardom by their, your, ability to suggest a kind of psychosis somewhere within any character they portray. Yours have been especially ambivalent. Even your good guys are what I’d call – not necessarily negatively – crazy bastards. 14

NICHOLSON: “Crazy bastards”? No. it’s too strong. And I think, after all, you’re talking about drama in general. After all, they don’t make movies about going down to the grocery store, buying a bag of tomatoes, coming home and making spaghetti. This is not the nature of cinema or drama. They’re based on conflict, and the conflict is meant to produce distilled behavior. So I think you’re not talking about me so much as you’re talking about “What are movies about?” And movies change like the fashions of skirts, up and down, up and down. I’ve done too many movies to fall into those kinds of easy definitions. Billy Wilder said to me, “What the public likes about your characters, Jack, is you’re always playing a guy who has this tremendous ability at any given moment to say, ‘Why don’t you go fuck yourself?’ And that’s what the people love, [because] they can’t do that.” But even there, I boil against all definitions. I don’t want to be put into a nutshell. In fact, quite the opposite. Nobody can tell me I couldn’t play… You pick any two extreme people. I could play the President of the United States or I could play a drooling, retarded woman. Between those poles, I don’t see what my limitations are. Maybe they’re there, but I’m not going to be the one who accepts them, or defines them. I’m not trying to kill myself as an artist by doing interviews that reveal everything about what I do. The work is only meant to provoke a stimulating point of departure. An artist provides a stimulating point of departure. That’s where his hopes are.

VENTURA: One last question. What would you say to a young person starting out to be, as you call it, a 20 th Century film actor?

NICHOLSON: You’ll get a shot. Be ready.

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Stephen Spielberg

11 June 1982

VENTURA: In a time when most people are saying Hollywood is dead, you bring out two pictures in one month – Poltergeist as writer-producer, E.T. as producer- director -- each of them technically and conceptually audacious, and each them virtually certain to be a big hit. You obviously don’t live in anybody else’s Hollywood. What Hollywood do you live in?

SPIELBERG : What I try to do, I just try to make movies that I’d like to see. I wanted to see E.T. before I made it. I wanted to see Poltergeist before I produced it. And I found the best way to do that was just to work out of my own shop. Because if I had to sit around and wait for the big “Yes” from some executive, I might be an old man before I made another picture. But I’ve always felt that I’m a product of the Hollywood establishment, in that I learned my ABCs at Universal Studios – which, in the early 70s, was the epitome of the Hollywood film factory. I essentially learned to work within the system. There’s not much bad I can say about Hollywood -- except some of the people in very, very powerful positions, who have the ability to say “yes” backed up by millions of dollars, don’t often say “yes” to the right filmmakers on the right projects. The great gamblers are dead. And I think that’s the tragedy of Hollywood today. In the old days the Thalbergs and the Zanucks and the Mayers came out of nickelodeon vaudeville, they came out of borscht-belt theater, and they came with a great deal of showmanship and esprit de corps to a little citrus grove in California. They were brave. They were gamblers. They were high rollers. There is a paranoia today. People are afraid. People in high positions are unable to say “okay” or “not okay,” they’re afraid to take the big gamble. They’re looking for the odds-on favorite. And that’s very, very hard when you’re making movies. All motion pictures are a gamble. Anything having to do with creating something that nobody’s seen before, and showing it, and counting on 10 or 20 million people, individuals, to go into the theater to make or break that film – that’s a gamble. And I just think in the old days, in the golden age of Hollywood, gambling was just taken for granted. Today gambling is a no-no. And I’m sorry to see that go.

VENTURA: That’s a nice passage of prose. When I’m interviewing somebody, I can see the sentences in print while they’re talking.

SPIELBERG: You actually see the sentences? See, I do that with film. I can’t see the words – that’s why my scripts are never verbose – but I can see the imagery. Sometimes it’s frighteningly clear. And sometimes that’s what’s so hard about making movies. The imagery is so clear in my head that I’m already exhausted thinking of the idea! And now to have to go to Tunisia, or Martha’s Vineyard, or get on the ocean, or get into the Sahara desert, and make those images come true, for a price, is – horrifying. Exhausting and horrifying.

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VENTURA: What scares you most?

SPIELBERG : Oh… relationships. [A good laugh here.] That’s why E.T. scared me more than anything else I’ve ever done. It just terrified me. It was not like I’d been on the horse and had fallen off and was getting back on again, it’s that I’d never been on that particular kind of horse. Except for Close Encounters – which I think was my most emotional movie, before E.T. – I had never taken my shirt off in public. There are a few things about my body I’m not proud of. One of them is I have very thin arms. The other thing is I have no hair on my chest. And it’s terribly freckled. I have the chest of Woody Allen. And I’ve always been a little embarrassed to bare that. Woody loves to show off his emotional inadequacies, which is what makes him a master at what he does. But I’ve always been afraid to do that. It’s always inside me, but it’s not shown. And even though E.T. isn’t exactly me running around the world failing at relationships – it’s just the opposite, it’s succeeding at a very special relationship – it took a lot of years to get around where, once I had the story, and then took it to Melissa [Mathison], who wrote the screenplay – I told her the story and then told her, “But, you know something, I may not be ready to make the movie now.” And she turned around and said, “You are ready to make this movie. But if you don’t try, nobody will know, indulging yourself.” So it took a while to get myself psyched up to make E.T. It goes a lot deeper than that. I don’t have an analyst, I’ve never gone to a psychiatrist, so all my own therapy is kind of like “Chuck Jones Acme Therapy Kit.” I open it up and something looks like a squeegee and something else looks like a can opener and I kind of deal with the little tools and try to make sense of myself. I got good people around me and that really helps.

VENTURA: After needing to psyche yourself up like that, was working on E.T. different from other films?

SPIELBERG: I had a lot of women working on the set. So many key positions were filled by women it was amazing. Not because they’re women, but because they were good. And it gave a real maternal feeling to the set. And I’m a sucker for that, because I grew up with three younger sisters, and a mother and her friends, and I just remember feeling more comfortable on the E.T. set because of all the women on the set. It was much easier as a working environment.

VENTURA: And all the children – \ SPIELBERG: Yeah, and all the children – it was really like a womb to make that movie. A very very warm womb. Not always so warm. And not always so womby. But when it was, it was real conducive.

VENTURA: You managed to make E.T. and Poltergeist without any stars. How did you get away with that?

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SPIELBERG: Every movie I’ve ever made, the movie’s the star. More than the director, more than the writer, more than the actors. All movies, I think, should remain anonymous. And the film should create a life of its own -- everybody helping the film come to life. In the history of the theater the catch-phrase has always been, “The play’s the thing.” And I’ve always believed that the concept, the story, the play – everybody in it, including myself, is just helping to glamorize and stimulate that center-stage attraction.

VENTURA: So you put as much attention into the writing as you do into the shooting?

SPIELBERG: Yeah, ‘cause that’s where it starts. I mean, I like to change stuff, too – I always change stuff, I’ve never ever shot a script exactly as written, whether I wrote it or somebody else wrote it. It’s always gone through a major metamorphosis.

VENTURA: Raiders [of the Lost Ark] is the only film of yours that I really haven’t liked. That scene with the Arab swordsman – whatever possessed you to get a laugh and an applause out of somebody getting their shit blown away?

SPIELBERG: Oh, because it was good clean fun – as Andy Hardy used to tell Judge Hardy about all the girls he was kissing after school. You can take it as seriously as you want to take it – it’s all subjective reactions. But I took the movie as seriously as I took a bag of buttered popcorn.

VENTURA: But there’s a coldness in Raiders that’s not in your other pictures. Indiana wins through on brashness and technique. He’s sort of what a corporate lawyer would like to be. It’s very different from JoBeth Williams in Poltergeist whose only strength is the strength of her love, or the kid in E.T. who has a deep faith in the goodness of existence. Their victories could be ours. But with Indiana, it’s like Superman, his victories don’t have anything to do with us. What fascinated you about Indiana to glorify him like that?

SPIELBERG: Well, because I think Indiana is more of a 1980s hero than a 1930s hero. If there was such a hero today, he would behave more like Indiana Jones than a hero of days of old. Because the heroes of today are more impatient with success. They want to get there faster than the heroes of the old Zane Grey novels and the old Edgar Rice Burroughs books. And I’m convinced that Indiana has a heart of mush and a very gentle soul underneath the five o’clock shadow and the bristle of armed combat – because that’s what he does, he’s a soldier of fortune. And I like the idea of making him a kind of nasty mean-spirited guy on the outside. But on the inside, as performed brilliantly by Harrison Ford, I think he’s a mushball. He’s a big teddy bear. That’s what Karen Allen loves about him. And she sees right through the hard veneer. And the audience, who eventually hooked up their worship to Indiana Jones, I think they got inside of him and saw he was just a sappy yoke.

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VENTURA: You’ve got as much command of technique as any director around – as any director who’s ever been around. When you’re out there on the set, what would you say is the most important element of what you do?

SPIELBERG: The best thing I can possibly do is communicate what my mind’s eye sees. And that’s not always easy. Because I usually have a very, very striking image of what I want to do. Whether it’s a shot, or lighting, or the way the scene can be paced, or I’m shooting a very strange angle for a reason, there’s always a method behind the madness – I think the toughest thing is actually communicating, so everybody who has to be my extension and do those things knows why, and knows how to get it. I mean, communication becomes everything. Directing is 80 percent communication and 20 percent knowhow. Because if you can communicate to the people who know how to edit, know how to light, and know how to act – if you can communicate what you want so that what they’re doing is giving you what you have up here [touches his temple] , and what you feel, that’s my definition of a good director. And I think all the good directors of the past had that. If you ever gave John Ford a camera, and you said, “Light that set, and take the meter readings, and show me where to put the lights,” I’ll bet Ford couldn’t do it – not that well. But with a guy like Gregg Toland, you would go to Toland you would say to him, “This is late day, this is dusk, and everybody’s come home hungry and sullen, and I would love to see this scene in partial silhouette and backlight.” Well, maybe that’s as much as Ford ever said, maybe he said “backlight” to Gregg Toland. And what Toland gave him were some of the greatest images ever put on black-and-white celluloid, in Grapes of Wrath. I just think a director has to communicate what he thinks because a director can’t get on the camera all the time, he can’t move that light around, and he – well, he can , George Lucas certainly does – but he usually doesn’t sit down and physically cut the film. For instance, I love cutting. As a matter of fact, I love cutting more than anything else. But I cut through people, I don’t do it myself. Though I remember Bogdanovich used to cut pictures himself, and Lucas, as I said, but I don’t like to do that. I cut my finger on the splicing machine, I get the tape all stuck together, and it goes all over the floor, I’m a mess. I’m the Julia Child of my movie sets, but I have a team of experts who know how to cut, slice and mince.

VENTURA: There was obviously a time when you absorbed all the old masters. Do you find yourself going back to them periodically?

SPIELBERG: I always go back to Frank Capra. Whenever I want a good cry or a good laugh I run up a Frank Capra picture. And it works all the time. If I’m really depressed, really down in the dumps, I’ll usually run either Pocketful of Miracles – that being one of his most underrated films – or It’s a Wonderful Life. Before I did Raiders I saw only one movie, The Adventures of Don Juan, by Michael Curtiz.

VENTURA: He’s an underrated director.

SPIELBERG: A very underrated director. 19

VENTURA: His films – Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, The Adventures of Robin Hood – they aren’t underrated.

SPIELBERG: But he is. When they talk about him they just talk about the studio gossip. And I love David Lean’s work [ Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, etc.] . He was a true filmic novelist. You just learn so much from him.

VENTURA: Those are directors you have a lot in common with stylistically. What about a director you don’t, like Cassavetes? What do you think of him?

SPIELBERG: I think he’s a genius. I always have. Cassavetes is one of the first people I met in Hollywood, one of the first people who ever talked to me and gave me the time of day. He met me when I was sneaking around Universal Studios watching other people shoot TV shows. He was doing an episode of Chrysler Theater, that Robert Ellis Miller was directing, and he pulled me aside and he said, “What do you want to do?” And I said, “I want to be a director.” He said, “Okay, after every take, you tell me what I’m doing wrong. And you give me direction.” So here I am, 18 years old, and there’s a professional film company at Universal Studios doing this TV episode, and after every take he walks past the other actors, walks past the director, he walks right up to me and says, “What did you think? How can I improve it? What am I doing wrong?” And I would say, “Gah, it’s too embarrassing, right here, Mr. Cassavetes. Mr. Cassavetes don’t ask me in front of everybody, can’t we go around the corner and talk?” And he made me a production assistant on Faces for a couple of weeks, and I hung around and watched him shoot that movie, and John was much more interested in the story and the actors than he was in the camera. He loved his cast. He treated his cast like they had been part of his family for many years. And so I really got off on the right foot, learning about how to deal with actors as I watched Cassavetes dealing with his repertory company. I’ve carried what I consider to be something of an unfair rep that I’ve paid more attention to the epic splendor, the epic spectacle of my film, than I have to performances.

VENTURA: I’ve always thought you must be good with actors, because the performances in your work are so fresh and alive. It’s funny about Cassavetes – when I finally met him, you know, he’s short, but you’re never aware of it, because of the way he holds his head, like he’s looking down at you, like a tall guy. He tilts his head down, and his eyes burn up at you. [I imitate that.]

SPIELBERG: You got that, you got that! It’s funny you mention that, because I’ve always thought that one of the best ways of being a director was to, as John did, scrounge around for the cast, promise them anything but give them quality, and look with great poignance and attitude at your cast and your crew up through your eyebrows, your nose facing the ground! That’s something else I learned from John.

VENTURA: Are you comfortable with Hollywood shooting schedules?

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SPIELBERG: I work better when I work faster – 59 shooting days for E.T. Poltergeist took 57. I didn’t realize this until Raiders. Raiders took 73 shooting days. I work much better when I work faster – I have less time to intellectualize something to death. Less time to go behind the scenes and pace and say, “Well, the angle I’ve set up and direction I’ve given the actors is wrong.” Because if I leave myself too much time to think I’ll spoil something. 1941 is an example. There are parts of that film that I spoiled by having too much down time to think about what I really wanted to do, not just doing what I felt like doing. So I work much better intuitively. And even on the storyboards, for a thing like Raiders, that’s an intuitive process. The storyboards come out very quickly, I do all the drawings and then I have an artist come in who draws for me so it’s legible.

VENTURA: Do you storyboard everything pretty heavily?

SPIELBERG: Everything but E.T. E.T.’s the first film I never storyboarded. Because I was afraid I would kill the naturalness of the kids in the performance, the whole feel of the movie, if I spent too much time premeditating the picture on paper. So I didn’t do one storyboard, except for the 40 special effects shots that had to be storyboarded. It was a natural childbirth.

VENTURA: Do you write fast too?

SPIELBERG: I wrote off my draft of Poltergeist in five days. I wrote 20 pages a day for five days and turned it in. It was a stream-of-consciousness movie. I had a story pretty well laid out from my original treatment, and I sat down to write a brand new script, and it was just sort of like telling the story around the campfire at night to a bunch of frightened children. I began at the beginning and ended at the end and read all the pages out loud to Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall and Tobe Hooper [Poltergeist director], who hung around with me while I was writing that draft. Every day I’d read them 20 pages – it was like telling them a serial – and next day we’d get back together again. I’d write from 8 at night to 4 in the morning – which is the only time I can write.

VENTURA: The characters in your films – I’m thinking of Close Encounters, Poltergeist and E.T. – all seem to me to have a beautiful, resilient innocence. And it’s hard to ask a specific question about innocence! But do you consciously make them innocent? Or do they just turn out that way?

SPIELBERG: I guess – that’s just me. I think I’m an innocent. [He thinks some more.] Well… I’m a cynical innocent. I can get to the purity of innocence when I really work at it, when I really think about it. It’s harder to remain an innocent – both in real life and in the motion picture industry – because things rob you every year of this kind of healthy naiveté. Actually, I think it’s optimism more than innocence. This feeling positive about things, feeling that all’s well that ends well. And I’ve always felt that.

VENTURA: Why do you think you always felt it? 21

SPIELBERG: I think growing up I had no other choice. I guess because I was surrounded by so much negativity when I was a kid I had no recourse but to be positive. I think it kind of runs in my family, too – my mother is a very positive thinker. One of the first words I learned, when I was very, very young, one of my first sentences I ever put together – my mother reminds me of this, I don’t consciously remember it – was “looking forward to.” And it always used to be about my grandparents. I loved it when they’d come to visit from New Jersey to Ohio, and my mother would say, “It’s something to look forward to, they’re coming in two weeks,” and a week later she would say, “It’s something to look forward to, they’ll be here in a week,” and then it would be “It’s something to look forward to, they’re coming tomorrow.” I’m always consciously looking forward to something.

VENTURA: There’s a real 1950s feel to a lot of your characters.

SPIELBERG: It was a very innocent time, too, the 1950s.

VENTURA: Well – people were trying to be innocent, anyway.

SPIELBERG: Yeah, I’m probably living the life of a character from the Twilight Zone in the ‘50s. With no ambition to emerge into the ‘80s or ‘90s. I don’t know what it is – well, the ‘50s were innocent because the war was over, it was a sort of time for reconstruction and hope, and then the Cold War hit, and we got paranoid. Actually… I think the 50s was – dumb. It was less innocent and more dumb. And the ‘50s to me was American Bandstand, Sky King, Andy and His Friends, The Pinky Lee Show, The Mickey Mouse Club – Poltergeist is my way for getting back at television for what it did to me as a kid.

VENTURA: In a way your films have all one plot: some average people, who fairly glow with innocence, have to grapple with some alien force. Is that how you see what’s really going on in our guts, our inner lives, our outer lives?

SPIELBERG: I think that people are always looking to enjoy the best of their anxieties. [Laughter.]

VENTURA: So you see –

SPIELBERG: I see life kind of… I don’t know. I really have two lives, I have a film life and I have a personal life. And I’ve worked hard at keeping them apart from each other. I need the personal life to supply the ideas and the real life for my film life. And I guess I just haven’t been interested in making movies on an eye-level -- making movies about things we know exist, things we can see on the street every day or on television every night. I’m more interested in making movies that are bizarre and baroque and uncommon. Things that we’d like to see happen about characters we’d like to become. But not necessarily characters we’ve known in our lives.

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VENTURA: The paradigm of people facing something alien – and facing it essentially with their innocence, with their optimism – it seems… I hate phrases like ‘the human condition,’ the condition the condition is in, but it seems that if one were writing a deep critical piece about Steven Spielberg’s view of ‘the human condition,’ you always have these people facing these alien forces –

SPIELBERG: Yeah, because I think people lead lives where their deepest wish is that something would interrupt the classic mundane everyday routine. And someone comes in their lives that disturbs everything, disrupts everything, and makes them suddenly have to work at life, and live it, to survive. So most of my characters in most of my movies are people with ordinary problems who suddenly have to become extraordinary to overcome. Elliot [played by Henry Wallace in E.T.] has to almost become a completely-rounded-out adult before he can become the hero of his own story in E.T.

VENTURA: Almost as though you can’t really grow up in daily life as it’s given you.

SPIELBERG: No, because we’re too busy providing for ourselves, providing for others. There’s really no time in the day! That’s the problem. For everybody. It’s either school or it’s occupation.

VENTURA: The influence of your films, when you think of it, is really astonishing. Does that enter your awareness much when you’re working? Or do you manage to insulate yourself?

SPIELBERG: I must insulate myself. Because my consciousness turns off when I make a movie. And when I write a movie. Everything that comes into me comes into me from what I like to think are just the, kind of, air currents. I like to think that these things come through me, and I receive and use the things that mean more to me than other things that go by me and maybe hit another writer working down the block. They go through him and he stops that thought, he checks out that thought and uses it for his thing. But I don’t really ever get into that kind of self-analysis. Haven’t yet, anyway. I’d like to know a little bit more about what I do, myself. But haven’t really had time. I’m been too busy making movies to stop and analyze how or why I make ‘em. When I do a good sequence, and I see good dailies, I say, “Did I do that?” And when I see a movie that I directed, and it turns out well, like a year later I look at the picture and say, “God, did I do that?” I’m still intimidated by my own success, the success of my movies, and how the audience perceives and receives them. I know a lot of my colleagues and I, when we get together and talk about it, we all feel that we just make movies that are truly – not simplistic, but truly simple in form. Linear story-telling, and plot. And with people you like. Stories that are interesting, employing technique that’s imaginative and unusual. But when George [Lucas] and Francis [Ford Coppola] and I get together with some of our other filmmaker friends, and we talk about that, we never look upon ourselves as a generation apart from the last generation, or very different from the new wave that will one day sweep over all of us. 23

It’s just, “What do you feel?” And then you make that, and you’re surprised. Lucas was the most surprised kid on the block when Star Wars became a megahit. When I sat with George a few weeks before the film opened he was predicting $15 million in domestic film receipts. ‘Cause he thought he’d made a Walt Disney film that wouldn’t have much appeal beyond young pre-teens. And he had tapped a nerve that not only went deep but went global. George has theories now, about five years later, but at the time there was no explaining. And I think George realized the meaning of what he had done as much from the critiques he read, and the psychological analysis they pinned to Star Wars, as from his own introspection. I’m the same way. I learned why Jaws was a megahit from what I read, and from hearing people telling me stories of when they were afraid of the water when they were very young, and why the water is more frightening than the air. But I think that when you actually make a movie like that, unless you are a preposterous ass, you never sit down and say, “I have the spinal tap to end all spinal taps, this movie is going to go into the heart of America and never come out.” I’ve never felt that about any of my films. I always plan for failure, and I’m surprised by the success. I don’t think any of us can make movies that reach out and make $100 million and plan to make a movie that reaches out and makes $100 million. I’m not trying to burst any bubbles here. I’m just telling you the truth.

VENTURA: In Close Encounters, you gave what for me was one of the best paradigms in American movies right now of the relationship between a man and a woman – totally out there, faced with incredible unknowns, nothing in the past can help them, no authorities suffice, they’re on their own. They have guts and faith or they don’t. In E.T. that’s been extended to childhood, and to friendship – very beautifully. They are faced with the worst possibilities if they can’t trust each other.

SPIELBERG: Yes. And E.T. is also a film about winning and losing best friends. What inspired me to do E.T. more than anything else was that my father was a computer expert, and he kept getting better jobs. And we would go from town to town. And it would just so happen I would find a best friend, and I would finally become an insider in school – in an elementary school, with a group of people, and usually a best friend, and at the moment of my greatest comfort and tranquility we’d move somewhere else. And it would always be that inevitable goodbye scene, in the train station or at the car-port packing up the car to drive somewhere, or at the airport. Where all my friends would be there and we’d say goodbye to each other and I would leave. And this happened to me four major times in my life. And the older I got the harder it got. And E.T. reflects a lot of that. When Elliot finds E.T. he hangs on to E.T., he announces in no uncertain terms, “I’m keeping him,” and he means it. Friendship has become more important to me than anything else. Having friends, and having good friends, is more important to me than making movies or anything else. Because when everything else is gone… [his voice trails off]. Because movies are a dream. They’re a fantasy. It’s a cloud over your head, a lovely blue and pink cloud, the kind of thing you see on ceilings and in children’s bedrooms. But that’s all it is.

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PETER BOGDANOVICH

28 May 1982

Peter Bogdanovich has made many good movies and at least one great one. The Last Picture Show was a classic as soon as anyone saw it. Add to that Paper Moon, What’s Up Doc?, Saint Jack, They All Laughed – and argue about Daisy Miller, At Long Last Love, and Nickelodean. He’s discovered excellent actors and a few stars: Tatum O’Neal, Ellen Burstyn, Jeff Bridges, Cybil Shepherd, Cloris Leachman, Randy Quaid. Others have done some of their best work in his pictures: Barbara Streisand, Ryan O’Neal, Ben Johnson, Ben Gazzara, John Ritter – and, of course, Dorothy Stratten, who starred in They All Laughed and with whom Bogdanovich was in love. Since Ms. Stratten was murdered, he’s taken a hiatus from films to write a book about her. Nevertheless, cinema is the air Peter Bogdanovich breathes and he loves to talk about it.

VENTURA: In general in the film business I’ve found a great ignorance of the history of movies. I don’t mean in a scholarly way, I mean learning to look at the quote- unquote “old masters.” Do you find a squandered heritage?

BOGDANOVICH: Well, we certainly have gone backward. In terms of the technique of making movies we’ve been going backward for some years. They used to make pictures better, and more economically, and faster, there’s no question about it. We’re having to learn all over again. After I finished Nickelodean [1976] somebody said to me, “How do you feel?” I didn’t like the picture, and I said, “Well, I think now I know how to make pictures, maybe I can make a few.” Because it takes a while to learn. Ford directed for years before he made The Iron Horse, which is his first known masterpiece. Hawks was directing for some years before he made Scarface – he’d made seven or eight pictures, none of them that hot. Hitchcock, the same. All the best directors made a lot of pictures before they made that one. But they worked a lot more than we get a chance to. They were shooting all the time. I mean, Allan Dwan was shooting six days a week for ten years every fucking day. And so was Griffith. Ford would shoot three pictures a year. In 1939, the year I was born, Jack Ford released three movies, and each one is a masterpiece: Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln and Drums Along the Mohawk.

VENTURA: What do you call well-directed?

BOGDANOVICH: So you don’t see the seams, you know? So you can’t tell it was directed. In other words, to me the best pictures are the ones where you may feel the director but you don’t notice him. Except through a kind of inference. I don’t like movies where you say, “Oh, that was a great shot,” “Isn’t that a great camera-move?” – if you’re noticing it, I’m not happy about it. Just tell the story and stop fiddling with all that, was John Ford’s attitude. People used to say, “John Ford never moves the camera.” I have 25 looked at some John Ford movies: he moves the camera quite often; the thing is you don’t notice it – that’s why it’s good. Same thing with Hawks.

VENTURA: Have you found a big difference in making studio pictures and independent pictures?

BOGDANOVICH: There hasn’t been a studio since I’ve been directing. The reason the old studios had an image, so to speak, was that there was one guy who ran it for a long time – he owned it! Warner owned Warners. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Mayer was there. Harry Cohn’s studio was Columbia. Now the people who run it are employees and they come and go. So essentially it’s all become sort of one studio – there’s just different addresses.

VENTURA: What about “studio” meaning sound stage as opposed to location?

BOGDANOVICH: Of all my pictures, the only two that for me don’t work anywhere near the way they were intended to were At Long Last Love [1975] and Nickelodeon, and both of them were heavily made in studios. The best parts of Nickelodeon were made on location, the rest of the stuff had that studio feeling I hate. We can’t do it anymore. I think the reason we can’t do it anymore is simply: black-and-white and color. You can’t shoot color in the studio. You never could. Color is distracting. The only reason they got away with it in the old days was that the public didn’t notice and didn’t give a shit. They hadn’t read 20 articles and 50 books about movies. And they didn’t go on Universal Tours, where they tell ‘em how not to make pictures. Now the public knows that there are studios, there are fake rocks, there are stunt men – people didn’t think about that back then. So all we’ve done is to take them backstage at the magician’s show and made it tougher for the magicians. A good example. Only Angels Have Wings [Howard Hawks, 1939] , a completely studio picture but it’s in black-and-white and there’s a lot of fog. So you don’t see the phoniness of it. If it was in color it would be no good, I’m sure. The minute you have color you’ve got to do it more carefully. You can’t cheat. It’s much tougher to cheat in color. It’s like John Ford said, “A good dramatic story, give me black and white.” Orson Welles said, “Black and white is the actors’ friend.” There’s another reason the performances looked so good in the ‘30s and ‘40s, it’s easier to be a good actor in black and white. You’re not looking to see has he got freckles, has he got pimples. You can see the make-up in color. Black and white, you don’t need it. You don’t need it in color, either, but they don’t know that.

VENTURA: Why don’t they know that?

BOGDANOVICH: I don’t know! They think you need to have make-up. Actors never wear make-up in my movies. Never. Actresses, sometimes, they want to put on stuff, and I say, “Don’t.”

VENTURA: We – meaning American filmmakers – seem to have forgotten the most basic things about film directing. What would you say they are? 26

BOGDANOVICH: How to talk to the actors. That’s the most important thing, really. Of course, if you know you’re cutting you’re in much better shape, because you can shoot what you need instead of just shooting what you think you’re going to need. After knowing about actors -- the most important thing, I think, for a director, is to know what the hell he’s doing in terms of cutting.

