Mavericks: Interviews with the World's Iconoclast Filmmakers (Screen Classics) 0813197945, 9780813197944

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Mavericks

Interviews with the World’s Iconoclast Filmmakers

Gerald Peary

A note to the reader: Some of the quotations printed in this volume contain racially insensitive language. The author has chosen to document the original terminology to provide full historical context for the events under discussion. Discretion is advised. Copyright © 2024 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Spalding University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, University of Pikeville, and Western Kentucky University. All rights reserved. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 www.kentuckypress.com Unless otherwise noted, photographs are from the author’s collection. Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-8131-9794-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8131-9796-8 (epub) ISBN 978-0-8131-9795-1 (pdf) This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials. Manufactured in the United States of America. Member of the Association of University Presses

To the memory of Peter Brunette—a great film critic, and my dear friend.

Contents Introduction 1 Howard Alk: The Murder of Fred Hampton 5 Ousmane Sembène  13 An Interview with Marcel Ophuls  21 Bernardo Bertolucci and 1900 29 Pell Mel Brooks . . . and He Is Mild  34 Interview with Hal Ashby regarding Coming Home 39 Roberta Findlay: Woman in Porn  44 Short Visits with Three European Masters  54 Interview with Martin Ritt  63 Two Interviews with Margarethe von Trotta  68 Bill Forsyth: Speaking with Scotland’s Finest Filmmaker  75 A Rare-and-Brief Glimpse of Director Akira Kurosawa  84 Norman Mailer: Where Tough Guys Spend the Winter  88 Volker Schlöndorff and Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale Depicts Futuristic Puritans in Harvard Square  93 Three Short Encounters with Gus Van Sant  97 Hybrid Identities: An Interview with Agnieszka Holland  103 Errol Morris and Stephen Hawking: The Universe in a Mind  107 Two Interviews with Gillo Pontecorvo  114 Two Short Interviews with Liv Ullmann  121 Two Interviews with Jim Jarmusch  125 Interview with Frederick Wiseman  131 A Talk with Benôit Jacquot  141

CONTENTS

Two Interviews with John Waters  155 Set This House on Fire: William Styron and Charles Burnett  163 Voices in the Middle East  170 Index 177

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Introduction May I contextualize this volume? I would not have interviewed filmmakers for the three decades covered here, 1973–2005, sought out twentyeight directors from around the world, if it had not been for the ascendancy of the “auteur” theory of cinema and my ascribing to its premises. The story is a well-known one. It was in the mid-1950s that, in France, the writers (and future filmmakers) at Cahiers du Cinéma adopted a polemical position that it was the director who is the creative force behind a film of worth, and who must be acknowledged as the essential Artist. The “auteur.” Film is a collaborative art, but all others involved in the making of the film— the screenwriter, the cinematographer, the actors, the technicians—are working under the forceful orchestral arm of the director-filmmaker. In the 1960s, the “auteur theory” was brought to America by Andrew Sarris, the influential film critic for the Village Voice. He wrote enthusiastically about directors, often very unusual ones, whom his readers should know about. I was a Sarris devotee, and my “Bible” became his 1968 book, The American Cinema, in which he streamlined American film history into an exalted story of great American filmmakers. But it wasn’t only Sarris. Many other critics in the 1960s shifted the focus in their reviews to the person in the director’s chair, including Pauline Kael. For the first time in the history of cinema, directors who were championed by critics were engaged for public appearances, asked to ruminate about their careers. In the late 1960s, when I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Hollywood veterans George Stevens and King Vidor were invited to our campus to speak, and each showed one of his essential movies. My first live filmmakers! But at Wisconsin, “the Berkeley of the Midwest,” I had other things in mind. I became embroiled in the seventies with campus issues, which included protesting America’s war in Vietnam, supporting strikes of Black students, and the unionizing of teaching assistants. I looked for similar themes to be taken up by filmmakers. The first two interviews in my book reflected my concerns, as a “radical” White student, with issues of Black liberation, at home and around the 1

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world. Howard Alk came up to Madison from Chicago to show his blistering documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton, and we spoke of the death of the young Black Panther leader by Illinois police. The legendary Senegalese novelist and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène stopped in Wisconsin on his American tour, and he discussed the anticolonialist struggles of West Africans trying to make movies. I was delighted to have these conversations with Alk and Sembène, the latter a collaboration with Patrick McGilligan. But a co-interview with Maureen Turim with France’s Marcel Ophuls, also on tour in Madison, got contentious and argumentative at times. Despite Ophuls having made the monumental The Sorrow and the Pity, we youthful left-wingers showed little sympathy for what we saw as a middle-of-the road liberalism in his work. (Looking back now, we certainly could have been more polite, more respectful to a filmmaker of consequence.) Meanwhile, Hollywood through the Reagan eighties was far more conservative politically than today. When I moved East from Wisconsin and, in 1978, became a professional film critic in Boston, I sought out the then-rare Hollywood “mavericks” who dealt openly with social issues. I spoke with Hal Ashby, who was the director of Coming Home, the first overtly pacifist Hollywood film to address the war in Vietnam. I interviewed Martin Ritt, whose Norma Rae and The Molly Maguires were made in support of labor unions. Ritt was also the only White Hollywood filmmaker who consistently made antiracist films about Black subjects, including Sounder. Finally, visiting Europe on assignment, I was thrilled to speak with Italy’s Gillo Pontecorvo, the person behind the revolutionary call to arms, The Battle of Algiers. The Cahiers French critics, I came to realize, were generally hostile to filmmakers who used the cinema for Important Themes and didactic purposes. And I had a division, too, with my American critic mentors. For much of the 1970s, I was the opposite of Sarris and Kael, who were centrist liberals, as I demanded above all of filmmakers a progressive political agenda. That can be seen even in my interview with Mel Brooks, whom I accused of making frivolous comedies. “To say there is no message in them is, I think, to be unfair and shortsighted,” Brooks defended himself. Slowly, my hard-edged radicalism softened, as I began attending the New York Film Festival at the end of the 1970s. I interviewed European filmmakers such as R.W. Fassbinder and Bernardo Bertolucci, and their politics, though avowedly Marxist, were never more important to them than the sexual obsessions of their characters. 2

Introduction

I spoke with Eric Rohmer, whose films dealt only with the rarefied French bourgeoisie. Rohmer, in truth, was a political conservative. And yet I liked his films. And where was overt concern with politics in the oddball, humanist world of Scotland’s Bill Forsyth? The baroque expressionist universe of Werner Herzog? Or the samurai tales of Akira Kurosawa? Through the 1980s and 1990s, my conception of a “maverick” filmmaker became far more inclusive. I still admired politically minded filmmakers. But I made room to interview directors who placed on screen their private idiosyncratic universes, sometimes hermetically sealed off from the world at large. I am talking of John Waters and his black-humor gay Baltimore, and Gus Van Sant and his subterranean Portland, Oregon. Frederick Wiseman and Errol Morris made documentaries that were nominally on the left and yet were never ideological. And where politically did I place the anarchist-libertarian novelist Norman Mailer, whom I interviewed on the set of a movie he was directing? Every filmmaker above, political and less so, is male. What of my commitment since the 1970s to feminism? Unfortunately, none of the handful (then) of women directors ventured to the University of Wisconsin in the years I was a graduate student there. Only when I was a film critic in Boston was I finally able to interview contemporary women filmmakers. I started oddly in 1979, with the first interview to be done with Roberta Findlay, the sole woman then directing pornographic features. And I met with Agnieszka Holland from Poland, whose films touched on the political world around her much more than so-called women’s issues. In 1984 and 1983, however, I twice sat down with the avowedly feminist German director, Margarethe von Trotta. Here, I encountered thematic obsessions radically apart from what concerned male directors. For most “maverick” women filmmakers, the personal is what is political, and nothing is more personal than what happens to a woman’s body. This theme is put in a larger context of a dystopian future society in the film of The Handmaid’s Tale, for which I interviewed both the German male director, Volker Schlöndorff, and Margaret Atwood, Canadian author of the feminist novel adapted for the screen. This volume ends with a return to my earliest concerns as a “radical” student interviewer: racial justice, colonialism. On the set in Virginia, I spoke with Charles Burnett, the esteemed African American filmmaker, about his film Nat Turner, a Troublesome Property. The soft-spoken Burnett 3

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admitted his admiration for Turner, mastermind of a murderous rebellion of slaves against their White masters and families: “His decision to do something so positive made the country a better place. Nat Turner was more American than those who denied him.” In 2005, Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad talked to me about the formidable task of making political films within the confines of the Palestinian Territories of Israel. “Now there are about a hundred people who live by producing their own work,” he said proudly, “[including] tough, professional actors who’ll do anything to survive in this field.” The best of luck to them! Finally, when conducting interviews, sometimes two are better than one. May I thank those who participated with me in several of the discussions, all Madisonians at one time: Patrick McGilligan, Maureen Turim, and the late Peter Brunette and Michael Wilmington. Also non-Madisonian Bill Nichols.

4

Howard Alk The Murder of Fred Hampton There are no credits on the important documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton (1971), for those behind the film wanted nothing to distract from their telling of the story of the murdered leader of Chicago’s Black Panther Party. They filmed Hampton in the time before his shooting by police and government agents and finished the film after. The actual credits would number only two, reflecting an almost exact division of labor between producer, codirector, co-cameraman Michael Gray and editor, codirector, cocameraman Howard Alk, the latter the subject of this interview. Alk, who lives in Ottawa, Canada, is a native Chicagoan, a cofounder in the late 1950s of Chicago’s original Second City troupe. Of his earliest films, he is most proud of editing a crude but potent 1959 documentary short called “The Cry of Jazz.” Alk says, “It was made by a bunch of Black cats in Chicago. The film was embarrassingly primitive but it was a film which was prophetic about the Black–White situation.” Alk did second camera on Don’t Look Back (1967), D. A. Pennebaker’s film on young Bob Dylan, and he coedited Dylan’s Eat the Document (1972), a pseudo-documentary. What makes him proud? “The thing that gasses me is that the Panthers took Murder of Fred Hampton to China, where it is showing now.” The interview occurred during Alk’s visit to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Behind one-way silver shades, he looked a bit like a fast-moving rock promoter. Question: How did you and Michael Gray1 meet to make a film about Fred Hampton? Response: I had been in New York after the 1968 [Democratic] convention working on an American Civil Liberty Union’s film answer to [Chicago] Mayor Daley. I was very dissatisfied with that work, with people like John Kenneth Galbraith talking about moral outrage. This guy 5

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Howard Alk editing The Murder of Fred Hampton. Courtesy of Jesse Alk.

named Michael Gray came up and asked me to cut his footage of the convention. He had undergone some sort of political catharsis by being hit on the head while shooting. We agreed we would not make another convention film but a film about people in Chicago to whom that shit had been happening for a long time, and for whom the convention was no news at all. 6

Howard Alk

  The Panther office had opened that week in Chicago. I went in and explained what we were about, and they said, “Sure.” It didn’t strike me as odd that the Panthers were in favor of getting their information out. There was no question of conning them. Our purpose was not to make an “objective evaluation” as the networks would have done. Our object was to let the Black Panther Party be seen. Question: Before your Fred Hampton film, you and Gray made American Revolution II (1969). Response: That’s right. In addition to the Panthers, we met a bunch of Appalachian hillbilly shit-kickers called the Young Patriots. They were trying to make the change from a street gang into some kind of political organization which would serve the people. They were having a hard time but knew of the Panthers. We were shooting both groups simultaneously. The two met, and the film became the story of the Rainbow Coalition of Chicago, which was Appalachian Whites, Puerto Ricans, and Blacks. The Coalition frightened official Chicago enormously. The police were terrified. Question: What happened to your film? Response: American Revolution II did very well critically but very badly theatrically, except in Chicago. I never did recoup the money necessary to make it. It finally got into the hands of some tits-and-ass distributor which had become an artistically viable organization by handling the film Joe (1970). They realized that AR II was a political film, and they put it on the shelf with no way to spring it out. What we finally did was allow bootleg prints so it could be shown.   It was clear that the Black Panther Party was not understood by White America and much of Black America. Al[bert] Grossman, who used to be Dylan’s manager, gave us money. He said of Fred Hampton, “That man’s got to be heard.” In addition, it was commendable courage and commitment on the part of Michael to put [himself] $70,000 in hock in order to make sure the film was completed. Question: Had you the experience of watching Fred Hampton speak in Black neighborhoods? Response: Yes, I had, and it was really terrific. A lot of people seeing the film have the same idea that people had who knew Fred. That is, they love him. They are in the presence of a man who tells the truth. It seems to me that Black audiences have been accurate in determining who tells the truth and who bullshits. I think most people believe 7

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when Hampton talks of “White power for White people” that he is not a racist. But racism is a byproduct of capitalism.   The film centers mostly on Fred as a teacher, leader by example. There is no personal material in the film. He and Mike and I felt it would be irrelevant and distracting to show a thing like, “What is Hampton like when he is not doing his job?” It was because he was doing his job that the state killed him. Fred Hampton was the enemy of the state. He made me an enemy of the state. You can quote me on that.   The material you see for the most part was Fred in public assembly, relating to a mass of people as you would speak from a stage. He didn’t care about the camera, though. He was a serious man, not hung up about a movie being made about him. Question: What was Hampton’s background? Response: Fred came from Maywood, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, where he had been, before moving to the Panther Party, a youth leader of the NAACP. He was very much loved in Maywood, a predominantly White suburb, instrumental in getting people elected responsive to the people. Question: Maywood is the site of the mock trial shown in the movie. Response: The people of Maywood made their courtroom available for the mock trial set up by the Panthers as an instructional event. Those playing “pigs” are community people from Maywood. The guy who suggests a policy of repression and genocide is a councilman who Fred helped elect. Question: Was the mock trial arranged because the film was being made? Response: No. The Panther Party was into a whole series of people’s courts. There was [also] a people’s inquiry after Fred was killed as a public event. The Panthers just called up and said, “Hey, did you hear about the mock trial?” They would tell us when something important was happening. One time they called me and said, “The pigs are coming down to our office tonight. Are you up to standing with us?” The day of the murder they called Mike and said, “Get over here and shoot every foot of the apartment.” That footage was seen by the grand jury. Question: Have you had people accusing you of being manipulative in your documentary in building up a case that Hampton was murdered? Response: Nobody has accused me of that to my face. Some reviewers have hinted that we may have been involved in special pleading, although I think that the case is very tight that is made, inescapable. Now you 8

