LEM DOBBS Interviewed By Dan Schneider First Posted 1/25/2010 http://www.cosmoetica.com/DSI21.htm 1 Lem Dobbs Interview by Dan Schneider DS: This DSI is with a screenwriter who has participated in some of the best films to be released in the last couple of decades, Lem Dobbs. Thanks for agreeing to discuss your work, career, opinions, and views on life and especially film. For those readers to whom the name Lem Dobbs draws a blank stare, could you please provide a précis on who you are: what you do, what your aims in your career are, major achievements, and your general philosophy, etc.? LD: No one has ever equaled “My name is John Ford, I make Westerns.” I wish I could say the same -- which gives you some idea of my aims and general philosophy -- and how minor my major achievements have been. I suppose I became a screenwriter thinking I would write the kinds of movies that had always been made and join the great Hollywood machine that produced them, only to find my “career” coincident with the creative and economic decline of what we used to call the film industry. Now that the counter-whiners are on alert, primed to point out that there are exciting things happening in South Korea, and that the latest if not the last Manoel de Oliveira film is sublime, and any year that produces UP can’t be all bad ... we may proceed. Although interviews by their nature are backward- looking. Roger Ebert once interviewed an aging Tony Curtis, who said when he first came out to Hollywood he stayed at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard -- a tradition I followed. Young Tony Curtis -- or Bernie Schwartz as he must still then have felt -- went down to the pool his first morning in the sun, jumped in, swam its length, climbed out the other side -- and sat down to do the interview. “Life and money both behave like loose quicksilver in a nest of cracks. When they’re gone you can’t tell where, or what the devil you did with ‘em.” (Name the film!) DS: Before we get to the biographical stuff, let’s get basic. How do you define your job, as a screenwriter? Do you see your words as eminently more malleable than a poet’s or novelist’s, since film is a group artistic effort, and last minute edits will inevitably affect your words? LD: I’ve always thought of it as describing a movie on paper, that’s all. There are scripts I’ve read, or once did, by favorite writers, that have never been made into movies, but I feel like I’ve seen them. You should be able to “see” the movie when you read a script, even though there aren’t actors, there’s no music … but somehow it’s washed over you as if there were. But this also presupposes the right sort of reader, a dying breed, someone who might actually know what a movie is and be able to visualize it. The lack of 2 knowledge and experience -- of taste -- of people in the film business has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The generally accepted page count has decreased significantly from what it used to be. As costs have increased. So scripts judged “a fast read” now -- a man, his wife, his vampire mistress -- on a plane -- are often mistaken for good. NORTH BY NORTHWEST or 2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY require a little more cognitive effort, from everybody. Edits, last minute or otherwise, presumably affect the work of “real” writers, as well -- Raymond Carver, to name but one famous example -- but in other disciplines, at least, their words are supposed to be the final product. Because of the collective nature of filmmaking, a screenplay is naturally more malleable in one way or another -- and often should be, but needn’t always be. Fealty to a good script doesn’t necessarily mean limiting a director’s or an actor’s expressiveness. You can have a “literary” movie, heavy with voiceover narration, where you feel the actors have been instructed to speak rich and allusive dialogue precisely as written. But we’re also thrilled by great films made in a seemingly more casual or improvisatory manner. The trouble from the screenwriter’s perspective is that a film can be sometimes faithful to the script as far as what’s written, but tonally all wrong, hopelessly miscast, with inappropriate music, clueless production design, crippled and compromised in countless ways large and small. You might go to great lengths, for instance, to evoke the light and landscape of the Hudson Valley -- only to see them film it on the cheap in Romania with eastern-European extras as Native Americans. Which was par for the course in the former German Democratic Republic, but by no means the only place walls are forever being put up in the world of moviemaking. DS: Despite the group nature of film work, are there times when you have put your foot down and insisted your words be performed as written? And, even if spoken verbatim, a good (or bad) actor can twist a word’s meaning to mean almost the exact opposite, no? LD: Screenwriters can’t insist on lunch, let alone adherence to their precious script, and if they put their foot down will be sent to their room pretty swiftly. Speeches imagined in the writer’s head as being delivered breathlessly at breakneck speed (and, God forbid, even so indicated) might be slurred by an actor at a snail’s pace, and pregnant pauses where none were intended can render a scene lifeless. (I may have dreamt it, but I’m pretty sure Michelle Pfeiffer once said “intellectu Al” in a movie -- and her co-star wasn’t Pacino.) In KAFKA, the marvelous actor Ian Holm -- if he’s to blame -- changed one word which, in a climactic summing-up speech, changed the meaning of the entire movie, if you ask me. His character declares himself in favor of a mob because a mob is easy to control. It’s the purpose of the individual he finds, as 3 written, “questionable.” But in the film what he says is that the purpose of the individual is always -- pregnant pause -- “in question.” Since he’s playing a mad scientist, the original phrasing is more in keeping with his project -- the revelation of the film’s mystery, such as it is -- which is to lobotomize individualism. He’s saying, in effect, I know perfectly well what the individual human mind is all about, and I don’t like it, I find it suspicious, so I’m working to change the equation. But by saying “in question” instead, he neutralizes his own argument and legitimizes his quest for knowledge. He becomes an ordinary, inquisitive man of science trying to find out what makes the human brain tick. What’s lost is, of all things, the Kafkaesque (“questionable” also carrying a hint of the interrogation room). Now, this may very well be nitpicking -- the director certainly thinks so -- it may even be a better choice for the character, if you want to look at it that way. But it wasn’t my choice and here’s the thing -- I bet you it was no one’s choice. It was probably just the way Ian Holm happened to say it while the camera was rolling on that day in that take at that moment -- and no one cared or even noticed. I could be wrong. I wasn’t there. It certainly wasn’t malicious; no one says, Let’s fuck up the script. Maybe there was discussion or debate about it, maybe Ian Holm said, “Would you mind if I said it this way, it feels more comfortable to me” … But I’d be surprised. The point is, it doesn’t cross anybody’s individual mind for a second that the writer might actually have selected the words he put down on paper with any thought or deliberation whatever -- with the luxury of time and contemplation to do so -- rather than in the midst of film set pressure and chaos. It goes to show you, it’s not only the massive or truly destructive changes routinely wrought on scripts. These relatively tiny details can drive you -- well, me -- crazy. Let go. In Steven (Soderbergh)’s interview book with Richard Lester, there’s a story about working on a script with Pinter and how desperately at the last minute he needed to add a comma. DS: I think that’s an excellent example, and I see what you mean, as the changed term does fundamentally alter the meaning of the moment, if not the prior film (one I’ve yet to see, however). In cinema there are noxious terms and ideas called film theory and auteur theory. The former is pretentious and the latter rather manifest, therefore redundant. What are your thoughts on the two terms, as applied to the actual task of filmmaking, and in their historical context? LD: Film theory has been a pretty dry well from the outset and since the days of Eisenstein/Pudovkin, etc. would seem to have had little overlap with actual filmmaking practice. Find a studio executive or a contemporary director who’s heard of Noel Burch or Laura Mulvey and you will have found the Missing Link. Well, you might find that at a movie studio, regardless. (An anthropologist did once write a book about Hollywood.) 4 I’m not altogether disdainful -- though Noel Burch himself ultimately realized how irrelevant he was.