VENTURA: Could you talk about that in more detail?

BOGDANOVICH: For example, you have a three-page scene between you and me sitting at this desk, like we are, with a tape recorder between us. Now, it’s three pages, we both know the dialogue, and we’re gonna shoot it. Average director will come in on an establishing shot: the two of us at the desk. Shoot it from the door over there. So we see both of us; see the room. Move in now to a tighter two-shot – see the both of us. That’s two shots. Then he has another shot over my shoulder, onto you. That’s three. Another shot over your shoulder onto me – that’s four. Then probably he goes and gets a close-up of you and he gets a close-up of me. That’s six. Six set-ups for three pages. That’s average. Oh, and maybe he’ll get an insert of the tape recorder for cut-aways, in case they want to take something out, or whatever – that’s seven. Okay? Seven set-ups for three pages. Now, generally speaking, the average director will not only shoot those seven angles, he will also shoot the entire three pages in each of those angles. Except perhaps the long shot, he might not. And of course he won’t on the inserts. Now you and I don’t know, at this point, as actors – we don’t know exactly which angle is gonna be used when we’re playing the first, last or middle lines. We don’t know. He might use any one of the five angles when you say “I don’t like you.” It might be over my shoulder, it might be on me when you’re saying it – you don’t know, right? Okay. So you gotta play each of those times, try to be just as good, each time. Well, you know, maybe they do your close-up last. So that’s when you really want to be good, in a close-up, and they’re doing it last, you’ve already done the line now five times – and maybe each of those set-ups you had to do it more than once, because the director said, “Well, why don’t you do that again,” so maybe you do two, three, four times in each angle maybe. Now, every time you move the camera there’s a rule of thumb: it takes about an hour. Unless you’re moving very fast. On television, you have to move fast; but on the average feature, it takes about an hour. So there’s seven hours. Forget the insert: six hours. That’s almost the whole day. For three pages. Well, they say three pages, on the average film, that’s pretty good these days. So we’re not doin’ bad. However, there’s another way to think about it. What if you, the director, come in and you know exactly where you want to be, where the cutting is, for the whole three- page scene. So you’ve got on a piece of paper that the first ten lines are a two-shot. So you shoot the first ten lines in your two-shot. That’s all you shoot in the two-shot, because you know the next three-four lines are going to be over-the-shoulder shots. So you shoot the first part of the scene, just that, over the shoulder. Now, the actors know. “This part is going to be in this angle, I don’t have to do it again.” Now the last part of the scene we do in close-ups, that’s the only place I’m going to use close-ups, for the end 27 of the scene. Let’s say, just to make it simple, I’m only going to shoot the last three lines in close-ups. Just before we go for the gun, all right? And that’s all we ever do. You only need to say “I don’t like you” once. In the close-up. Well, aren’t you happy? Plus, it goes faster. Much faster. Because you don’t have to do it all perfectly each time. It’ll take a lot less time because you’re shooting a lot less. Now, when people say a person spends millions of dollars to make a movie, I say he doesn’t know what he’s cutting. Doesn’t know why he’s shooting. Because you don’t have to shoot so much if you know what you want before you get on the set. Of course, some directors I know who are very good will shoot an awful lot of coverage, an awful lot of footage, and they’re still damn good. Cassavetes, for example, is to me a marvelous director who breaks all the rules and he’s still good. There are no rules for talent. But it certainly moves faster this way.

VENTURA: You said cutting is the most important, after knowing how to talk to actors?

BOGANOVICH: The MAIN thing, the main thing is how to talk to actors. Because I’ll tell you the truth: somebody can teach you about cutting, you can have a cutter on the set, there’s no crime to it – Billy Wilder had a cutter on the set all the time, always did. You got a cameraman to tell you how to light it if you have problems. Get a good writer, he’ll tell you how to write it. But somebody’s gotta talk to the actors. You can have ten good actors, and they’re still not gonna be that good unless somebody’s there. Because the difference between actors on the stage and actors in the movies is that on stage there’s an audience, and, no matter if the stage-director is a schmuck, if the actor can really work with that audience he’ll know where he is. In the movies there’s no audience. There’s just the director. He’s the only audience. That’s why so many actors feel adrift in the movies. I asked James Cagney once – and he said he’d worked with about 70 directors – I asked Cagney what did he think was a good director, and he said, “Well, I only worked with five. A good director for me is a guy who if I don’t know what the hell to do, he can get up and show me.”

VENTURA: In most arts you hear about “self-expression” but in Hollywood that’s a dirty word. When you’re making a picture, is that there for you, does it go through your mind?

BOGDANOVICH: I think so. When I’m working I’m thinking, “What’s the point?” Is it just to make another movie, or make money, or what? I’ve tried never to make a movie to make money, I’ve tried never to do a movie that I didn’t think was about something. It may have been misguided, and I maybe didn’t pull it off, but it started with an intention of being about something. At Long Last Love , which didn’t work – but the idea was to try to show the very tenuousness and difficulty of a relationship that’s based on what we all think is “falling in love.” What is falling in love? That’s what the movie was about. I don’t think it ever answered the question, but at least it was asking the question. It just didn’t work.

28

VENTURA: Seems like you asked that question again in They All Laughed.

BOGDANOVICH: Yeah, what I think I did in that picture was to accept it. And to try to define more what it was. In At Long Last Love – that’s an ironic title, because nobody gets what he wants in that picture. In They All Laughed Ritter does get what he wants. It’s based on trust. Totally. Because none of them discuss. Neither does he ask her, nor she ask him, what it’s really about. She in fact asks him and he lies to her and she knows he lies, and still likes him. So there’s two people who essentially say, “Well, we love each other, and that means we just trust each other, ‘cause that’s it. ” On faith. In fact, Dorothy’s [the late Dorothy Stratten] character in the movie is totally on faith. ‘Cause the audience – interesting thing is, that the audience accepts it on faith, too, because there’s no idea of what she does. You don’t know whether she’s really having an affair with Sean Ferrer, which she doesn’t seem to be. Or why she doesn’t like her husband. But you take her side on it, and that’s potentially because Dorothy annihilates disbelief. You don’t believe that there’s anything wrong with her – she doesn’t seem like she would be doing anything wrong. Which was true of Dorothy. That was her personality. And that comes out, you can’t hide that. And then, of course, when Dorothy got murdered it changed everything. And… [his voice trails off]. The meaning of things falls into a different perspective when somebody you love dies, or gets killed. When my parents died it seemed more in the nature of things. Parents die before you do, supposedly. At least, that’s sort of the way it goes. But this was different. This was murder. And it wasn’t a movie. It was life. You know, we all make movies about murder – we all make movies about a lot of things – but we don’t really know what it means. We just think we do. But when something happens , and it’s real, and there’s no way to change it, no way to re-write it, no way to re-cut it or re-shoot it, you suddenly say, “What is the point of making pictures? What is the point of doing anything? Because this is real. ” And how do you deal with it? What is important? You start asking a lot of questions. At least, I did. About everything you’ve ever done, about anything anybody’s ever done. And that’s one of the reasons I’m not going to be directing for a while. Because I’m just trying to get a company together where a lot of people are working toward a common goal and quality. That’s the only thing I can do at the moment. I’m not able to do much more than make pictures – I wish I could. But that’s the main thing I know. So I’m putting together a picture company. Try to show them a world that does exist. Or that could exist. Or that shouldn’t. There has to be some point to a movie beyond simply the money. I’ve always known that, but never more so than in the last couple of years.

29

JOHN CASSAVETES

20 August 1982

“Sonofabitch -- what I wouldn’t give for a different nightmare.” -- Cassavetes playing Phillip in Paul Mazursky’s Tempest

The people who did the trailers for Paul Mazursky’s new film, Tempest, knew what they were doing: John Cassavetes, amidst flashes of lightning, saying with all the intensity at that intense man’s command, “Show me the magic. Come on. Come on, show me the magic.” As actor, writer, and especially director, it has been the work of Cassavetes’ life to show us the magic -- and it has been the discipline of his life to look for that magic not in special effects that can only take place on movie-screens, or in the often easy outs of fantasies, but in the look on a woman’s face between the time she puts her kids on the bus to school and the time she goes crazy; or the look on a man’s face, after he’s vomited in a bathroom in a bar, when he can look up from his humiliation into the eyes of a friend. It’s the magic that happens when all the layers are peeled off, no defenses, no tricks -- nothing but the great trickster, the human heart, quickened for a moment into honesty. He is deeply committed in grounding his philosophic points in what he calls “real things.” “Because,” as he told me, “I too am a member of this age -- this age of nihilistic positivity, or whatever the hell it is.” And for twenty-odd years now his films have taken the side of those who must earn their baffled living in the Age of Nihilistic Positivity: Shadows, Faces, Husbands, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Opening Night, Gloria. I’ve written elsewhere and at length about the tremendous influence of his direction, and how moments and filmic styles we take for granted in many films were first explored and given form in his. And as an actor, Cassavetes has stood for a style that can be popular without being homogenous, without ironing out the natural quirks and flaws and fissures of the psyche. In Mazursky’s Tempest Cassavetes gives his best performance in a decade, a fiery, funny, feisty portrait of a man who decides the only way to stay is to leave, the only way to safety is to risk everything, the only laughter worth laughing is the laugh that brings tears to your eyes.

VENTURA : What was it like to work with Mazursky in Tempest as an actor?

CASSAVETES : Well, when I first saw the script, my mind flashed back to all the incredible double-crosses people perform, particularly when they’re working on an expensive picture. So the first thing I wanted was not to be double-crossed. And the only way you can not be double-crossed, is to say up front what you feel. Straightforward. A lot of people thought the script was very good. I frankly didn’t understand the script. I understood that the guy was an architect and that he was having troubles with his wife and his way of life and job, and that’s simple, that’s everybody. It could be a workman just as easily as being an architect. But I didn’t understand his reactions to the feeling that he was in -- the change-of-life period, or whatever you want to call it. Somebody trying to be young, trying to be vital the way they used to be. And finding himself in a position 30 where everyone surrounding him is as dead as he is. And all the things you try to accomplish in your life suddenly come back on you and you realize you don’t have that much time. So, when I read it, I didn’t know if the struggle to get out of that was going to be handled honestly, movie-wise. I knew it was a comedy, because everyone said that. But I didn’t know if Paul wanted me to do jokes, or act funny -- which I can’t do anyway -- or if he’d let it be straight. And so I said, “I take this very seriously, this script.” I went into that meeting angry. And I didn’t know why I was so angry, but I was angry. I think I wanted to let Paul know that there is a certain amount of bitterness that comes into the constant boredom of meeting people who don’t connect with you -- I mean, chemically, or just what they’re doing. You get crazy, you just don’t want to do it. But Paul is very interesting. Because he’s a man who doesn’t really say a lot about what he’s gonna do. He’s always alive and vital and making statements that you can challenge. I mean, he’s a dynamo! Dynamic man. Laughs in the middle of what actors would deem important scenes. And clowns around during rehearsals. And he prefers somebody to challenge his thoughts. A lot of directors -- not good ones -- but a lot of directors let their script-girl tell them that you didn’t say the line, that you left out a “But, I --,” or something like that. You do a take over again. And the feeling is that it doesn’t matter what’s on the screen, it only matters that you left out a “But, I --.” But with Paul -- I very rarely work with a director, like him, who doesn’t really challenge every specific comment, and yet watches every specific moment. You know, sometimes everyone second-guesses the director. It’s very simple to do and it’s very normal. I’m sure when Mazursky acts he does the same thing. You know, you think, “My god, why do they have to push it in this direction, when it could be so lovely in this direction.” That happens all the time. But Paul really likes that. He likes it in the sense that if you really know so much, do it. Don’t sit and talk about it and conspire about it and fret about it. Put it on the screen. Who’s stopping you? And then he might stop you. But Paul’s whole thing, not only in front of the camera, was a nice rapport between the actors. And working with Paul wasn’t, “This is the scene about the girl whom you meet for the first time,” there’s none of that. It’s “Oh! There’s Susan! [Susan Sarandon] Gah! She looks great. Susan, you look great! Fantastic! Oh my God!” And Susan gets all embarrassed, she says, “Ok, Paul, let’s do the scene,” and he says, “Ok, the car is coming, I’ll play the guy, I’ll play the guy!” And off-scene Paul will play me, and he’ll say, “There’s no room for you, John, you get outta here!” And I found it, for everybody there, maddening, because it’s a strange different kind of direction. But now I miss it. And I don’t want to go back to the other. I mean, he’d never say, “This is what it’s about,” “This is funny,” “This is not.” It’s, “Look at that daughter [Molly Ringwald, in her first role], isn’t she wonderful , God, she’s better than you! She’s better than Gena [Gena Rowlands, John’s wife, who also plays his wife in Tempest ]! She’s better than anybody! God! She’s marvelous!” Then he cries. Hugs her. Embraces her. Then you do the scene. Or in Greece, in the Peloponnesus, he might storm into the bedroom and say, “Are you going to the party?! We have the boat tonight!” And Gena and I would be asleep. And he’d say, “I can only stay a minute, John. John, don’t ask me what the dailies 31 are like, ‘What are the dailies like?’ don’t ask me, you’re gonna drive me crazy.” “Would you like a drink, Paul?” “A drink?! No, I don’t wanna drink. I toldja I can only stay a minute. Are you going to the party or not? Oh, God, the dailies were really great, the dailies were…” and then he’d talk about them. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about magic in films. I think, from my standpoint, that Paul was Phillip [the soul-searcher of Tempest ], and so was I. But so was he. Not only was he, but then he insisted that the whole crew make magic! And if the weather turned and it was all just beautiful blue sky and he wanted it gray, then he’d go into the water and actually be doing these chants! So it was a delight.

VENTURA : You said you walked into that first meeting angry?

CASSAVETES : I think, like everybody, nobody trusts anybody. I’m not different. And actors are particularly distrustful, and mean. Simply because they feel that no one is really going to be able to help them. Or be able to understand what the story is - - that the author himself has written, but actors just feel that they know it. Your tendency as an actor is to create your own story immediately. Out of panic. And that’s what happens in the beginning. And Paul just wanted that short period out.

VENTURA : When you’re directing, what’s your approach to that period?

CASSAVETES : I’m a totally intuitive person. I mean, I think about things that human beings would do, but I just am guessing -- so I don’t really have a preconceived vision of the way a performer should perform. Or, quote, the character, unquote. I don’t believe in “the character.” Once the actor’s playing that part, that’s the person. And it’s up to that person to go in and do anything he can. If it takes the script this way and that, I let it do it. But that’s because I really am more an actor than a director. And I appreciate that there might be some secrets in people -- and that that might be more interesting than a “plot.” I like actors and I depend on them a lot. I depend on them to think. And to be honest. And to say, “That never would happen to me, I don’t believe it.” And to try to decipher what is defense, and what is a real irregularity in somebody’s behavioral pattern. And then I try to find some kind of positive way to make a world exist like a family -- make a family, not of us, behind the camera, not of the actors, but of the characters.

VENTURA : A shared world?

CASSAVETES : That they can patrol certain streets, patrol their house, and -- that’s what I feel people do, they know their way home. And when they cease to know the way home, things go wrong.

VENTURA : How do you mean, “know the way home”?

CASSAVETES : You somehow, drunk or sober or any other way, you always find your way back to where you live. And then you get detoured. And when you can’t 32 find your way home, that’s when I consider it’s worth it to make a film. ‘Cause that’s interesting. People are interested in people that are really in trouble. Not pretending to be.

VENTURA : Did you discover that first as an actor?

CASSAVETES : I think I discovered it on the streets. I think I discovered it in barrooms, when people talk about their life. And they’re not worrying about paying a psychiatrist, or worrying about the guy next to them. I think it’s a given with men, or has been, that that’s not just conversation, it’s stating something else -- so whatever somebody was talking about, they were talking about it for a reason. People in barrooms know that. Like being in a war, being in a bar. And I think women probably -- I don’t know -- I don’t really know anything about women. I try to deal with women in films a lot differently than I would deal with men.

VENTURA : How?

CASSAVETES : I look at women much, much more fairly, because I’m not a woman. And I don’t really know very much about them. So I try to make their life a little more straight-line, so that we won’t be taking some opinionated view of a man taking an opinionated view of a woman -- rather deal with it on a line of activity. Of what they do. And then their behavior comes out in their activity. With men I don’t do that. Because I feel I know men. I know men very well. I know all their hypocrisies, and the fact that they don’t have babies, and how important that is, and what a pregnant woman means to a man, and what sports or non-sports mean, or philosophy, or culture, or when it happens, and when it’s interesting to talk about, when it brings tears to the eyes, and when it means nothing. All the complexities of men I’m sure are like the complexities of women, but they’re definitely in my opinion not the same. I don’t care what the legislation says. I feel that women are more receptive by nature than a man is. I don’t know whether it’s conditioning, or whatever -- it’s an actuality, anyway. I’ve seen my daughter, when she was very young, practice seeing herself through a man’s eyes. I mean, no one told her to do that. I don’t see boys doing that. They don’t practice being. They just grow up, and they are either something that pleases them, or nothing that pleases them. I don’t think that the question of identity is so strong with a man as it is with a woman. It’s just, most men don’t go around worrying if they’re good enough. And women do. And their whole life is a challenge.

VENTURA : How did that view figure in A Woman Under the Influence?

CASSAVETES : I only knew one thing about Woman Under the Influence when we started: that it was a difficult time for today’s woman to be left alone while somebody goes out and -- lives. And it’s fine for a housewife to get her kids off to school. As irritating and annoying and boring as that may be, it’s not the same as, later in the day, being totally alone with nothing to do, nothing you’re supposed to do, except maybe darn 33 a sock or something like that. So it becomes a very tough existence. So you look to get out. And what place do you have to go? Because when they all come back you’re happy. And I think that probably happens to every woman. I know when I was not working, and Gena was working for me -- because I was really in trouble in this business, I’d done a lot of things where it really looked like I wasn’t going to be able to work again -- and I stayed home and took care of the baby, and I was a pretty good housewife and everything else, and I didn’t have really much time to think about what was wrong and all, but I didn’t really have the same reactions as a woman would have. Mainly because I didn’t have to be a housewife the rest of my life. I didn’t have to think into the future of when I’d get older or when my attractiveness would fade or when the kids would grow up or when the baby would cease to cling to you and you’re not really a mother then and you have to think, Well, should I be the friend or should I be the mother? All those things are much more interesting than what they’re making movies out of. People are crazy, you know? They really are. Because they think that it’s good enough to make a movie that you don’t like, as long as it makes money. It’s just much more interesting to find out whether you’re going to live or die. Whether you’re going to have a good time or not. Whether the children will be content with their life -- not “content,” but content with their life. Not feel they have to be like everybody else.

VENTURA : When you were in trouble with the movie industry, how were you in trouble?

CASSAVETES : Well, I -- I was young. And I felt that everybody had talent. And that for some reason they were being arbitrary and not employing that talent. ‘Cause I thought, “Well, these people are the giants of an industry, they must have a good brain and a good heart and ability, how come they don’t use it?” And Gena, she said, “Look, a lot of people just don’t have the same drive, the same desires, the same gun that sparks them, as you do. You’re acting like these people all understand you; nobody understands you. I don’t understand you, who the hell can understand you?! You’re nuts!” I would think she was crazy. And I would go in, and I would think, “Naw, this sonofabitch understands what I’m talking about -- he just, for some reason, doesn’t want to do it. I don’t know what the hell it is with this guy.” And I’d meet these people years later and we’d become friends and they’d say, “I don’t know what the hell you were upset about!” But I’d go like a maniac. Because I figure, if you work on a picture, that’s your life. For the moment. That you’re working on a picture. It’s like a beautiful woman. And you fall in love. And when the picture’s over it’s like a break-up of that love affair. And then somebody says, “Well, are you gonna do another picture,” and it’s offensive, because it’s like saying, “When are you gonna fall in love again?” I mean, Husbands was Husbands. I was in love with that picture, in love with Bennie [Ben Gazzara] and Peter [Peter Falk] and New York and London and hotel rooms and beautiful women and the whole adventure, behind the camera and in front of it, and it was one of the most romantic things that ever happened in my life. A Woman Under the Influence was a wonderful experience -- but it was hard.

VENTURA : How?

34

CASSAVATES : It was hard work. It was disciplined work. Something that made me feel good, the discipline, but it wasn’t free-wheeling, you didn’t feel like going out after shooting. I usually like a lot of noise on the set. I didn’t like any noise on that set. I felt the people who were doing it should be respected, because it’s so embarrassing to relive moments that are private and delicate. And it was also not totally real. It was a concept. Of love. A concept of how much you have to pay for it. That’s kind of pretentious, but I was interested in it. And didn’t know how to do it, and none of the other people knew how either, so we had to work extremely hard.

VENTURA : You said it wasn’t totally real? How would it have been?

CASSAVETES : Well, it would have been nastier. I think in the whole picture the defensiveness was just removed. No one there is defensive in the whole film. There isn’t one shield on anybody’s psyche, or anybody’s heart. It’s just open. So you just to have to work on a different level. You have to work on a higher level, and deal with philosophic points in terms of real things.

VENTURA : How do you mean, in terms of real things?

CASSAVETES : Real things. Children -- are real. Food is real. A roof over your head is real. Taking the children to the bus is real. Trying to entertain them is real. Trying to find some way to be a good mother, a good wife. I think all those things are real. And they are usually interfered with by the other side of one’s self -- which is the personal side, not the profound, wonderful side of somebody’s self. And that personal side says, “Hey, what about me ? Yeah, you can do this to me but, uh…” If you’re in the audience, the audience is saying, “Hey, what about ME?” All the way through the picture, the characters are not -- and therefore the audience is allowed to ask that, because the characters can’t. And that’s why it was unreal. Because in life people stop and ask “What about me?” every three seconds.

VENTURA : That accounts for the reaction that many women I know had to that picture, leaving it with this deep yet not bitter conviction that they had to change their situations now -- the picture made them say “What about me?” for the character, and so for themselves.

CASSAVETES : And Gena is the kind of person -- I don’t mean she’s an actress - - I mean, I’m sure she’s an actress, but I don’t see her that way; I see her as an incredibly gentle and kind person with this vision of what life could be. I remember one time in the picture, when Gena was committed by Peter, and she went to an institution, and as the film says six months later she comes out -- I would have thought that she would be so hostile against her husband. But she comes in the house and she never even acknowledges his presence. She’s only considering her children. And we did a take, and I thought, “Should I stop this? I mean, she never looked at Peter.” She walks in the house and everyone greets her and she never looks at her husband -- I mean, she looks at him, but she never sees him, yet she’s not avoiding him. And I thought, “Well, that’s that defenseless thing carrying itself too far here, what are we doing?” 35

You know, ignorance is astounding, particularly when it’s your own. And all through the homecoming scene I was astounded by what was underneath people, what these actors had gathered in the course of this movie. And I was way behind them. As a matter of fact, when we looked at the dailies, Gena said, “What do you think? I’m at a loss, did we go too far?” And I said, “I didn’t like it, I just didn’t like it at all.” I mean, I found it really so embarrassing. To watch. It was such a horrible thing to do to somebody, to take her into a household with all those other people after she’d been in an institution, and their inability to speak to this woman could put her right back in an institution, and yet they were speaking to her, and that Gena was so willing to get rid of them, and at the same time not insult them -- but then I thought: what Gena did, it was like poetry. I thought the film really achieved something really remarkable through the actors’ performances, not giving way to situations but giving way to their own personalities. So it altered the narrative of the piece, but it really made it. I would grow to love those scenes very, very much, but the first time I didn’t.

VENTURA : When you say “altered the experience,” you mean --

CASSAVETES : The dialogue was the same.

VENTURA : But the performances changed the meaning of the scene.

CASSAVETES : Sure.

VENTURA : So because they didn’t succumb to what was obvious in the situation, but played from a deeper level, they came out with something entirely new and liberating. But your scripts expose intimacies, privacies, in a way that’s very tense as far as the audience is concerned. It’s why European filmmakers, especially, look at your films as landmarks in film history. You let the act of performance, on the set, determine a great deal, but do you write the script as intuitively as you direct? When I interviewed Gena, she told me there were no improvised lines in Woman.

CASSAVETES : The preparations for the scripts I’ve written are really long, hard, boring, intense studies. I don’t just enter a film and say, “That’s the film we’re going to do.” I think, “Why make it?” For a long time. I think, “Well, could the people be themselves, does this really happen to people, do they really dream this, do they think this?” In replacing narrative, you need an idea. And the idea in Woman Under the Influence was, could love exist? Then, in 1974, ‘75. Could it exist? Society had already changed. Is it possible that two people could really be in love with each other under the conditions of the new world, where love is really a sideline? It’s just a word. And it’s even offensive -- like the word “art” in Los Angeles. So it was interesting to see, whether that could be done. And it’s impossible to determine the result when you start. You know it’s going to be painful, to begin with, but you hope that the love will be strong enough that you can take the picture as far as it has to go. The adventure of making films is to say, “Can we do it? I mean, is it possible to do it?” 36

VENTURA : The process of “doing it” is getting more and more interminable. What would you say to a young director who asks you, “What is the most important thing that I should think about?”

CASSAVETES : I would probably say, “Love the artists, and -- screw the rest of the people!”

VENTURA : Would you say the same thing to an actor?

CASSSAVETES : An actor? Performing artists are different from anybody. They get up there, and they’re all alone. And the only thing they have is the material to support them. And in between times a person says, “I don’t like what you did. Perhaps if you did this , it might be better.” And no matter how you say that, it always comes out just as crudely as that. And the actor’s feeling is, “You don’t like the way I sat? I’ve been sitting down that way all my life! Stay out of my life! Stay out of my guts, I don’t need you around.” It’s a very hard job, being an actor. Because the camera slate comes down in front of your face in the movies, and someone says to you in essence, “Be big, now!” Because after they finish powdering you, and dusting you, and messing with your hair, and throwing you in front of the camera, and then there’s the tension, “QUIET now! It’s a long scene.” And you’re standing there with a bunch of strangers that you have nothing in common with, whom you’re supposed to love or hate, and with a bunch of words that you don’t really want to say. And a different kind of acting is born of that, and that is a professionalism -- a professional, theatrical kind of acting, which all actors have done. But in films like Mazursky’s or mine, we have a different view of what you are.

VENTURA : To say the least, it’s hard to get that view across in this business.

CASSAVETES : The business stinks. It always has. It’s always been a crappy business with crappy people in it. I’m one of those crappy people, too. I’m one of them! I negotiate for anything I can get. And take advantage. Just the way everybody else does. I’m just as dumb as everybody else. I think that we’re all barbarians, basically. Occasionally, we come up with an idea -- like, we pray for rain and it rains. And we think that’s gonna do it.

VENTURA : You don’t make films as though you think people are all barbarians.

CASSAVETES : I don’t see anything wrong with barbarians. I don’t really see anything wrong with barbarians. I mean, occasionally we feel poetic. I’ve seen a lot of drunken sailors. But most of the time it’s just dog eat dog -- our truth is what’s convenient for us. All of us. What’s wrong with that? You can’t be an idealist 24 hours a day. You’ve got to pick something that’s important to you and stick with it. The rest of it is your own personality, saying, “Shithead, go ahead! But you’re gonna suffer for it!” But if you find something you like to do, you think that’s a beautiful thing. I like to act in films, I like to shoot ‘em, I like to direct ‘em. I like to be around them. I like the 37 smell of it, I like the feel of it, and it’s something I respect. A lot. It doesn’t make any difference whether it’s a crappy film or a good film. Anybody who can make a film, I already love -- but I feel sorry for them if they didn’t put any thoughts in it. ‘Cause then they missed the point. There is no great film. There’s just something that touches you for a moment. And the only mistake the barbarians, which is us, make, is not giving people hope. That they could have that moment in the sun.

38

GENA ROWLANDS

5 December 1980

I interviewed Gena Rowlands after her performance as a savvy gun-moll and reluctant mother-figure in Gloria, written and directed by her husband, John Cassavetes.

VENTURA : When mainstream Hollywood folk talk about your work with John Cassavetes, they invariably mention what they call your “improvising.” I think, frankly, that they’re being ignorant. It doesn’t look like improvising to me. What do you say?