Howard Alk

may approve if you are so inclined of [Cook County state’s attorney Edward] Hanrahan’s actions.2 But I don’t think you can take refuge in the position that the murders [of Hampton and Panther member Mark Clark] were a defensive act on the part of poor attacked policemen. Question: In the film you allow the law officials to present their own cases. Response: It’s a question of giving people a fair shake. Everything Hanrahan says in the film is in chronologically correct order. I don’t fuck with him in filmic terms. When he begins to crumple and bullshit and backtrack, it happened that sequence. I’m not that interested in getting people to scream “Right On!” and go crazy. I’m not even that interested in Hanrahan. I’m interested in the reasons that Fred was murdered, and in changing a system not responsive to the needs of the people. Question: Don’t you think that many people who voted for Hanrahan for state’s attorney in the 1972 Democratic primary knew he was a murderer and yet voted for him anyway? And how do you think he will do in the upcoming general election? Response: It’s a very discouraging situation. Sure, there were a lot of people who thought Fred caught what was coming to him. There were even Black wards which went strongly for Hanrahan. Surveys were taken to find out why, and people said, “Well, we heard the name.” He’s going to be reelected.3 Question: Why do you think the Panthers didn’t retaliate against Hanrahan? Response: The heat that would have come down on the Black community would have been unspeakable. The Panthers have made it clear that they are oxen on whose backs the people can rise if they choose. Their concept of the vanguard is to offer themselves, let the shit come down on them. It’s an outrageously courageous position. Question: For your film, did you have trouble securing television documentary footage of the events surrounding the murder? Response: A great deal of trouble, a great deal of money, a great deal of hassle. First of all, footage [we needed] was missing. Some of it had been subpoenaed by Hanrahan the week of the murder. It was an interesting subpoena because it was partly for footage yet to be shot, an unheard-of kind of a subpoena. In another case of footage which mysteriously disappeared, a copy had been sent to Huntley–Brinkley [at NBC]. Some of the missing footage had been on TV. CBS had run six minutes of the official re-enactment of the shooting by the police 9

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on national TV. Therefore it had to be made available for sale. We had to go through the process of finding it, confronting them with its existence.   Footage was inordinately expensive, somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000 to the networks. I don’t know how that compared to their normal stock footage sales prices. I only know if you are going to make this kind of film, you have to, somehow, beat the problem of getting “bread.” Question: How do you respond to someone who complains that The Murder of Fred Hampton is technically and aesthetically a faulty movie? Response: Mike and I didn’t really think if it was going to look pretty or not. In some cases, we were shooting too fast. In the office scene, where we were waiting for the cops to come and raid the place, there was twentyfive minutes notice. It was dark. There were no lights. That’s Plus X film pushed to 800. For technical errors, the film can be faulted totally. There is sloppy camerawork, all kinds of sloppy shit, and bad recording. Bad Art. A bad film if you want to discuss film aesthetics. But it makes no pretense of being a “movie.” It’s a political document, a sharing of material. Yet I think you get a sense of Fred, the man. And I think the case against the State is tight. You can’t make a case of murder as an absolute. But you can make an absolute case for perjury. And the implication of murder is as close as it could be gotten by using the film media. Question: Have you tried to sell The Murder of Fred Hampton to distributors? Response: The film was seen by an enormous number of distributors. The responses ranged from “We couldn’t possibly handle this film because those [customers] will tear up the seats in the theaters” to “Documentaries don’t make money.” Well, there are documentaries that have made money: The Sky Above, the Mud Below [1961], Mondo Cane [1962], the [Jacques] Cousteau-type films. Maybe documentaries such as mine don’t make money. It may be a total error on our part, given the nature of the system, given the fact that people are made acutely uncomfortable by this kind of film, to think that such films will ever be distributed to the mass of people. Question: What kind of film would you ideally want to do?4 Response: The film I would most like to make at the moment is one that it is not my vision imposed on the people at the other end of the camera but coming from them. I would like to go around the country present10

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ing people with the proposition, “OK, we’re making a movie. It’s cool. You can do whatever you want because this is only a movie. But assume you had the power to run the community, what would you do? Let’s play a little game called ‘Running It.’” Question: There’s a scene in The Murder of Fred Hampton which maybe hints at the kind of vision you would like to show in your movie: the breakfast program for children offered by the Panther Party. Response: Mike shot the breakfast program, and that’s the way the breakfast programs were! All the horseshit suspicion in the media that the Panthers were feeding those children’s minds with “off-the-piggery” wasn’t true. The point was to feed people who needed to be fed. Some people were willing to dedicate themselves to serving the people. Fred Hampton was a man who was serving the people. In Chicago, since Fred’s murder there are more Panther programs than ever before, four or five times more medical centers, ten times more breakfast programs. Question: What can we learn from the lesson of Fred Hampton and the Panthers? Response: White people are suffering from a lack of models. Black people had Malcolm [X] and Fred. They have Huey [Newton]. Models of free men, cats who stand in free space and say to their community constituency, “We’re here. If you’re up to it, step in.” To the real American youth out there (as opposed to the wilted flower children, the underground newspaper bull-shitters, the “counter culturalists”), people like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin are disgusting. And to real revolutionists, people like that are a disgrace. For Abbie Hoffman to talk about “Revolution for the hell of it” is an appalling goddamned thing, as Fred Hampton told him.

Notes This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Take One, May 1973. 1. Michael Gray (1935–2013) moved to Los Angeles, where he cowrote the skillful screenplay for The China Syndrome (1979), directed Wavelength (1983), a science fiction film, and was a producer for the TV series Starman and Star Trek: The Next Generation. 2. Under Hanrahan’s orders, fourteen Chicago police staged a December 4, 1969, raid on the West Side home of Fred Hampton, ending in Hampton’s death. 11

MAVERICKS 3. Actually, Hanrahan (1921–2009) was defeated. According to Wikipedia: “The combined votes of Republicans and African American Democrats sufficed to elect his Republican opponent in the general election.” 4. Howard Alk (1930–1982) would direct Janis (1974), a documentary about Janis Joplin, edit Hard Rain (1976), a TV movie about a Bob Dylan musical tour, and shoot and edit Dylan’s feature Renaldo and Clara (1978). He died at fifty-two of a heroin overdose in Dylan’s Santa Monica studio, perhaps a suicide.

12

Ousmane Sembène Interview by Gerald Peary and Patrick McGilligan Senegal’s Ousmane Sembène is an evocative conversationalist, a committed political activist, and Africa’s most important filmmaker, based on his first five films.1 He has an international reputation, and his volatile works have often been banned in Africa, typically through pressure of the French bureaucracy, which vigilantly watches over its former colonies. Only Sembène’s second feature, the much-celebrated Mandabi (1968), has been widely distributed in Africa outside of Senegal. Sembène was born in the rural southern region of his country, where Emitai (1971), his latest film, takes place. Emitai’s story of unwilling African natives being recruited by the French colonialist establishment parallels his own life: he fought in the French army during World War II as a forced enlistee. He remained afterward for a time in France, employed as a dockworker in Marseilles, and became a union organizer while training to be a writer. Sembène has published five acclaimed novels and a collection of short stories. His most famous novel, God’s Bits of Wood (1960), documents in semi-fictional form the historic Dakar–Niger railroad strike of 1947. His last novel, Le Mandat (1966), was the basis for Mandabi, about a simple, uneducated man in the city who is reduced to hopelessness in his circular confrontations with government bureaucracy. The filmmaker toured the United States in the fall of 1972 in order to raise funds for his next film project. He stopped in Madison, Wisconsin, for a day, showed Emitai at the university, and was interviewed about his life and career. An adept translator put Sembène’s answers in French into articulate English. Question: You were a highly successful novelist. Why did you make the switch to filmmaking? 13

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Ousmane Sembène directing an actress.

Response: I’ve just finished another book but I feel it is of limited importance. First, 80 percent of Africans are illiterate. Only 20 percent of the population can possibly read it. But further, my books indispose the [African] bourgeoisie, so I am hardly read at home.   My movies have more followers than the political parties and the Catholic and Moslem religions combined. Every night I can fill up a movie theater. The people will come whether they share my ideas or not. I tell you, in Africa, especially in Senegal, even a blind person will go to the cinema and pay for an extra seat to pay a young person to explain the film to him.   Personally, I prefer to read because I learned from reading. But I think the cinema is culturally more important, and for us in Africa it is an absolute necessity. There is one thing you can’t take away from the African masses and that is having seen something. Question: But are the films by native Black Africans being watched at home? Response: In West Africa, distribution remains in the hands of two French companies that have been there since colonial times. Because of the active push of our native filmmakers, such as our group in Senegal, they are forced to distribute our films, though they do so very slowly. 14

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Of the twenty movies we have made in Senegal, five have been distributed. It’s a continuous fight, for we don’t think we can resolve the problems of cinema independent of the other problems of African society.   Neocolonialism is passed on culturally through the cinema. And that’s why African cinema is being controlled from Paris, London, Lisbon, Rome, and even America. And that’s why we see almost exclusively the worst French, American, and Italian films. Cinema from the beginning has worked to destroy the native African culture. A lot of films have been made about Africa but they are stories of European and American invaders with Africa serving as décor. Instead of being taught our ancestry, all we know is Tarzan. Many of us perceive Africa with a certain alienation learned from the cinema. Movies have infused a European way of walking, a European style of doing. Even African gangsters are inspired by the cinema.   African art has continued, even as the black bourgeoisie has aped American and European models. True art remains in the villages and rural communities, preserved in the ceremony and religion. It is from believing in this communal art that we can be saved. Question: What are the particular circumstances of making films in Senegal? Response: We produce films in a country where there is only one party, that of [President] Senghor. If you are not within the party, you are against it. Thus we have lots of problems, and they will continue while Senghor is in control.2 For instance, his government just vetoed the distribution of the film of a young director, the story of a Black American who discovers Senegal.   We are approximately twenty filmmakers in Senegal. Last year we made four long films produced through our own means. Financing is our most complex problem. You can find a very small group of people who have money which they might lend you in exchange for participating in the filming. Perhaps you can locate a friend who has credit at a bank. Emitai was shot on money I received on a commission from an American church. We do not refuse any money, even from a church.   We began by making our films on 16mm, much more economical. But the distributors would refuse to project the films in the cities because of the 16mm, so we had to adapt to their game. Our films are shot on 35mm for the city theaters, then presented in 16mm for the rural areas where there is no 35mm. 15

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 Emitai has been banned everywhere in Africa except in Senegal, where it was allowed only after a year of protests. We tried to show Emitai in Guadeloupe, but the ambassador from France interceded. The film had one night of exhibition in Upper Volta3 but never again. When I was invited by the government and students of the Ivory Coast, the French ambassador went to the head of the government. I was told that it wasn’t an “opportune time” to show this film. They were all very polite, so I didn’t say anything. I took my film and left. Question: Has Emitai ever been screened in France? Response: Every time I want to show the film, the date falls on a “day of mourning for de Gaulle.” De Gaulle dies every day for my film. Question: Can we go back to your second feature, Mandabi. Who were the actors? Response: They weren’t professionals. The old man who plays the main role [Makuredia Guey], we found working near the airport. He had never acted before. I had a team of colleagues and together we looked around the city and country for actors. We didn’t pay a lot but we did pay, so it was always difficult to choose. There was also the influence of my parents, my friends, and even the mistresses of my friends, and we had to struggle against all that. You laugh, but I assure you it was very difficult. Once the police called and this fellow arrived who was their representative. He came to tell us he had a friend who wanted his mistress in the film. I was forced to accept or else it would have cost me. It is concessions like this one that make work difficult.   We rehearsed for one month in a room very much like this lecture hall. Mandabi was the first film completely in the [Wolof] Senegalese language, and I wanted the actors to speak the language accurately. There was no text, so the actors had to know what they were going to say and say it at the right moment. I composed the music for Mandabi, and tried to make it of maximum importance. After the film was presented in Dakar, people sang the theme song for a while. But the song was “vetoed” from the radio, which belongs to the government.   We in Senegal are looking for music that is particularly suited for our type of film. I think here is where African cinema still suffers certain difficulties. We are undergoing Afro-American music and Cuban music. I’m not saying that’s bad, but I prefer that we would be able to create an African music. Question: Are you satisfied with your conclusion to Mandabi? 16

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Response: I don’t think I really have to like the ending. The ending is linked to the evolution of Senegalese society; thus, it is ambiguous. As the postman says [in the film], either we will have to bring about certain changes or we will remain corrupt. I don’t know. Do you like the ending? Question: Some would say it is the duty of the political artist to go beyond a picture of corruption and to present a vision of the future, what could be. Response: The role of the artist is to feel the heartbeat of society. But the power to decide escapes every artist. I live in a capitalist society, and I can’t go any further than the people. Those for change are only a handful, a minority, and we don’t have that Don Quixote attitude that we can change society. One work cannot instigate change. I don’t think that in history there has been a single revolutionary work that has brought the people to create a revolution. It’s not after having read Marx or Lenin that you go out and make a revolution. It’s not after reading Marcuse in America. All that an artist can do is bring the people to the point of having an idea in their heads that they share, and that helps. People have killed and died for an idea.   I have no belief that, after people saw Mandabi, they would go out and make a revolution. But people liked the film and talked about it. People discussed Mandabi in the post office or the market and decided they were not going to pay out their money like the person in the movie. They reported those trying to victimize them, which led to many arrests. But when they denounced the crooks, they would say it was the government which was corrupt. And they would say they were going to change the country. Question: Mandabi is a city film. Why did you address Emitai particularly to the peasantry? Response: In African countries, the peasants are even more exploited than the workers. They see that the workers are favored and earn their pittance each month. Therefore, the element of discontent is much more advanced among the peasants than the workers. This fact doesn’t give the peasantry the conscience of revolutionaries, but it can lead to movements of revolt with positive results. There are peasants involved in commercial activities who are beginning to understand economic exchange. To tear apart this discontent, Senghor distributed three billion francs to the peasants. 17

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Question: What is the historical background of Emitai? Response: I came myself from this rural region, and these true events of the Diola people inspired me. During the last World War, those of my age, eighteen, were forced to join the French army. Without knowing why, we were hired for the liberation of Europe. Then when we returned home, the colonialists began to kill us, whether we were in Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Algeria, or Madagascar. Those of us who had returned from the French involvement in Vietnam in 1946 came back to struggle against the French. Question: Aren’t the women the true heroes of Emitai, as they were also in your revolutionary novel, God’s Bits of Wood? Response: As Emitai shows, when the French wanted our rice, the women refused but the men accepted the orders. Women have played a very important part in our history. They have been guardians of our traditions and culture even when certain of the men were alienated during the colonial period. The little that we do know of our history we owe to our women, our grandmothers. In certain African countries it is the women who control the market economy. There are villages where all authority rests with women. And whether African men like it or not, they can’t do anything without the women’s consent, whether it’s marriage, divorce, or baptism.4 Question: What were the circumstances of filming Emitai? Response: The Diolas are a small minority with a native language about to disappear. For two years, I learned and practiced it. Then I set out to make contact with the chief of the Sacred Forest. I needed to bring a gift offering. He preferred alcohol, but I myself drank it along the way. When I arrived and was hungry, the chief ate without inviting me. Afterward, he said, “You know well to speak to a king you have to bring something.” The chief is not chief by birth, incidentally, but initiated after receiving an education and training. There have been moments when the Diolas elected leaders who then left in the middle of the night.   The people in the movie are people from the village. I had a limited time to tell my story, so I couldn’t permit them to do only what they wanted. We would rehearse beginning fifteen minutes before the filming, but all the movements were free. I bought red bonnets for the young people to wear as soldiers. They refused at first because such bonnets are reserved for the chief. 18

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Question: Did you consciously move from the individual in Mandabi to the collective hero of Emitai? Response: I’m not the one evolving. It’s the subject which imposes the movement. This story happened to be a collective story. I wanted to show action of a well-disciplined ethnic group in which everyone saw himself as an integral part of the whole. Question: Have the Diola people seen Emitai? Response: Before premiering the film for the Senegalese government, I went to the village to project it. I remained three nights. All the villagers from the whole area came and, because they have no cinema, their reaction was that of children looking in the mirror for the first time. After the first showing, the old men withdrew into the Sacred Forest to discuss the film. When I wanted to leave, they said, “Wait until tomorrow,” then returned to the forest. They came back the second evening [for a second screening]. The third evening, there was a debate. The old men were happy to hear that there was a beautiful language for them, but they weren’t happy with the presentation of the gods. The gods still were sacred and helped the old men maintain authority.   The young people accused the old of cowardice for not resisting [the French colonialists] at the end of the war. The women agreed, but were very proud of their own role. Question: And the reaction in the cities? Response: Many asked why I wanted to make a film about the Diolas. You have to know that the majority of maids in Senegal are Diolas to give you an idea of the superiority felt by others in relation to them. The African bourgeoisie have two or three maids. It isn’t very expensive. To see Emitai, the maids left the children. They invited each other from neighborhood to neighborhood to see the film. Finally, the majority Wolofs went to see the film and realized that the history of Senegal and the resistance was not just the history of Wolofs. The Diolas are part of Senegal, and so are other ethnic groups. And when the Senegalese government finally decreed that they were going to teach Wolof, they were in a hurry to add Diola. I don’t know if it was because of the film, but that is what happened. Question: Even if you are modest in believing so, your films are influential political instruments in Senegal. Could films made in the USA have the same effect in this country? 19

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Response: Alone, no. With the people, yes. You can put all the revolutionary work on the television, but if you don’t go down into the streets, nothing will change. That is my opinion.

Notes This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Film Quarterly 36, no. 3 (Spring 1973). 1. Sembène (1923–2007) would make eleven films in all. The last was Moolaadé in 2004. 2. Senghor (1906–2001) remained president until 1980. 3. Now Burkina Faso. 4. Sembène often dealt in his films with issues of women’s rights. Black Girl (1966), his first work, is about an African girl trapped in slavery by a French family who has brought her to their country to be a nanny. His final film, Moolaadé, is an attack on the practice in some African countries of genital mutilation.

20

An Interview with Marcel Ophuls Interview by Gerald Peary and Maureen Turim Marcel Ophuls made one of the greatest and most ambitious of all documentaries, The Sorrow and The Pity (1969), his 251-minute revisionist telling of what happened in France during the German Occupation and with the establishment of the Vichy government. No, not everyone was a noble member of the French Underground. Many French, Ophuls insisted, were collaborators, including such beloved cultural icons as singer Maurice Chevalier and actress Danielle Darrieux. What could Ophuls do afterward even to begin to match The Sorrow and the Pity for potency and political relevance? He continued with backto-back ambitious documentaries: America Revisited (1971), a series of interviews with representative Americans about current concerns such as racism and the Vietnam War, and A Sense of Loss (1972), interviews with both Catholics and Protestants about the ongoing troubles in Northern Ireland. A Sense of Loss quickly found distribution and an audience. Not so for America Revisited, which prompted Ophuls to cross the United States personally showing it on campuses. When the filmmaker embarked at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, we interviewed him—and sometimes grilled him—about his whole career. Especially in discussing The Sorrow and the Pity, should we have been more respectful of Ophuls’s accomplishments? We demanded that his interviews be less politically balanced and that he assume a more activist way of interrogation. But Ophuls is a precursor to the strategies of Shoah in letting anyone, even Nazis, get their say before the camera. Still, as they speak freely, those with nefarious secrets will implicate themselves.

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Question: Could you tell us your background and earlier filmmaking? Response: There’s a lot of background but there aren’t many films. I’m a second-generation filmmaker, following after my father, Max Ophuls, the motion picture director who died in 1957. He was a German Jew, and I was born in Germany [in 1927]. We left there when I was five in 1933 to settle in France. And so I became a French citizen. I went to school there and saw the fall of France as a twelve-year-old. We came in exile to this country and, because of my father’s business, settled on the West Coast. I went to Hollywood High, later to college, and I was a GI in Japan.   I went back to France and got into film as an assistant director. Later, François Truffaut, who was one of my friends in Paris, helped me to make my first [short] as a director, a sketch in a film called Love at Twenty [1962]. Truffaut did a French sketch, and I did an autobiographical German sketch. Afterward, I met Jeanne Moreau, who bankrolled me to buy movie rights to an American paperback novel.1 I collaborated on the screenplay, then made the movie, Banana Peel, with Moreau, which was a nostalgic comedy attempting to recapture the classic, prewar Hollywood atmosphere. After that, I made a couple of films I don’t like to talk about.2 Question: What a leap to The Sorrow and the Pity, your first theatrical documentary. There is so much to praise about this film. But watching it, we couldn’t help but be bothered because the women are in such a subordinate position. Why is that? Response: This question comes up at every bull session, every time the picture comes up [for discussion] in a group, especially in your country. I believe the quota system is sort of dangerous, seeing films in terms of head count. Yet if you looked at [A Sense of Loss], you would find that this problem with the number and role of women does not exist. Women are a very important part of the political and social activities of the Irish crisis. France was, and is, an extremely bourgeois country dominated by traditional Catholic bourgeois values.   Women resistance leaders are treated today as sort of Joan of Arc figures at official ceremonies. They transport the flowers and the flag to the sounds of trumpet calls. Maybe it is because of this sexist representation that I intuitively stayed clear of their particular fate. Also because most of these women are now Gaullists. Maybe I am just rationalizing. 22

An Interview with Marcel Ophuls

Marcel Ophuls.

  My basic belief about documentary film direction is that you must not upset the scene you are filming, and especially not by projecting your own ideas, whether they be sexist, democratic, or whatever. A good example of this belief in action is this evening sequence in The Sorrow and the Pity spent with the Grave brothers. In the movie you see only men sitting at the table drinking wine. Madame Grave comes in every once in a while and pours a little more wine. Now I spent several days there and happen to know that Madame Grave is a very important figure in the household. And during the time of the Resistance, she was also a very important figure. Yet for the whole evening of filming, she stayed geographically between the kitchen and the living room. For the whole evening she listened in on everything that was said. And every once in a while she interjected remarks, and these were important and with good purpose. Question: It seems imperative that we hear with a full voice the story of this woman who was in the Underground. Shouldn’t you have made that happen? Response: Something very significant occurred which I think holds the answer to our question. One of the producers of the film, a political 23

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journalist named André Harris, became very uncomfortable because he believes in sexual equality, that every member of the family should contribute. So he said at one point, “Madame, why don’t you join us? Come sit around the table, participate in the discussion.” Here is an example of what a documentary maker should not do. The men starting shifting their feet. And she didn’t want to sit down. Now all of us were uncomfortable. I kept shoving my elbow in his ribs, yet Harris still insisted. Finally, out of courtesy and politeness, Madame sat down. We shot two or three more reels and I found in the editing room that I couldn’t use a single sentence. André Harris, who should have known better, had blown it. Question: It often feels that you are obsessed with balancing one side to another, being generous to everybody, the Truffaut school versus Godard. Why shouldn’t a documentarian take sides? Response: I think there is an awful amount of misunderstanding in your question. I always accept the challenge to take sides. You ask me whether I am on the Godard side or the Truffaut side. I’m on the Truffaut side, and there you are right. I do believe in pluralism. And if you want to call that “shitty liberalism,” it doesn’t matter. My politics are in complete accordance with those views. You are free to put me in league with the type of TV journalist who gets one man representing one side and one the other and thus hides behind both of them. I don’t believe that I am at all in that camp. I think the films I have been making have points of view which annoy a great number of people, so much that I am accused of manipulation.   I do get the facts from both sides. I can accept this attack because it is closer to the truth. I do use confrontation of different points of view by means of irony, contrast to put across my point of view. This may be a very bourgeois way of expression, but this form of film is the only kind which would interest me in the nonfiction field. To me, agitprop is not creative. I can’t do anything with it. It would bore me. Question: Someone like Godard could conceivably attack The Sorrow and the Pity by labeling it as a “Hollywood film.” How would you react to such a label? Response: I don’t know what Godard thinks of the film. I don’t know if he dislikes it as much as I dislike his films. But if someone called The Sorrow and the Pity a Hollywood film, would I be insulted? No, I think there is a great deal of truth in that statement. It’s a work by someone 24

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who’s trying to tell a story with a beginning, middle, and an end by means of sex, music, cutting, and manipulation. I’ve seen a great many American movies in my life. I’m the son of a moviemaker. Perhaps I have very classical taste. Different from most documentarians, I believe in trying to put things across through entertainment.   Actually, I don’t think I’ve changed that much since my comedy film, Banana Peel. I think I have a comedy director’s sentiment. Most of the directors I like are comedy directors like Lubitsch. There are a great many laughs in The Sorrow and the Pity, though laughter was not my main priority in the cutting room. Question: Could you talk a little about your father, Max Ophuls, who directed such masterpieces of romance as Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), La Ronde (1950), and The Earrings of Madame de (1953). Response: I don’t think he was a romantic. I don’t think he was nostalgic. I think he had an awful lot of pertinent comments to make about society and about the condition of women in bourgeois society. And these were not apolitical [films] and he was not an aesthete. He was a very tough guy indeed. Anyone who met him in private life can confirm this. He had very tough ideas about the world. I’ll grant you, however, that he did take pleasure in luxury and elegance and in manners. I sort of sympathize with him. Question: The Sorrow and the Pity was attacked from both the left and right more than almost any recent film . . . Response: May I interject, just a matter of personal vanity, that it also received a great deal of praise on both sides. Question: Granted. But considering the various criticisms of your approach, did you alter your methods in making A Sense of Loss? Response: No, nothing. Let me cite my father. He said, “Work for yourself, for what makes you laugh, weep, think, reflect, and then hope there is a bridge to what people perceive.” Question: What is the most immediate difference in the perspective of The Sorrow and the Pity and A Sense of Loss? Response: The Sorrow and the Pity benefits from the reflections and analyses of individuals confronting their experiences of years ago. But persons seeking this same intellectual approach will find it missing from A Sense of Loss [which] is not a politically reflective film. Most of the talk about politics in Ireland today is rhetorical, clichéd, dull, and 25

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repetitive, and so those people wound up on the cutting room floor. What I found interesting were other things, what loss of life meant individually. I showed real maiming, real suffering, and real death. Question: Is it true that your cameramen were disguised as a TV crew from Sweden? Response: They weren’t disguised. They were a TV crew. And they weren’t from Sweden but from Switzerland, which had a wonderful advantage for me. When trying to get clearance with the police or with the army, I had working with me people who seemed so fantastically neutral. [Though] A Sense of Loss was 95 percent a private American production, they were technically coproducers of the film for camouflage. No, not camouflage, but to make it easier for necessary clearance.   I had a conversation with Bernadette Devlin3 on this topic. She was always getting young, committed filmmakers, photographers, journalists [who] never got clearance with the police. So, when the shit hit the fan, all they could photograph were people’s backs .  .  . jumping people somewhere and maybe one or two authentic noises. Question: What are your personal views on Irish politics after the experience of filming A Sense of Loss? Response: My answer has to do with my general politics, which are left-wing social democratic. This means that when the crunch comes, I’m more interested in the luxury of individual freedom, which I realize is a luxury of privileged people, than I am in the far distant goal of complete social justice. In Ireland, violence is dividing the working classes. Most of the suffering occurs in the working-class neighborhoods in Belfast and Derry, and it is these people who get it in the necks. And so I believe that violence there, because it is so nationalistic and sectarian in nature, cannot possibly be good. I’m in favor of negotiation. I’m also very much in favor of the British army staying there for the time being. I think if it leaves, there will be a bloodbath, and not a useful bloodbath at all. Question: Why are you taking America Revisited around America?4 Response: I’m hoping to find an audience for it, and perhaps interest an American distributor. There is a technical problem releasing this film in the United States with the music and movie rights. Because of all that old Crosby, Sinatra, and Glenn Miller stuff, plus scenes from the Marx Brothers and Rebel Without a Cause [1955], the commercial rights for all that material would probably cost $50,000. A distributor would have to think about whether he would get a return on the money. 26