ROWLANDS : All of our scripts really are very heavily scripted. I really can’t remember any improvisation in, say, A Woman Under the Influence. Maybe the construction guys talking on the mountain, maybe there was something there, but I don’t even consider that improvisation. For instances, Faces was interestingly presented in, I think, Black Sparrow Magazine , where they showed the written screenplay and then what had turned out actually on film. It was very interesting for me to see as an artist. You could see that it was totally scripted. The difference between the script and what was on film was mostly just scenes that had been cut or didn’t work. We do use improvisation when we want it and need it. Something’s not working, well, we’ll stop and improvise. And talk about it. But then re-write it.

Here Gena’s press-agent, accompanying the interview, added: I remember in Woman, I went over when they were shooting the scene when Gena has just come back from the sanitarium -- and that was a very crucial scene. They were going over and over and over it, and it wasn’t working. And everything stopped, and John went upstairs. And he came down, a few minutes later, with a changed thing -- and that was it, it was written.

VENTURA : What I think people get confused by, is that here’s a man with the finest ear for American speech, the way it’s really spoken, that any American writer has. And he’s the only filmmaker with the courage to use American speech instead of contrived speech, the way the rest of us do. And so it sounds improvised, because it sounds to the audience like, “That’s how I talk! If that’s how I talk, it couldn’t possibly be written.”

ROWLANDS : I notice that so many things start from the very first story done on you somewhere. And John’s very first film he directed was Shadows , which was entirely improvised. I was in a show, and he was doing very well in live television, and he had a workshop, not a class, that he was teaching. He was doing scenes, improvisations, because we all liked improvisation. So they improvised, and then they decided that what they were doing was good, and they started putting some scenes together from their improvs and they said, “Well, let’s shoot it.” Someone -- Shirley Clarke -- had a camera, and there was some 16mm film, and they raised a little bit of money and they shot this movie without any intention really of releasing it. Nobody even thought of that. And then the film turned out better than expected. And then it became known that it was 39 improvised, and from that point on a great many people think that everything is improvised.

VENTURA : When you’re delivering a line, how much is the moment to come just after the line there in your world? How much are you consciously building up to the point?

ROWLANDS : You ask hard questions. I think about it -- and think about it -- until I’m sure I don’t have to think about it anymore. So by that time you’re actually seeing me do that moment, I’m not thinking what’s coming next. But -- I don’t do that until I’m sure I can get from here to there. Because getting from here to there is the whole thing.

VENTURA : Do you find that Cassavetes writes lines into scripts that you’ve actually said in other contexts?

ROWLANDS : Not to my knowledge. He might answer that differently. I don’t recognize anything when I get there, but then you’re a writer and you know how deceptive they can be. He’ll often laugh or something when I say, “Oh, I see.” He’ll laugh and he’ll say, “Well, you ought to.” But I usually don’t go into that then because it’s not pertinent at the time. What I do notice is that afterwards you find mysterious conversations that go on that you’ll suddenly hear three lines from your script -- that you aren’t saying, that somebody else is saying. And you think, “Am I hearing things?” But you often do hear those things afterwards.

VENTURA : Do you take the film home?

ROWLANDS : Well, we try not to. You get rid of it a little bit when you first get home because the children are there, and you have your life, and you’re so relieved to get back to life problems. It’s wonderful, that first part of the evening. And then I like to go to bed early when I’m shooting because I have to get up at four o’clock. John never sleeps that I know of. I’m sure he must sleep sometime, but you can’t catch him. But finally he’ll come to bed, and then we’ll wake up about three o’clock or something -- your mind just wakes you up about whatever you’re doing, and then we’ll go down and talk about it and drink some coffee. I’m not sure they’re particularly creative conversations, as far as what people would think a writer and an actress would be saying. Usually, if I get to thinking about it, I’m sure that I did the scene wrong, because if you thought about a scene you would add something to it every day of your life. Anything you look at behind you is already lacking something. So I might wake up with the terrible nightmare that [in Gloria ] I hadn’t run the child far enough up the street to really convince you I wanted to get rid of him -- that I might have, in some terrible way, anticipated coming back, which would fairly just kill me if I did that. And he’ll say, “No, no, no, because if you had I would have made you, so don’t worry about it.” So a lot of it’s reassurance. And he never asks anything.

40

VENTURA : Is working on a John Cassavetes picture as radically different from mainstream pictures as seeing a John Cassavetes picture is? And did I ask that question in English?

ROWLANDS : I would say the most important difference is that the actor’s first. There’s always a list of priorities, and on a normal set, if you’re very, very lucky, the actor’s about fifth. And if you’re not, you’re farther down. But with John, the performer is first, so things automatically change a little bit. If you move, the cameraman is expected to follow you and the focus man is expected to follow you. That doesn’t mean you can just run wildly through the meadows, surprising them, but everyone is in a way very alert, and you get a very close crew, a close artists’ group relationship. John regards his performers so highly that you always feel you have all the time in the world. The affection is there, with John. He really prefers actors to anyone in the world, and it gives you a certain amount of confidence. I’m not the only one who feels that way. I’ve never known anyone who’s worked as an actor for John who didn’t feel that it had been -- well, it’s an experience that you think everything is going to be when you first get into acting. I would say that the world has moved more towards the way John directs now -- there’s a lot less difference than there was, say, ten years ago.

VENTURA : Did working with a child in Gloria make it harder for you to act?

ROWLANDS : Children are always harder in a wonderful way because they say wild things, their reactions are different, they laugh in serious parts, they roll their eyes. you know, they do all kinds of things they just feel like doing. Which is what I like about them. You have to keep your eye on them as an actress, but they just keep you honest there. I loved that child. He was this macho little kid, too. He walked in the strange way that he walks in the movie -- that wasn’t put on, the hunched shoulders and the grave expression. He also does speak in rather adult terms. I didn’t talk with him much in between scenes because I didn’t feel that would be fair, to be running around playing with him and then, in the scene, be mean to him. Because, you know, even though people explain what’s supposed to happen, it’s still -- psychologically, I was afraid it would be damaging to him. I was just afraid I would plain hurt his feelings, which is the worst thing in the world. When John asked him if he wanted the part, he said, “I don’t know, I don’t wanna cry.” So John said, “Well, this boy doesn’t want to cry either, so I don’t think there will be any problem.” This, to him, wasn’t the chance of a lifetime to be a movie star; there were qualifications. So John said, “Now, look, think about this, because you’re not going to be able to swim and be with your friends, it’s going to take all summer. If you really want to do it, I’d really like to have you, but take the time to think about it a couple of days, because if you’re just doing it to make your mom or dad happy, don’t do it to yourself. Enjoy your summer vacation, and we’ll still be friends.” So they were getting ready to go home, since John expected them to talk the next day, and the kid said, “May I ask you something? How many words?” John said, “That you have to memorize?” He said, “How many new words would I know from the script, 41 afterwards?” John said, “Three hundred,” just like that. And he said, “Three hundred words -- three hundred words. I’ll take it.” Now, if you wrote a script, in a million years could you possibly think of those reactions?

VENTURA : Do you study your performance when a picture’s finished?

ROWLANDS : Once the picture is finished it sort of just… makes a lock in my mind. I only see it usually once at the end, or maybe twice. I don’t want to remember it that way. I still remember it from the inside looking out. It’s very difficult for me be an audience to it ever . It’s sort of disturbing to me, so I don’t usually see it except just to see how the whole thing turned out. But that’s the last of it.

VENTURA : Disturbing how?

ROWLANDS : Changing sides, I guess. It’s as if you would be asked to suddenly step out and observe your life. Something unnerving about it. Also, it’s sort of frightening to see yourself in that size. That’s a giant version of you walking through the doors. It doesn’t bother me at all when I see my friends. I make a simple adjustment to it all. The actors seem perfectly in proportion, it doesn’t bother me. But when I see this great huge version of myself, it’s like some sort of big giant. I’d rather not deal with it, I guess. I don’t feel that it’s necessary for me to be an audience, so I don’t see why I have to if it disturbs me. Because I like to think… I guess, I wish to think of it on the other side, I wish not to lose the character, the private, specific character to me.

VENTURA : A last question. What advice would you give to young actresses and actors?

ROWLANDS : I would say not to take anybody’s advice, including mine. You should just try to find your own feeling about something, because that’s the only thing that separates one actor from another: how she or he feels about character. Not to copy anyone or to hold anybody too high in your estimation that it might intimidate you. Just to think about it until you know it’s yours.

42

PETER FALK

23 November 1984

Several years ago Elaine May wrote and directed a picture called Mikey and Nicky, starring Peter Falk and John Cassavetes. Paramount didn’t know how to promote it – it was too intense, too real, its beauties too paradoxical for the standard ad campaign. The picture disappeared, and with it disappeared two of the finest performances of the 1970s. Now that Mikey and Nicky is being independently reissued, we finally have a chance to see and to savor their artistry in a gangster picture like no other.

VENTURA: How do you prepare for a part as intricate, and as intense, as Mikey?

FALK : Jesus, Mike. I’ll tell you, I’m more confused about how to prepare for a part now than I’ve ever been in my life. I don’t know how to prepare for a part. Years ago, the way I used to prepare for a part… it was simpler in those days. With the theater, in the beginning, and with television, I always used to think right away: “The costume.” That’s important, what you’re going to wear. But when you get into writing on the level of A Woman Under the Influence or Mikey and Nicky , the costume is only going to take you an inch and a half. It ain’t gonna do it. Then I used to think: mannerisms… gestures… speech patterns… body posture… things like that, the way actors have always approached a part. But once again, you hit this level [of Mikey and Nicky ] and you’re on that level [the level of mannerisms and gestures], and you’re gonna be in a lot of trouble. A lot of trouble. Elaine May… every once in a while she says something. Your ears perk up. So she says: “The thought precedes the feeling.” And it’s true. One of the terrific things that can happen to an actor is to have what I call a fresh thought. A totally spontaneous, fresh thought. A thought while you’re performing that never occurred to you before, but a thought that will then color what you next do or say. The thought will be your thought, so that what you next do or say is going to going to be colored by your own personality, your individuality. It will not be a cliché. It will probably be something slightly unexpected. You’ll acquire a tone or an expression that you could never have planned on. It won’t necessarily be dramatic, or riveting, or dazzling – because there are infinite gradations of tone, of gesture, of expression. And I’m not sure how to get those fresh thoughts. When you were younger, you used to work on emotion. You go into acting classes – and I think it’s probably the same now as it used to be – you’ll see a lot of anger and a lot of tears. They’ll be working on how to get out emotion. And it’s not that that anger and those tears aren’t sometimes very good, it’s that they’re general; they’re not specific. You can hear anger Monday, and then on Wednesday you’ll hear another anger, and it’s too similar. But if a fresh thought precedes the anger, if a thought comes first, I think the anger will be more specific, and more personal, and more intricate. I’ll give you an example. There’s a scene in Mikey and Nicky where we’re on a bus. John is next to me and we’re gonna get off at Fifth and Hall. Presumably. But I – my character – I’m thinking that when we get off, a guy [Ned Beatty] is gonna be waiting 43 there, and he’s gonna do away with John. Shoot him. So John only has a few minutes to live. You know how complicated an emotional relationship Mikey has with Nicky, but I’m not so sure that even if you didn’t have a complicated relationship with a man, you wouldn’t still need some form of denial. You’ve got to have some way to handle this situation. On what basis do you carry on a banal conversation as you’re driving a man to his death? And you’re the betrayer. You’re responsible. Forget that you know him 25 years! Forget that he knew Izzy, your brother, when he got scarlet fever and lost all his hair! Forget all that. With anybody, how do you play this scene? What do you do? I didn’t know what to do. What are we talking about? I’m saying to him he shouldn’t smoke on the bus. I think I say to him, “Don’t I owe you two hundred?” And he says, “Yeah, but you don’t have to pay me now.” “I’ll pay you now, I say.” [Falk laughs.] Then he gets into a beef with the woman in back over the smoking. And then all of a sudden out of the blue I say to him, “You got… you got big hands.” I say something about his hands, and he just makes a joke about learning to play the piano when he was a boy, whatever the hell it is. All right, in a regular gangster picture you’re supposed to set this guy up and you do away with him, so you go in there and you just behave , you talk about the races: “Fuck, I had this horse the other day, the sonofabitch – he drowned. I had five hundred on him, he went over the steeplechase, he hit the water, the sonofabitch never comes up. My luck.” Talk sports, whatever the hell it is, and you walk off the bus, and the guy does him in, and you tell the hit-man, “Jesus Christ, I gotta get home. Oh no, fuck it, let’s play a game of pool,” or something like that. And the audience will think it’s terrific, they’ll enjoy this character. But that kind of scene – that doesn’t tell you anything about people. Now Elaine starts talking to me. She starts talking about death. The fact that people defecate before they die. The fact that there is such a thing as a death rattle. You can wet your pants. And she says, “Try playing how interesting something is. Become fascinated with something. The size of the pores on his face. Just get interested in that, or anything.” So I’m playing this scene, and that’s all I’m thinking about. I’d choose different things. How John would smile – whatever. And one time I did that without self- consciousness, unaware of what the next line was. And at one point, then, in that scene, I had a fresh thought. And the thought was that this bus – maybe it was a bus, but it wasn’t in Philadelphia, it was in the Balkans. And I wasn’t sure whether or not this was a dream. And I wasn’t sure whether this person next to me was alive. Because, you know, John has high cheekbones. So I saw a skeleton. But he would laugh, and then I knew it wasn’t a skeleton. But there was something of the nightmare, of the dream, in what I was feeling as I looked at him and as I saw the white in the bus and it was dark outside, so we were moving and this strange creature was sitting next to me that I knew but didn’t know, but that sometimes was fascinating . I didn’t always like him, but I didn’t dislike him – he was just fascinating. And it struck me after that take that what it was, essentially, was a man who had transported himself out of reality into something beyond. But this has nothing to do with saying that if you were actually in that situation you would have a nightmare. Nothing to do with that. You wouldn’t have a nightmare, you wouldn’t have a dream, and you probably wouldn’t think it was a dream. But the expression on your face, your body 44 posture, would reflect some form of being transported out of where you were in that place in time. I don’t even think the fuckin’ take is in the picture. [We laugh.] It might be, or part of it might be. Maybe it is. But that’s what I mean about difficult parts. Mikey was a difficult part. To deal with scenes like that. So you say, how do you prepare for such things? I become less and less certain how to prepare. I don’t know how to prepare.

VENTURA: So many actors fall back on the surfaces of technique, and…

FALK: What is technique? I don’t know what the hell it is. In its extreme form, somebody just rehearses, figures it out. “On this line I’ll make this move, I’ll make this gesture, and I will sound like this, I’ll go slow here, I’ll go high here, I’ll go fast here, I’ll move my hat here, I have a gesture or an expression to convey this particular thing.” And the actors can repeat that. That’s not to say they’ll always do it the same. They’ll alter it, because a certain amount of spontaneity will come into it, but they’re pretty close to what they originally thought they were going to do. Another way is to choose to play something, and trust to that. You don’t know what you’re gonna do. In the scene in that bus, I was playing that I was fascinated by his physical characteristics. Now, that will come out different every time. And it could be by the third take that that gets stale. You’re self-conscious, you’re not in it anymore. All it is by then is that I’m making believe that I’m fascinated. Well, then you got to throw that out, gotta get something else. There is no one thing that’s gonna take you all the way through. What was hard there, with Mikey, is that this guy was lying, he was dissembling, he was betraying, but – what he said when he lied is what he wanted to say in his fantasies!

VENTURA: Can you talk about the script?

FALK: It’s a helluva piece of writing. It’s like a novella, very complex. But the beauty part is that, as complex as it is, it has a simple primitive emotion to it, coupled with – talk about an abundance of blessings – a story that is taut and suspenseful, wrapped around the most complicated psychological behavior between two people that I’ve run across. Elaine used to say that these two guys had no socially redeeming characteristics. But you like it because it’s so ruthlessly accurate. Absence of sentimentality. It deals with jealousy, anger, narcissism, rage – but despite that, it’s deeply compassionate. I think of the book Last Exit to Brooklyn [by Hubert Selby, Jr.], or that story “A Bottle of Milk for Mother” [by Nelson Algren]. Same kind of thing. No sentimentality. You know them just as they are. But you know the writer really felt for these people. When I first read Mikey and Nicky , I felt their sense of loss. Because there is the sense in these two scumbags – more in Mikey, but even in Nicky – each of these worthless nothings had a moment when he wished it could have been different, wished he could have been different, wished it could have all been different. Two pieces of refuse, flotsam, in way over their heads, they don’t understand a thing that’s going on and they’re going to get washed away like that [snaps his fingers]. But behind all the garbage 45 there was still some longing for something that was worthwhile somewhere along the line. That kind of writing affects me. I don’t care for writing that shows what’s bad with such glee -- so anxious, so proud of the fact that they’re showing you what’s wrong. That’s why it’s nice in Beckett, how you feel how reluctant he is to have arrived at whatever pessimism he’s arrived at. And it’s the same thing I see in this screenplay. You don’t want it to be that way, and that’s what makes it affecting. I put this piece of writing right up there. In some ways it even reminds of The Turn of the Screw, where every line is ambiguous – every line. Elaine did a good job, believe me.

VENTURA: But, because of the accuracy of the dialogue and the immediacy of the acting, it’s been said – I’m sure it’s about to be said again – that much of Mikey and Nicky is improvised.

FALK: Do they think anybody could get up and improvise a story like this here?! Are they crazy ?!

46

VANESSA REDGRAVE

12 April 1985

This interview occurred prior to the opening of James Ivory’s rendition of Henry James’ novel The Bostonians, in which Ms. Redgrave played Olive.

VENTURA: You’ve played a range of roles, from Isadora to the Olive in The Bostonians. Is there a pattern to the way you open yourself up to a character?

REDGRAVE: The cases of Isadora and Olive, since you mention them, are slightly different. With one, your basic starting point after the script is the book. And, of course, Olive is based on many Olives, and real-life Olives. With Isadora, we made the script as we went along. I’m not saying there weren’t scriptwriters – there were – but we were working and preparing and sculpting the script, because that’s how Karel [Reisz] worked, in a very collaborative way. And also because it was a real challenge. Nobody knocked off that script in one sitting, and it wasn’t their fault that they didn’t. Anyway, with preparing Isadora, first it was that; and secondly, to read the many, many people who knew her – and her own My Life , of course. But you’ve got a real woman who actually existed and whom people did remember, vividly – many dancers remembering her, composers remembering her, who knew her, who saw her. So there was a difference in the processes, but basically you have to open yourself up to the first material at hand – which is usually the script. Then to the background material. In other words, anything that is concerned with the times in which the person lived. And with Isadora, we all had to do a lot of layers of research. I especially had to. In the case of Olive, James Ivory, the director, said to me, “You must read the book.” And I’m thankful that he did because of lot of directors don’t mention source materials, or say, “Don’t read it.” I read the book, and I had never read it before. But we – the principal cast – read the book again and again and again. That was the first starting point, and I think it’s the continual start if you have a book on which the story is played. And the same thing goes for a script, simultaneously. I’ll go back to it again and again, even if I know the words. I’m very particular about saying the right words, the words that are written. That’s my own choice, quite apart from whether anybody else wants it that way. Because those words do represent lives that have been, and in that sense they are an abstract of very many layers, and extensive lives are contained in these words, and you can keep returning to them from your other work – discussions with the other actors, reading -- a lot of reading. Each time they will have more life, and you begin to go way, way beyond the first level with what’s there. But without imposing anything. That’s important. When you said, “open up,” that’s what you must do – keep opening up. It’s important not to get stuck on your own fixed images. That’s the difficult thing not to do. Words carry many associations for everybody, and it can be that the first images that are struck off can be quite powerful ones, but they can be the wrong ones – sound images and visual images. And if they’re powerful, they tend to guide your thinking and approach to the part. You can miss something that’s right under your nose, some single germ that’s right under your nose, as it were, which you’ve stomped over 47 because you’ve got a whole set of things – “Yes, I understand this, I understand this” – and sometimes you do, you understand straight off, there’s nothing more to be said about it. But not very often. And it’s all so hard because, after all, actors see a lot of films one way or the other, so images come very easily. It’s very important not to have a highly structured pre- conception, because it’s got to develop itself, its own life, in you and in the other actors. And I stress the other actors because the development of work is absolutely inseparable from the life and work of the others you’re working with. It’s not a one-man or a woman- woman job, not as I see it.

VENTURA: Did you rehearse a great deal for The Bostonians?

REDGRAVE: No, we didn’t. There wasn’t the time. We would all have liked to, and certainly James Ivory would have liked to. But it was a low-budget film, a very low- budget film, that covered many locations in the period of 1886. A very, very short time on the schedule. We just had about two days’ read-through and discussion with Jim Ivory. And then the rehearsal was the same as it is – rudimentally, anyway – on any film, to plot where you’ll be sitting, what you’ll be doing, and that’s it.

VENTURA: Does something take the place of rehearsal? A movie set is so tense…

REDGRAVE: There’s a lot of tension around, but again, you learn how to help ease that. That’s very important – not ease it for yourself, but ease it for other people. And if you’re easing it for other people, you’re easing it for yourself. But when I say easing it, I don’t necessarily mean cracking jokes, although there’s a time for those too. But above all, doing the best to create the kind of conditions – which is the most difficult thing of all, on what are usually very, very hair-raising schedules – for a few precious moments of consideration of where you are, what is happening, what is happening in the world outside the scene. One important thing to understand and trust is that each script – because it does represent real life, even if it may be a very poor representation of real life or a very distorted representation of real life or bears little resemblance to real life at all – starts as real life, and, therefore, you can find a way to the real life from which it comes – if you let it develop its own life. And it does that automatically through the human beings who are chosen, usually all good actors. It starts to take its life through them and through the times they live in and what they knew. The unconscious begins to work. I’m stressing its own life because it does come from not just one other person’s own life, or the producers who chipped in and changed this and changed that, or anybody else, but no matter who got involved – whether they did good work or damaged the thing irreparably – it still has a source of life that it comes from. And in the same way that if you’re tuning a radio and you can’t get straight on the correct wavelength, it’s very distorted. But you search and search, and someone who technically knows how can tune in very fine to it and find the wavelength that the signal is traveling on, and he gets it very loud and clear. 48

If you don’t know how to do that, or if you’ve got a rather faulty radio or the battery is running down, it’s very jumbled, very distorted, but it’s still coming from that source, it’s still being broadcast by real people. That’s the closest analogy I can think of to the actual, the concrete, nature of the process.

VENTURA: What would you say to somebody beginning to be an actress, beginning to go on this road?

REDGRAVE: I’d say make the script your guiding line all the time – doesn’t matter what you think about it, make it your guiding line. Study the whole story – always. Make that your starting point – the whole story – and within that you’ll find your part and the true relation of your own part to the audience. It’s awfully simple, but – it’s not done very much.

VENTURA: How does The Bostonians speak to you?

REDGRAVE: I identify very strongly with the passionate enthusiasm of all these women in the story and the women they represent. They were looking for anybody who could write and explain a whole perspective of what they had to do in the society they lived in. That’s what guided Madeleine and me in our relationship, completely. I’m just amazed when I read some comments about what people think their relationship is about. [Laughs.] I don’t see it at all, but that’s where assumptions and images come in.

VENTURA: What interpretations do you disagree with most?

REDGRAVE: I don’t remember what reviewer said it, but somebody commented on a lesbian relationship. That’s not what this relationship between these two women was about at all. It struck me what a strange society we live in if two women cannot love each other without it being sexual. And indeed, if a man and a woman can’t love each other without it being entirely a question of “Are we going to marry?” or “Are we going to be the lovers of all time?” That’s not what the relationship between the women in The Bostonians was about. Olive thinks she’s in a marriage of two minds – and there is , potentially and implicit in the young girl, what Olive invests totally in her; but it’s not there yet. Yet that’s certainly how Olive sees it, and that’s what the young girl feels and responds to. That’s how I see it, anyway.

VENTURA: That makes the young girl come alive. In the Eastern sense, Olive is her teacher in the profound way. Not so much the content she’s bringing to her, but the girl grows as she’s seen. She tries to grow into what she’s being seen as.

REDGRAVE: When history’s advancing in giant leaps and bounds, people who feel that, sense it – they want to be part of it, want to make it, want to change it – not in a grandiose way, but just because they can’t stand things as they are and feeling certain of how things could be quite, quite different – and reject totally that most human beings should live an unhuman life – these people find themselves leaping with enormous consciousness – maybe not enormous understanding but enormous consciousness of what 49 they are part of. But not finding, perhaps, at certain moments, many other people who share completely their convictions. So they found themselves lonely and they looked for others, to consciously work with others. They formed their groups, their circles. It wasn’t that they just happened to all feel the same; they had to find others who felt like them, and they knew they couldn’t survive if they didn’t. And they couldn’t change anything if they didn’t. Olive wants to change.

50

DENNIS HOPPER

26 November 1982

Dennis Hopper, of all people, has made a family film – or anyway, a film about family. There have been several major efforts in recent years, but none like his. America’s audiences and critics have wanted their family films to look like Ordinary People and Kramer Vs Kramer : fairly manageable emotions in fairly manageable surroundings, with tidy endings that result in what social workers call “adjustment.” You could even call this year’s Poltergeist a family film, where the horrors come from outside the family; once they are safely together at the end there are no horrors left. In Hopper’s Out of the Blue , the horrors start when the family gets together. What they feel, what they need, is utterly beyond what they have been educated and conditioned to understand. They are not in Ordinary People’s affluent economic strata, where there’s a money-cushion that allows you the time and help to learn. Dennis Hopper’s people are much like the novelist Nelson Algren’s; Out of the Blue is a story about what Algren called “men and women forced to choices too hard to bear.” Dennis Hopper, on the afternoon I met him, looked like a man who had seen all this up close, and had forced himself, at 46, to remain calm. In a slouch hat, he looked uncannily like a wasted Bing Crosby, of all people. I had seen the film for the first time less than half an hour before we talked, and I was still in its shock-wave – as my first question, very much tongue in cheek, demonstrates.

VENTURA: So what do you make such happy pictures for? Aren’t people happy enough out there? They’re having a good time already, they don’t need you to cheer them up.

HOPPER: There’s no question about that. I’m the ugly American, right? With Out of the Blue, part of it is inherited and part of it is just meanness.

VENTURA: What was inherited?

HOPPER: The incest and some of the ending and Raymond Burr. It was going to be “The Case of Cindy Barnes.” I was originally hired to play the father. It was going to be a TV movie. The writer was the director. I was brought in, against a lot of advice from my managers, by my friend Paul Lewis, who produced The Stunt Man and The Last Movie. I got there, was there two weeks, and never worked. And Paul Lewis said, “Hey, you gotta come see the rushes, there’s nothing useable!” And I said, “Nobody said you were a critic of artists, right? The guy’s never directed a film, let him alone.” Friday night in the toilet Paul tells me, “I’m leaving the picture. But your money’s in escrow, everything’s cool for you.” By that time I’d met Linda Manz, and I’d known Sharon Farrell before, and I’d been getting my wardrobe together – I was ready to play the father. So I says, “Hey, wait a second. Let me see what you got.” Paul said, “All we’ve got is 2½ hours.” On Saturday I went and looked at the 2½ hours. There was no useable footage at all. 51

Monday morning at 6 o’clock I started shooting. And I rewrote and recast everything but Sharon and myself and Linda. I shot it in four weeks and two days, and edited it in six weeks on one movieola.

VENTURA: So you re-wrote as you shot?

HOPPER: There was no punk involvement in the original, and she didn’t play drums or guitar. Her mother wasn’t a junkie, and it was all narrated by Raymond Burr. Originally, he was the hero of the film. It was like, the case history of Cindy Barnes and how Raymond Burr saved her as a child psychologist. Of course, by the time he got to do his part I’d changed the whole concept. And he didn’t know this. He got there, ready to do his thing. And the investors insisted on Burr, because they had to qualify for the Canadian tax shelter. And he didn’t like the script – not knowing that I had thrown it away, and that he was only going to be in two scenes. I said, “Well, re-write it – re-write it any way you want.” And so in three days, for the $50,000 he got, I did a whole television show. I shot everything he re-wrote, knowing I was only going to use two scenes.

VENTURA: You must have been really ready to tell this story.

HOPPER: I pulled a lot of things out of my own life – being from Kansas, a small town, wanting to know where the trains were going. Smoking cigarettes, wandering around, saying, “I’m gonna be somebody someday. Put me down now, but one of these days…” And the scenes with the psychiatrists came a lot out of my own childhood. And I borrowed from everybody I could think of. I’ve got my Ingmar Bergman scenes, my Henry Hathaway scenes, my John Fords. It’s funny, in four weeks and two days a lot comes back. Line readings. Screaming and yelling. Back to all those devices I really fought against as an actor.

VENTURA: ‘Cause they work?

HOPPER: Yeah. And I think if you open yourself up you get a lot of help from outside. Everything seems to fit right in if you’re really cookin’. You’re in a cab on your way to work, and “Hey, there’s Neil [Young] on the radio!” Hey hey my my/ Rock and roll will never die/The King is dead but not forgotten/This is the story of Johnny Rotten. I saw a lot of punk writing on the walls in Vancouver, and I said, “Gimmie a punk group.”

VENTURA: When you were actually on the set, what was the most important thing to you? What did you concentrate on hardest?

HOPPER: Keep moving! When in doubt, give ‘em a set-up. “Put the camera here! Light it!” I try to figure out a way to utilize as much of my set as possible. And without losing content, story-content. And setting the cameras so they’re moving. Moving the actors through it, so they know where they’re going. See what plays. And, in this instance, I would go through and do the whole thing myself, by myself. Set the camera. 52

And then, while they were lighting, take the actors through their paces, work with the actors between shots. The most important thing is just to keep the next shot coming. Make sure your crew isn’t dragging ass. Make sure you got a shot going next. As soon as that shot’s finished, you got another set-up, so your actors are working constantly – so that they’re not all sitting in dressing rooms screwing around. It’s really important to keep them moving. And your crew moving. Keep them busy all the time. And to minimize as much as possible.

VENTURA: How do you mean, minimize?

HOPPER: First of all, I relocated everything. I mean, the first director had the locations 40 miles here, and 20 miles there. And I got everything within a ten-mile, almost ten block , radius. Easy moving. I made the city look like the country. And you’ll notice that a lot of my shots are one-shot scenes, because I had the paranoia that somebody was going to take my footage and cut it to pieces. So I didn’t give them many options. Take the diner for example. I shot everything in the diner in one day. That was in the beginning, where the camera goes down off the Superman sign, ding ding ding, “I want a raise,” bla bla bla, “Oh hi Mom,” Linda carries the tray by, sees another guy there, “Hi, Glen,” goes and picks up some dishes, comes back, Sharon comes back out the door, goes back in, Sharon asks Linda about the kids at school, Linda talks about Elvis, Sharon sits down, goes back and forth, and the other guy is in the background – that’s all one shot. One shot. And then there’s the shot in the other part of the diner where Paul is arguing with Sharon about, “Hey, you know, now is the time to tell him,” dah dah dah dah dah, “You’re not talking to me anymore,” “Hey you’re driving me crazy,” and then you see me and Linda through the window pull up in the car, I get out of the car, you see me in the window – that’s all in one shot. Those are three master-shots. And then I shot the scene where I pick her up at school after that. So that’s one days’ work. But it’s only four set-ups. And there’s no way they can cut it. And then all the driving things were shot in one day, including the walk on the beach. That picnic scene was really supposed to be in the car, shot through the car windshield, but they said they couldn’t shoot through the windshield anymore because there wasn’t enough light. So I took a walk on that beach and said, “Fuck this shit, man, we’re shootin’, man.” I said, “Lay me a dollie track right down there,” and did that scene. Keep your crew goin’. Keep your actors busy. That’s it. And make sure it’s good. Which may be the easiest part.

VENTURA: Making sure it’s good?

HOPPER: Yeah.

VENTURA: How do you mean, easy?

HOPPER: Well, you see, what most directors don’t know about is acting. I know a little bit about it. 53

There aren’t really too many directors who like actors. And I get the feeling now that it’s becoming even more mechanical, with all the new computers and devices, videos and so on. They don’t even trust themselves, they have to look at the video five or six times. I’m just from a little different school. Not UCLA, but the factory floor!

VENTURA: Who have you liked working with, as an actor?

HOPPER: Wim Wenders, George Stevens. I remember George Stevens saying in Giant , “Look, I know you’re a thinking actor. In my pictures, I love thinking actors. You can think as much as you want to think. Just don’t ever let me know what you’re thinking.” Which is basically a way of saying, “Don’t indicate it. Just do it. Don’t show it.”

VENTURA: As a director…

HOPPER: I believe in miracles but I don’t really believe in luck.

VENTURA: What kind of miracles?

HOPPER: Just photographing light. And sound. I’m very much involved in the camera, because I was a photographer for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and because I photographed the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King. So I’m very camera- aware. We’re in the first 70 years of filmmaking, the first 50 years of sound. I think probably films will change, with video and whatever, the formats will change tremendously. They have already. Very likely the time of what I call the chapel-builders, the Hollywood syndrome that I’ve grown up with, will all be over soon. There won’t be anybody to lay the frescoes anymore, to make the Sistine Chapel ceilings, the church won’t be putting up the money. What’s coming will be like the time of the easel-painter; I mean, the filmmaker who carries his own cameras and sound to do his own thing. Probably three-minute and five-minute video films will be what a guy wants while he’s shaving to go to work, watching his video screen, rather than Easy Rider and Gone With the Wind or whatever. It’s already here, almost, what I’m talking about. But I hope this era doesn’t end quickly, because I consider myself, even as a primitive, a chapel-builder.

54

JEANNE MOREAU

22 October 1982

After years of working with directors like Truffaut, Louis Malle, Renoir, and Orson Welles, actress Jeanne Moreau dared to become director Jeanne Moreau with her intense, well-crafted Lumiere and L’Adolescent.

VENTURA: When was the moment you realized you had to be a director?

MOREAU: While I was shooting with Orson in The Trial. One night we were really depressed because some money was needed, and he had had a meeting with producers, and he come out close to tears, he was so hurt, and we didn’t know when we could start shooting again, and we went out together and drank, but I didn’t feel drunk. In fact, I got home quite early. And at home I watched on television a film with Marlene Dietrich made by von Sternberg, Shanghai Express, and I was caught up in the vodka, and in the pain I had seen Orson go through, and the beauty of this von Sternberg film, and the beauty of Orson’s directing since we had started the film – it was so exciting I called him up and said, “Orson! I want to be a director!” So he started laughing, and he said, “Well, you know what pains you are going to face? How difficult it is?” I said, “Yes, yes, I saw that. But it’s so beautiful. It’s magic. It’s more real than life.” I relate to that, but some actions in life, I cannot really relate to them. So, when we started shooting again, about four days later, I was ashamed of my outburst. I thought, “What’s he going to think?” But he said, “Okay – you be my partner. Each time you have an idea, I’ll give you some money in that box.” And all the rest of the shooting, every morning we had a meeting, we discussed ideas, and when he liked one he would say “Good!” and the money would go in the box. That’s how it started. And then Orson said, when we finished with the film, “When you feel it badly, badly, when you’re feeling it so badly that you know if you don’t make the picture you’re thinking of you’ll be sick, you may die of cancer, then you must do it.” And that’s what I did. And I am working on my next film now because I know if I don’t do it, I’ll be sick. And while I’m thinking of it I repeat to myself – even today, when we were driving – “Everything is possible when you make a film. You can allow yourself everything.” I’m reading the biography of Walt Whitman, and he said once, “You don’t have to tell the truth but…” Oh, I can’t remember the word. But it meant, “hidden in a sort of mystery.” What could be the word in English?

VENTURA: I like what you said. “Hidden in a sort of mystery” is just fine. I don’t see many filmmakers proceeding on “Everything is possible in a film.” Where do you find support for that view in your work?

MOREAU: Because of the definition of dreams. Surely you dream, and you have some incredible, articulated dreams, and they’re fascinating because they are surprising, 55 the form is surprising. It’s absolutely true, but the sense is hidden – but it strikes you, even though it takes time for you to find out what it means. You know it’s essential to you. Just so, there is a level in a film that must not be told. It must come out. It must flow. All the essential things in a film ought to be like wind and water. You cannot say anything about water. Something that is totally unseen is the wind – we know about the wind, but nobody’s ever seen it. There are films like that.

VENTURA: What films?

MOREAU: I remember 8½. I remember some Bergman films, where you’re trapped, really, in the elements of the film, like being in a wind. And there’s no need to understand, you just can feel.

VENTURA: How do you make that feeling concrete when you try to figure out how to do the film?

MOREAU: I rely a lot on music each time I work. For example, for L’Adolescent it was the Ravel Waltz. There’s just that beautiful theme that always wants to flow and flourish, and POM! POM! POM! -- it’s always broken. And it starts again, very slowly, you know, dun dun-ta-dun dun-ta-dun, and it grows and it grows and BOFF! It’s broken again. I was helped for Lumiere very much by the paintings of Andrew Wyeth and Bonnard.

VENTURA: How did Andrew Wyeth –

MOREAU: Because Lumiere is a film about women, and women live a lot inside. And remember some Andrew Wyeths, the windows, the doors, the shadows on the beds, and that painting with the girl sitting on the smooth hill, “Christina’s World”? This helped me with the form of Lumiere, the frames and the speed and pace.

VENTURA: In terms of that, as a director, what do you look for you in your actors?

MOREAU: I want what is deep, deep, deep. My desire is for them to reveal themselves to themselves. And, out of the performance in the film, to feel more secure.

VENTURA: How do you go about directing that?

MOREAU: When I’m with an actor on the set? With each one it’s different. And it’s sensing. It’s without asking questions or whatever. It’s sensing where the man or the woman think they’re weak. And it can be hidden by all sorts of things. It can be hidden by an actor saying that this line he cannot deliver, or the costume is not right, or the make-up.

VENTURA: These are the concerns of a film of self-expression – art films. What’s the difference between these and working in a commercial film? 56

MOREAU: The difference is that in a commercial film it’s complete solitude. You are your own director. You’ve read the script, you know about your part, about the others, you know how the director behaves, and you know that you are in charge, totally, of your performance. And, as I’m an honest person, I stay inside the box that I’m meant to live in, in the picture, and do my best.

VENTURA: You said that Lumiere is a film about women, but it had some very believable men, I thought.

MOREAU [after a pause] : I don’t know much about men, in fact. Because I live into my skin, you know – I’m a woman. Sometimes I imagine how it must be for a man to have sex – it’s so strange! And I don’t think women have that incredible freedom to make films about men the way men have had to make films about women – though some of the men’s films come very close to the truth.

VENTURA: Like what?

MOREAU: I don’t remember the name of the man who directed Bette Davis in –

VENTURA: Not All About Eve ?

MOREAU: No, All About Eve is not true – it’s fake. I don’t mean women are all that good, but it’s more complicated than that. That makes me think of another fake film I saw on television the other night – I got so angry! That film with Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando, Streetcar. I hated the film, I hated the play, I got so mad! You know the shots on him with the undershirt ripped, and his naked shoulder, and he’s screaming like mad, “Stella! Stella!” And that poor Vivien Leigh, I don’t know how old she was, but she’s told all the time that she’s old, and she’s crazy, while what she loves is beauty and she wants to live in a sort of harmony. Ah, I was so angry, and I thought, “God, these men fucked up everything.” And surely she was harmed, because she was so fragile, Vivien Leigh. Can you imagine what state she must have been in when she came out of that film?

VENTURA: It seems it’s getting more and more rare for films to deal with what really happens between men and women.

MOREAU: Yes. Yesterday we were waiting at a red light, and there were about 20 people waiting to cross. What attracted my attention was a man’s hand stroking, gently, like this, a woman’s back. It was a black man, and just in front of him was this woman, and she was stretching and yawning, and he was just patting, like that. It was so lovely, you know. It lasted a few seconds. He was waiting to see the sign go “Walk,” and he was just doing that [she makes a gentle stroking gesture] . It was beautiful. I haven’t seen a moment like that in a movie in a long time. Men and women – we’re craving for the same things but we don’t get them in the same order. Or it hasn’t got the same taste. And we think that it’s all different, but it’s 57 always the same thing: to be recognized, to be loved. As though our existence on this earth is somehow unreal, and from time to time we really need to have some strong relationship, or emotions, or fighting for something that is essential, so that this short passage on earth is related to something real.

VENTURA: We were talking about the form of a film, what is hidden and what is shown outright – does the whole film form at once for you, or in fragments, like seeing the fragment of that man and woman on the corner?

MOREAU: Having an idea for a film is like when you arrive in a city by plane, especially at night. There the city lies under you, all the lights in the buildings and the streets, and you think, “Well, I’ll get to know that city!” Then you land and take your luggage and get in the taxicab, and you’re lost. You have to find your way.

58

RICHARD RUSH

26 September 1980

LA Weekly film editor Ginger Varney and I interviewed Richard Rush about his recently released film The Stunt Man. Ginger and I collaborated on the questions and editing the interview, so our part of the conversation will be designated simply as “V.”

V: Psyche Out, Hell’s Angels on Wheels, Getting Straight, Freebie and the Bean , and now The Stunt Man – can you talk about your evolution, is that talkable?

RUSH: With the first couple of films I found it was really challenging to get an actor to a car, get the door closed, and have him drive away. Getting everybody going in the right direction at the right time – that was great. But after accomplishing that in a couple of pictures, I got to where I couldn’t stand to see my dailies unless there was something unique and different about every scene. I wanted to operate on a couple of levels. I wanted a subtext that was being described while the action was being played, a visual style that lent additional meaning to what I was trying to say. The Stunt Man , of course, is very ambitious in that area. It’s trying very seriously to alter syntax, asking the audiences to participate more strongly with actors and what they’re bringing in order to make the scene work. A lot of scenes in that movie are audacious. Whether they succeed or not, the ambition is there.

V: About casting. What drew you to whom you got?

RUSH: Peter O’Toole, because the best single screen performance I’ve ever seen was Peter’s in Becket. It’s nice to be able to come to a single conclusion like that in life, isn’t it? But that’s the way it seems to me. It defined the outer limits of the art. I’d never met nor contacted Peter, and then one day I got a call from a guy who knew I wanted him. He said Peter was at his house at a party and to come on over. I did, and I talked to him about half the evening, but I didn’t have the guts to bring up The Stunt Man, because it seemed so tacky – springing that at a party, like that. So he walked out and I said to myself, “You schmuck, you asshole, you really blew it.” I was standing there really suffering when he came back running in and said, “You directed Freebie and the Bean ! That’s one of my favorite pictures. My wife just told me.” And I said, quick, “I’ve got a screenplay for you.” So he called me a few weeks later, and he said, “Richard, I am an intelligent, literate man. I’ve read your screenplay and I won’t beat around the bush. If you don’t give me the part I’ll kill you.” And about two and a half years later we got the financing.

V: How did you choose Steve Railsback?

RUSH: On recommendation from Elia Kazan, who said Steve was one of the finest young actors in the country. That’s a recommendation you always take with a grain of salt, so I called him in to read. And I honest-to-God thought the gardener’s kid had 59 walked in. There was no way you could see this kid as an actor. He still had his head shaved from Manson, a big high forehead sticking out, really clumsy, unstudied. Then we started working together and it was devastating – the inventiveness, the depth, the intensity. Stunning. I cast him on the spot. Which is where I make most of my decisions. That’s difficult, by the way, since in our Hollywood system as soon as actors become stars, or even semi-stars, they don’t feel they have to read anymore. I’ve always managed to get around that. A film means too much to me.

V: Is that disrespect, or a forgetting, of craft on the part of Hollywood actors?

RUSH: No, I think it has to do with prestige. In other words, they’re not to be auditioned because their desirability is too great. That’s the star system. If you want them, you know them -- is how the thinking goes.

V: And you don’t agree with that?

RUSH: No. When I agree to direct a picture, I tell the studio exactly what I want to do with the goddamned film because it’s usually something quite different from what they’ll expect. If people don’t know the last work I did, I want them to see it so they’ll have a reference point, so they can talk about it, so they don’t have any terrible surprises that I’ll have to fight, and I don’t have any startling surprises about their expectations. I don’t mind, at all, auditioning.

V: Do studios generally ask a director to work on a picture whose work they have not seen?

RUSH: Yes. The criteria is generally box office receipts of the last picture, not the picture itself. The rest could matter less. But back to actors. I love them. They’re what it’s all about. While we’re sitting there in the corner saying, “Get in there and go,” they’re emotionally getting their brains kicked out. They’re the ones in the ring. So they’re entitled to deference and respect. But a reading is for their own protection. How in the hell do they know that they can handle the role, that they’re gonna deliver what the director has in mind, what he’ll keep pushing and fighting for, what he needs to tell the story, how he works? How do they know he’s the man who will support them and help them find the performance that’s needed? There’s got to be some exchange, some testing back and forth like the sort that takes place in a reading situation. And most of the good ones don’t mind.

V: How long did you actually rehearse before you started shooting?

RUSH: There was a period of about a week and a half that we called an official rehearsal period. But since we were casting at the same time and doing everything else, we had maybe a two-hour session a day. During the reading period, I worked with the actors individually, and I continued that on-and-off through the picture. Especially Steve’s character. It’s quite a non-verbal role, but the story is told through that character. Subjective reality, if there is such a term. In other words, the audience has got to make 60 the same mistake he does, come to the same conclusions he does. To depend so totally on his changing perceptions in such a non-verbal character – that’s really a trick to pull off. It took a tremendous amount of fine understanding – the past and the reality of that man. Steve had to communicate complex ideas without saying a word.

V: How do you direct a non-verbal performance? What kinds of things did you say to him?

BUSH: You do it through an understanding of the character. In other words, we talked and analyzed the character, found out where he was coming from, what he was feeling at as particular time. We improvised words to express that attitude and see where that leads us in terms of physical actions. It’s a matter of coming to it with intensity of feeling, the million minute things that he, as an actor, an instrument, brings to the attitude when he’s moving through a scene. A single idea emerges from all this for a bit of business, an action that nails down the feeling.

V: Did the actors come up with these bits of business?

RUSH: Always. Which is the presence you depend on getting from that really good cast you assemble. If it’s not there instantly, you work towards it. I mean, you’re both on the same track and one or the other of you will start coming up with it once the right emotional levels are reached. You see, for me, performance is the number one element in making movies, aside from story and concept which come before the actual shooting. But during the shooting, everything is subservient to performance. I used to believe very deeply in heavy rehearsals, which on the stage you do and then kind of recapture your best moment from rehearsal. In film, I learned over the years, it’s different. It’s terribly important to rehearse in order to clean up the screenplay, to find what isn’t going to work, but I try never to achieve the moments that I’m going to go after on film. As a matter of fact, frequently when rehearsing the actors, I give them similar improvisational work so they’ll never get to the real lines in terms of heavy emotional performance. Then, on camera, we start heading for the performance and modifying it from take to take.

V: How so?

RUSH : Tell one actor, “Give your character a switch of attitude.” Tell another actor, “Switch your attitude.” But usually not sat the same time. Say you and I are having an argument on film. I have to believe I’m right, you have to believe you’re right. If I give the rationale to both actors at the same time, that blows it. Then they know which is the winning side. So I usually work at a whisper individually with one actor about what is going to work for them in their own style. All the performances, relationships, change and get polished down. Sometimes you’re right there. You know where you are at take one or take two. Sometimes you’re literally moving it around on film – rehearsing – until take 15 and the magic explodes.

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V: The Stunt Man has everything – action, adventure, crime, a love story – everything that a commercial distributor could possibly want. Yet it went nearly two years unable to get a distributor. Why?

RUSH: The comments I was hearing were, “What is it?” It is not like any other picture you’ll see. You can’t rip an ad campaign off another picture and stick it on this one, you can’t describe it easily in one sentence. Is it action? Adventure? Is it an intellectual art picture? And I kept trying to say to them, Well, it operates on several levels. The whole concept of the design of the picture was that we all ourselves operate at several levels of taste. Myself, I really like action stuff and I also like complex intellectual material, and if I’m reached at both levels, I’ll remember a picture longer than if I were only reached at one. Finally, some distributors started previewing it. It was shown at the Dallas Film Festival. We started accumulating good press out of town. But the distributors were still telling me that they liked the picture, really thought it was marvelous, but like one guy said, “When you’ve got an assembly line that turns out Chevies, you don’t really stand up and cheer when a Ferrari comes out. That gums things up.” It’s a nice way of saying no, but it’s still no. Then I had another head of a studio tell me, “Dick, I turned down the picture four times while you were writing it. And I’m really amazed. You covered everything you said it would. It works magically.” He’s churning out all the adjectives, and then says, “Look, I’ve got nine pictures coming out. If I take your picture, turn the distribution on to it, then I have to take the money and the enthusiasm from my own pictures, in which I have a large investment. What I’m trying to do is say no -- I can’t, because I like the picture. But don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying yes. ” A month later he finally worked up the courage to say no flatly. They don’t believe it out there in public-land, they don’t. So what if we were pleasing the critics and the preview audiences? There was no indication of “legs,” no handle to sell it with. They weren’t buying. So okay. Finally the Seattle test run. On opening day we broke the house record. We broke the circuit record. It’s now in its eleventh week up there, and the tenth week was as good as the first week. The result of which was that the industry, en masse, declared Seattle a non-market. I’m not making this up! Another studio head said, “Seattle’s crazy. They like The Stunt Man . You can’t count on them.” That was our answer. Which was why we decided to open in Westwood [in 1980, the prestige cinema neighborhood of Los Angeles]. And the picture made it. It made it in the most competitive arena in the world, and we didn’t have a months-in-advance build-up that most movies coming in have. We had similar concerns when we opened against Redford, Eastwood, Travolta, Nicholson, Burt Reynolds – which is a formidable array. But the first weekend in Westwood we became the leading grosser. Then we went wide the following Friday, into ten theaters. We became the box office champs of L.A. That same day Twenty Century-Fox picked it up and we won the grand prix at the Toronto Film Festival. So it was a hell of a weekend. Nine years after sitting down to write the script.

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V: In the best of all possible Hollywoods, the saga of The Stunt Man would really be a lesson.

RUSH: I don’t expect that. Everybody’s rewriting history so fast. You’d be surprised how many of the studios really always loved it – now.

V: How do you explain the phenomena of people in positions of power at a studio looking at a picture, or a script, and saying, “God, I really love it, NO”?

RUSH: I honestly used to be more cynical about it than I am now. I used to think that they really believed that in corruption lay profit. You know, if you do something dirty and evil and lousy, it’s gonna pay off. But now I don’t think it’s just that. They never look at the film as an audience. An audience goes to a movie and sits down really hoping to be entertained. I mean, they’ve shown five dollars worth of confidence in the fact that this isn’t going to be a totally misspent evening. They’re going to give the picture the benefit of the doubt. They’ve put up their money to prove that. But the distributors go in with almost the opposite attitude. Their jobs, their reps, are at stake if they make a mistake. In the corporate structure it’s not their money they’re dealing with. They’re salaried employees. As long as they don’t do anything really wrong, they will survive. They’re there, really, to distribute pictures made by the studio. To come up with an outside winner, or even a picture from the studio that’s unusual and daring and out of the pattern and not a repeat of the last successful picture, that’s chancy. If they go with a copy of the last successful picture, and if it fails, they don’t get fired. I mean, it had the same star, it had the same story, so you’re entitled to that error. But with the unique picture that fails, the question always is: “Who the hell asked you to take that chance with our money?” Without having the support of every man up and down the line to share the blame for that, they’re making a very dangerous career move. So the distributors are walking in with that sense of personal protection. And then there’s the basic method of viewing pictures by distributors. There’s a few guys in black suits, there are phone calls coming in, they skip alternate reels. Can you imagine The Stunt Man surviving that? So those are some of the reasons. But there just isn’t any excuse for it. I mean, their business is making movies, so you’d think they’d hire the best experts, experts who understood story, who had good taste, themselves. But the guys who rise in the corporate structure have great talent… at rising in the corporate structure. It’s a talent, but it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the making and understanding of movies. Those talents aren’t what you rise for in a corporate structure.

V: Back to the art of moving pictures, who are the directors who influenced you?

RUSH: George Stevens had a good deal to do with my early picture-making ideas. His pictures were the essence of novelistic relationships on film, and I’m tremendously drawn in that direction. Fellini, of course, for 8½. And, probably strangely, from the French, it’s Claude Lelouch who has certainly had the strongest influence on me. To me, his visual phrasing is tremendously innovative.

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V: Tell us about the “rack focus” you developed for yourself.

RUSH: It was a technique I worked out one summer around the pool with an 8mm camera. It was a time when I was working on non-union pictures, exploitation pictures, like Hell’s Angels on Wheels, Savage Seven and Psyche Out. And I had the best crew in the business. Laslo Kovacs was my cameraman. Those three pictures were all part of a controlled experiment – well, not so well-controlled. Let’s just say an experiment. At the time I had sort of the reputation – well, at the time I was known as the best of the two-dollar hookers. I would give a producer all the exploitation thrills he wanted and promise to bring it in on budget, if I could experiment. It was a terrific opportunity to work on technique. Story-telling and camera technique. In the story-telling area, we were working with ways of getting an improvisational look on film. In the camera area, what you call “rack focus” we called “critical focus.” True, the most visible part of the technique is the “rack” – where the focus is visibly switched from the foreground to the background to emphasize different parts of the action or conversation. But really it’s part of a whole blocking concept. It’s a way of using the zoom lens without making it obvious you’re doing so, because you’re constantly covering the zooms with lateral movement. This works much more like the human eye does. If I’m talking to you I can shift my focus without moving my head and in my vision you become blurred while the area behind you becomes focused. Using that principle I can phrase with moving masters, design the blocking of the actors right along with the blocking of the camera. I can start with an over-the-shoulder close-up on you, then cross behind you and the camera picks up on me. It’s obvious that two people are talking in the same room all in the same shot, instead of two shots. See, we’re conditioned by motion pictures to accept movements that are quite alien. Take the cross-cut. Going from a close-up on you to a close-up on me as we talk. If you’re a purist, this particular perspective of dashing back and forth between us as we converse is nobody’s actual point of view. But with the rack focus shots, and the moving masters that are the basis of the whole blocking system, there is movement much more natural to the human eye, much more the way we actually perceive the world -- if they’re phrased just right, timed just right.

V: What’s the best coverage technique with this ensemble system?

RUSH: I’ll pluck out coverage at specific spots, depending on the design of the shot. Say you’re talking, a second person crosses behind you to get something, a third person comes in the room screaming at us both. The camera moves in to take establishing, or prevailing, shots of you and the second and third person. Then, for the interesting parts of the conversation, I know I want the intimacy. So if I have you in an over-the-shoulder shot in that moment, I know I also need a corresponding over-the- shoulder shot of the second person in that moment. Then for your dramatic moments with the third person, I know I need to match a close-up on that person with a close-up of you.

V: So the preparation must be meticulous?

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RUSH: Yes, but over the years I’ve become able to think that way and now I can easily improvise. For instance, I know that one actor’s delivery on the third line was perfect in the close-up, so I’ll need close-up coverage to handle that, and I’ll print several takes. Also, I love what the same actor did in the over-the-shoulder shots during the second half of the speech, so I’ll figure I’ll have to get into over-the-shoulders for that. I’m using performance as it evolves, for the coverage guide.

V: So you do your coverage directly after the master-shot?

RUSH: Yes. And maybe some of the coverage will be a counter master-shot. In other words, if I started with an over-the-shoulder shot on one actor, I’ll start with an over-the-shoulder shot with another actor and repeat the same movements but from the opposite starting point. That way I’ll have alternate choices, depending on where the performance emerged.

V: Do you ever make sketches of the blocking?

RUSH: At the beginning of a picture I do. Just to know where I’m at, but they’re… badly drawn. So then I usually go to my head as the picture progresses. I used this moving-master technique a great deal in The Stunt Man , because there’s so very much peeking through keyholes. The long lens is ideal for dealing with the what-is- illusion?/what-is-reality concept? Like the dinner table scene. There’s a lot of rapid cutting to individual close-ups but always through heavy foreground – under arms, past ears, that sort of thing – so that half the frame is fuzzed out with color and moving impressions of eating to give the personalized sense of looking at something, the feeling of being in the middle of the action -- not just observing it from the camera but from the mood of the character.

V: Which was the hardest scene to direct in The Stunt Man ?