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Question: Did you have a particular thesis while shooting the film? Response: The answer is “No.” That doesn’t mean that I didn’t have a basic structure to hang my coat on. In this particular case, it was the business of coming back to America and looking up my family and old friends. My films are post-structured. That’s why they are such edited works. That’s where my point of view and creativity come in. Before that, I’m in a much more passive position. Question: How can you remain so utterly calm when interviewing, especially when those to whom you talk say such outrageous things? Response: Whatever anger I feel is pushed into the background by my professional reaction telling me, “Well, I got it.” I laugh on the inside thinking, “That’s going in the film.” Even when interviewing Lester Maddox5 in America Revisited, I didn’t get mad at him because I knew I had him. When I get mad, it’s usually when I fight with my wife or producer, and then I start to scream and throw tantrums. But not with the camera. There’s no reason. In a very significant way, I’m the stronger one in these situations. Question: What is your responsibility in informing people you interview how you might use their words? Response: I always tell the people that the average interview [is used] at a ratio of fifteen to one. That’s the truth, although I sometimes will use the whole interview. But the average is fifteen to one. I also warn people that their interviews will be juxtaposed with opinions in conflict with their own, and that I will be the person deciding this. There is no collective democracy here. Question: America Revisited concludes with crosscutting from a Village Voice left-liberal cocktail party, which you attend, to an interview with a Black mother in a lower-class housing project. Could you describe your strategy behind the sequence? Response: I tried to show the terribly screwed-up conversation of the professional liberals, with whom I belong. If I lived in Manhattan, I’d be in with those people. They are caught in a contradiction which I understand. All their lives they have been in favor of integration, of wanting to be on the good, right side of things. Suddenly, when confronted with sending their own children into the front lines, their priorities change. I find this very natural and understandable, nothing to snicker at.   But I do put that scene in contrast with the Black woman who says, “I want my children to be in an integrated school because if they aren’t, 27

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then they will grow up and be prejudiced.” I think this is a beautiful sentiment. I ended the movie with her quotation, “Because otherwise they will be prejudiced.” Question: From making America Revisited, what do you see as the near future of the United States? Response: I’m not a political analyst, historian, or sociologist. I can only gather impressions and juxtapose them to give some sort of an illusion of totality, perhaps. Keeping that in mind, I will say that I am pessimistic because I feel that the period of activist confrontation may have come to an end for a while. The people in power are extremely clever about keeping it down.

Notes This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Velvet Light Trap, no. 9 (Summer 1973). 1. Charles Williams, Nothing in Her Way (New York: Gold Medal, 1953). 2. Fire at Will (1965) with Eddie Constantine is the only listed film. 3. A civil rights activist in Northern Ireland who served in Parliament from 1969 to 1974. 4. Since America Revisited and A Sense of Loss, Marcel Ophuls (1927–) has made five feature documentaries. Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988) won an Academy Award. His last film is Un Voyageur (2012), a selfportrait. 5. Lester Maddox (1915–2003) was a militant segregationist who was elected governor of Georgia.

28

Bernardo Bertolucci and 1900 The great battle of 1900 ended in cease-fire and compromise. Previously, its director, Bernardo Bertolucci, had clashed with his producer, Alberto Grimaldi, and refused to allow more than a trim for his five-and-a-halfhour epic of Italian history from 1900 to 1946. However, 1900 weighed in at a mere four hours and seven minutes for the 1977 New York Film Festival; and Bertolucci, in Manhattan for the American debut, claimed to like the film better this way. “Instead of a castration, I arrived at an artistic work. What we have now is the film I want,” the English-speaking Italian director explained, when interviewed. What was deleted? “My friends in Italy couldn’t even tell me. I didn’t remove any sequences. I cut short pieces of film. The difference is only in the rhythm. The meaning, the strength, is absolutely the same.” An advantage of the “short” 1900 is that it will be exhibited in the United States. Paramount Pictures had been set to turn their investment in the $8-million film into a tax write-off rather than challenge the five-hour-plus director’s cut. The studio had contracted originally for a three-hour-andfifteen-minute picture. But after Bertolucci applied his scissors, Paramount came back into the film. “I read in the newspaper that Paramount is releasing the movie,” he said, bemused. “Nobody told me. Strange.”1 Paramount’s financial destiny with 1900 lies with American audience interest in the sexy, bed-hopping stars. Dominique Sanda, once slated for Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris in the Maria Schneider role, has sex with Robert De Niro in the film’s most scandalous sequence. But De Niro is equally devoted to European superstar, Gérard Depardieu. They tumble in the hay and kiss in one scene, and are mutually masturbated in another. Different from Brando’s sheltered loins in Last Tango, celebrity penises abound in 1900. “I didn’t want to cut [shots of] the two men naked,” Bertolucci said. “I was so attacked by feminist groups because Marlon wasn’t naked.” He now agrees with those who complained that only Schneider’s bare body was revealed in Last Tango. “It’s true. There is a sexist connection. You always see the female, but not the male.” 29

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Bernardo Bertolucci.

1900’s sexual field day continues on. Donald Sutherland, with greasy black hair and feral eyes, rapes a young boy, and then murders him in a fascist orgiastic frenzy. And even stately Burt Lancaster gets into the act, forcing a pubescent girl to stick her tiny hand into his unzipped pants to force an erection. Lancaster, sublime as the aging and impotent padrone, spent twenty shooting days on 1900 without pay. Bertolucci recalled with gratitude that “Lancaster told me, ‘I’m so expensive, you couldn’t possibly afford me. I’ll do it for nothing, just to see how you work.’” 30

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Paramount will be trying for an “R” rating instead of an “X” so that 1900 can play wider. But what about, in conservative America, 1900’s blatantly radical politics? Bertolucci is a proud member of the Italian CP, a Eurocommunist. 1900 is a Marxist homage to the Italian peasantry overthrowing the yokes of their landlord masters at the turn of the twentieth century. The last section of 1900, in which the farm workers celebrate the defeat of Fascism, is a dance to life under a red flag. Bertolucci’s Communism upset a number of film critics gathered to talk to him after the New York Film Festival press screening. “How do you expect us to want Communism when your partisans are such singularly unattractive persons?” queried a red-baiting reviewer. “How would you feel if the peasants really took over?” demanded a cynical liberal critic. Bertolucci ignored the first question and answered the second. “I think we will be in a better world the day it happens,” he said. But he asked the gathered not to reduce 1900 only to politics. “The film is a living epic poem, a saga, and not just a political manifesto.” As proof, he pointed to the weird and subjective conclusion, where De Niro and Depardieu, grown suddenly aged, leap on each other’s backs and flail out like obscene escapees from Waiting for Godot. Bertolucci doing a Q&A was polite, humble, and serious. Our hotel talk was only half an hour later, and the Bertolucci I met was an utterly different person—voluble, so, so loose, fielding my questions with a jovial smile, and grabbing the house phone again and again to converse with well-wishers. Sergio Leone and Francis Ford Coppola were two of the many phone interrupters. Incidentally, the filmmaker is a prosperouslooking fellow in his mid-thirties, a comfortable Communist who might make an affable tennis doubles partner. We discussed the conclusion of 1900 again, which is, to me, surprisingly soft and sentimental. “Maybe the reality in 1946 was sentimental,” Bertolucci explained. “The bosses in Italy weren’t killed. No padrones were put on trial. The partisans made the peasants give their arms back. It’s the contrary of a didactic epilogue. I wanted to end as a fairy story. It’s very funny. I can’t even explain the poetic license.” For my dissatisfaction with the whimsical finale, the filmmaker could only shrug. “I must confess that the end of a movie is an adventure for me. I always have trouble. I’m so happy shooting that the idea to finish makes me sad.” Could such an abstruse sequence appeal to a popular audience? “In Italy, 1900 is the most successful movie in our entire history. It made $10 million. Only Jaws did 31

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better. So the peasants weren’t upset.” And Last Tango? “It had a strange life in Italy. It was seized, banned, and the negative was condemned to be burned,” he explained gravely, then giggled. “Luckily, we had lots of negatives.” The only XXX film that has interested him is Deep Throat. “I think it’s so obsessive. I don’t like the others. They have no movement, they aren’t made by good directors. It would be worth it to make a good pornographic movie.” Would he comment on Norman Mailer’s claim that Last Tango cheated because actual penetration never occurred on screen? “Do you mean maybe I was repressed? Sometimes it’s better to indicate than to show. In 1900, you see penetration in the look on Dominique Sanda’s face.” Then quietly, he refuted Mailer’s allegation. “The first time they fucked in the empty apartment,” Bertolucci weighed his words, “they fucked.”2 Why does Bertolucci cast famous stars like Brando, and now those in 1900? “I wanted to make a monument to contradiction. I wanted to make a popular movie, a dialectic movie, between Hollywood actors and peasants, prose and poetry, money and red flags. My first idea was to have Americans play the landowners. Burt Lancaster, Robert De Niro. Then I wanted a Russian to play the [main] peasant. Gérard Depardieu at least looks like a Russian. For me, Sterling Hayden can be a partisan peasant. I’m not a purist.” Hayden, Sutherland, Brando, Lancaster are all left-of-center actors, so must Bertolucci’s cast share something of his politics? “I don’t think it’s important. It might be more interesting to have a non-leftist portray a leftist because then I would try to catch the left feeling which is inside everybody. I like to go against the ideas actors have of themselves and the scripts, to be dialectic and constructive instead of being destructive.” I bring up another reservation I have about the filmmaker’s new work. Why is 1900 so metaphoric, so bereft of actual Italian history? “It’s true,” Bertolucci acknowledged, “that I didn’t want to make an historical document. Some historians have been angry, ‘pissed off.’ But there is a lot of information, about how the wind blows, about how peasants live. You missed it. You are asking for another movie.” Finally, my toughest questions. Why does Bertolucci make films that deal bravely with bisexuality and yet that equate homosexuality and fascism? Why does he never affirm an adult gay relationship? In answer, Bertolucci acknowledges a bias. “I’ve been in Freudian analysis for eight years and I think ‘adult’ homosexuality is an impossible contradiction. It can’t 32

Bernardo Bertolucci and 1900

exist.” I tell of an upcoming article in a left-wing magazine in which a Canadian critic traces the “gayness” of his films.3 Bertolucci looks stunned. But before he can comment, the phone rings and rescues him; and, my time up, I am out of the door.4

Notes This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Real Paper, October 29, 1977. 1. Paramount did release the four-hour, seven-minute version in the United States. In 1987, the Bravo Channel showed the original five-hour, seventeen-minute cut. In 1991, the film was officially returned to its original length. A restoration of 1900 was shown at the 2017 Venice International Film Festival, a year before the death of the filmmaker (1941–2018). 2. The treatment of young actress, Maria Schneider, on the set of Last Tango in Paris has been a subject of controversy over the years. The official story always was that there was no sexual penetration. This interview is the very rare occasion, perhaps the only occasion, when Bertolucci admitted that there was actual sex between Schneider and Marlon Brando. 3. Will Aitken, “Leaving the Dance: Bertolucci’s Gay Images.” Jump Cut, no. 16 (1977): 23–26. 4. Bertolucci (1941–2018) made nine more features; the last was Me and You (2012).

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Pell Mel Brooks . . . and He Is Mild By the end of my interview with Mel Brooks, I had acquired a Hebraic uncle. We took a Jewish photograph—that’s when you squeeze with a relative into the snapshot. And I assured Uncle Mel that we’ll get together the next time he’s in New York. And, of course, I’ll write a nice story about this five-foot, seven-and-a-half-inch sweetheart of a man. At least he was a sweetheart to me. Brooks had reciprocated the warm feeling. “I feel good about this interview,” he confided, when we sat at our table at the Russian Tea Room. “How can I tell? Because I wiped up my food with bread. If I’m uncomfortable, I won’t do that.” Luckily for our intimacy, we consumed fine victuals without, for a time, confronting the subject of deepest concern to the filmmaker: the merits of High Anxiety (1977), his newest film. I avoided confessing that the film is only mildly pleasurable, neither as sustained conceptually as Brooks’s earlier brilliant Young Frankenstein (1974) nor filled with the belly laughs of Blazing Saddles (1974). Instead, we talked spiritedly about food. Of where to get the best sturgeon in New York, or the best smoked salmon in the whole world, or whether it makes sense to drive all the way to Nova Scotia to get lox almost off the boat. The cinema was totally forgotten. Until Brooks suddenly interrupted the feasting, declaring, “You haven’t asked me one stinkin’ question about High Anxiety.” I pretended I didn’t hear him. We continued eating, and soon Brooks was deep into Jewish relative stories about his Lower East Side grandfather who pushed a herring cart and spoke fluent Norwegian, about his big brother Irving who patented some scientific invention that sounds like a million dollars, about his eighty-one-year-old mother who, at seventy-five, moved to Florida by herself. But probes into his own psyche or questions about his marriage to Anne Bancroft1 drew blanks from Brooks. “I don’t want the audience to understand me, just my pictures. I am essentially a

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Pell Mel Brooks . . . and He Is Mild

Mel Brooks directing Cleavon Little in Blazing Saddles.

shy and private person. What I say is meaningless. What I make on the screen is everything.” Like many in show business, Brooks compensates for his shyness with a forced buoyancy. He sang to our waitress, Louise, “Every little breeze . . .” with a Maurice Chevalier Gallic accent, and, at first, punctured our conversation with jokes (Tolstoy as a TV writer: “Leo, we need a belly laugh!”) and more jokes (“They don’t fool around here, they make hot coffee here”). But when Brooks understood that this interviewer didn’t demand oneliners, he visibly relaxed. The adrenalin slowed down. He could talk cinema shop and explain how he operates as a film director. “I’m going to tell you the truth,” he straight-faced to this Real Paper reporter. “I don’t tell everyone the truth, but the name of your paper is real.” So what is he like on the movie set? “No visitors are allowed. The sessions are hard and tough.” Sometimes he has to sit on manic comedians like newcomer Ron Carey, the chauffeur in High Anxiety, who would entertain the crew instead of keeping his shenanigans for the camera. “It doesn’t mean there isn’t a good giggle going on,” Brooks said, “When you 35

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have people like Dom DeLuise, Harvey Korman, Cloris Leachman, you’re going to pinch each other, bite each other, and laugh. But you aren’t going to be bull-shitted. The most desperately evil thing that happens is silly compliments from sycophants and parasites: ‘That was wonderful, Mel!’ I think the death of pictures is the set celebrating all that phony baloney bullshit.” Many films are born dead, Brooks continued, because of “phony baloney” at the moment of conception. “A movie about mosquitos? wrong! wrong! wrong! Fellini is a genius, but when he made [Fellini] Satyricon [1969], I walked out in the middle.” He turns his ire on his good friend and collaborator, Gene Wilder, a Brooks star since The Producers (1967) and a screenwriter of Young Frankenstein. Recently, Wilder has turned to directing with two trivial farces, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975) and The World’s Greatest Lover (1977). “Gene is one of the best directors who ever lived,” Brooks asserted, pure hyperbole. “But his milieux are tired clichés.” On the other hand, Brooks claimed to have persuaded a dubious Herbert Ross to make the successful dance melodrama, The Turning Point (1977). “I said, ‘Schmuck, they will love it! Go to Akron, Ohio. Even there, you can’t get a ticket to the ballet.’” As for his own film projects, Brooks takes no chances developing them. He begins with four writers voting on jokes, a secretary giggling or not giggling, a stenographer pool reacting to the material they are typing. “I will tell you something I haven’t told anybody,” Brooks said, and sailed into his behind-the-scenes revelation. “When we get a rough draft of the script, we send fifty copies out to friends, relatives, and we give them coding instructions. If you don’t like something, give it an X. If you hate something, give it two XXs.” He wants only amateurs, private citizens, believing they care more about storyline than Hollywood executives. “The Producers lives because it is well-constructed and not because of ‘Springtime for Hitler.’” At last, our plates were cleared and coffee was before us. It was the inescapable moment to discuss High Anxiety, so I began by noting the overt Hitchcockian setup: the young blonde heroine (a bewigged Madeline Kahn), the neurotic WASP hero (an agoraphobic Brooks as Phi Beta Kappa Harvard psychologist Dr. Richard Thorndyke), and parody scenes from various Hitchcock classics. Brooks told me that, before filming, he managed an audience with Hitch himself, and found Sir Alfred not only 36

Pell Mel Brooks . . . and He Is Mild

witty but worth squeezing. “He’s a hard man to hug because he is big and fat. His eyes get moist and he’s very sweet and emotional.” Hitchcock wholeheartedly approved of the idea he would be spoofed, and suggested that Brooks would do best by ridiculing the most obsessive films in the director’s vast oeuvre. “He told me, ‘Play the tower scene from Vertigo [1958].’ And with Psycho [1960]: ‘Do it seriously, but move a half inch to the left or right. It could be hysterical.’” In High Anxiety, Vertigo and The Birds (1963) jokes are indeed cleverly executed and funny. Brooks’s recreation of the shower scene from Psycho is the transcendent comedy moment of the movie, with Mel’s own naked body replacing that of Janet Leigh. The gags come from any and all the writers, three plus Brooks on High Anxiety. But Brooks takes credit for the visual execution. “Without tooting my horn too much,” he said, “I’m a little more cinematic than the other guys. The scene with [the man] dying in the car, I shot exactly like Hitchcock would shoot it—the rain, the truck passing, even the blood coming out of the ear.” Skirting discussing its artistic merit, I dare confront Brooks about the politics of High Anxiety. Rather, its lack of politics. Why should a studio spend millions of dollars making a movie as restricted in larger meaning as is High Anxiety? “Should I give the money to the United Jewish Appeal?” Brooks quipped. Then he balked at the idea that his films have not been socially responsible. “To say there is no message in them is, I think, to be unfair and shortsighted.” He ran through his repertoire. “The Producers was about love and greed, and it’s also about neo-Nazism. I thought it was the best way to handle Hitler. To treat him ludicrously is to do more damage than to get on a soapbox and rail.” The Twelve Chairs (1976) was an “anti-totalitarian film” showing “that share and share alike does not work in the Soviet Union. It’s a very serious picture: how much can the individual sacrifice for the collective?” And Blazing Saddles was the most “message” of all. “I treated racial intolerance, bigotry, homosexual love.” Suddenly, Brooks exploded the case he was building for himself, perhaps realizing he was coming to Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie (1976), and High Anxiety in a row. “No, I agree with you,” he said. “I get paid money to make people laugh and I love doing it. I wasn’t put on earth to run a country. I use my film budgets to make frivolities instead of message pictures.”2 He also has no interest in making incisive movies about modern love relations like Woody Allen films or the screen adaptions of Neil 37

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Simon. “No. I go to work. I don’t think they go to work. I think they sit in some corner of their mind or soul. I leave my heart and soul in my apartment. My job instead is to bring jellies and jams to your local theater. “I never sign political statements. I never use my name for, quote, ‘good things.’ It’s a secret ballot. I always vote quietly. I never campaign for anybody. I may be wrong.” Brooks sensed that the interviewer was not placated, that I wanted more from the immortal two-thousand-year-old man. Brooks sighed, eyeing his near-nephew. “You’re an idealist like my children. They think I can do anything.”

Notes This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Real Paper, February 1, 1978. 1. Actress Anne Bancroft (1931–2005) was married to Brooks from 1964 until her death. She appeared in two films directed by her husband: Silent Movie and To Be or Not to Be (1983). 2. None of the films directed by Mel Brooks (1926–) since High Anxiety would qualify as “message pictures”: History of the World, Part 1 (1981), Spaceballs (1987), Life Stinks (1991), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995).

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Interview with Hal Ashby regarding Coming Home This is a shaggy director story: Hal Ashby, frizzy-bearded, bespectacled, and usually barefooted, is a forty-three-year-old film guru. He may be the best filmmaker of 1970s Hollywood—Shampoo, The Last Detail, Harold and Maude, and Bound for Glory are all authentic Ashby—and perhaps he’s also the best-intentioned. Jack Nicholson has said, “We discuss him like we’re writing a recommendation for a college scholarship.” Haskell Wexler, his cinematographer, told me: “Never let the idea that Hal is so easy-going, so conversational, so loose, make you think he is anything but an extremely sharp, precise human being. He knows every inch of film after he has worked on it, every sound, every nuance of the frame.” When the real-life voice of balladeer Woody Guthrie philosophizes over the Bound for Glory (1976) soundtrack, “I hate a song that makes a person feel bad,” he is expressing Ashby’s own mission to create, in Hollywood, an optimistic, breathing humanist cinema. He’s an alternativethinking hippy who, like Holden Caulfield, finds potential and worth in the seemingly crummiest people, like the Navy “lifers” in The Last Detail (1973), or the LA one-night-standers of Shampoo. He finds beauty and connection in the weirdest places, as with those loony, generations-crossed lovers, Harold and Maude (1971). It makes sense that the great Jean Renoir thought Ashby’s debut work, The Landlord (1970), in which young Beau Bridges takes the side of his impoverished Black tenants, the best first film he had seen in a decade. Ashby’s screwball left-romanticism is very much like Renoir’s own populist Marxist comedy, The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936). What would Renoir say of the current Coming Home, Ashby’s plea for peace, harmony, forgiveness, in the aftermath of Vietnam? Isn’t it akin to Grand Illusion (1937), Renoir’s pacifist masterpiece?

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Hal Ashby.

Interviewing Ashby was sheer pleasure. In a New York hotel room on a snowy February day, he kicked off his shoes; and with his bare feet crisscrossed on a chair in the way of high holy types, he spoke freely. Coming Home (1978) is set in 1968, the year in Vietnam of the Tet Offensive, also the year that a pre-political Jane Fonda, Coming Home’s star, became a pinup queen in Barbarella (1968). For Hal Ashby, it was the year he broke through from Hollywood technician’s anonymity to win an Academy Award for editing In the Heat of the Night (1967). Soon after, Ashby was promoted to director on The Landlord, and the rest is all good. Today, according to the tabloid New York Post, he embraces the lifestyle of a 40

Interview with Hal Ashby regarding Coming Home

Charles Foster Kane, “a $400,000 beach house in Malibu, a checkbook whose balance he doesn’t know.” Before that, Ashby remembered, were odious times, ten years of highpaid enslavement in the editing room, usually seventeen hours a day of cutting film, sometimes seven days a week. Ashby went through three of his five ex-wives during his workaholic decade. His earliest wedding was when he was a Utah boy of seventeen heading to Wyoming to reface railroad bridges. Wyoming, he explained, was too darned cold, so young Hal took off for the Los Angeles sunshine. Soon he called his mother collect back in Utah and announced, “Your little boy is in California starving.” From all this squalor, Ashby found doing the life of Oklahoman Woody Guthrie a most familiar tale. Some of Bound for Glory maybe never happened to Guthrie, but only to Ashby. It was he who slept in a ditch by the highway when hitching dried up. Both Woody and Hal came penniless to California, and got famous mixing art and progressive politics. Back in 1968, Ashby found himself part of a tiny grapevine of anti–Vietnam War people in the movie industry. “I was involved at whatever protest could be made, whether it was marching, making phone calls, or whatever.” Nobody was making movies then about Vietnam, except John Wayne with the right-wing The Green Berets (1968). “I never had anyone come to me with material that dealt with the War,” Ashby said. “It just wasn’t discussed.” On to Coming Home. Ashby disagrees with some reviewers who have found the insistent sixties score (Buffalo Springfield, the Beatles, lots of the Rolling Stones) annoying and obtrusive. If anything, he wanted more songs. He thought of opening the movie with a deejay, who would announce a plan to spin platters for the next couple of hours. “It would just be wall-to-wall music, as far as I was concerned,” Ashby said, giggling impishly. He also expressed fondness for a criticized histrionic sequence bringing together the adulterous lovers, Fonda and Jon Voight, and Bruce Dern, Fonda’s crazed, rifle-bearing husband. “That is obviously the most melodramatic thing in the film,” he admitted. “It almost goes over the edge.” However, Ashby wisely rejected filming a definitely extreme section in Waldo Salt’s original screenplay in which Dern goes mad, takes a bunch of hostages, and is killed by police. “I couldn’t do that, if for no other reason than my responsibility to the veterans of Vietnam. The only way vets are shown is to have them go crazy and kill people. That’s not fair.” The most talked-about sequences in Coming Home are the tender love scenes between Voight and Fonda, with paraplegic Voight performing in a 41

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way very different from Dern, her in-and-out, missionary-position spouse. “As far as getting a hard-on, it doesn’t happen [with paraplegics],” Ashby said, explaining his direction of the difficult moments of coupling. “It was touch and love and oral sex.” The makers of the film had no trouble researching how paraplegics deal with their problems. “The vets in the hospitals, that’s all they talk about,” Ashby said. “When forty or fifty vets get together, 90 percent of the time the talk is about sex.” I ask Ashby to explain the fate of Bruce Dern’s cheated-upon husband at the end of the film. What happens to this psychotic person who had soldiered in Vietnam? When he strips naked and jogs into the Pacific Ocean? “In essence, he swims out and kills himself,” said Ashby, without conviction. He admitted that, as he cut the movie, he began to feel uneasy about the inevitability of Dern’s watery demise. Thus the scene ends ambiguously: did he or didn’t he? For me, Coming Home can have only one conclusion in terms of its theme: this film critic lectured the filmmaker that Dern must save himself. Those destroyed, mentally and physically, by Vietnam, must be incorporated into the social fabric, not drowned at sea. That’s what George McGovern, Democratic presidential candidate, meant by “Come home, America,” presumably the rhetorical inspiration for the title. For a moment, I watched Ashby actually wrestle with whether he still might jiggle the ending; but he realized, of course, that Coming Home was locked forever. “I don’t mind the controversy,” he had no choice but to say. He told me how an acquaintance of his has interpreted the ocean plunge as a rebirth, a religious expiation, that Dern is washing away his sins and strictures, including his failed marriage. “I listened to that very closely,” Ashby said. “I was beyond that round and yet I thought, ‘That’s much more important because it makes it so much more positive. It doesn’t talk about death as the ultimate answer.’” However, Ashby was jolted anew when I brought up the obvious comparison with the endings of two classic versions of A Star Is Born, 1937, 1954—the troubled husband (Fredric March, James Mason) making a death walk into the sea. “Boy, that is really not what it is about,” moaned Ashby. “The arguments I don’t mind. But if someone takes it to A Star Is Born, that saddens me.” Was I nitpicking? Hal Ashby took my criticisms graciously. I hope he realized how thankful I was for him having made Hollywood’s first meaningful anti–Vietnam War movie.1

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Interview with Hal Ashby regarding Coming Home

Notes This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Real Paper, April 8, 1978. 1. Ashby (1929–1988) followed the success of Coming Home with, a year later, Being There (1979), equally acclaimed. But rumors of acute drug problems meant that the filmmaker was bypassed for prestige films, so he directed such forgettable works as Second-Hand Hearts (1981), Lookin’ to Get Out (1982), and The Slugger’s Wife. He did make a comeback with 8 Million Ways to Die (1986), an excellent neonoir, before dying at age fifty-nine from pancreatic cancer.