RUSH: You mean which scene presented the most difficulty technically? That’s a difficult question to answer, and I don’t mean to avoid it. Immediately I reach for performance. Just let me say this: all of the scenes in a picture, if they’re successful – let’s say eight out of ten – are designed with a certain complexity. In other words, you start the whole perspective here , and shift there. You shift because of a new piece of information, or a change in attitude, or a change in mood. You go from one perspective to another of the same facts . While the basic which-is-the-illusion?/which-is-the-reality? theme progresses, you’re simultaneously, rather than alternately, dealing in each scene with at least two of the three or four major elements – such as, the relationship between Steve Railsback and Barbara Hersey, the jeopardy from the police, Peter O’Toole’s problems with telling his anti-war picture, and so on. That’s what made each scene the most difficult. But that’s what also made each scene the most fun. It was a terrifically exciting picture to do because it was a terrific juggling act. I think the worst difficulty was the fact that we were shooting a big outdoor picture in the middle of a flood. About the only thing I learned from that was that it’s hard to shoot 65 airplane sequences in the rain because the planes are up there and that’s where you’re trying to point the cameras, which are getting very wet. We never did get to the point where we could consistently take advantage of showing rain on film, so it had to be avoiding the rain on film. This worked out fine visually. It didn’t cost us anything except a lot of cold capsules and energy. But even then, because the cast and the crew all felt so special about the film, it was more like going on commando raids every day and coming home with captured footage, rather than shooting a movie. All in all, the picture was more a pleasure than a pain to shoot. It was financing it and getting it distributed that was painful.

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BERTRAND TAVERNIER & PHILIPPE NOIRET

4 February 1983

The “signature” of Bertrand Tavernier doesn’t consist of stylistic flourishes, or of a fixation on one subject or genre, yet I am sure with just a few minutes’ viewing I would know a film by Tavernier if I had never heard of it nor seen any credits. Every Tavernier film is marked by the gentleness of its clarity, and a simultaneous attention to huge issues and intimate gestures. We are always watching something of interest yet we’re never aware of the camera – and no matter what’s going on, there’s an indefinable quietness in Tavernier’s atmosphere. Beginning in The Clockmaker, and continuing with Let Joy Reign Supreme, The Judge and the Assassin, Deathwatch, A Week’s Vacation, and now Coup de Torchon [Clean Slate], Bertrand Tavernier has expressed himself through the acting of Philippe Noiret – a director-actor symbiosis like the collaborations of Bergman-Von Sydow and Fellini-Mastroianni. Sitting in a room with them, the ironic, large, languid Noiret hardly seems a vehicle for the quick-talking, pointedly gesturing, younger Tavernier – yet it’s as though Noiret anchors Tavernier, as though Tavernier tests his ideas about film and life by seeing if they can be embodied by this big man who has the air of having seen most of it, if not all of it.

VENTURA: Mr. Tavernier, you’ve used Philippe Noiret in many of your films, so this must be a very special relationship. Do you see him, as an actor, as a projection of yourself?

TAVERNIER: Sometimes, yes. At least in certain feelings, certain emotions, certain frustrations, yes. It’s easy for me to write things which I feel and give them to him. I can write the most daring scenes, or the most crazy ideas, and Philippe will never be frightened. And it’s true, in Coup de Torchon , that the camera movements are set on the way Philippe walks, on the way he moves around, on the way he looks at things, and suddenly he acts unexpectedly, so the rhythm changes at this moment. Because I think that direction, for me – and every time I say a word like “direction,” I should add “for me,” because there is no rule, and the worst thing is to impose what you want to do over some other people, for some people will do the opposite and achieve great films – but direction for me , what I try to get, in a way is a bit like music, is to get the music of the main character in the style, the mood, the pace, the way the camera moves, on the main character of a film. And then, once that is established, to have around him a lot of dissonance of things. It is very easy to take Philippe as the emotional center of the film, and to have the people move around him as they want. And, of course, when I say “center,” I don’t mean the center of the frame, because that’s something I always try to avoid – I don’t like symmetry. Not in the center of the frame, but at least in the center of the shot.

VENTURA: Your films seem so personal to me, yet certainly Coup de Torchon is not autobiographical. 67

TAVERNIER: I put in one detail which is very personal, and then put in another detail which can be very far from me. That’s not conscious. I don’t sit down and say, “I will be ambiguous!” It’s just that the more I do film the more I think it’s like an exploration, and the less I want to know exactly what I’m going to say and how I’m going to say it. I want to discover that during the writing, during the direction, during the editing. I want to have things which I have to explore, which I have to find out.

NOIRET: That is the point which we have in common! Because as an actor I feel exactly the same, in the sense that I don’t prepare every detail of something. I think a lot about the character and the script. I take my time – that’s my luxury – before the film, I take two or three months before I do a film, and just think of it. Very easily, very easily. Like that… [ Noiret makes a gentle long gesture in the air.] And then going to shoot, I let things happen.

TAVERNIER: Shooting is cathartic!

NOIRET: Yes, especially –

TAVERNIER: -- because we shoot very fast!

NOIRET: Yes. So, with Bertrand, when I go to see the film, when it’s finished, I have some surprise! And that’s fine, I think, that’s interesting. Because, you know, though I act every sequence, every shot, I’m not always aware of what it will be at the end. I don’t know exactly, before I see the film, what is the character, completely, that I am playing.

VENTURA: That’s very interesting. So the character is completed by the film?

NOIRET: Yes, exactly. You’re right. I never thought of that, but you’re right.

VENTURA: The impression I get is that you sort of let the role seep into you, over that period of time –

NOIRET: -- the time is very important for me, I need a good lot of time before the shooting. But it’s very difficult for me, it’s very difficult for me to speak about the way I prepare. Let’s say that I don’t have a method. I have an approach that’s very instinctive toward my character.

TAVERNIER: It’s instinctive, but it’s based on –

NOIRET: -- on reflection –

TAVERNIER: -- on reflection, and on an unconscious knowledge of how you work on the project as a whole. And that’s based on his training in the theater. The fact that he played 40 plays ranging from Moliere to Shakespeare to Chekov, to have that 68 classical education. For I know some people who are instinctive without any such education, and sometimes their instincts are completely wrong! But Philippe’s instincts are tuned not only to the character but to the technicalities of cinema. In Coup de Torchon, in a violent scene, for a moment he is a bit out of frame, then Glenn [cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn] finds him again – and when the scene is done Philippe says to Glenn, “Don’t speak to me! I knew as soon as I started making that [gestures ], that it was completely wrong! I saw you trying to catch me.” And at the same time Philippe had a long long speech, which he delivered perfectly!

NOIRET: Twenty-five lines!

TAVERNIER: And he said, “I knew that you had the problem of catching me, so I tried to raise up, and I knew that I did it too quickly and you missed me.” And that’s extraordinary, because if you look at the take, in spite of the fact that there is one moment when he’s out-of-frame, one second, you would never guess that he was thinking of that. I mean, he gives a completely violent, moving performance. And that is something which I didn’t find in the two American actors I worked with. They don’t have that sense of the technical. Harry Dean Stanton, who is a tremendous actor, and Harvey [Keitel], lovely too, a lovely actor, they completely ignore the technical. They don’t know, they will never know.

VENTURA: This simpatico between actor and cameraman –

TAVERNIER: Glenn will always find a way to get them. Glenn is a very quick man. If there’s a special change, he will find something new immediately.

NOIRET: He’s a very quick man. I remember in The Clockmaker when we had the fight on the bank of the Rhone, and we were supposed to stop the shot after the man I hit had dropped in the river, and as we had fought really and run for a long while, when I was done I was exhausted, and I sat down – because the shot was supposed to be finished. And Glenn was with the camera, hand-held, and he just knelt on his knees, and we carried on the scene! I was laughing with the other actor. And that was a surprise, because Glenn followed, he understood immediately. I think the older generation of American actors knew a lot of about this sort of thing. The big stars, Gary Cooper, Gable, Mitchum.

TAVERNIER: I saw Gabin [Jean Gabin, Renoir’s great actor] on the set of his last film. They called him to be on the take. The set was inside of a plane. And he came, and he looked at the camera, and he says, “I’m sitting there?” “Yes,” they said. “What lens?” Gabin asks. “Fifteen,” the director says. “I’m not in the frame. You don’t need me yet.” And he went off. And maybe that lasted two minutes. He did not even sit down. He looked, and said, and left. And the director said to the cameraman, “Check,” and the cameraman did, and said, “He’s right.” This is a thing which is great. And he did not do this in a boasting way. I mean it was, for him, not proving that he knew better, but as though, “Oh, I still have half an hour to finish my coffee.” He knew absolutely.

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NOIRET: I was working with Sophia Loren once, I remember, it was on a big set, an enormous set – a bordello in a Peter Ustinov film [ Lady L, 1965]. I had a scene with her, and we rehearsed once or twice, and we were in the first take, and then we did the second one, and when we were doing the second or third one, she just said, just like that [ gestures as though brushing something away casually], near the end of the shot, “I’m sorry.” And we cut. And she pointed out a little, little piece of wood that had slipped in front of one of the lamps. And there were hundreds of lamps! But she knew that that piece would make a shadow on her nose. And she was perfectly wonderful in the scene, talking with me, looking at me, no problem, and suddenly she said, “I’m sorry,” and pointed it out, and they said, “Oh yes, you’re right.” I like that.

VENTURA [to Tavernier]: This combination of instinctive and technical, how does it apply to writing a script? Would “technical” in a script be form, or psychological considerations, for instance?

TAVERNIER: I never thought about psychological motivation. The characters are never written in a psychological way. It’s more emotional. And it is true that it’s a combination of the shot and the interpretation which creates the character. But I like to, even in the writing, to have a sort of opacity – to have certain things which are mysteries, which I would like to understand. And even when some of my characters explain themselves – I never know if the explanation is completely right.

NOIRET: Or true!

TAVERNIER: Or covers everything. For me , the explanation never covers everything. Especially in Coup de Torchon. I mean, it’s exciting that the character always explains what he’s done, but in a very strange way. He even goes very far; he explains to a black man why he’s going to kill him, he educates him, right before killing him. But I don’t know if each explanation is completely true or complete, and I don’t know if the character knows it.

VENTURA: I suspect most Americans – most American filmmakers – would find that a very strange way of making films. Ray Stark, the producer, is said to have said to Louis Malle, when he saw Atlantic City, “I don’t like this film because you never know what the character is going to do next.” And he was told, “But that’s what’s good about the film, that’s what we were trying to do.” And Stark said that in his films you know the character completely in the first ten minutes.

TAVERNIER: That’s two different approaches. I mean, he produced Annie , and Louis Malle does Atlantic City. It’s not completely fair to make fun of the approach of Ray Stark because sometimes it has had a good result, but the problem of Ray Stark is not being able to see what is good in the other approach. To refuse to see. That is the problem. Some of the older show-business men, with all their crude vulgarity, their cheapening, yet they could understand that, because they were producing those two types 70 of film. Cohn, for example, produced All the King’s Men, which was very surprising at the time to the studios, and which still has no equivalent.

NOIRET [to Tavernier]: You were talking the other day about the new producers as compared to the old ones, and you were right, I think.

VENTURA: What about the new producers?

TAVERNIER: The non-producers, now. The people who are so frightened to have an opinion that they will wait till whole studios, including maybe secretaries, have read the project and say “Yes” or “No.” They are people whom you don’t feel have any organic link with show business. They are sometimes intelligent, sometimes smart, and sometimes they pretend to be artistic, but they have no courage, they have no dedication, they are afraid to lose their job. So they will spend 15 years between shy “No” and timid “Yes.” And I think that situation is what is bad in the American cinema of today. It makes it less stimulating. I think it’s a pity.

VENTURA: Even in Europe it must be hard to finance such unique material as yours.

TAVERNIER: I know I can hope for 400,000 people in Paris. So I will try to calculate a budget, based on that, which will allow me to do a film without any pressure, without people complaining, “It’s too expensive,” “You should change the ending.” So the seven films I did, I did exactly as I wanted. Though sometimes we have to find a fortunate solution to get away with it. For instance, to give you an example, because of the budget – two million dollars, which is big for me, on Coup de Torchon, but not so big – there were certain things which we had to do very quickly, and find, or try to find, tricks how to do it. The eclipse, we had to make it on the set. It was not done in the lab, it was created right there. All the specials effects were done directly, like in the old days. Everything connected with the open-air-cinema sequence – including the scenes on the balcony, the excerpts from the film, the storms, and when the storm shreds the screen – everything was shot in only one night. Which I’m very proud of. Just pure craftsmanship. I’m sure for a lot of directors it would have taken at least five or six nights. When we talked about that sequence, we called the people who specialize in that sort of thing, who work on James Bond, etc., and they asked seven days of rehearsal and two nights of shooting! But we had only one night, so we did it in one night. We made a few tests, we invented –and we sent in around two hours of rushes! Two hours we shot in one night!

NOIRET: It was a long night. Only one, but very long.

VENTURA [to Tavernier]: What is your primary concern on the set?

TAVERNIER: One of the first things I ask on the set is that there is no censorship. “Let’s look.” If someone wants to try something, let’s look. And, then, if it’s interesting, I will take it. Or, if I’m not completely sure, I will ask for something different. Always you cannot be completely sure when you are shooting. The film – there 71 is something magic. You’re seeing a take which maybe you had doubt about, and then, when you see it on the screen, the doubt disappears. And the one you thought better, on the set, will be more elaborate, but maybe it will be too elaborate, you will lose that moment of magic.

NOIRET: That’s what’s funny in this business, you never know exactly what the camera will take of you. Even as an actor. The actor who says, “I am sure of what the camera will take of me in this shot,” is not true. Because sometimes the camera picks up something that, not that you never thought about, but maybe you thought it s small thing and it will be the more important thing in the shot. So sometimes you try to give a color to a shot, say, “I will make it very red,” or something like that, and suddenly there is a piece of green that comes out of you! And then the camera will take that. That’s interesting, and why I am also sometimes very surprised with the finished film.

TAVERNIER: Yes. When you allow the actor to give you all that range, it’s interesting. The only way to control completely the film, is not to do take after take until you have the feeling you want; it’s more exploring, and to try to get two or three colors, directions, and then see at the end, see the different nuances. Some directors want to control everything, every movement, and what will come will be often something without any mood, completely lifeless. Something which has no rigor. Somebody like Renoir was the opposite. He was trying three, four, five directions, and then things were growing up on him, in his mind. It’s like painting, it’s like discovering one touch after another. You have to be surprised by certain things. You have to be surprised. I would like to be able to see, in five or six years, to see again one of my films – which I do rarely! – and think, “Ah, that’s interesting!” To be surprised by it. Not to have the impression that I know everything.

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NICOLAS ROEG

2 August 1985

Five minutes into Performance, Nicolas Roeg’s first film, viewers knew that all bets were off, all rules suspended. Here was a man recreating the givens of cinema to express something uniquely his own, in a style that would influence Peter Weir, David Lynch, and many others. The Roeg films that have followed – Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bad Timing, Eureka, and now Insignificance – have been films without precedent, works that have gone out into the world on their own to seek an audience far from the mainstream, an audience interested in delving, in taking chances, in exposing itself to paradox. Roeg himself is self-contained, courteous and soft-spoken, but he bursts suddenly into unexpected flurries of gestures, his hands drawing figures in the air, his face fluidly expressive. Just as suddenly, he’ll lapse back into the reserved ways of a well-bred Englishman. This shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with his films. Their technique has always been one wherein disparate moments are brought into relation with each other to form an unexpected entity, a work of art that’s up to something unusual. Insignificance intersects four disparate people whose lives have become symbolic in our culture -- symbols that (to say the least) contradict each other. Brought together, their relationships must create and embody paradox as Albert Einstein (Michael Emil), Marilyn Monroe (Theresa Russell), Joe DiMaggio (Gary Busey), and Senator Joseph McCarthy (Tony Curtis), meet in a hotel on Times Square during the filming of The Seven-Year Itch in 1954 .

VENTURA: When The Man Who Fell to Earth came out, you told an interviewer not to be so sure that Newton (David Bowie) was from outer space. “Perhaps he’s from inner space,” you said. That seems to be even more true of Insignificance . These characters – Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Joe DiMaggio, Senator Joe McCarthy –

ROEG: They’re mythic characters. They’re only what one perceives or imagines they are now – no matter what their life was, or is. In that sense, it’s a piece that’s never complete. You can take those basic stones and blocks and pieces and in them put your own attitudes and feelings. If we hadn’t used them, if we’d said instead, “Mary Barnes is the most known and recognized woman in the world and Professor Wockmeister is so-and-so,” you’d have to fill in so much back-plot to make the audience believe. They’d say, “Oh, that doesn’t look much like a movie star to me. ” But here the back-plot’s over, finished. Instantly you recognize them. Then you can get on to what the piece is about. And I think, I hope, that 10 minutes into the movie, you’re involved with them, what they’re saying to each other, their problems. At the same time, nothing is quite what it seems. They’re not them. “But how can you say that? They look exactly like them! I know who they are. I can identify them.” “Yes, you can, but it’s not that person.” Back and forth, nobody knows. But nobody 73 knows a damn thing about anybody anyway. That’s part of the premise of this thing. We’re alone, very much alone. Nobody knows anything about anyone – not sons and lovers and mothers and children and daughters and aunties, uncles, brothers, husbands, wives – they know nothing of each other. Not a fucking thing. What’s a lover’s endless question? You sit, and gaze into each other’s eyes, and you ask, “What are you thinking, darling?” [He laughs.] “I’m thinking about you,” darling answers. “No, I mean – what are you really thinking?” [He laughs harder.] “Do you love me?” “Yes, of course I love you.” “How much do you love me?” “I love your eyes, you’ve got the most beautiful eyes in the world.” “Do you really love me?” “Yes, I really really love you.” “But what are you thinking ?” “I’m thinking about getting a divorce, actually.” [He laughs still harder.] You don’t know a damn thing. Which reminds me of Einstein’s last words – or they were among his last words; I don’t know what his very last words were – “And even so I’m not quite convinced myself that it’s all true…” An interesting thing, you know – he has no burial plot. He was cremated, and he wouldn’t have it known where his ashes were scattered. He didn’t like the idea of someone going there, reviewing the spot, thinking about the place. And that seemed, to me, to tie in tremendously with the title itself: Insignificance.

VENTURA: The title puzzled me, frankly.

ROEG: It’s that things are only relatively significant. Let’s say, “Darling, we’re having a very important man to dinner, a very important man, everything must be right, this is a very significant occasion.” He arrives – and the water main bursts! Then the plumber is the most important suddenly.

VENTURA: Terry Johnson’s script was a play originally –

ROEG: -- yes, but it’s the source , that’s all, just as the source can be a short story or an incident you’ve read or heard about. You find a source wherein the characters that inhabit the plot can carry one’s own beliefs. It’s quite interesting that in Don’t Look Now, in Daphne Du Maurier’s short story, the child dies of meningitis [she drowns in Roeg’s film] and then they go on holiday to Venice. I’d finished the movie, and the producers were very worried about showing it to Daphne du Maurier. They said, “What’s she going to say? It’s all changed!” But of course a writer of that stature knows that the story, the plot, is just the stones you build with. She wrote me a beautiful letter after she saw it. She said, “Dear Mr. Roeg, I so enjoyed your film of my story.” And later on in the letter – I’m paraphrasing, I don’t remember exactly – she said, “You captured so well my John and Laura, the attractive couple I saw one lunchtime in Venice who seemed to have a problem.” Now it went right back to the source that she had seen. She had seen a couple sitting having lunch, and they seemed to be disturbed about something, and she had thought, “I wonder what on earth that is.” She’d developed that, and that moved on to a film, and then the audience moved on to what they make of it all. I like that. And I felt in touch with that couple, whoever they were.

74

VENTURA: Time is a very important element in your films. You often cut several experiences together from several times to blend them into one scene.

ROEG: We’ve got this linear idea of time, of the past being back somewhere, instead of with us. That’s a crazed idea! Time isn’t that at all. [He runs his finger very quickly around and around the face of his watch.] “What’s the time?” “It’s 27,000,387 and a half minutes.” But instead, it just comes up all the time, 8:15 comes up all the time. Linear is a mad idea!

VENTURA: In Insignificance, Einstein’s watch is stopped at 8:15, the hour Hiroshima was bombed.

ROEG: When something has happened – with lovers, or with the world – it’s very easy to think, “Oh, that was 40 years ago.” We think that 40 years diminishes it somehow. Hiroshima was 40 years ago, so it’s all right. But 8:15 comes around every morning. It comes every day, and that moment is in our lives. It’s in my little 2-year-old boy’s life. It’s here. The act is with us. Everyone in the world now has a bit of it on him. It’s important to know that something that’s been done, committed, is lived with. I’m glad you haven’t used the word “flashback” – it’s such a confining term. I’ve thought and thought and thought, “What is it I’m trying to do in expressing time?” And the only way I can possibly describe it is to present time as an emotional continuity that we live in. If you asked me about my childhood, I would be emotionally having it in my head. It would not be a flash back , it would be here. It isn’t spoken of in literature as a flashback. You find thought processes that blend times going on in literature in practically every book you read. I’m not sure why the grammar of film is expected to be so conservative. I can’t think of another medium of contact, of communication, where that is so.

VENTURA: Why do you think that is?

ROEG: I think it’s because the visual culture was lost, to a degree, for a long time, and it just takes a long time to get it back – reading pictures, reading the signs, the omens of life.

VENTURA: Speaking of time, in Insignificance the first time you see the cubist- like calendar of Theresa Russell, the date is March, 1954. The second time, it’s June, 1954, though only an hour or so of the story has elapsed.

ROEG : That wasn’t an intended thing.

VENTURA: Too bad. It meant a lot to me.

ROEG : But that’s fair enough, too. Why shouldn’t it? A film has a life of its own. You can’t dictate to it. When I’m shooting a movie, I like to feel the random factor is always present, and I must respect that too. Once you start working on a film you begin to see that everything has some sort of relationship to what you’re doing. The film itself is 75 telling you things. It’s helping you to see what the route is through the film, and that’s very exciting and nerve-wracking. It’s like being a jockey on a horse. You kind of feel it’s going right and just sort of let it have its lead.

VENTURA: Which brings me to something else. The paranormal – prescience, especially – is always an important element in your films. Is there a way to talk about that?

ROEG: I’m glad you brought it up. It dismays me every time the paranormal is spoken about as something unusual. We’re made up of all kinds of things. We are part of something that we don’t know about. You know, the studios close down during Passover, and yet they say, “There’s so much mysticism in Roeg’s films!” But it really comes down to the very first question that a child asks: “Why am I here, Mummy?” “Because Mummy and Daddy love you, darling. Now don’t you worry about that. Go to sleep now.” [He laughs.] We shut the door quietly and leave them gazing with big eyes at the stars. I can remember then, myself, lying in bed thinking, “They haven’t got the answer.”

VENTURA: So this mystery, this “something we don’t know about” and yet is a force in our lives, paranormal or –

ROEG: We all have it – and I don’t mind sounding mad or highfalutin. If you truly believe you don’t, then you’re not living at all.

VENTURA: One of the most disturbing passages in Insignificance, though it’s very brief, is when we see a young Marilyn in a run-down bathroom dyeing her hair and suddenly laughing and drawing a pentagram, a certain five-pointed star, in platinum-hair dye on her bathroom mirror – the symbol of Satan.

ROEG: At that point she has her demon, doesn’t she? It’s inescapable then. And remember it’s a star – what she had made herself. The whole point, when she dyes her hair platinum, is that she is saying, “I have decided to be someone else. This is a disguise.” When you decide to be someone else you never get rid of the person inside you. But very few of us have an opportunity to totally disguise ourselves, as she did. With her it was a total hiding of the inner person under the disguise: “I will be this other person for other people to use, and no one will know who’s inside me.” Well, after a while it wants to be itself.

VENTURA: What wants to be itself? The disguise wants to be the whole person?

ROEG: Yes. You become the other, the disguise. The inner person is lost. And that is what possession is about, isn’t it, possession of any kind? At the end she says, “I don’t want to want to be what you want me to be.” That was the death knell of the inner person. The myth had overtaken her, taken her over. [He pauses, then goes on slowly.] How much is anyone prepared to forfeit? What is that 76 marvelous phrase? “There’s a point beyond which we cannot return. That is the point that must be reached.”

VENTURA: Kafka. I pulled that book off the shelf four days ago, looking for that phrase.

ROEG: How funny. I think that’s strange. But all things are connected; nothing is on its own.

VENTURA: And it’s like a cut from one of your films.

ROEG: It is.

VENTURA: Especially how you stopped and said, a bit mysteriously, “How much is anyone prepared to forfeit?” Critics tend not to understand, or not to value, those resonant, suddenly suspended moments in your films.

ROEG: They’re getting a lot better, the critics. In general, I mean, not simply about my films. Four years ago, all the plot would be written out in a review. That was a hideous way to do it. The whole bloody plot, and then whether the reviewer liked the picture or not. That’s not what criticism is at all. With the popular press, I often wonder, are they being as honest as they can be to themselves? Are their private video collections the same as their public critical favorites?

VENTURA: How about audience reaction to your work?

ROEG: When The Man Who Fell to Earth was completed, the man running the distribution company wanted the film seen by [psychologist and theorist] Ronnie [R.D.] Laing, and Laing was quite interesting about it. He said, “It’s rather disorienting in terms of an audience. The individual is likely to feel, ‘I get it, but I don’t think my partner here does.’ We’re enjoying it or not enjoying it individually. We’re not being melded into a block, into an audience.” One can only do something as truthfully as one can, and if that’s the way I feel it should be expressed, it would be wrong to express it another way. And I can only hope that there are people who have an emotional contact with me, even if they kick the film. To have a contact with someone. All one’s work is saying, “Hello! Is there anybody out there?” And someone says, sitting somewhere in the dark, “I’m here. I know what you mean. I feel that too.”

77

PETER WEIR

8 February 1985

Many directors bitch about the unending hassle of getting a film from its conception to the set. Peter Weir feels differently: “But that’s the fire you have to go through! That’s what makes the film what it is.” Acknowledging the influence primarily of Stanley Kubrick, and of Joseph Losey “during the period when he was working with Harold Pinter,” as well as an obvious affinity for Nicolas Roeg, Weir emerged with Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and The Last Wave (1978) as a unique director who seemed to come out of nowhere – and Australia was “nowhere” before Weir’s films put it on cinema’s map. Bruce Beresford, Fred Schepsi, Gillian Armstrong and George Miller followed, but Weir was the first Australian director to break into a world market, helping to make other breakthroughs possible. His last film, The Year of Living Dangerously (1983), was an American production, but this year’s Witness is an American film . Set among Pennsylvania’s Amish people, and starring Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis, Witness is an American detective story given the Weir treatment: the mystery occurs within the people more than within the plot.

VENTURA: Most of your films involve a tremendous sense of dislocation – a protagonist being thrown into an utterly alien world.

WEIR: It might seem odd, but I didn’t really think of that with Witness – though the pattern is particularly sharp to me as a result of having finished it. It seems, of course, incredibly obvious that I’ve been following this particular line, but I certainly didn’t think I was with this, initially.

VENTURA: Why?

WEIR : The ambience of the movie is somewhat different from the screenplay. The screenplay was emphasizing more the melodrama – the cop on the run, hiding out with the Amish people. It had the humor, but you didn’t sense from the screenplay this extraordinary clash of these two people [Harrison Ford’s and Kelly McGillis’ characters] from virtually different centuries. And, you know, casting makes an incredible difference. I basically tried to cast all foreign people in the parts of the Amish – which is, in a way, a way of getting at the truth through a certain distortion. A lot more of them speak with an American accent, but they don’t look American.

VENTURA: How do Americans look?

WEIR: Like the food you eat! [ Laughs. ] Mobile faces. The Amish have a stillness about them. They’re a white tribal group, really – their religion is their way of 78 life, like all tribal peoples. As the weeks passed, in fact, I became more and more intrigued by the Amish and knew less and less about them, and never tired of seeing them in the fields or in the streets or in the supermarkets.

VENTURA: How do you mean you knew less and less?