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Roberta Findlay Woman in Porn Several years ago, a male American film theorist offered an abstruse Lacanian reading of the pornographic feature Angel Number 9 (1974) at an international conference on psychoanalysis in Italy. He concluded his paper quite ingeniously by claiming that this movie was made by a man, that the director’s name, “Roberta Findlay,” was an obvious pseudonym. Ingenious, yes, but dead wrong. Roberta Findlay is alive and well in New York City; and she is a female all right, the only woman currently directing XXX-rated movies. Interestingly, she often directs under a man’s name, Norman Roberts and Robert Norman being two of her favorite noms de plume. As for Angel Number 9, feminist film critic Molly Haskell found it conclusively woman-directed: “The most unusual occurrence [is] the fact that two women greet their lovers with the unwelcome news that they are pregnant. . . . Pregnancy is a no-no in sexploitation movies, a definite downer to Don Juan fantasies of quickie, no-fault sex.”1 Getting the reclusive Findlay to agree to an interview happened only after a long telephone conversation about Joan Crawford movies established our empathy. She agreed to her first real career interview, ultimately five hours of conversation at her Manhattan apartment. Findlay is a feverish cinephile with an infectious Judy Holliday daffiness who learned about old movies while a student at City College of New York in the 1960s. There she met and married and took the name of husband Michael Findlay; and they attended weekly screenings of the Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society, a famous haven for the most zealous movie freaks. Findlay fell into sexploitation in the late 1960s by following after her enterprising spouse as his “movie girl” when Michael directed soft-core films. She insisted on starring in the first picture herself for fear he would succumb to his leading ladies. Thus she was featured in Take Me Naked

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Roberta Findlay

(1966), filmed on the beach at Gloucester, Massachusetts. When the Findlays moved to “Hard X,” Roberta became “cameraman” (sic) under Michael’s direction. Their pornos at the beginning of the 1970s were faux “documentaries,” so titled as a way of avoiding arrest on obscenity charges. A “doctor” or “psychiatrist” would talk into the camera about sex counseling and then the film would cut to “educational” footage of supposed real-life encounter groups, or to dramatizations, Joy of Sex fashion, of Kama Sutra positions. When it became clear that the films would not be busted, that pornography was here to stay, the Findlays dropped the documentary guise and went to narrative hardcore. Along the way they ventured to Argentina and made Snuff (1975), the most infamous of all pornographic films. Findlay discusses Snuff for the first time ever below. Admittedly shy and insecure, Findlay spends six workaholic days and nights a week shooting and editing film, then retreats to her apartment to play her grand piano or read her favorite novelists, John O’Hara, Theodore Dreiser, and the Victorians. She says she has no friends or family. (She has never had a female friend, which may explain some of her suspicious attitudes toward the women’s movement.) As for Michael Findlay, the maker of Snuff ended up dead in a way more terrible than anything concocted in the movie. Age thirty-nine, he was killed atop the Pan Am Building, decapitated in an eerie helicopter accident that made newspaper headlines across America. He was waiting to board the helicopter shuttle, on the way to the JFK airport and then to Europe to demonstrate his grand invention: a portable 3-D camera set to revolutionize the filmmaking world. It too proved victim to the fierce propeller. Question: Were you, Roberta Findlay, always interested in making movies? Response: I was a music major at City College (CCNY) and the Manhattan School of Music simultaneously. I knew that I was never going to be a concert pianist. I wasn’t good enough and I said, “Oh dear, I have to do something or else I’ll have to work all the time. What am I going to do?” So Michael Findlay came along and he told me that he was interested in films. And that is all he wanted to do ever in his whole life. And I said, “Gee, that sounds much easier than being a concert pianist.” So I left school and [eventually] we made movies together.   I was seventeen when I met Michael. We lived together. At that time it was a great sin. Then we got married. So Michael started taking me 45

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regularly to the Theodore Huff Society.2 I thought it was so interesting because I was in love with Michael and I felt that anything he did was fabulous and spectacular. Most of the stuff that we saw was, well, “wacko.” A kind word for it was “very esoteric.” And there would be specialized discussions. I didn’t know what anyone was talking about. And Michael, who I thought knew a lot about films, was really left out in the cold. He didn’t know what they were talking about either.   Before the introduction to film at the Huff, I didn’t have any friends, so I had trouble getting [myself] to the movies. Any of the films I saw were on television, until I went to CCNY and met Michael. He was running a film society. He was interested in European silent films, so we went and recorded a whole bunch of piano scores for all these films. Michael threw in Intolerance [1916] for the hell of it, and I did a score for that based on Pictures at an Exhibition. Question: Did you play piano accompaniment? Response: I did that once. Michael had a film festival running in a coffee shop down in the Village. And I was so nervous it was terrible. I drank a pint of vodka during the whole thing. It was The Kiss [1929] with Greta Garbo and I threw up as the film was ending. Very embarrassing. Question: What are your favorite films? Response: I love The Crowd [1928]. King Vidor. The most depressing film I’ve ever seen. The Passion of Joan of Arc [1928]. That is a really exciting film. The Thief of Bagdad [1924]. Trouble in Paradise [1932]. I love Greed [1924]. I love I Married a Witch [1942]. Let me see, what else? Touch of Evil [1958] is one of my favorites. Very secular favorites. Question: How did you get into making pornography? Response: It’s a long, involved personal story. I’d worked with Michael in the beginning as nothing. Sort of trailing in back of him. And then I became his cameraman. Not that he wanted me to. But I badgered him and bothered him until he finally agreed. Michael would tell me where to hold the camera. He didn’t know too much technically about making films. Or about lighting. I was just a little kid being protected by Michael all the time. We’d go out and shoot and I thought that was great fun. Not shooting these people screwing because I never liked that. It was disgusting. I just found it repulsive to look at these people’s things through a camera. And then, after a while, it was just very boring. It was like machinery.

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Question: You would make these films and then sell them outright to a distributor? Response: I think we got $10,000 for the first one. We doubled our own money, more or less. Well, the price kept going down. The last one we made lost money. It cost us about $3,500. We had outtakes from other pictures in it too. Yet we sold it for only $2,850. So Michael said, “Oh, something is wrong.” The price went rapidly down because the pictures were awfully terrible. And there were other people doing the same too.   Then we went to Argentina to make Snuff. Question: I understand you have never told the story of the making of Snuff. Response: No. At the time of its release, people were trying to find out about the picture and they discovered that I had shot it and Michael had directed it. But I refused to talk about it because there was a disagreement we had with the distributor of the film, and I didn’t want to aid him with his royalties. There isn’t much to tell. We were in Argentina and we had all these investors. Michael and his partner had talked these guys into putting up about $35,000 and making a film in an exotic place. They picked Argentina. I always wanted to go to Argentina. So we did and shot for four weeks. Question: Did you know it was going to be called Snuff? Response: No. No. Michael wrote this terrible script. It was really awful. And Michael thought that in order to interest these investors we’d have to offer them something different and special. It was about Charles Manson. Michael, being one of those Upper West Side liberals, added all these political implications, because in Argentina there are all these Germans living there. Question: What were the politics? Response: It was very confused. In the end, it came out that Manson was a sympathetic figure. He killed off the German people. This Charles Manson character makes a speech about killing all these German people, and he asks if that isn’t the same as the Israelis supplying guns to the Arabs. Now, I never understood what that meant. Question: Did the investors read the script? Response: They thought it was pretty good. Question: What were the elements of this movie that made it appealing to them?

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Response: The violence and the exotic locations. And the star of the movie. The production manager got us this girl who had been Miss World of 1969 or 1970 or something. 1971. Whatever. So that, with the star and the violence in the script and my camera work, the investors thought, “How can we lose?” Question: What was the reception when you came back with the film from Argentina? Response: Nobody wanted it because it was awful. We took it to the MPAA and they said, “This is disgusting.” There was too much violence, and you couldn’t be making films about Charles Manson that were favorable to him. The picture just didn’t go anywhere. Until the distributor read about these “snuff ” things in South America.3 He said, “Oh, what a good idea I have. I’ll call it Snuff and release it and pretend that is one of those pictures shot in South America [with] actual killing of people.” And he added one scene at the end. I never saw it when it was released. Question: I haven’t seen the film either. From what I understand, the last scene of Snuff allegedly shows an actress literally murdered before the camera. Fortunately, it was a hoax. Almost as bad, an animal was substituted. Response: That’s how Snuff was released. It was just a fake. I didn’t even get paid for the shooting. Michael made around $1,500 to get paid off. Question: As you know, theaters were picketed by feminist groups because the film advocated murdering women, regarded as the ultimate misogynist message of pornography. Response: I must say that I became popular when it was discovered that Michael and I had made the film. Variety and Show Business called me and asked for interviews. If they asked me what I thought of the movie, I probably said, “I don’t know. I don’t know.” Being the cameraman, why should I? Then I started getting phone calls from a group of ladies when Snuff was playing on Broadway. Then I got scared. Most of the people who objected seemed to be the liberation feminist people. The last I heard, this group of women went to this distributor’s office with the intention of beating him up. He locked his door and called the police and they carted away all these women.   They, in effect, publicized the film. The picture made money in New York because of these women’s groups marching up and down in front of the theater. I didn’t care one way or another, actually, I don’t have any interest in women’s lib. So, that was the end of the Snuff story. 48

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Question: When did you come to direct movies? Response: About five years ago, I left Michael. I don’t know why but I just left. That was the end of our careers together. And I started making films myself. I went to the same film distributor who had turned down Snuff originally and said, “I can make you a film really cheap, and I’ll make you lots of money.” And he gave me $5,000 for starters. And I made The Altar of Lust [1971]. It was a hard-core feature with a very slim script and no sync sound. I was the producer and the director and the cameraman and the editor. I had nobody to turn to. Then I wrote another script, produced and directed it and cut it. Again, it wasn’t much. It was just a stupid series of loops, later titled The Doctor Knows Best [1971?]. Question: Did you also direct when you did camera for your husband? Response: Oh, I left that part out. We made a film in Belgium a couple of years into the Michael thing. I studied French in high school and in college. Michael was beginning French. So we decided that I would direct the film. So he shot it and I wrote the script. That was called Erotikon. That was a real script. It was an R-rated picture because in Belgium they didn’t screw in movies at the time. It was about a man who shoots himself in the beginning of the film. He shoots himself in the stomach and spends the whole film dying on the floor. That’s eightyfive minutes. It is a series of aural impressions. He hears his daughter in the next room with her boyfriend, he hears church bells that send him into memories of his life. We utilized these pictures from a book of ancient obscene Greek paintings. He keeps finding this book all over the place with all of these [homoerotic] drawings. He is frightened of being homosexual and he keeps being approached and backing off. Question: Does he have heterosexual experiences? Response: Yes. But they are very bizarre. The first one is with a female impersonator whom he picks up in Belgium. He marries a beautiful girl during the film but she dies. All his experiences are unhappy. He wanted to be with men but he wasn’t allowed. So he kills himself.   Anyway, that was my first cutting job. I cut most of it in Holland under Michael’s supervision. And we mixed it in Belgium. We brought the film back into the country, whereupon it was seized by Customs. There was a big court case for this blue picture, and they objected to the drawings, which were legitimate works of art. A very expensive court case went on and the distributor won. And the distributor said, “Oh 49

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look, now we will be famous.” But he never released the film. God knows where it is. It’s a very strange picture. Béla Bartók on the soundtrack.   It was my own film and I was very proud of that picture. But nobody understood it. Question: Does it have a theme? Response: It didn’t have any theme, unfortunately. The most I can say is that a man killed himself. Question: Can we discuss your films which were distributed? Response: I made this thing called Rosebud [1972] and that made a lot of money for the distributor. I think I got $4,000 for making the film. The girl’s name is Rosebud. She’s dead. And it opens with a tape recording of why she killed herself. Through the picture we keep cutting back to the tape recorder. She left the tape to her father. I thought that was cute. Question: There seems to be a kind of porn genre about people on the edge of death. Response: [laughs] That’s what one thinks about when one shoots dirty pictures: death. Right? Sex and death. Anyway, I got even more money for the next one, which was a real goodie. It was called Teenage Milkmaids [1973]. It was a silly picture about a girl who lives on a farm with her old, Bible-loving, fatuous father. And he winds up having a stroke and she ends up pregnant having to take care of him. She meets the traveling salesman. It’s sort of a parody of Warner Brothers. Then I made another after that called The Clamdigger’s Daughter [1974], which was just like Teenage Milkmaids except her father was a clam digger. He drank instead of reading the Bible. All these pictures have mean, crazy, or drunk fathers in them. In The Clamdigger’s Daughter, the father sabotages a ship with his daughter and her lover on it, and that was the end of the film. It was very exciting. Question: On a very low budget, how did you film a sinking ship? Response: Not very well. What I did was I shot a love scene below deck and I started filling a fish tank with water in front of the camera as they were making love so it looked like the cabin was filling up with water. I forgot to light the water. So you see this black mess coming up. Black primordial ooze, slopping up to the top of the tank until it blocked out the picture. Then we cut back to the ocean. They are not there. The fishing boat is gone. This was a two-week shooting. It was not a successful film, and the distributor didn’t release it. It was soft-core, practically. 50

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  Then I made Angel Number 9. That was pretty good. It was based on Goodbye, Charlie [1964]. You know, the film with Debbie Reynolds? It’s about a man who has been killed and comes back to earth as a woman. We shot in heaven. We built heaven on Forty-Fifth Street. Question: And with this film you were actually noticed and written about. Response: This time the distributor decided that it was time to declare that a woman was making “erotic films.” Not pornography! He hired two publicity guys to do whatever they do and I was on radio shows and in magazines, and they were going to try television but I refused. Some stupid talk show, Joe Franklin or somebody. I just couldn’t do it. Joe Franklin is such a nerd. And so on the marquee, it opened at the Lincoln Art Theatre in New York, it said, “Roberta Findlay’s Angel Number 9.” Question: Have any of your films played at women’s film festivals? Response: No, no. I never tried. I defy anybody to think they are made by a woman. The only reason I make these pictures is because I’m not talented enough to be a concert pianist, and [pornography] is the only way I know of at this time to make films. But intermixed, I shot a number of pictures for a number of other people. I shot things for the New York government. I shot a documentary film one summer for the News Service Agency and it was on WNET in New York. It was an hour-long documentary for kids.4 Question: Why do you hate making pornography?5 Response: It is a whole snowballing thing. You can’t have a large budget because the market is so limited. If you have a small budget, that brings all kinds of horrible things. It brings in bad scripts, it brings in bad technical equipment. I just can’t make a good film for $20,000 or $30,000. The money’s gone even before I turn around. The second thing is the actors. I’m sorry to say this but the actors are dreadful. They can’t get anywhere in the world, so they go into pornography. I hire actors who will screw as opposed to screwers who I try to make act, which is impossible. Actors can’t talk and screw at the same time.   I have tried over and over to make one erotic scene. Not even erotic, but to make it even sexually realistic. There was only one scene in Angel Number 9, the blow job scene, which was actually powerful. I think. I let the camera run and I never cut or anything. Jamie Gillis played a bastard. The girl was madly in love with him, and he just accosts her and abuses her. Slaps her around, hits her with his belt. Not hard, he just does it. And she’s blowing him, and she is happy to do it. 51

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At the end of the scene, he comes and he throws her out of the room. It’s one shot. A four-minute shot. Question: But how do you feel about the fact that this scene sexually humiliates the woman? Response: Women’s groups protested this one scene because it looks so real. It actually does. It took about half a day to shoot. I spent a lot of time talking with Jamie about it. I try to make a reason for everybody screwing. Pornographic films are like opera. You have the opera story, but then everything stops when the soprano has to sing an aria. It’s the same thing in sex films. The story goes on, then it stops, the script has stopped, they have to screw. Sorry to compare pornography to opera. I really think more of opera than that. Question: Have you made anything recently that is more interesting? Response: I was the cameraman on a big fancy picture,6 and they hope to get an “R” rating. We’ll see. If they do, it will be a breakthrough in the MPAA. It’s about “civilians,” we call them. That is, people like you. Well, more normal than you. Just regular people off the street and their sexual fantasies, which are reenacted in this mansion in New Jersey. We shot about fifty interviews and then they selected about thirty [of these] people. And we shot these people’s fantasies, and they used a cast that I assembled out of our stable of porno actors. They were used as props. Ralph Rosenblum cut it. He’s the editor of the Woody Allen pictures and A Thousand Clowns [1965] and The Pawnbroker [1964]. He’s also one of the directors. We shot ninety thousand feet of film between two cameras. Question: Is that the first time you shot with two cameras? Response: I always shoot with two cameras. Sometimes three. Sweet Punkin’ I Love You [1976] was a three-camera film. I used three cameras for the come sequence. It’s three guys. Dear, dear, dear. They just kept coming and coming and coming because I kept switching from one camera to the other. And it looks like they were all doing it simultaneously. Question: Any other film you are proud of? Response: I also shot a musical. It’s a remake of Gold Diggers of 1933. We shot elaborate musical numbers on a sound stage on Eighty-Fourth Street. Wind machines blowing diaphanous gowns. It was wonderful. I was the photographer. A very pretty picture. Question: And yet you don’t seem to care about the subject matter. Or do you? Deep down, don’t you care about the morality of your films? 52

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Response: I’m sorry. No. Isn’t that terrible? One of my favorite films is by Leni Riefenstahl. Triumph of the Will [1935]. I thought it was a great film. My parents were Jewish, making me Jewish. I should [bring] more depth to this thing, shouldn’t I? So shallow.

Notes This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Take One Magazine, September 1978. 1. “Are Women Directors Different?” Village Voice, February 3, 1975. 2. Named after American film historian Theodore Huff (1905–1953). 3. There were rumors, never verified, that people had been purposefully killed on-screen in subterranean South American movies. 4. Unfortunately, this documentary is not listed in any Findlay filmography. 5. Findlay (1948–) made approximately thirty-nine soft- and hard-core features before retiring to run a recording studio in New York. Her last film was Banned (1989). 6. Acting Out (1978), codirected by Rosenblum and Carl Gurevich. Findlay is the credited director of photography.

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Short Visits with Three European Masters Éric Rohmer Interviewed by Gerald Peary and Michael Wilmington (1946–2022) “He was the leader of us all,” François Truffaut said of his fellow New Wave filmmaker. “His thoughts have been behind all of us for a long time.” Indeed, Éric Rohmer, born in 1920, was older than the others, a teacher when they were students, and the editor and cofounder of the Gazette du Cinéma, house organ of Paris’s ciné-clubs. He was André Bazin’s natural successor at the helm of Cahiers du Cinéma, which he edited from 1957 to 1963. A practicing Catholic, he was considered the most politically conservative of the Cahiers writers and staff, and he was appalled when, after 1968, the magazine took a Marxist turn. We are sitting in Rohmer’s hotel room in New York, where he has come from the world premiere at the New York Film Festival of Perceval, based on a quite obscure twelfth-century poem by the troubadour Chrétien de Troyes. It’s about King Arthur and the Round Table, about gallantry and chivalry and courtly love. And sublimation. And holy grails. It ends with a mystery play: the Crucifixion of Christ. Perceval, in Rohmer’s hands, is told on-screen without compromise: the text, if shortened from the original, is mostly intact, interspersed with ballads performed with authentic medieval instrumentation. The drama is on sets designed to resemble miniatures and paintings of the Middle Ages. Rohmer is tall and lean, with sky-blue eyes, a Roman nose, a face both joyous and ascetic. Befitting his austerity, he chooses to sit in a straightbacked wooden chair for the interview. We know better than to ask him personal questions. His biography is off bounds. His name is not Éric Rohmer, we have read, but Maurice Scherer; and it is said that his religious 54

Short Visits with Three European Masters

Eric Rohmer. Courtesy of the estate of Cori Wells Braun.

mother died without knowing her son was involved in the impious profession of filmmaking. What did he wish to discuss about Perceval? Rohmer becomes most animated and expressive, most fired up, discussing arcane points of scholarship: the derivation of the songs, precious moments in de Troyes’ text. His hands move rapidly, his eyes flash with excitement. A question about the self-consciously artificial mise en scène of Perceval—filmed on a sound stage with stylized castles, rubber flowers, sawdust trails—was greeted by a long discourse on the distinction between “troubadour” (singer) and a similar word, “trouvere” (a medieval epic poet). Rohmer stays with a subject until he feels his ideas have been thoroughly elucidated. 55

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Earlier in his life, Rohmer was extraordinarily versed in the history of cinema. In 1957 he wrote, with Claude Chabrol, the first book ever on the complete oeuvre of Alfred Hitchcock.1 Now, he complains of a “selfcentered, narcissist cinema” that contains little but references to other films. Not that he wants social engagement. Rohmer has written that “films are a bad arena for political struggle.” Whatever, he has seen only a handful of movies in the last decade. He is much more attuned to painting, literature, music, and the theater. He says, “I want to break out of the selfcenteredness of a certain cinema crowd, and branch out.” Novelistturned-filmmaker Marguerite Duras is one cineaste whose work he will seek out. And he says he must make sure to see the Fest screening of Violette Nozière by his old friend Chabrol, so he doesn’t embarrass himself when they meet in New York. And what of those Nouvelle Vague cinephiles of yesteryear? They have drifted apart. “When we were young, we shared a certain world. And since then, these worlds have become separate. We have our own lives. It doesn’t mean we have something against each other.” We were present later in the week for the happy Manhattan reunion of Rohmer and Chabrol. Rohmer tells us he visits with Truffaut often since they share a great cameraman, Nestor Almendros, and an art director, Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko. But he had not seen Jacques Rivette since 1974 and Jean-Luc Godard since 1972. “Godard,” he tells us, “is someone who is not very sociable, and he’s been kind of wild, and he doesn’t want to communicate very much.” Back to Perceval: “I tried to do something that has not been done up to now. Essentially, the way the Middle Ages have been portrayed has been from a romantic point of view: putting films in the ruins of old castles, and so on. I did not want to do the Middle Ages such as they appeared to the people at the time. Not from a distance but from here. . . . I wanted to do it such as it would have been done had cinema existed in the Middle Ages. It is a personal interpretation of what would fit rather than realism. “The man who composed the music is a specialist in the Middle Ages. He’s a mystic, this man—he actually believes himself to be living in the period.” Perceval unfolds like a sweet, chaste, delicate dream, replete with piping melodies, joyous flutes, toy-like landscapes, all in counterpoint to Perceval himself. “I wanted to show Perceval going through stages,” Rohmer explains. “In the beginning, he is a person who is brutal and violent. Then slowly, he learns to pardon. Finally, he himself is subjected to violence. For that reason, he plays the role of Christ. In the beginning, Perceval believes 56

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God is a warrior: God is a person with shiny, strong armor. At the end, he realizes that God is a victim. God is a person who suffers.”2 We were coming to the end of the interview, and this is what the “austere” Rohmer does for us. Suddenly, there is mischief in the air. With one nimble hand, he closes his sports coat tight around his collar. “In France,” he says, “austere.” His eyes twinkle. “In America?” He boldly, naughtily, throws open his coat.

Vladimir Nabokov and Rainer Werner Fassbinder Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, written in 1932, should be known ahead of seeing Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s movie of Despair (1978): a wealthy Russian émigré, Hermann, settles in Berlin. Hermann now runs a chocolate factory. He is vainly bookish, narcissistic, self-conscious. Quite obviously, he’s an early incarnation of Lolita’s Humbert Humbert. Fassbinder even calls him Hermann Hermann. His Lolita, his magnificent obsession, is a tramp named Felix, “lank, dirty, with a three days’ stubble on his chin.” Hermann is intoxicated, smitten, though there’s no admittance of homosexual desire. It’s because this Felix is his exact double! So Hermann, the prototype unreliable narrator, informs us. Fassbinder read Despair five years ago, and wanted to make it immediately. Many shoestring movies after, the German filmmaker secured for a Nabokov adaptation his first substantial budget. He hired Tom Stoppard, dramatist of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Streamers, to write a screenplay for Fassbinder’s first English-language film. He coaxed Dirk Bogarde, star of Death in Venice (1971), out of retirement for the lead. The British actor as Hermann becomes the first international star to appear in a Fassbinder movie. The German Klaus Löwitsch plays Felix, Bogarde’s supposed doppelgänger, though he’s a head shorter than the patrician Bogarde, and has a lean, taut, laborer’s face. Fassbinder chose Löwitsch precisely because he bears no likeness whatsoever to his supposed double. A scheduled New York Film Festival press conference for Fassbinder at Lincoln Center passed without Rainer (pronounced like Carl Reiner) Werner in attendance. He missed his Concorde from West Germany. Was that possibly on purpose? When the adamantly antisocial director finally arrived in New York, he didn’t bother to check into his paid-for, first-rate hotel. Instead, Fassbinder stayed out on the town. Some speculated about him: when you are a gay man, there are things to do in Manhattan. 57

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder behind the camera.

He does appear for this interview the next day, inside Lincoln Center, looking tired and frazzled, his hair dirty and his face pale and puffy beneath his adolescent fuzz of a beard. He sinks down onto a soft couch with big pillows, and squirms all through our talk. When he isn’t sulking. He’s thirty-one now, yet Fassbinder up close looks disarmingly young, a babyfaced biker with his perpetual dark glasses and leather jacket. (Why does R. W. Fassbinder wear black suspenders? To hold up his white chinos.) The West German talks tiny bits of English and answers questions obliquely through an interpreter. “I don’t believe in a casserole and a cover” is a straight-faced response to one of my inquiries, which loses something, don’t ask me what, interpolated from German. He hates probes into his personal life, all statements of praise about his filmmaking talents, and most questions about explaining his movies, although he will bend and answer if hammered at in enough different ways. Fassbinder’s basic pose is that he makes films for his own satisfaction, lots of films, and he has little interest in how audiences or critics interpret them. “If someone says to me, ‘I don’t understand your films,’ I recommend he go to a psychiatrist,” he declares. 58

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Fassbinder resents those who accuse him of being artistically sloppy, of making less-than-great movies because he is too prolific. “I prepare my films as much as others who only make one film a year. I have no yacht and no private plane. I don’t do anything else but make films3 . . . and then I do a little living.” Finally, Fassbinder is sick of discussing his homosexuality, and how it affects his movies. He concedes that the attraction of Hermann for Felix is “homoerotic”; that was all he would say, hiding behind this paradox: “The moment homosexuality is discussed, it is discussed as a problem. Therefore, I won’t discuss it because it is not a problem.” I observe that Felix wears a brown leather jacket like the one donned by the director, when he acted the exploited lower-class homosexual in Fox and His Friends (1975). Fassbinder agrees that Hermann fulfills his fantasies by using someone economically beneath him. “Even in insanity, there are class differences,” Fassbinder says. About his political frame in Despair, he is equally direct. “I set my story in the Weimar Republic because we know what happened afterward. If you tell people now that they live in a pre-Fascist country, they won’t believe you.” The Nazi icons, seen early in Despair, disappear from the movie altogether in the last hour. Fassbinder’s explanation is telling: “At first you notice those things. Then, after a while, you forget about them, and what might be approaching.” Postscript: This talk with Fassbinder was his only Q&A on his first morning at the New York Fest. He had been sassy, combative, ultimately fun to talk to. However, I had no photo. An hour after, my photographer and I were outside Lincoln Center, and there was the leather-jacketed filmmaker, sitting by a fountain, puffing a cigarette, devouring an open New York Times. My photographer edged up to him and leaned close. When Fassbinder looked up from his newspaper, she took photos. Without us asking his permission. In answer, the perturbed filmmaker marched to the curb and hailed a taxi. He jumped in, and disappeared. He never returned to the festival! All the other interviews, days of them, had to be canceled. Poor journalists, I shook my head sadly, as I typed up—by default!—my very exclusive scoop.

Werner Herzog at the Grave Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) succeeds because of the purity of German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s vision. A shot of a vessel sailing Count Dracula across the sea is what Coleridge must have had in mind for the Ancient 59

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Werner Herzog.