WEIR: Initially, going in, meeting the Amish people – one in particular, an old man – it was like meeting a tribal elder who was going to give you the secret of the Amish. And you realized very rapidly there was no secret knowledge. There was no dogma; there were no mysteries hidden from the outside. What you saw was what they were – simple farming people. So I seemed to have reached a point of knowledge about them, having read books about their background, and that was the end of it. But then the mystery began to deepen as the weeks passed. That is, how can this possibly still be going on? Why is it still that way? You could understand if it was in a remote mountain region, but an hour from Philadelphia by car, planes flying overhead, a tourist industry growing up all around them, and yet they still carry on as if it was 1740 or something. So the experience of being there began to have something to do with a glimpse about time – the way we’ve come to deal with time, the way we’ve structured a view about time. And I began to get wonderful little jolts about how this country was settled yesterday, and that I had as much right to be there as anybody else, that I was an English person – my crew were, Harrison was. We all came from other countries not long ago. And how something like the settling of America is, really, in the great laying out of the history of man, a very recent thing and still an ongoing experiment, still very much the New World. Yet that is something that you are taught -- the United States is as old as the world , one is taught somehow. The American Revolution is almost, in one’s cultural myths, lined up with the Garden of Eden. It’s so much a part of your myth that it almost didn’t happen. The Civil War is in the dim and distant past, and so is the Second World War. In a sense, the history of the country, at the moment, seems to stretch back to Vietnam. I don’t fully understand why this is. All I do know is that there are moments when you get these little blasts of electricity through your body, so to speak, when you see it whole. But then it’s lost. You just can’t hang onto it. I remember having the same thing when I was filming Gallipoli in Egypt and came across some Australian soldiers’ names on the pyramids, then some Napoleonic soldiers, and then some Portuguese sailor, one man who’d been there on several different voyages – in 1581, and then in 1593, and then in 1604 or something – and each time he’d come back he’d put the date of his trip on this massive ancient stone. So I had one of those flashes with the Amish.

VENTURA: That’s very much in the film. When you were shooting, did you have the sense of making an American film?

WEIR: The atmosphere of making a film is another country anyway. You arrive in the morning and cross through the gates into your own territory. In that sense, it was no different from shooting anywhere.

VENTURA: How do you function on a set? What’s most important to you? 79

WEIR: Just keeping all the receiving devices open – always looking for the chance. That’s perhaps why I’ve not done storyboards on films. I did it on only one film many many years ago and found that it was no use because I didn’t really use that much. Though I do storyboard certain sequences – just for communications’ sake, particularly night-shoots – I’ve found that on the set, with my particular way of working, it’s alive with possibilities if your receiving devices are fully tuned up. You’ve got to be fresh and aware and open. You need your team, in this approach, very much with you, I think. Otherwise, you’ll be distracted by somebody’s bad mood, or bad temper. I can, when I’m really on, pick out an electrician who’s not with us that day – and I may go over and say, “What’s bothering you?” Through being so open you can pick up the little nuances, the development of an idea, the prop that suddenly becomes useful. A casual remark over coffee suddenly becomes significant. Always looking for the chance -- because fundamentally I know that when you arrive to shoot something you are probably some distance away from the full potential. That’s just a condition of the whole business. And mostly you don’t get very close to it, but occasionally you do, so you try and gather enough of those special moments, because obviously enough of them will make the film very powerful. Therefore I like location pictures, because you add to that the dinners in the evening, the beers at rushes – which is where I think I do most of my work, really. Off the set, or just in wandering around, rather than in actual instructions. Finally, there’s not much you can say just in English.

VENTURA: What about working with actors? What’s your method, if you have one?

WEIR: Depending on the actors – some like to discuss it, of course, and some don’t. With either broad attitude I generally just like to spend as much time with the principal people as I can prior to filming. Again, dinner or lunch – which is a kind of theatrical thing in life anyway, the whole idea of the ritual of going to a restaurant, what type of food would you like to eat, “I’m in the mood for Thai.” Already that’s interesting, for two people who are not Thais to go into a Thai restaurant. And then what you order, and what your reaction to the food is, and the waiters. There’s the dialogue over the food – it’s not really entirely natural, it’s a little stage, really, and you’re the players.

VENTURA: On the set, do you rehearse that day or do you just block it out?

WEIR: I like to work fast, so sometimes I’ve just got it all worked out and I just say, “Look, there’s the camera being set up while you’re in makeup, and unless you’ve got any objections or a particular idea I’d just like to do it in one shot. We’re just going to bring you in through the door, take you over to join your wife at the table – whatever it is – and do the dialogue. Let’s try it that way; I think it’s going to work.” And then it goes or it doesn’t. And then there’s another type, which is, “I don’t really know what we’re going to do. As soon as you get made up, no, even before makeup, will you come down – I’ve 80 cleared everybody out of the room – and see if you’ve got some ideas, because I just can’t seem to get a hold of the damned thing.” And if you’ve got an actor like Harrison Ford, then you’ve got an extremely agile mind, a terrific ally in a situation like that because he’ll always have a point of view. And this is film-making in the oldest sense of the word, from the Mack Sennett-type thing or the early Australian days, when you were all thrown in together. You would pool the ideas. Someone was better at acting than directing and you just divided the jobs up – but basically, you’re throwing it in there and stirring the pot.

VENTURA: You tell stories with pictures more than most American directors do. Dialogue is very important for you when it’s emphasized, but usually the real dialogue is the picture. I don’t know how to frame this question, because questions are always so monolithic anyway [Weir laughs] … You’re trying to get at variety with monoliths, it’s such an awkward form. But what is picture-thinking for you? Is it a form you’re aware of?

WEIR: It comes off music, firstly. I think I do my first thinking with music, with the collection of tapes that form around any film. And the music helps me think of the film and then think of it in terms of pictures. And I think, going back to my childhood, growing up without television, my father told me stories when I went to bed – long running series about pirates and things. I can still recall that feeling of lying back in bed, looking up at the ceiling, and imagining what he was saying. And listening to radio, the Sunday Night Playhouse , lying on the floor looking up – again looking up – and imagining what the characters looked like. It’s a great thing for someone who’s going to work in a visual medium to have those years of thinking in pictures. But all these years later, I think it’s music that unlocks images for me. I play a lot of it on the set, I never move without my cassettes. So I begin to gather about three, four, five cassettes that seem to give me the whole picture. I can put this part of that tape on – that rock’n’roll, that aria, that piece of Mozart, or that African drum track – absurd for anybody else, perhaps, but for me somehow they’ve tied together all the major emotional movements of the picture, and have all given me images. They influence the casting, the entire film. And then when I turn the script back up, having done a lot of thinking, I say “I must get back and do another draft or edit of that script.” And then with my head buzzing I put the tapes on, start reading, and then suddenly words are coming off the page and they’re not something that I remember. I haven’t planned them. And I think, “Oh, we don’t need that there, that’s quite apparent with a close-up there , and that sort of turn will be wonderful, so we don’t need to say anything because the picture is giving us that feeling, and particularly that bit of music, so let’s delete that. ” And so that process begins cutting down the dialogue, which I think in a number of instances has been very hard for a writer to understand. Because I can’t communicate what I plan to do. And you can be wrong. Of course. And then there are times when, you know, good writing is good writing and you don’t touch it. I think we’re in an age when we’re not articulate, in emotional areas. And therefore, rather than having a certain limited number of patterns expressing a feeling from one individual to another – you choose pictures. 81

Particularly in the Australian way of life, the way is really to be contradictory in what you say. You say something in the opposite direction of what you mean, and the other understands that the meaning within those words is deep and profound. You know, one friend to another: “You’re a terrible old bastard,” and he means, “I’m terribly fond of you.” “You drive me crazy”: “I love you.” But the words already, through the use and decay of our language, have lost the potency and the original meaning, and, while we all understand what this person is trying to say, it’s devalued. And given that you don’t want that on the screen – which I often don’t, I want the original feeling – then you’d better strip the dialogue out entirely and use the close-up. This film, I think I just loved taking close-ups and cutting one to another. Just as the Amish have their plain dress, and yet with the brightly colored shirt -- I wanted to make a film like that. It seemed appropriate. Simple and to the point and without embellishment.

VENTURA: When you began as a filmmaker, did you have a sense that there was a style that was yours that you could find?

WEIR: I think, like anyone beginning, you adopt some style for a while. Definitely my early films, my so-called underground films, were really infantile surrealism of one type or another. And I think for many years I treated my actors like figures in a landscape and went for knock-out shots – style, style, style.

VENTURA: You mean before Picnic at Hanging Rock?

WEIR: Including Picnic, although that was a case where I knew I was very short of story and the style was going to be what the people were paying for, in a way. I had to be a real illusionist. I had to pull a lot of rabbits out of the hat to deflect the normal expectations of narrative at that time. And I think I’ve changed over the years. Now I enjoy stripping myself – of tricks, if you like. As Bette Davis said to me years ago when I met her, “We used to do it against a gray flat in a close-up, and if you can’t do it there, no matter how clever you are you’ll never make a thing have the power.” I think she was right, and I’ve enjoyed stripping myself down and saying, “Right, if there are two people in a room let’s get two close-ups” – working within the context of the story, of course, I think it was Renoir who said you can build a film around a close- up, and there’s a great truth in that. And so it’s a process of some sort of refinement, which I’m enjoying.

VENTURA: You’ve worked deeply in some films with a sense of the spiritual, the mystical. Not in Witness , though, at least not obviously. Is it more or less difficult for you to work in or out of that… call it “subject matter”?

WEIR: I, probably more than you realize, do begin with story. There have been occasions – The Last Wave was one – where I’ve begun with details and forced them to become a story. But generally speaking, as with most filmmakers, I do look for a good 82 story, and then for the most appropriate way to tell it. And then my particular areas of foreshadowing or whatever come out through the way the story’s told, if it’s applicable. But talking about stripping devices away, I do fundamentally see that as a device, however real and true it is. I’ve come to find the sort of thing you’re referring to less significant than I once thought it. And, therefore, in the cleaning out of my films, and getting rid of a lot of clutter, a lot of favorite little pictures hung on the wall… it’s like it just sometimes happens, you go into your study or your room and it’s filled with mementos and photos and odd rocks people gave you in the jungle or something, and you suddenly just want it all out. You just suddenly want the floor and the walls. And I think I’ve been doing that. What I’ve been left with are the people , really, and the faces. Hence the close-ups. And finding wonderful mysteries in the human spirit. So I’ve gone on wonderful inner journeys finding I can just sit and stare at certain faces for a long time. And tying that in with the music, as I said earlier, and then probably finding words failing in terms of the corruption of the language and the inability to express feeling. As a matter of fact, the expression of feeling is also out of fashion, among educated people anyway, and in some countries more than others – particularly in Europe. I’ve found my films fit less and less into the pattern of Europe, because they’ve decided to label – tragically and dangerously – all areas to do with expressing the human spirit in certain overt ways as “sentimental.” Particularly the French. And it’s their loss. And that’s why this country suits me at this time. But you still are more open.

VENTURA: By the way, are you aware that all your happiest, most lyrical love scenes happen in, or in the presence of, cars?

WEIR [laughing hard] : I am now!

VENTURA: Well, they do. Critics have some function. Since I love cars myself…

WEIR: …so do I…

VENTURA: …I noticed that. Just thought I’d mention it.

83

LOUIS MALLE

2 April 1982

Louis Malle is a small Gallic man with a calm face and active hands. When he speaks he sits on the edge of his chair and looks directly at you. When you speak, his look is even more direct.

VENTURA: I was thinking that with American characters in American films, usually it’s the ego that’s projected on the screen – the part of a person that American films make a character out of is what psychology calls the ego. What John Wayne or Kate Hepburn project are, essentially, egos – a set of decisions about a personality, rather than a whole character. In your films you seem to be looking at something much more nebulous than what the character thinks his personality is.

MALLE: I know a good example of that. A very famous Hollywood producer – we shouldn’t use his name – happens to know John Guare [writer of Louis Malle’s Atlantic City ] and is smart enough to realize that John is a great talent. He got John to write a script once – that he didn’t like, of course. And when he saw Atlantic City the famous producer said, “Well, you know, this would never be a film of mine. In my films, you know everything about the characters in the first ten minutes. Everything you have to know. And what I find very difficult about Atlantic City is that these characters keep changing all the time and you don’t know who they are.” And John said, “Maybe that’s what makes Atlantic City interesting.” The producer said, “Maybe, but the audience doesn’t like that.” And it’s always been like that – not only in America either. Ninety percent of films are just part of a system, delivered on time. Now it’s becoming a little more difficult to still exist as a sort of individualist, anarchist quote-artist-unquote in the film industry. But I think it’s wonderful if you can keep your sense of experimenting, your sense of taking risks, and at the same time be aware that you’re not only an artist but an artisan.

VENTURA: Why did you put the word artist in quotes?

MALLE: Because it sounds pretentious. And sometimes an “artist” is singled out as an individual, like a painter, but one of the reasons I choose film for my creative medium is because I love to work in collaboration. You’re working with a lot of people and making a film is like building a house. And you need a specialist on every level. And it’s the putting together of all those people, and you build the house. At the same time you’re the architect, but also you’re the carpenter. So there’s something humble about it.

VENTURA: You’ve been making films for 25 years. Can you talk about an evolution in your technique – the changes that most strike you?

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MALLE: When I started making films I would work very much – it was fashionable at the time – in those long takes. They are supposedly very difficult. I remember we were all so impressed by this Hitchcock film, Rope , in which each reel was one take! It was very brilliant, but actually I saw it again lately and it doesn’t really work – but he was such a brilliant technician. So I remember that my second film, The Lovers, is composed of a series of long takes, and some of my shots were very complicated: five minutes with 17 camera positions! Now, when you do that and you get to the cutting room, if you realize that the rhythm is wrong what do you do? Here you are with five minutes of film and you cannot touch it. So, when I started, I found myself in the cutting room so many times really frustrated. “My god, I wish I had made that close-up! This scene is too long, there’s something wrong with the pace! I wish I could take out this line of dialogue that doesn’t help at all.” So now, I always have the close-up. It’s like part of my luggage. And if I have any doubt about not even a scene, or an entire scene, but a part of a scene, or the beginning of a scene, I always give myself a chance to do it differently in the editing room. So I usually drive my crew crazy, because there’s a point where, for instance, the continuity-girl comes to me and says, “Louis, this doesn’t make any sense!” And I say, “Well, don’t worry, it makes sense to me,” and it’s too complicated to explain sometimes -- but I know that, though this shot doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the general direction of the way the scene has been filmed, in case I need to short-cut something I would use that “senseless” shot. Initially, especially at the beginning of shooting – somebody like me, shooting every two years or so – the first week of shooting is almost like starting all over again. You know, you’ve lost your reflexes. So the first week of shooting I’m so insecure about doing something wrong with the rhythm -- and my obsession has always been rhythm – I would ask the actors, “Well, this take is great – now I want to have it faster.” They look at me, “But you said it was right.” I say, “It’s right, but once it will be edited, you never know. You could find out that what seems absolutely right when you see it as a separate piece in dailies and seems perfect, after 45 minutes of film it might be the moment when you get a little impatient or something, it’s going to be too slow.” Because, you know, what is so difficult about filmmaking is that you’re asked first to be, not a genius, but you’re asked to be very talented, every day, for three months, from nine in the morning to six at night! Like going to the office and being at the peak of your talent from nine to seven. Which is absurd. There is no other art where you’re asked to be a talented bureaucrat! So. You have off days. And when I started, and had an off day, I would find myself in horror. It’s like a nightmare. You come to the set, and you have 35 people waiting for you to say, “Well, put the camera here ,” and you say, “Oh my god, I would like to go FISHING!” But, of course, that’s what experience does to you, it teaches you to fill in. And then you try to – and I’m very good at this – you try to convince the production people to switch to a scene that is much less important. Or I would go so slow that I would do only half a day’s work, and then the next day would bring it back, speed it up. The other thing which is almost impossible to do is – you’re like a composer, you’re going to write four bars, not only write them but play them, but then the next four bars you’re going to do three weeks later. And it takes – you have to have an incredible 85 amount of concentration that people are not even aware of. Including quite a lot of directors! They don’t even know what concentration it should take.

VENTURA: For instance?

MALLE: In Atlantic City we had something like eight or nine scenes – some of them very short, some of them very important – in the staircases going between the apartments. And we had two days at the location. These staircases were quite interesting visually, and the eight or nine scenes were at different moments of the script – they were with different lights, the actors would have to be not only in different costumes but in completely different moods. Each time you have to imagine this particular moment, like eight seconds of film, that’s going to be squashed between this shot that you’ve not done yet and this other shot that you have done. So you have to constantly have the imagination of trying to figure out what you’re going to do, what it’s going to be like. And you’re the only one. Nobody else can help you. So that way it’s a very solitary exercise. And the more you advance the more you find out about the incredible complexity of the medium.

VENTURA: You’ve said before that you don’t believe these things can be learned in film schools.

MALLE: Because I don’t think the art of film has been established. It’s still very much exploratory. It’s a language, which is still in its formative years. And I believe the only way to learn about films is making films. When people ask me “What should I do?” I always tell them “Try to see as many films as you can and try to take a camera and try to make films. Don’t listen to film teachers, because usually they’re going to come up with rules that you’ll find out you’ll have to transgress. If there are any rules, you have to find out for yourself.” I went to film school – it was not a bad period. I saw lots of films, we had some good people with us. But I don’t think you learn much!

VENTURA: In My Dinner With Andre what rules did you most enjoy breaking? For that film breaks every rule, since for almost the entire picture all we watch is Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn conversing over dinner at a restaurant – yet I and many others found the film visually involving.

MALLE: For me, actually, it was more like not so much breaking rules but enforcing rules. In France we’re very fond of the famous Aristotelian tradition of unity of time, unity of action, and unity of space – which is the golden rule of French tragedy. Racine. So for me it was this, having the entire picture take place in the same evening, in the same place, with really one plot. People were asking me, “What are you going to do?” As if I had a gimmick I would take out of my pocket! “How are you going to film it!” “I don’t know, I’m going to take a camera and I’m going to film Andre, and then I’ll film Wally, and sometimes I’ll film the two of them.” “But,” they said, “are you going to do something with the camera?” I said, “I’m certainly NOT going to try to do something with the camera because it would just kill the picture if you start fooling around with the camera, because 86 obviously this is a picture where you must not feel the camera. Obviously. If not, then it would look like everything I was afraid of: a “tour de force,” or a “challenge.” Instead of saying it was breaking the rules it was just the essence of what, for me, cinema is about, which is a very sort of voyeuristic exercise where you’re watching somebody and trying to track the most intimate reactions. In a way, it was almost on the side of documentaries that I’d done. I felt very much at ease dealing with a 16 millimeter camera and filming Andre and just trying to catch things, you know.

VENTURA: You shot in 16 and then blew it up? Is that a departure for you?

MALLE: No, I’ve worked a lot in 16. All my documentaries I shot in 16, and a couple of times I’ve even considered doing a feature film in 16. Ingmar Bergman has worked in 16. In a picture like My Dinner With Andre it was very obvious that you would lose practically nothing because it’s very tight, visually, and with a good blow-up you wouldn’t see the difference.

VENTURA: Does it change the process of shooting?

MALLE: I knew that I would shoot a lot of film – and we shot a lot of film – and our 16 millimeter cameras run 11 minutes each magazine. So, practically each take was 11 minutes. I found that a rule. For instance, we would do a certain segment, and I knew Andre would need three pages to warm up – the first three pages would not be good. So if I wanted to go from the middle of page 87 to the end of something when the waiter was coming, I needed those four or five minutes, I would start three minutes before. We shot two weeks. I didn’t use anything of the first week. We shot the first week, and we had this little lab, and we could see practically the next morning what we’d done. It was such a huge amount of film – everything was printed – that we had three hours of dailies! The first Sunday I said, “I don’t need anybody, just bring me some food and drink,” and I stayed in the editing room from about seven in the morning until midnight and I saw everything we’d shot. I didn’t like it. And I decided to reshoot it entirely. So the next morning I said, “All right now, I’ve seen all of it. It’s not good. But I think we’re on the right track.” And in five days, actually, we re-shot the entire picture. It was not so much that everything had to be thrown away, it was just that I’d seen what was working better. It’s not that I found there was one angle for Wally, or something like that – it’s just that at certain moments I was better off being far away from him, or making a two-shot. I worked out what was best after seeing this large amount of rushes. And so then we got into shooting, and we shot in five days – after all that enormous amount of experimenting. What I did with Andre was extreme – shoot the film and reshoot it, which, I think, only Charlie Chaplin did once. But, for instance, I know that [cinematographer] Sven Nyvist was telling me that Bergman very often reshoots. It’s part of the planning of the shooting that, since they used to work as a company usually with the same actors, the same technicians, and they had no money problems – they would shoot the picture, and they would have one month’s editing, and then they would have programmed two weeks of reshooting. 87

I always try to do that. But in a studio film here? Forget it! If Bergman asks his actors, “Well, we’ll stop now, I’m going to see how it works, and I’m sure we’ll have some things to reshoot,” they’re ready to do it. But of course if you came to a studio here and said that you would like to do that, they would kick you out and say, “You’re not even a professional! You don’t know what you’re doing! You’re not even able to be right the first time!”

VENTURA: What about studio crews?

MALLE: With the kind of crews that they have in studio films – where every minute costs thousands of dollars – you get very nervous, of course. You would like to say sometimes, “Well, I don’t like what I’m doing now, I think I was wrong, instead of starting that shot from over there I would like to start from over there !” I did that a lot with Pretty Baby – I always do that – but working with a crew that was not used to working with me, they thought I was a nut. Especially because I had an American “B” crew, a crew that was more used to doing TV movies. They were good technicians, but I was amazed by the routine they established. And that, of course, I broke. You would get on the set and you would sort of settle the shot, and then you would let the technical people, the electricians, and the grips and the camera people, work it out. They would take their time, working with the second team, the stand-ins – and then you would come back, the actors and the director, and they would give you ten minutes to do the shot! It was like a sausage machine! At the idea that you could change the camera position after six takes, they would just freak out. “This guy should be in a mental institution!”

VENTURA: What would you say to a young director, a first-time director? What’s the most important thing t be aware of?

MALLE: Everything is important. You find out that sometimes a very unimportant detail, like an object in the background – in a scene, say, based on reverse shots – at every reverse, the object keeps coming back. A vase of flowers in the background – it suddenly becomes incredibly important for some reason, for composition or something. This is something that normally most people would not even be aware of, but for some reason, even if the spectator doesn’t see it, it certainly has an effect. It’s distracting. I’m giving you a very basic example. But I would say that’s what so difficult about filmmaking, that you have to be aware of every possible detail. You have to enter and say, “Well, I think we cannot shoot with these plants over there. No way.” And sometimes you don’t even know why. But I would say basically that what you have to worry about is the actors. Because finally it always ends up with them, on the screen. They convey the story. You know, I started in filmmaking as a technician. I’d been a cameraman, an editor – I was a pretty good technician, but I knew nothing about actors. I was a little scared of them, too. Because actors are sometimes difficult, to say the least! A lot of directors have great contempt for actors – that’s the Hitchcock school: the actors are objects you move like little pieces in a chess game. But I very quickly got to love them, and to realize that it’s one of the scariest professions. 88

It’s very difficult to be a screen actor, it’s much more difficult than being a stage actor – contrary to what people think. Because a stage actor has two hours to develop a character and impose a performance. But the screen actor is stuck with these bits and pieces of acting. They don’t know how it’s going to be inserted, sometimes they don’t even know if it’s a close-up or not – sometimes, with some directors, they’re not even told that.

VENTURA: The fluid process with which you work seems almost more what is associated with painting, rather than with filming or photography.

MALLE: Yes. One of the things I have learned – when I started making films I was pretty sure that I knew everything, and there was only one solution to every problem. Now, I just like to take chances and see if it works. If it doesn’t work, I want to be able to do something else. I’ve been making films for 25 years and I still believe I have a lot to find out. It’s part of an exploration. You know, the camera is a wonderful way of looking at people. It forces you to focus. I was extraordinarily impressed with Ingmar Bergman’s film Autumn Sonata, because there’s one scene, that 20-minute scene between the two women – and the faces! There’s a five minute close-up of Ingrid Bergman, and to me it was just: “This is what it’s all about! I could look at this woman filmed like that – maybe not in reality actually, but filmed the way she was filmed by Sven and by Ingmar – forever. ”

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MARTIN SHEEN

10 December 1982

Our conversation kept coming back to Sheen’s stunning scene that opens Apocalypse Now. Sheen’s character, you remember, is alone in a hotel room in Saigon, trying to call his wife in the States on the day of their divorce. The man goes mad in the room, karate-chopping a mirror and wiping himself with his blood. A very rare moment - - an actor stripping himself psychically to try to reveal true horror, the horror of a soul that is lost.

VENTURA: What’s the most difficult thing about screen acting?

SHEEN: The basic thing that’s difficult is just learning to relax in the middle of all the technicality. Stepping inside that technicality. You could play Hamlet to that tree out there but it doesn’t mean shit, you know. It has to be lit and you have to be properly dressed and made up. And you have to have someone watching it. Otherwise it’s just a soliloquy to a tree, it doesn’t mean anything. So for me the difficulty was learning to relax and actually think on camera. Because I believe that the camera can photograph your thoughts. Very often, it’s not what you say on film; it’s what you don’t say, what you imply. The camera will pick that up. And that’s very difficult to get used to, because actors want to act – you act so rarely, you get so few good parts, you want to get a chance to act, right? But on camera it’s summed up in: less is more. But what the hell do I know about acting? Let’s talk about trees or something.

VENTURA: Let’s talk about Apocalypse Now.

SHEEN: The first dialogue scene I did with Marlon was in the cave there, when I came in and was thrust at his feet. Marlon looked at me and improvised a line that stayed in the picture, if I’m not mistaken. He said, “Are you free of others’ opinions of you? Are you free of your own opinion of yourself?” That’s what he said to me.

VENTURA: Brando improvised that?

SHEEN: Yeah. I looked at him, and I thought, “God damn, I never thought of that.” The thing that’s so great about Marlon is that he doesn’t deny anything. He’s available. He accepts whatever is there. He doesn’t try to remake or reshape it. And rather than trying to fit that to him, he fits himself to that. He doesn’t try to put the square peg in the round hole; he becomes the square, and gets in it. He has that extraordinary ability. His talent is right there, right there are his fingertips. Marlon has killed all the bulls, you know? He’s walked in all the rings. He’s done everything, as far as acting is concerned. And the biggest problem in dealing with him, is our image of him. We’re not free of his own image. I know for a fact that he’s a deeply spiritual man. Marlon, like all of us, is trying to save his soul. 90

And that’s really what all our work is about. I think that’s why, basically, we’re actors. It’s such a spiritual profession. It really is. I’m not talking about career. I’m talking about work. Being an actor, in a very very realistic way, is a very deeply spiritual experience, because I am given, as an actor, a license, as it were, that each time I’m to play a role I am allowed, I am given permission, to go into an area of myself and explore it. And I do it for me, not the character. I do it for me. I’m there because I want to be, because I choose to be, because I need to be. And as long as you don’t wave the cup away and you accept it, don’t let the cup pass, go through the pain of the revelation of yourself – then you’re going to come out with something. But if you continue to wave it off, stave that shit off – then you may have a fine career, you may be pretty on camera, but you may also be disappointed in what the result is. Because it’s going to be hollow. So I think it’s always a good idea to jump for the cup. Grab that son-of-a-bitch. And don’t let it go. And you’ll get something out of it, you know? As long as you’ve got the courage. Because I think courage is the basic virtue. It takes courage to love, it takes courage to have faith, and so forth. So courage is the greatest virtue to me because it’s the first virtue. And acting takes an awful, awful lot of courage. You have to have the courage to expose yourself. To do publicly what everyone else does privately. And to do it for yourself, not your career, and not even the character you’re playing. For yourself, to get in touch with that deep well that has all that stuff combined, the love, and the pain, and the hate, and the joy, and the sorrow, and the compassion, and the fear, and the anxiety, and the ignorance – all those marvelous things that make up the human psyche. You want to get in touch with that. Actors do. To want to do that is an interesting phenomenon, because those are all the things that most people want to avoid getting involved in. And if you do get involved in that, outside acting, very often you end up in the nuthouse or jail or something. But an actor who does it can end up revered by society. I think of DeNiro. Jesus, I tell you frankly, that performance in the boxing movie [Raging Bull ] – I was so stunned after I saw that I walked around, oh, for two days unable to focus on anything. I could not get that picture or him out of my mind. And then when I had a chance to reflect on it, what was so moving about it was that he was courageous enough not to play Mr. Nice Guy. Here’s one of the biggest stars in the world, one of the best actors, choosing to play a real prick. And by his playing it the way he did, he taught us the damage we do to ourselves and to each other through the absence of compassion and love and humor – how we can cause severe damage to ourselves and our families and people we love. I think love is really letting go of fear. And he was not afraid to show us what the absence of love does. The courage it took him to do that! And the encouragement that gives us, as fellow actors! DeNiro willing to go that far and do that much and risk those high stakes, even with his health, you know? Because, Jesus, when he came on in the latter scenes in that condition, it was frightening. He was willing to go that far and explore within himself, to tap that resource. That was a magnificent contribution, and a very loving, deeply compassionate thing to have done for all of us. He was greater than the film, I felt. He was more important than the film, bigger than the film. The fact that he was willing to go that far, do that much.

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VENTURA: I felt that way about your opening scene in Apocalypse Now. You did that for me.

SHEEN: I was in a very bad way, in my own personal, spiritual, physical life at that time. I was fragmented, and that scene was an exploration of it. I was very drunk when we did that shot, and that day was my birthday, my 36 th birthday. We had no idea what we were going to do. We just framed it and explored a little bit. And Francis [Coppola] tried to stop me.

VENTURA: How do you mean that?

SHEEN: Francis tried to stop the scene, particularly when I cut my hand. He was very deeply concerned. I said, “No, no! Keep going, keep going!” A pain was escaping from me. A pain that just jumped out of my throat. It left me wandering and dazed for a while, but it was just one of those demons that I had not exorcised till then. And I chose to do it on film. I’ve had nights and days where they’ve come out and they weren’t photographed. That one just happened to be photographed. It was nothing premeditated, it was just happening. There was a whole bunch of footage on that sequence. He narrowed it down to 30 or 40 seconds out of two rolls of film – two cameras rolling, ten minute rolls. You know that scene was cut out overseas? When Francis went to Cannes, a lot of people were offended and terrified by that scene. What we were trying to establish, very early – both Francis and I agreed, we had to do something to show the audience, “Alright, you are going to deal with a war story? It’s about Viet Nam? You’re gonna follow one guy? But this ain’t gonna be your G.I. Joe, your blond-haired blue-eyed Midwestern hero here. You’re dealing with a guy that is a professional killer. You are dealing with a fucking mad man. He kills people for a living. He kills them looking right in their eyes. That is what he does. Now, if you don’t think that that has an effect on somebody, leave the theater.” We had to get that right up front, very quickly. That was our job. And I just sort of popped the cork on my own psychic and emotional life to allow it to happen in those surroundings.

VENTURA: How did you pop the cork?

SHEEN: I was so drunk. I didn’t realize how close I was to that mirror – that’s when it really happened, when I threw my karate thrust with my hand and caught the mirror. Then it reached a level, kind of like, “This is it.” This was the moment when, if it wasn’t going to happen here it would never happen. And I had to have, in a strange sense, the courage to let it happen. At that point Francis tried to stop it. And I just started to explore this thing. I said, “Let’s keep going, let’s explore it.” My memory is vague on some of the things I did, which are not on film, which Francis reminded me of later. He told the whole story to me, and I listened amazed, like a third party. I didn’t think of it as me who had done those things. I was absolutely enthralled with what he told me I did. He said I went through various stages. At one point I was an actor. I recited Shakespeare. At another point I prayed. My memory is vague 92 about all that. I only touched on it when he told me. I said, “Did I really?” and I tried to remember doing it. I was that drunk and that in touch with those things at the same time. I didn’t feel good about myself. I didn’t like myself very much. In one strange way I was trying to destroy myself and purge myself in front of the camera, which is really the public. I just let this exploration go on to find that son-of-a-bitch in me and to get him out. And… I came out kind of knowing that I was a good and decent person. I came out kind of knowing that. It’s strange, it was some sort of strange exorcism. It’s very fuzzy and blank in my mind, now.

VENTURA: I’ve heard that a lot of your role was cut from the final scenes?

SHEEN: We tied the beginning scene in at the end, but this was all cut out of the picture. At the end of the picture, I come up out of the water and I go through the camp and kill every one of those Green Berets with my hands until I get to Marlon. We said, “That got very ritualistic and very primitive. Wouldn’t he wash in the blood of his victims?” And that’s what I did. I washed in their blood and went from one to the other until I got up to the temple. Now, the last guy between me and Marlon was a Green Beret who’s watching the festivities with a child between his legs. And I can’t get to the temple without killing this guy. And as I come out of the bush to thrust in a surprise attack, he turned around and held the child up to protect himself, and the spear went through both of them, and that was the last killing. Before Marlon. I understand when they showed that footage here, when they strung it together, it was very hard for people to watch. So they cut all that. But. That’s what the guy did for a living.

VENTURA: In a way, it’s a shame they cut that, even though I usually hate film violence.

SHEEN: I abhor it. I find it really appalling. I won’t do it anymore.

VENTURA: You wouldn’t do those scenes again?

SHEEN: No, never. I’m not even capable of doing it now because it’s something I don’t have to do. I can’t do it anymore. It’s not important to me. I can figure a way out of it. Yeah, I always figure a way out of it. There is another way. I’m not interested in physical violence . I think there’s violence in silence. I think there’s violence in a look. There’s violence in avoidance of problems, you know? I’d rather confront it and avoid violence really at all costs, more than anything. I find it hard to raise my voice. I’ve just had enough violence in my life. That’s all over. I think it, the violence, is fear. I think violence is an expression of fear and anxiety more than anything. Violence is a reflex, when you don’t have time to think. And I’m taking the time to think now.

VENTURA: You once spoke very beautifully to me about starting to feel good about yourself, and how it had to do with your father and with sensing the father in yourself.

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SHEEN: Yes. My father was the best man I ever knew. I loved him. He was a hero of mine. A very shy little guy – extremely shy. He had a thick Galician accent and he’d rarely speak outside the house. He was a self-educated man, and worked at National Cash Register most of his life. He had an honesty that was really overwhelming – I think he found himself incapable of lying, and he found it intolerable in others. There was no greed in him. For him… life was a mystery to be lived, rather than a series of problems to be solved. And he really lived his life this way. If he heard me say this right now, he’d probably look askance. He wouldn’t know what the hell I was talking about. He was just doing his job. And I only understood him, if I understand him at all, when I was a father. So this image came to me after he died, about being able to project yourself as your own father. Because this is really what we are, you know. I had to look at myself one day, you know, a bad day, too, and realize – if my father saw me that day (and this was after his death), he’d forgive me. And he was a good man. He’d love me. So I had to be my own father. And love myself. You know how so often we punish ourselves in a lot of different ways. We see someone else struggle, or see some old lady fall down your heart goes out to them right away. Or if you read that someone’s been injured or killed, it breaks your heart. To see what’s going on in the world today, almost everywhere, it’s just heartbreaking. You feel for other people. And yet how very rarely do we really feel for ourselves. Someone injures us, and comes with an apology, we accept it, “It’s ok, forget it,” we give them a hug and say, “Don’t worry.” And yet we don’t do that to ourselves. We injure ourselves. We’re the only ones that know it and know how deep the injury is. We have got to learn to hug ourselves and to forgive ourselves and let that go. And to realize that we are good and decent. And to go from there. Since I’ve seen you and we had that conversation, I guess I went into a really penetrating long search for my spiritual center. I had been raised a Catholic and practiced pretty good until I was in my late teens and went to New York. I started getting a foothold in the theater and started getting a sense of myself, and I abandoned religion per se -- the practice of Catholicism specifically. I didn’t stop believing. I stopped practicing. And the further away I got the more desperate I got. It caught up with me in the Philippines [on Apocalypse Now ]. And after that experience – I nearly died then – I decided very clearly that I had to find my reason for existence. I had to start answering a question that had been in my mind all my life. And that was, “What am I?” And the second question, “Why am I here?” Which is what every human being for all time, I think, has been asking. “What’s the story? What am I doing here? Who am I?” And I would talk to strangers, go up and ask them what they believe about the afterlife, or did they believe in God. What did they believe in?! Perfect strangers. I got right to it with people. I wanted to know. Nothing else was more important. This went on for a couple of years. And then I went to India, a year ago last January, with my son Emilio, my oldest boy, to do a few weeks work on Gandhi. And that experience just overwhelmed me over there. It was frightening. To me India was a very frightening place. The deprivation, and the poverty, and the inhumane conditions that the people are forced to live under really overwhelmed me. Particularly the suffering of the children. I was terrified. You’d see children with lice in their hair, skin already shot – they look like old people. Second set of teeth already rotted, dressed in rags, no undergarments, and they’re begging in the 94 street. They grab hold at your legs, you know, until a crowd gathers. If you’re white you really stand out. And after a while you really have to surrender. And I started doing that, because I started to see in the face of these children, which I was trying to avoid, my own children. I realized, they are mine. We really are all, every one of us, connected. That had a profound influence on me. I came back from India shaken. Very deeply shaken. And started searching. Asking. Trying to make touch. I also became a practicing Catholic once again. You see… I don’t think there is anything sadder than a fellow coming backstage after something you’ve done, in the theater, where friends come back and people see you right after a performance – somebody comes back and invariably says to you, “Damn, I was an actor for a while, but I gave it up for security.” That’s sad to me, because there isn’t any security anywhere. And when you do that, give up that part of you, part of your spiritual life dies or lies dormant. Your essence. Who you are always dies because – acting, all the arts, are a connection to that. To the spiritual. And when you let that go some part of you dies. I’m convinced of it. You’re not whole. You’re not happy. You’re never going to be happy until you make touch with that – whatever it is. I’m not talking about being successful or good at something. I’m talking about connecting.

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FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA

19 February 1982

If you’re looking for a self-portrait in the work of Francis Ford Coppola, you might consider his script for Patton – which, though co-written by Edmund H. North, describes Coppola to a T. Coppola’s Patton is the general-as-artist, who wrote rhymed verse and sensed psychically where ancient battles were fought – a general far in spirit from company men like Ike and Bradley, more brilliant than the others, but who could show his brilliance only when the corporate-style generals gave him permission. Coppola’s Patton is simultaneously in total command and not in command at all. So the brilliant director needs permission from financial “generals” to work his magic, and he too has his defeats and indecisive victories. After four master-works in a row – The Godfather, The Conversation, Godfather II , and Apocalypse Now – brave General Coppola attempted to start his own studio, Zoetrope. Using the most advanced technology, innovating every day, he tried his hand at directing that Old Hollywood stand-by, the romantic musical: the sweet, vigorous, sadly underrated One from the Heart, with songs by Tom Waits, filmed entirely on the sound-stages of Zoetrope. For Zoetrope to survive, One from the Heart had to be a super-hit. It was not. As we spoke, the Zoetrope studio was closing its doors. Coppola talked to me slouching on a couch, a rumpled, chubby, bearded yet boyish-looking man of 43. He’d been up all night writing the script for his new film, The Outsiders, which begins shooting on location in Tulsa in a month.

COPPOLA: The script really had to be in on the first of February, which was two days ago [we spoke on February 3 rd ], and I only started it last week. It was one of those things where if you didn’t get it in it would just delay everything, which is the source of all problems. One of the reasons why at the last minute I decided to make the [One from the Heart distribution] deal with Columbia, instead of distributing it myself, was because we really didn’t have the energy to do all that and do The Outsiders.

VENTURA: So you wrote the script in a week?

COPPOLA: Yeah, but it’s based on a book [by S.E. Hinton] that’s very sound – it’s substantially there.

VENTURA: When you’re working on a movie, what’s the most important element for you?

COPPOLA: I think that writing the script is the most pleasurable part of movie- making. You’re working alone. I’ve evolved a method that I’m very comfortable with, in which I treat everything as source-material. I have the original book, maybe the first draft of the script, or somebody else’s first draft, research material relating to all phases, any information I’ve been collecting – and then I just kind of go through it with a scissors and stapler and typewriter and pencil, and it’s like cutting as movie almost, where you just 96 kind of patch and patch it and then type it up and then you see it. And at first what it looks like is different from a screenplay, because you see the evidence: like, this came out of the encyclopedia and this came out of something else. And then it’s like you put it through a little factory. So I feel good that I got it out and sent it off to a typist.

VENTURA: The image of Francis Coppola is not a man working alone – it’s the image of a ringmaster.

COPPOLA: Well, you should have come here sometime at four in the morning.

VENTURA: I assume that because there’s such public momentum, there has to be a much huger private momentum.

COPPOLA: Well, my life feels a little bit like being in the middle of a weather front of some type. Now I’ve learned that the best thing to do is to commit yourself to an impossible task. And then by committing yourself to an impossible task, somehow the storm that may be going on around you – well, you can’t even indulge yourself by being frightened of it, if you have to have the script out by Monday to have the film started. So I use the technique in my life of solving the lesser storm by creating a bigger one for myself. It’s like having a hurt hand, so you gash your leg so you don’t feel your hurt hand. I think that with Apocalypse certainly I felt that events had gotten me into this pickle. I had made this unusual film about an unattractive subject, and I had a fortune in it – not that I did it deliberately, but it happened that way. And I had all the energy resulting from working so hard, and so I bought this studio – not having the money to buy it, and not having the resources to build this notion of a studio-of-the-future. And then all this Apocalypse stuff just started to fade away in my mind because I had bigger problems financing the studio, the mortgage, this and that. And to my surprise, Apocalypse just, uh, people kept going to see it and it did pay for itself. So that the thing that caused me to get into this [Zoetrope] evaporated. Now I was into another one! And, I’m sure, with The Outsiders – I knew that when One from the Heart came out, you could waste four months talking about it, or saying what was useful from it or not useful, and rather than do that I felt that if I made a movie right away, not only would it be a real cleansing experience, but also I would be doing something productive. The biggest disappointment I have with my generation of film directors is that they don’t set their limits high enough – they don’t decide to make films that there’s a good shot that they could fail with.

VENTURA: You exert a huge influence on your world, you start a studio, then you’ll turn run around and do a movie – there’s always all these waves coming out of your life. Yet the characters in your movies are almost totally the opposite. Their world exerts a huge influence on them. Michael Corleone starts out as an idealist and ends up as a monster, and the film seems to say that it’s more because of circumstances than his choices; Brando goes to Viet Nam and the same thing happens. Can you talk about that?

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COPPOLA: Well, I never thought of that. I’m sure it makes some sense. I think that maybe my personality… well, I think the inaccuracies about understanding what I’m like, come from not accepting what I think is a basic fact about me, which is that I was pretty much programmed, as is everyone, when I was a little kid. And I was a very exotic little kid from the point of view that I was NOT a popular kid, but I was like a lover of everything. My recollection of myself was kind of like Dopey in Snow White – remember, he was the one who just sort of looked around and thought it was all great? And I think that when I was paralyzed for a year and a half, that kind of Dopey kid, there was something about being in a room for a year and a half, with a television across the room, and an old-style movie projector, and a tape recorder – something about that made me want to be able to figure out how I could change the channels on the television and affect the world! When I did recover, I was real good about building scenery or putting the blocks together – I mean, it was a switchover from becoming a passive kid to becoming somebody who wanted to make things happen.

VENTURA: An art can’t grow without audacity. And one time this town had incredible audacity. Somebody would call up Mack Sennett and say, “There’s a fire down the street!” And he would just run everybody off and film the fire and come back and say, “Okay, what’ll we do with this footage? Let’s make a movie with a fire in it!” Now you are the symbol of audacity in this business, and the symbol of what can be accomplished with audacity. Do you see that kind of growing audacity possible in films beyond you?

COPPOLA: You can see the historical pattern in this – for instance, consider the era of live television. In live television, which was a descendant of live radio, they suddenly realized they had this picture and sound in people’s houses, and they threw together programs much as you described Mack Sennett doing. “Can you get a script about so-and-so?” – and someone would go in a room and do it, and whatever came out they did. It wasn’t a matter of talking it to death or taking it apart. They had actors and they did it. They made television that way for a while. But it was almost as though while they were doing it some guys were looking and saying, “You know, this is too big for them – for those creative people.” And a big transition happened. The business or industry interests took control of television. For instance, they removed the right of the sponsor to sponsor an individual program, which insured a kind of individuality to different series. They generally turned this field into a product that could be marketed, and that destroyed television. I’ve had the feeling for the last couple of years that some guys have been watching the movie business and understanding the various possibilities. And they’re saying, “This is too big for them.” And now, you see, Fox gets sold to Marvin Davis. So that if the people controlling the business choose to, they can hamburgerize it. They can say, “We know the ingredients of a movie, a movie should have this, this, this, it must be made this way and be this long,” and they market it this way. It’s like breeding chickens for Kentucky Fried Chicken. There’s no room for something that’s just alive on its own. I think what has happened in front of our eyes is that the entire Hollywood studio phenomenon has just been eroded away, along with all the traditions and ancillary talents. You can’t do a musical here! If you want to turn out a musical here, you need two and a half years of lead-up time just to train the corps, I mean, like you would a football team, 98 starting from scratch. What they didn’t realize is that with the thinning out of where the money used to go – technical research, talent development, maintaining the ensembles – that’s been let go for 20 years, and what has resulted really is that Hollywood is a television town, geared to turning out that kind of pre-thought, pre-sold product. Even the exciting films of our country, such as they are, tend to come from New York, where there’s still the economic base of the theater, and all those diverse kinds of writers, designers, what-have-you. So the process has already happened here. And to turn it around would take an influx of money way beyond the little experiment here at Zoetrope. For all the noise we made, we operated on nothing.

VENTURA: What would you say, then, to a young filmmaker who has the energy, has the guts – and he comes to you and says, “Francis, this place is dead. Where do I go, what do I do?”

COPPOLA: I think Lucas has a good point about that, saying that this is an interim period. Because I do believe that there will be new majors [major studios] – there will be a new film industry that will not be like this, and will once again try to build all the different aspects of a filmmaking community by investing in talent way in advance and not expecting it all to look good on the books in three months. That’s something that’s gonna come. But in the interim, I would say that independent, regional filmmaking is important. Guys taking the video equipment away from the television station they work on, and making stuff on the sly. Making a feature film in Philadelphia. What it comes down to, really, is don’t count on the industry to be interested in you. Go out and just make film, on your own. A piece at a time. Because if you’re making a film that someone else is financing, and you have to go to them to get all your approvals, then he is calling the shots.

VENTURA: You said that you expect to see new majors. How do you expect that to come about?

COPPOLA: I think it’s going to be similar to what happened to the American consumer electronics business. Zenith, RCA, Magnavox, all those companies were giants. But there was a time in which essentially technology had changed how all that is done, and no one realized it. They just didn’t realize it, because they were pretty fat, just existing on doing the same thing. The challenge came in the case of Japan – they used the new possibilities in technology and just stole the market overnight. And I think that’s gonna happen in films. It’s a little trickier because we’re dealing with exporting English-language American culture, so it’s hard for Finland or Japan to compete with us. But even so, I think the studios have their guard so far down – given their real lack of appreciation of how much the technology is gonna change what they’re doing, and given their lack of any kind of good relationship with talent, and their repeated refusal to invest in the future of talent. All of a sudden, somebody is going to do those things with some money behind them. Maybe George Lucas, maybe myself, maybe both of us together – but whoever does that, I believe that there’s just no competition. And the majors will be forced to reinvent themselves just to stay in business. In which 99 case we’ll have studios that, for instance, really understand that writers are the core of it, that we have to start finding writers and supporting them from when they’re kids. And the same thing with the other crafts.

VENTURA: Could you be more specific about the technology?

COPPOLA: All the elements – information technology, video technology, audio technology – have one thing in common: that they’re electronic, that they can all work together. And that can give us an audio-visual instrument – so that, really, groups of artists could come together in the studio of the future and use this audio-visual instrument almost as performance artists. You go in there and you stay locked up in this configuration for a month and out comes Lawrence of Arabia. It looks like it, it is it – but the road from the artist’s imagination to the imagery on the screen is just not done so arduously. Technologically, in the fields of editing and post-production, our company is constantly shortening their schedules. With The Outsiders – we may not do this, but if we wanted to we could have it out by August 6 th . It’s starting to shrink the time, and of course that shrinks the money. Within less than five years electronic cinema will be a real fact of our lives.

VENTURA: Then why did One from the Heart take so much longer than you projected?

COPPOLA: Well, in fact, the shooting of it wasn’t all that long – the film we shot. But I think two things happened. One, tampering with the piece to try to make it be, in my mind, a kabuki-style piece – in which the elements of the piece were all of equal importance. The lighting was as important as the actors. In tricking around with that I was in real uncharted waters. And after I was finished I was able to see it, I decided that it had serious problems in certain areas, so I went back and, since I had the set, I just started shooting a bunch of stuff over again. And that resulted in shooting 24 days more than I was supposed to.

VENTURA: What were the problems you saw in what you first shot?

COPPOLA: For instance, it had to do with the script working with the songs – I mean, every element of the film, the story, the script, the style of acting, the sets, all those things, it wasn’t like they all came to me finished. They were all being done at the same time. So that if the lyrics of the songs didn’t show up when they were supposed to, then the part that I had left out thinking that the lyrics were going to do it, I had to put something else in. It’s like you’re making a building and you have those sub-contractors who are very talented except that they don’t always do what they say they’re gonna do and you’re the one constantly trying to chisel the brick so that the window casements, which didn’t come in the way they said they would, would fit. But it was probably doing it that way, I think, which gave the film vitality. Because all those people were artists.

VENTURA: You said recently that the modern concept of acting is narrow? 100

COPPOLA: We all know that if you go see Oklahoma you’re not gonna see the same style of acting that you’re gonna see in Mean Streets. What I’m saying is, really, that when you approach a subject matter I think you have to be able to operate from a whole spectrum of styles of acting, just as a painter starts out with a whole spectrum of colors. I feel that now we’re not realizing the people who make the standards as to what a good movie is and what it isn’t – and that’s the studio heads, the critics, the whole group who say, “We are in charge and we determine what is a movie.” They have gotten it so narrow that almost nothing is allowed that isn’t naturalistic, Freudian acting, naturalistic settings, certain unities of plot and story. All that stuff is much more like the Ten Commandments than people realize. And if you don’t do it, there’s just a whole bunch of people who cry, “Foul!” And an art like the cinema can’t have that. I mean, you can make ANYTHING with film! And these guys are ganging up and saying, “These are the rules,” when movies shouldn’t have rules! I mean, if you are a filmmaker and you have an idea for a film that could really be something beautiful, you can’t get to make it unless it fits the very criteria that we all agree are making things horrible. We have to allow that there are other styles, other than naturalism, which could be encouraged. Because perhaps in those styles we’ll be more likely to find the ideas sand principles and feelings to guide us in a changing world that doesn’t know, that doesn’t have any rules either! What we need now is the artist’s intuition. We need that kind of person – artist, designer, architect, engineer – the creative person to provide the direction. The people who are in charge of things now are people who inherited that power from innovators in previous generations – from Henry Ford, Edison, these kinds of men. But now everybody knows that the kind of men who run our industry, run our government, run our lives, are not prepared to help design a new world for our young people to grow into. They’re more concerned with just hanging on. Movies are only one small part of it. I see it as a design revolution. It’s where the people in the auto industry who they’ve got designing cigarette lighters, they should now come out and take responsibility for what a car is, or if we need a car in this country. And in all our industries, in our films, our culture, our music, the artist types should now be given some power in relation to distribution and marketing.

VENTURA: You’re seeing a spiritual transformation coming out of a technological transformation?

COPPOLA: I think we’re at the point now where art and technology are the same thing. We have the tremendous talent in this country and in the world to redesign the world. Redesign it in every possible way. Even our ethics systems. So that that new world that will be designed from our talent will be our best chance for operating as human beings, in some sort of joyous and enlightened way. I mean, it’s so preferable to what is being offered us that it’s hardly not worth the risk.

VENTURA: You do see the possibilities for dangers in this redesigning?

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COPPOLA: Oh, we’re living with so many possibilities for dangers anyway ! We do not need cynicism in this era! We need optimism. Not stupid optimism, but my kind of optimism, where you take a big chance. And you know, people who typify what I do as just risky and chance-taking are not quite accurate. This is business, and I haven’t missed yet. I’ve made a lot of money for myself and for other people. I’m not merely being optimistic; I’m looking at the upside rather than the downside, and I think there’s nothing wrong with that. It inspires you to work hard, to be productive, and very often it comes true!

VENTURA: Which brings me back to the first paradox I mentioned – it really interests me. Because you obviously have no cynicism at all, to be doing the things you’re doing, but very cynical things happen to your characters. They lose. They lose hard. I mean, you can’t lose any harder than the guy in The Conversation. And even in One from the Heart , they have these dreams and they run after the dreams and then they go, “Oooohhhh, waiiiiiiiit a minute! Maybe I’d rather go home and watch television.”

COPPOLA: I… like to think that I have a lot of stuff left in me. Writing and stuff. I don’t feel I’ve really begun. You know the Madison Avenue guy who works in the advertising agency and thinks he’s gonna write a novel someday? Well, I’m like that too. I look to the time when I’m gonna really have the means to be like a novelist – to work in film like a writer works in novels. And I do a lot of things inconsistently just to kind of get through from there to there. The Godfather was not a… [his voice trails off for a few moments]… that was a job I got, to get out of a financial hole. Though every time I do something I try to make it personal. But I like to think that in the next ten years is when I’m really going to do the filmmaking, and the writing for the filmmaking… [his voice trails off again]… and then perhaps really see what my writing tells me. It’s funny, you talk about characters and stuff, and I realize that I don’t look for the patterns in there; I’m just doin’ this stuff off the top of my head. But I think there is gonna come a period for me in my forties and fifties when I’ll be like a novelist. I’ll really sit down and work real hard, not just for these mad one-night things, but, you know, for six months, and then try to make the film. I’m looking for that body of work to tell me a lot of the answers to the questions that you’re thinking of.

VENTURA: So a deepening of Coppola as an artist instead of a stylist?

COPPOLA: I’m more like a theater impresario right now. But there’s another side of me. I use the word “novelist” because I do think now – learning what I know about film, that, although it’s collaborative, the production phase is very collaborative, for me the conception phase is the phase , it’s like writing the work. And I always fantasize that I will set up a studio that will give me the means of going on. “See, I have this movie I want to make, and it’s 12 hours long, and it’s in four parts,” and they’re going to look at me like, “Well, we don’t make those kinds of movies.” So I’m trying to lay away my power now, so that, when I have emerged to the point where I could be in the mature bloom of being an artist, I don’t have to be like Kurosawa and those guys. No 102 one will let them do their films. So I’m very concerned with creating the fortunes that will enable me to make my films. You’ve gotta do that while you’re young. But I love this, too. I like working like this, I like style, I like the collaboration, but I do feel that you also gotta go and have a chance really to WRITE the work, think it up! A lot of what I did with One from the Heart was used as a learning process for this. See, One from the Heart is part of a bigger film. And this film, which I’m planning or working or sketching out, is a film that I’ve been calling Elective Affinities. Which is really a Goethe book; though, really, the Goethe book happens to be the concept. It’s not Elective Affinities. It’s something I don’t have a name for. But it’s always the same -- the man, the woman, the other man, the other woman; and it’s always about theater, and it’s about illusion and reality, always, it has to be. See, all the sets of One from the Heart are saved so that when I someday begin to try to make this longer film, there are going to be parts where we’re gonna put up the One from the Heart set again and get those same actors again – but the real story, the real tragic aspect of the other man and the other woman is going to be put on in the space between where the sets are and where the stage wall is. One from the Heart is a Las Vegas kabuki-style show of what one aspect of this is. Elective Affinities has, as one of its central early gleams of it: America and Japan as the man and the woman. And it tells the story of a man, a woman, the other man, the other woman on every level you can tell that story: in physics, in astronomy, in a Japanese kind of style – I do the real Elective Affinities in a Japanese setting in the story. And I work on this just by kind of clipping out things or xeroxing stuff out of books or saving pictures, and it’s my dream that I’ll put this together in a studio of the future, and the fundamental difference is that I will try to do it spatially rather than linearly. My whole technical concept – or not “concept,” but the way my brain thinks – is a spatial method, which One from the Heart represented. Now, a lot of it didn’t work the way I intended. Because I was obviously trying to replace the character and performance impact that you normally get through editing – the fact that you can swat a big close-up in there. You know most modern performances today are built by editors. I wanted to see what happens if you got the actors in a position where they could play 12 minutes straight in a scene, totally within the scene, and the audience would feel that the actor was really doing that for you. I think in One from the Heart , on these first looks, a lot of people missed the intimacy they feel for the characters due to the editing and the use of close-ups – they kind of felt that because they were looking at medium shots that it was theater, stagey. You couldn’t get into it like you get into it when you’re looking into Humphrey Bogart’s eyes. And that was an experiment, partly. My idea originally was that all the sets in One from the Heart were going to be in, like, two [sound-]stages, and you would literally be able to take the cast and say, “Kids, ready? On your mark, get set, go!” And they could just run through this trick set and curtains would go up and down and music would come on and off and all that, and you could film One from the Heart every day – with editing, sound, everything, every day on this trick set. Even film it every day with different casts. The concept was trying to understand the approach of making audio-visual stuff this way – just to see what you learn. I was more interested in trying to get the illusion through trickery – mirrors and matting and all the stuff that we have at our disposal. 103

Then one night I was having a drink with the brother of the art director, trying to explain how we need a girl in a tunnel of stars, and the stars would get blue, and the birds would fly, and it would be like Walt Disney. And he said that his brother thought so too, but that he wanted to BUILD the dream. And that’s when I realized it wasn’t gonna be projections of mirror-shots, it was going to be big fucking skies with stars in ‘em! And that was a very different concept. But it was so intriguing that we went suddenly like from two stages to nine! And the idea that the actors just keep goin’, the cameras just keep goin’, and something happens and you’re in entirely another scene, like we did in that one shot – we couldn’t do that for the whole film because suddenly we were in over nine stages. You’re also dealing with schedules and money. I had to make that decision – to go with the expanded view, which just seemed like it would be beautiful. But, like, would we afford that? And it was, “Oh, don’t worry, the neon will not cost more than $300,000.” But then, of course, when all was said and done, the neon cost over a million dollars. And the sets, which were supposed to cost $4 and $5 million, cost $10 million. [Note, 2007: That’s in the vicinity of $40 million today.] And then everything’s related, so the sound stages that we were gonna rent to other people we rented to ourselves. And then it took more time to do, so we postponed. And that postponement also – to tell you what I’ve learned from One from the Heart – I realize how much that postponement traumatized everybody. Because it was as though everybody was insecure about this weird kind of piece. When we postponed to accommodate the sets, in that period it was almost as though everything was free to wander, and it was very hard to get it back together again. And that’s why one of the rules I’m now gonna attempt to live by is to not delay. But you can’t work on that scale, approaching this kind of work so differently, without learning a ton of stuff that I’m sure I haven’t had time to think about yet. What One from the Heart is, it’s one of those little Easter eggs, you look in and you see it. You don’t say, “Oh, the characters are two-dimensional!” – the characters are two-dimensional. You don’t say, “Oh, the sky is painted!” – the sky is painted. What you do say is, “Wow, looka that!” I did it, and I deliberately chose an extremely simple story because I would like someday to do it for 14 hours with tragic dimension. What I want to do is, I want to make a major tragedy. Something that, in film, would qualify to be some kind of as yet unknown film opera. I want to do a thing that when the girl dies you are aware of the whole combination of what you’re seeing, and the philosophy connected with it, and her history, and the emotion you feel just skewers you. A work in which theme, and acting, and dance, and singing, and scenery, and lighting, and scenic design, all of these elements come together at their highest possible level in a piece that tries to look at life and the human situation on the highest possible level. And I don’t feel up to it now. But I feel I could get myself up to it if I’m allowed to continue to make films. And whenever I’m lucky enough to get to do it, when I do do it, I feel it will make use of everything I’ve done before, and the people will see how it all fits together. I mean, it’s constantly going to be theatrical, and yet it’s going to be trying to get at the real feelings that we have, which I don’t think you can get in a naturalistic style. I mean, look at 8 ½, that wasn’t realistic ! He commanded the style to give you that view of himself and of all of us, which is what great art is. But you can’t do that following the rules. 104

And now that I see it that way, I just want to make one film after another now, I don’t see it anymore as making this film and that film; to me they’re all the same film. One from the Heart could be connected to Apocalypse Now like a sausage. I have always felt, as a younger person, that I didn’t have the talent that the other kids I knew had. You can see it so clearly: you draw a picture and the other kid draws a picture, and his picture is beautiful and yours is not. I wasn’t given that kind of talent on the level that it was given to Roman Polanski. But I’ve always felt that I had a talent that was a different kind of talent that was like, maybe in the cave it was like a little vein of gold, but that it was a vein that would go for a lotta years and would ultimately take me to the place where the real source was. So I mean I struggled as a younger writer and director. I had the energy and I had the showmanship to put it all together and make it happen, but for those more solitudinous nights, when you’re sittin’ at the typewriter and you know what you’ve written is no good, and you’re upset because you have no talent – I’ve always believed that the answer for me was just to keep turning out stuff, and each time I turned it out I understood better how to do it. I would prefer to have my real time to do work be when I was old enough and experienced enough and have been through it a lot. I’d rather do it at 50 than 20.

VENTURA: And you see your previous films, then, as steps preparing you –

COPPOLA: -- to someday be able to do a really personal work of dimension, made in calm.

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ROBERT ALTMAN

18 November 1983

Fourteen years ago a prolific TV director who’d made a few unexceptional features was shooting a comedy on the Fox backlot. His name was Robert Altman. He was 43 years old – in America, a late age in which to bloom suddenly into a pathbreaking filmmaker. In his cast were several young players who had attracted no more than passing glances in other films. There was no reason for anybody to suspect that on Altman’s set the future of the medium was being shaped. The picture, of course, was M.A.S.H. – the decisive picture for modern comedy. Few American comedies since don’t owe their tone, pacing, and sense of wit to M.A.S.H. Within two years of its release in 1970, Altman directed Brewster McCloud, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Images and The Long Goodbye. The mood of these pictures – not their style, not their content, but certainly their mood – found so many earnest imitators that theirs became the mood of many pictures of the 70’s. Where, for instance, would American Graffiti (1973) have been without it? And Altman kept pushing the boundaries: Nashville in 1975 was another hit that broke all the rules. Then Three Women in 1977 found Altman far beyond where most filmmakers and audiences wanted to go. Ever since that picture, people are queasy about him. “What’s he up to? What does he expect of us? Why’s he gone so weird?” In answer he kept making pictures. Quintet, A Perfect Couple, A Wedding, Health, Popeye – against the odds, through years of audience desertion and almost unanimous critical dismissal, Altman kept at it as though to say, “Experience this! Now this! Now try this!” Critical barrages only seemed to make him more determined. For instance, it was when Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean flopped on Broadway that he decided to film the play. With Come Back to the Five and Dime (1982), people who hadn’t had a good thing to say about Altman in years started saying good things, though most critics missed – or didn’t know how to deal with – how in that picture Altman played with simultaneous time and simultaneous subjectivity, narrative strategies barely touched in cinema. But for Altman, Come Back to the Five and Dime wasn’t merely a detour into theater. As has been the case recently with Ingmar Bergman and John Cassavetes, Robert Altman’s theatrical work has become one of his central occupations. When Come Back to the Five and Dime opened as a film Altman was directing an opera, The Rake’s Progress , at the University of Michigan – a production he’s been invited to present at La Scala in 1985. And for his new film, he’s turned to David Rabe’s play Streamers. There is no way to sum up a man like Robert Altman, or his films. Who could like them all? And who could afford to ignore him? Always an image breaker, even at the height of his popularity; always active, even at the lowest point of his critical reception; always facing our era with a mirror of its mercurial collective nature –each of the 17 films he’s released in the last 14 years has stood on its own and gone its own way, without waiting to see whether or not the rest of us were headed in the same direction.

VENTURA: I can’t think of another film artist who provokes such a wide spectrum of reaction. There are people who love your work and people who don’t even 106 want to hear about it; people who believe you’re an important artist and people who think you’re just out of control. Why do you think the opinion pendulum swings so widely regarding you?

ALTMAN: I just accept those reactions. If I try to analyze them, I become a… [his voice trails off]. I have to really stay with my own intuition and my own instincts about “ this is correct,” and once I decide that it is, or feel that it is, then I have to be very careful not to analyze that. Because once I know why I’m doing something – or think I know why I’m doing something – I wouldn’t want to do it. Interviews, like this, like what I’m doing now, are ultimately dangerous to me, to my working level. Because you tend to try to articulate, and the minute I start saying “Oh, well, yeah, that’s right, this happened, and that’s why this happened, and that’s why this is correct,” then I’ve intellectualized it and I can no longer do it. Somehow that takes it away from me. My real mode of operation has always been that the minute something seems right I physically force myself to stop thinking about it. Not to analyze it any further. I say, “That’s right, that’s it, that’s what we’re going to do,” and I put that whole issue out of my mind, and I won’t let myself even ponder on it. Later, when a film comes out, the critics do it for you – point things out that are often absolutely correct, but that I never verbalized to myself before. Not that there’s any one answer to anything – I think that everything is so shrouded in different shades that there just isn’t any way to pigeonhole, and once you do, you’ve eliminated opportunities. I’ll go back to a case of a colleague of mine, Federico Fellini, when he did Cassanova. I was astounded by this film. I felt I was a ten-year-old boy who’d found a key to a museum that had been locked up for 400 years, and I could just wander around in there. I was in a state of awe. But the reviewers just hated it – and I couldn’t figure out why it was treated in such a way. I think the reason was this: Fellini was having trouble getting his films financed, as he always had, and so the producers said to him, “You’ve just got to do a lot of publicity.” So Newsweek and Time and everyone else came and interviewed him. But he considers filmmaking a joke – or doesn’t consider it a joke, but he considers himself a joke – so he started just saying anything, and he was lying! He’s saying, “Oh, I don’t like Cassanova as a man . I don’t like that kind of man.” So when you go to see that film he’s already limited what you can see in it. He built a boundary, and he doesn’t allow you to spill over that boundary. How can you like Casanova after you know Fellini himself doesn’t? So I think interviews – you’ve got to be very careful and protect yourself. And I don’t mean lie, because that’s never a thing you can do, but I think you must be careful not to answer questions that you yourself have.

VENTURA: Not to comment on anything you’re really thinking about. Interesting.

ALTMAN: I’m pretty well able to fend my way through these things now.

VENTURA: I can tell. You went from very free-wheeling films like Health, A Wedding, A Perfect 107

Couple, Quintet – which, by the way, I got very involved with, wrote about it, “this means this and this means this,” and after I wrote about it I still didn’t know whether I liked it, but I had a ball with it.

ALTMAN: Well, that’s what Quintet is. It’s a game, a puzzle, it’s a dark painting.

VENTURA: You went from these free-wheeling films – in form, in style, in production – to filming plays. Unlike a film script, the text is holy in a play, very few things can be changed. Why this shift in emphasis?

ALTMAN: Actually, the shift came after Popeye . I’d spent a year on Malta [filming] and had a really lousy time with Disney and Paramount – they were just ugly about how they went about things. I felt we’d made a really marvelous film, and there was no gratification from it other than from the children who saw it, and the few people who let the children in them see it. After I sold my company [Lion’s Gate] – which was a big, physical plant -- I suddenly realized I had been running a business and not addressing myself to what I do. Then I did very small one-act plays at the L.A. Actor’s Theater. I wanted to get into theater, back into theater, but I’d never given myself the time, with just one film on top of another. And then the Jimmy Dean thing came up. I did that play on Broadway and we got slaughtered by the critics. But I saw what those actresses had done and I did not want to let that die that way. So I bustled around and we made that film. And with the success of Jimmy Dean I thought I could do Streamers the same way, only stretch it out a little bit more, and really not pull any punches with the audience. I will say that right after Streamers I went right back the other way – I just finished shooting this film in Arizona, O.C. and Stiggs, which is probably looser and wilder than Brewster McCloud and Nashville.

VENTURA: I think that in the last decade or so you’ve directed more films than any other important director – is that just a compulsion to work, or does each film begin with something truly private, truly personal?

ALTMAN: Well, Three Women was a dream. I mean, literally started with a dream. I didn’t dream the story, but I’d had this succession of dreams all in one night in which I was making a film with Shelly Duvall and Sissy Spacek and it was called Three Women and I didn’t know who the other woman was. It took place in the desert, and it was about personality-theft. And in my dream I kept waking up and people would come into my bedroom – production managers – and I’d say, “Go into the desert and find a saloon.” And when I did wake up, and realized it was a dream, I was very disappointed, because I was really happy with what was beginning. The next morning I called an associate of mine and said, “Listen, I read a short story last night, see what you think of this.” And I roughly winged it, with those two characters, and I put this third shadow of a woman in. And she said, “That’s very good, can you get the rights to it?” And I said, “Yeah, I think so.” And we literally had a deal and were working in nine days. 108

A Wedding sprung from a picture, one of the earliest photographs I remember of myself. It was cut out of the Kansas City Journal-Post, in the rotogravure section. I was probably five years old, I might have been three, and I was the ring-bearer in a wedding. And there’s my mother and my father and all my aunts and uncles, and they’re all members of the wedding. And that photograph stayed in my mind, and has all my life. When I went and put A Wedding together, it looks like that photograph. It’s updated and all that, but the people who are in the wedding are members of my family.

VENTURA: That’s the part of creation that cannot be explained.

ALTMAN: No, ‘cause you don’t know where it comes from. Of course, then, with film, you have collaborative artists who say, “Oh, I had the same experience, but it went like this,” so the concept changes, and that process makes it accessible to more people. What I really look for now in a film is for an audience to come and meet me halfway with their own experience or thoughts or fears or desires or whatever – nobody is really seeing the same film.

VENTURA: Do you think the audience wants to work that hard?

ALTMAN: I don’t think they have to work. I think they just have to giggle and give in. Of course, in comedy it’s most accessible, because it’s easier to laugh at someone else’s humor than to experience someone else’s fears. I know I’ve made films where people right off the bat say, “Oh, I’m not going on this trip! I don’t want to make that stretch.”

VENTURA: That sense of having the audience participate in the experience of the film, that’s exactly what most studio films – many of which I enjoy, I’m not against the American studio film –

ALTMAN: Oh, I’m not either –

VENTURA: -- but they do try deliberately to stop that process.

ALTMAN: Yeah, they want to do it all for you. You sit in front of it, and it’s like reading a detective novel – they’re a lot of fun, but the minute you close it you can’t remember any of it. Because everything is who did what to whom and when, and there are no whys. There are no ambiguities. But I like ‘em too. I also like doing crossword puzzles at certain times, but I don’t call that reading.

VENTURA: When you’re on the set, what’s the most important thing to you as a director with a scene to shoot?

ALTMAN: I think I most concern myself with the look of it. And with the camera. But again, I deal with the camera in much the same as I deal with the material itself, and with the actors. I don’t plan it. 109

Like in Streamers , we used a really interesting camera-mount, a thing I got in Canada that some fellas who worked on Quintet discovered and made. The camera is balanced on an Alamac dollie with a jib-arm, and the cameraman actually moves behind it. He can move pretty freely, up and down. So I tried to get the feeling that the camera was the audience floating in that room almost like an invisible spirit. With that camera, the performers had great freedom, and all you had to do was occasionally get out of someone’s way so they wouldn’t walk through you.

VENTURA: You’re talking about directing the camera, and yet you’re legendary as a director of actors. How do you direct them?

ALTMAN: Well – I don’t do much. I don’t talk to them very much. I try to get everybody together for more time than is needed before we start shooting so that everybody gets to know the crew and gets comfortable. And I purposely don’t say too much. So there’s an awful lot of interplay between the actors. They’re saying, “Gee, has he said anything to you?” “No.” “Well, how do you suppose he wants us to do this?” “I dunno.” “I’m just going to go up and ask him if he doesn’t say anything for the next couple of days.” So what they’re really doing is finding out from each other, and they’re figuring it out. Then when I get them into wardrobe and they try something on and I say, “Oh, yeah, that’ll be terrific in that scene,” that’s giving them hints of what I think, and they’re giving me hints at the same time, so that by the time they’re ready to do it they are able to say, “ Well, this is the way it’s gotta be done,” and they do it. Occasionally I’ll say, “I think that this shouldn’t be so loud,” or, “This should be said,” but generally I think I force them into not being able to blame someone else if it doesn’t work. In other words, they have to really stretch out and say, “Okay, I’m going to go all the way with this thing.” And then hopefully they have the confidence that I’m going to protect them and not take a bad or an excessive performance and let it go through. But I feel that by the time I’ve totally accumulated my creative collaborators – I’ve got the cameraman, I’ve got the basic crew, the art direction people, and the film is cast – I think that most of my creative work is finished. Then the next shot I get is in the editing room. Which makes the theater work different than film. Except that in theater you have rehearsal. And that’s exactly the same process as your editing – it’s just done in a different order. I mean, I could go out and shoot film and something could be not good at all, or not the way I thought it should be, but it’s interesting. Then I’ll keep it, and I’ll just cover it with something else, knowing that I have these editing choices. Which really gives me a chance to rehearse the piece in the editing room. So a lot of times we’ll do a scene, and some actors will get very annoyed, and they’ll say, “Was that okay?” and “Don’t you want to do it again?” And I’ll say, “No, that’s all right.” “But is that what you want?” And I say, “I don’t know. It’s okay. We’ll make it work.” And that’s the absolute truth. I mean, it’s impossible for me to make a judgment on what’s gonna work and what isn’t gonna work when I’m in the middle of 400,000 feet of film. I have to put in what’s gonna go in front of it and what’s gonna go in back of it.

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VENTURA: You directed a few studio films in the 50s, TV in the 50s and 60s, and you, more than anybody else, set the tone for what film would be like in the 70s – M.A.S.H. had a tremendous influence, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Most of this work you did in the middle of the mainstream. What changes have you seen in this process of getting a film made?

ATLMAN: The same thing that happened to television, as compared to the television that was done in the 1950s, applies to film and to what happened in New York to theater. It’s become run by accountants. All they’re interested in is whether it’s going to reach the lowest common denominator, sell the most tickets, or the most Miller’s High Life. They’re looking for the thing they can foist off on the most people. And in the process of doing that, they have to eliminate the major artists. Because the major artists won’t do that. Now, somebody will do that till they get their foothold. Once they get it, if they follow that plan it will destroy them; if they don’t follow it, they’re not desirable anymore. But it’s always been that way. In television in those days, you were under the same kind of pressure. Except that there was so much being done, you were working so fast, that nobody could pay much attention to what you were doing. It was on the air before they’d seen it! So we were able – as in the early days of feature-film making – to work underground within the system. When I was first doing television like Whirlybirds and U.S. Marshall and My Little Margie and that kind of – just crap! – you’d go in, you’d meet the cast when you were ready to make your first shot. But everybody was sneaking their art into the system. M.A.S.H. never could have been made if it had been the only film that was going through. But there were two other wars going on at Fox at the same time, Patton and Tora! Tora! Tora! So we were this little company on the backlot. And I learned real early that I’d better keep our mouths shut. And that’s what we did. So they didn’t pay any attention to us because they thought M.A.S.H. was a film that was “heading for the drive- ins.” That’s a direct quote. They didn’t know what they were making. If they had considered M.A.S.H. an important picture, it would not have been an important picture. Nashville could never have been made in its day, totally financed as it was by ABC, except that the guy who made the deal got fired from ABC just before we started shooting, so nobody there had anything to lose, and there was nobody who had anything to say – except me. And when I was doing those films for Alan Ladd, Jr., at Fox [ Quintet, A Wedding, Health, A Perfect Couple ], he and Jay Canner never necessarily approved of them, but they totally stayed out of my way. We did the proper kind of budget, and even if they didn’t like the results, they knew that what I was trying to do was the right thing. I admire those guys a great deal for what they did. The only thing that happened with those films was that when they got to the marketing level they were never able to be treated as important films because in order to get them done they had to be treated as not important films. Paramount – Barry Diller – was out bad-mouthing Popeye before the film was finished. To the press! So you haven’t got much chance when you’re trying to make a film and what the studio wants is a lot of hype. They would rather have Flashdance than Popeye , and yet there’s a place for Popeye. They didn’t lose money on it. And Popeye 111 was very inventive, imaginative – really, really a good film. And yet in the Academy Awards it’s some period-piece that winds up winning all the awards – a film they pull off the racks at Western Costume.

VENTURA: What won that year?

ALTMAN: Oh, I don’t know. What won any year? I mean, I’m not complaining. I don’t expect it to change. Those are the facts.

VENTURA: You’re still making the films you want to, in spite of that. Streamers worked for me on many levels. Technically, and topically, because it deals with the Viet Nam war at roughly the same stage of development as the Central American War is in now. But beyond its topicality, I think emotionally Streamers is a rare picture about men – I can’t remember as good a picture about men since Cassavetes’ Husbands.

ALTMAN: I get a very funny reaction from some women – they come out of the film and say, “I just never dreamed that men were like that!” And as for topicality – we made it last February, and already the Central American activity was heating up, and I decided that this one [ Streamers ] was really not about Viet Nam. It’s about sending young men away to fight enemies that haven’t been defined yet. Two or three nights ago on television they had three young Marines in the hospital, and they interviewed them. They had all been wounded when they landed in Granada, wounded by friendly fire – their own guys shot them. The point is, you could see the confusion in their faces. And you could have taken any one of those guys and dropped them in that barracks in Streamers and you would have said, “Hey, that’s good casting, those are good actors.” Because somebody suddenly told them, “Hey, pick up your rifle, we’re going to land on this island!” “What island?” “Grenada.” “Who?” “And when you land there, somebody’ll want to shoot you and you’re going to have to kill him.” “Wait a minute, who are they?” “Well, they might be Cubans, we don’t know.” “What’s a Cuban look like? What color jerseys are they wearing? How do we tell who’s the enemy?” And these young men really are the misfits in our society, unfortunately. A lot of them go into the army because of high unemployment. “It’s a job. I go in for two years and I come out with a trade.” So the basis of this situation is that the people who have taken the most out of what our society has to give don’t have any risk. I would say that everybody, as soon as they make $100,000 a year, has got to take two years off and serve in the Army. One of the interesting things about Grenada is that people were glad it wasn’t on television. After the suppression of news on Grenada, the majority of people in a poll said they thought that was right, the government has the right to do that. But this is exactly what we criticize the Russians for. Our people are say, “We don’t wanna know.” If that’s true, and if it continues to be reflected that way, then I think we’re in for very, very serious problems.

VENTURA: Given this larger situation, what kind of difference do films make in general? What’s their impact? 112

ALTMAN: It’s the same impact as any art, but art is just – everybody’s an artist, everybody has a point of view, everybody looks at things a little differently, and all the artist is saying is, “Hey, this is what the ocean looks like to me – it’s not true but it’s my truth.” So no film or no work of art is itself going to turn anybody. But all of them in aggregate eventually effect people, and they’ll never know what affected them. It’s things we remember and absorb, and eventually it changes out outlook. An example of this: When I was a kid growing up in Missouri my father was a big duck hunter, and my desire was always to own a gun. He’d take me, when I was 12 years old, down duck hunting, and I’d just love killing ducks, sitting in the blind and being with my father and the ducks would come in and they were beautiful and then we’d blast away. I remember chasing wounded ducks across the field and throwing my body on them and wringing their necks and bringing them back. And I just wanted to own a really good shotgun. Fifteen, twenty years later, after I had finished some film or other, I was walking the streets of London on a Saturday, and it was kind of quiet, and they have all these marvelous gun shops. And I passed this window that had stuffed pheasants and birds and these intricately carved guns and all the accouterments that go with it. And I stood there and saw my own reflection in that stuff, and I thought, “God – this repulses me.” I couldn’t bring myself to walk into that store. I could afford at that point to buy anything in that store – and yet I felt a certain repulsion. And I thought, “Twenty years ago I would have sold my soul to be able to go in there and pick something out. When did this change happen in me?” Something worked on me that changed my attitude over that period of time, and I think I know what it was: it was just a series of exposures to different points of view. If you’re changed overnight by a revelation, “My god, I was wrong and now I’m gonna do so-and-so,” you’ve been exposed to propaganda, not to art. So I think that film and theater –which is the way I practice art – will have a slight effect. But I don’t think it’s a lasting art. I think it’s all temporary. It’s showing someone, “Here’s my point of view,” and maybe you’ll put something from your point of view together with it and that’ll make a third feeling which you’ll have and I’ll never have the opportunity to have. But I don’t think it’s important. It’s important to me that I do it. I don’t think that what I do is important. I take my work very seriously but I don’t take myself very seriously. It’s just a way of life. And I’m gratified for it. Because each film, or each theatrical piece – each piece of work I do – is like a complete lifetime for me in itself. It has a beginning, it has all the pain, the joy, there are new people involved, then it has an end – each project is like living a full life, so if I do 40 projects I have the opportunity, the pleasure, the joy of living 40 lives instead of just one.

113

CANDY CLARK

27 March 1981

VENTURA: Did you rehearse much for The Man Who Fell to Earth ?

CLARK: Well, David [Bowie] and I ran lines all day long on other scenes, or on the one we were working on. That’s important, so when you get on the set you’re not wasting a lot of film flubbing a line. And then once you get on the set you start blocking it out. For instance, there’s a scene where I said, “Do you want some wine from some store?” – and I had to take ice cubes out and get glasses and shut the refrigerator and open the wine and pour the wine. When you do all this stuff you don’t want glasses clinking while you say your lines, because then you know you’ll have to loop them later. So you have to coordinate it so you pour and it looks natural and you’re not pouring liquid over your lines. You have to pour and then do the lines or do the lines and then pour -- and just make it look really smooth, instead of thought out. Plus you have to hit your marks so it stays in focus. You also have to learn, know where the camera is looking and where the lens is, so that when you’re doing a scene and someone is in front of you and they stand up and they’re blocking you, you can kind of naturally scoot over, so you don’t have to redo it again. You learn not to be blocked so you can save the scene.

VENTURA: Was there much improvising in The Man Who Fell to Earth ? The acting looks so natural.

CLARK: No, the lines were all taken from the script. I like to go by the script because that’s what attracts me in the first place, the writing. So I try to figure out a way to say the good writing. I appreciate it, so I don’t want to improvise and make up lines. I want to do what’s there and do that page. Then I turn it down and make a fold here and a fold there and that page is finished. Then when all the pages are folded, the film’s finished. Acting is learning how to walk and talk at the same time and chew gum and pat your head. It’s fulfilling a character, getting a page full of type and transcribing it into action and emotions the way you see it. It’s translating this white page with type on it into actions and emotions and reactions, as you see it. You give someone else the same page and they’re going to do it differently. I just read it and like the character and then I build and give them personality things: walks and ways of dressing and hair-dos – hair-dos are very important. The little tiny things are very important to me. And the clothing. Take Man Who Fell to Earth . I wore very loud clothing, bright colors and funny-looking outfits. I dressed her in lime- green and bright yellow and hot pink -- colors I thought Mary Lou would think were sexy. I liked her a lot. I just liked her sweet personality and her simple ways. But acting’s not something you can talk about easily. Acting’s not like a painting or something which you can hold or put on your wall. And it’s not something which you do on your own, there’s so many people involved, so it’s not totally yours, it’s everybody’s. There are so many people that come into it, it makes it hard to describe. 114

Like the make-up people are important, hair people are important, and prop people are important. Everybody has to do their job. The director is extremely important, and most important is the script, I think. The foundation is the script, the writing. And without the writing, you can try and try and try and spend a lot of money and it’s not going to be that good. If it’s got flaws in the script it’s gonna have flaws on the screen, and you can’t patch it together by image. When you’re doing it, it’s all three dimensional, and you can look around the back of the set and it’s all chicken wire, or the front end of the car is cut off and you have to use your imagination a lot. Or you look up, and you’re in a three-sided room and the ceiling’s out and there’s just lamps up there, and one wall is just gone, and there’s all these people out there. There’s just so many people that go into this final thing where it’s just you up there and your face. And then all you’ve got is this piece of film that you have to hold up to the light in order to see it. It’s just this piece of plastic. That’s all you have at the end and it’s two- dimensional, not three dimensional like it was when you did it. It comes out just flat, just this skinny piece of plastic.