Mariner’s “painted ship upon a painted ocean.” There are moments of Lucy in ghostly white walking on the dunes that are expressionist paintings that Edvard Munch never made. This is Herzog’s tribute to the original Nosferatu, the 1922 F.W. Murnau film, which he believes the greatest German film of all. “I’ve only seen the Murnau Nosferatu twice in my life,” Herzog said, surprisingly, interviewed in his room at New York’s Algonquin Hotel. “But I have included a few well-planned shots in order to bow my head to this great film.” He noted that Lucy’s sitting atop a cemetery of crosses in the sand is one visual homage to Murnau. He is particularly proud of a copied sequence in which Dracula carries his own coffin and hides it. He shot that in the identical spot of the filming for the silent picture, in the German port city of Lübeck. Although Lübeck was almost completely destroyed in World War II, this single location remained intact. “You can see bushes in Murnau’s shot.” Herzog smiled. “Now they are trees.” What is his opinion of other Dracula movies? “There is a very interesting one, Vampyr [1932] by Carl Dreyer. But the genre has degenerated 60

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since the early 1930s.” Herzog couldn’t remember if he had seen the British Hammer versions, including the excellent The Horror of Dracula (1958). He hadn’t bothered with the Frank Langella Dracula (1979) and expressed distaste over Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967). “Polanski made a parody of it. That’s one bad tendency. The other is to make Dracula a triviality.” Unlike his movie-obsessed German contemporaries, Wenders and Fassbinder, Herzog only goes to see films a couple of times a month, and then casually. “I’m an average audience,” he insisted. “I saw Alien [1979] not long ago and it scared me shitless. I don’t analyze these films as a filmmaker.” Fassbinder and Wenders quote Godard and Sirk and Ford and Nicholas Ray in their films. “Herzog, that’s my reference,” he said pointedly. “In fact the real father of Nosferatu is the last scene of my Heart of Glass [1976], the rock in the ocean.” And what films of his had I seen? he seriously queried his interviewer. When I met Herzog’s challenge by nervously naming seven or eight pictures, he continued our talk with a bit more ease. Still, he acknowledged his discomfort being interviewed. “I don’t like it, but I’ve learned that it is necessary. A new film is like a child. You have to help it with its first steps.” But Herzog couldn’t hide his suspicion of journalists. “I haven’t found any morality in the press in general. It is not in the nature of your work.” Right now, Herzog is smarting from press reports around the world that he has destroyed the crops of a Peruvian Indian tribe while directing a new film.4 Herzog said the whole thing is a vicious lie, that he has been made “a dancing bear in the media circus.” With conviction, he said, “You can check this out very easily. I haven’t yet shot a foot of film. I haven’t destroyed a leaf of grass.”5

Notes Portions of this chapter were originally published, in slightly different form, in the following: “Interview with Éric Rohmer,” Real Paper, October 28, 1978. “Vladimir Nabokov and Rainer Werner Fassbinder,” Real Paper, October 28, 1978. “Werner Herzog at the Grave,” Real Paper, November 3, 1979. 1. Hitchcock: The First Forty-Four Films (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979). 2. Like his directing hero, Alfred Hitchcock, Éric Rohmer (1920–2010) was a church-going Catholic, and many of his films deal overtly with moral and, more subtly, with religious issues, including his self-named Six Moral Tales. He made sixteen features after Perceval, ending with The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007).

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Interview with Martin Ritt In March 1979, Martin Ritt turned sixty-five and walked down to his Medicare office in Palisades Park, California, to declare his eligibility. Being a loyal union man, Ritt went on orders of the Director’s Guild. He doesn’t really need Medicare. He’s a successful Hollywood director, who right now is sitting easy. His new film, Norma Rae (1979), has delighted almost everybody, starting with critic Vincent Canby in the New York Times. Norma Rae—simple, straightforward, humanist—seems to have swung skeptical critics over to Ritt’s side, after his twenty years of making features. Andrew Sarris became an overnight convert in his Village Voice review. The Seattle Film Society, elite and learned, is offering a Ritt retrospective this month. “I haven’t been a critics’ star before. I haven’t been sought out,” Ritt said. “I’ve just gone my merry way.” The reason for critical neglect of Ritt can’t be for lack of interesting pictures: Hud (1963), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), The Molly Maguires (1969), Sounder (1972), and The Front (1976) are five exemplary works. What seems to have kept the cineastes away: (1) his casual personal identity, never acting the inflated role of movie director; (2) his anti-artsy approach to filmmaking, an insistence on content over flashy style; (3) his commitment to a left-wing, social-realist aesthetic, which turns off more apolitical film critics. “My points of view have always been independently left,” he said. “I’m not afraid to reflect that.” Martin Ritt is true grit. This is the man who has made six Hollywood features attacking racism: Edge of the City (1956), Paris Blues (1961), The Great White Hope (1970), Sounder (1972), Conrack (1974), and Norma Rae. Edge of the City was among the first integrationist films, with Sidney Poitier as a union man who brings fellow worker John Cassavetes home to dinner. Their White–Black friendship becomes threatened by the bigotry of their foreman. Thus Ritt connected racism with class and labor issues, most daring for his debut film as a Hollywood director. “Metro was in a proxy fight at the time,” Ritt recalled. “They were involved in their internecine 63

Martin Ritt.

Interview with Martin Ritt

power struggles, and the film was finished before anyone knew what was going on. Edge of the City was a succès d’estime; but it didn’t make any money because they couldn’t get bookings on account of the racial issues.” Sounder, made for less than $1 million, was his most financially successful movie, and Ritt’s well-loved Black family foretold the future American embrace of the folks in Roots. However, Ritt was criticized in militant circles for not deferring to a Black director. Ritt’s answer was unequivocal. “I say that’s the worst kind of racism. When they say the film is phony because I’m White, I say fuck ’em.” If Black nationalists jumped on Ritt, White liberals took his side perhaps too easily. They championed Sounder and Conrack, in which a kindly White man (Jon Voight) teaches Black children off the South Carolina coast, as the type of films that were good for African Americans to see, not the violent ones. In one of his finest moments, Ritt penned a 1972 letter to the New York Times disassociating himself from his liberal bedfellows and siding with Shaft (1971) and Superfly (1972). “Black audiences are delighted,” he wrote. “They are for the first time seeing Black heroes or even antiheroes on the screen and, incidentally, hearing in many of these films anti-white sentiments, which Black audiences are only too happy to applaud. It gives vent to some of the accumulated and very understandable anger that has been stored up all these years.” Norma Rae continues Ritt’s racial concerns by demonstrating how management tries to bust up union organizing by dividing Black and White employees. Here at work is Ritt’s didactic impulse, his desire to use the cinema to fill in gaps about American history and politics left out of the textbooks. The Molly Maguires, the personal favorite of his movies, was a lesson in American labor history about the violent struggles for union recognition in nineteenth-century America. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, perhaps Ritt’s most underrated movie, channels the venom of John Le Carré’s novel in its blistering attack on the cruel fighting of both sides in the Cold War. Ritt’s The Front was the first Hollywood film to deal with the shameful in-house story of studio blacklisting. Ritt ought to know—he was blacklisted himself for six years. “I never had any desire to be part of the Hollywood social scene,” Ritt said. “I’ve been to two Hollywood parties in my life.” He’s a transplanted Brooklyn Jew in California who has little in common with his sunbaked neighbors. Early in life, he tried to enlist to fight fascism in Spain. He then turned to acting and directing politically engaged theater groups in New 65

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York City. His favorite movie director is India’s Satyajit Ray, his favorite film of recent vintage is the call-to-revolution The Battle of Algiers (1966). Around LA, he might be found at the racetrack with Walter Matthau, another ex–New Yorker, or lounging about in one of his forty-three $42 leisure suits. It’s all he ever wears, he says, including for our interview. “If a thief opened my closet, he’d scream. ‘For what?’” Ritt joked about his one-note, horrendous wardrobe. When not at his home, Ritt is probably on the road shooting. Pete ’n’ Tillie (1972) is the only one of his twentyone pictures to be made exclusively in a Hollywood studio. “I like rural America,” Ritt said. “I like cowboys and working stiffs. I go to the sections of the country where there is change.” Ritt is known as a rigorous disciplinarian who works his actors hard, demanding two weeks of rehearsal prior to shooting; and he insists that his performers learn the script and stick to it. Or else. As a result, his films look rational and clear-headed, never as if some fevered, eccentric genius put them together. You wouldn’t mistake a Martin Ritt picture for a film by Orson Welles or Nicholas Ray. “I think form in film is exaggerated,” Ritt opined. “I don’t want anything to interfere with the story.” James Wong Howe’s mannered, incandescent photography of the coal mines in The Molly Maguires is the exception. Ritt’s films are visually prosaic by intention. There are rarely flashbacks and never show-off editing. “I think guys of my generation relate more to linear films. We start a story and tell it in sequence,” Ritt said. He had graduated through the Group Theatre, including understudying John Garfield in Golden Boy, to a fabulous career in early television as an actor, writer, and director. Note the first name. Paddy Chayevsky’s Marty was written, Ritt said, with himself in mind for the teleplay lead. Instead, quoth the victim, “The shit hit the fan.” Besides belonging to leftleaning theater troupes, Ritt had directed trade union shows, signed petitions to recognize Red China. Suddenly, his contract with CBS was not renewed. He returned to teaching acting for little money at the Actor’s Studio (among his students were Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward). His wife, Adele, went to work selling advertisements in the Yellow Pages. “An amazing woman,” Ritt said within earshot of his spouse, who had accompanied him to New York for the plugging of Norma Rae. “Without her then? God knows.” One day Ritt was offered an out. In an office at CBS, he was told, “Marty, television is growing up. We need a guy like you.” All he would 66

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need to do is take out a full-page ad in the Times or Variety saying, “I was a dupe. I was taken in. And at various meetings I went to, so-and-so was there.” They didn’t care whom he named. It could be dead people. “They were only interested in thought control, in breaking my spirits. I may not be the most judicious political thinker in my lifetime, but I understood that. I said, more or less, ‘Fuck you! I’ve gotten along without you, I’ll manage.’ And I did manage.” Ritt’s curse became translated into Woody Allen’s rousing “Fuck you” in The Front to the HUAC hearing. This conclusion to The Front led to the same criticism that is being leveled at Norma Rae by some naysayers: its contrived “up” ending. The filmmaker had no trouble here. “I’m looking for something affirmative in every situation,” he said, the perfect social realist. “For the union not to win the election in Norma Rae would be too depressing.” Ritt is more disturbed that, with The Front, he had to couch the unpleasant realities of blacklisting within a comic, satiric form. “I would like to tell about that period straightforward, like Norma Rae. It was a bad time. I hope to bump into another story so I can make another, more factual picture about that period.”1 But can movies really affect political thinking? “You know, George S. Kaufman2 said, ‘You’ll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.’ I really don’t believe that. They aren’t dumb. They are misinformed. They don’t understand. Often they’ve been accused of being naïve and idealistic, but I really believe that if people are genuinely informed they’ll behave well. Given the proper choices, they’ll make the right decisions.”

Notes This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Real Paper, March 17, 1979. 1. Ritt (1914–1990) made five more films after Norma Rae, none as successful: Back Roads (1981), Cross Creek (1983), Murphy’s Romance (1985), Nuts (1987), Stanley & Iris (1990). 2. Kaufman (1889–1961), American playwright and drama critic.

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Two Interviews with Margarethe von Trotta 1984 Interview Margarethe von Trotta’s Sheer Madness was greeted with sheer malice when it premiered in 1983 at the Berlin Film Festival. The overwhelmingly male West German press took exception, in their intemperately harsh reviews, to the female director’s ungainly gallery of men. Why must they all be such wimps, cowards, misogynists, malcontents in this women’s consciousness tract? Von Trotta was shaken by Sheer Madness’s hostile reception in her native country. (She lives in Munich with her husband, Volker Schlöndorff, director of The Tin Drum [1979] and Swann in Love [1984].)1 She had paid her dues as a filmmaker, building from 1977’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (with Schlöndorff as codirector) to 1981’s much acclaimed Marianne and Juliane. And in truth, von Trotta was working at the peak of her talents making Sheer Madness. Her cinematographer is the brilliant Michael Ballhaus, a frequent collaborator with Fassbinder. Her leads are the most capable film actresses working in Germany, Hanna Schygulla, Fassbinder’s siren-inresidence for The Marriage of Maria Braun (1978), and raven-haired Angela Winkler, who starred recently in Andrzej Wajda’s Danton (1983). Finally, her story is an enticing one: the tale of a deep psychic friendship between a feminist university professor, Olga (Schygulla), and a depressed, introverted painter-and-housewife, Ruth (Winkler). As the amity builds, the men around the women are threatened silly and driven crazy. They plot, they pout, they seek revenge. I spoke with von Trotta a few months after Berlin, when she came to America with Sheer Madness for the Montreal World Film Festival. We talked on a late afternoon, at an upscale tavern filling up for a Quebec happy hour. We started with the Berlin controversy. Does von Trotta agree that in her film she is unfair to men? 68

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Margarethe von Trotta.

“Well, a lot of women have written to me and said the men in their lives are like that,” she answered, in near-perfect English. “But you could say it’s a cliché. I feel I’m describing men from the outside because I can’t feel their soul. I can’t say that I’m really hating men, but things come out unconsciously.” (To this male interviewer at least, von Trotta is friendly and forthcoming.) Even sympathetic audiences have been disturbed by the film’s portrayal of the husband of Ruth, the depressive woman. At first, he encourages outside friendship for his lonely wife, trying to bring her out of her sadness. Later on he gets fiercely jealous and plots to make sure that her first art exhibition is canceled. At one point, he tries to strangle Olga, who has become his spouse’s best friend. “I don’t think he’s a bad man,” von Trotta said. “Women’s friendship is new. Men aren’t used to that kind of behavior. He reacted in a very helpless way. Anyhow, I know lots of husbands who act in this way.” To prove her point, she told me (she asked, not for publication) the very personal inspiration for the near-strangulation, stressing that her own husband was not involved in the macabre incident. Also, von Trotta noted that some of 69

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her anger toward male figures began in childhood. As with Ruth in Sheer Madness, she had problems centered on being a visual artist. “My father was a painter who died when I was ten years old.2 He tried to make me paint when I was five or six, but I couldn’t really design anything at that age. He loved me a lot, but he told my mother, ‘She has no talent.’ “My father wanted it so much, so I had to show him I was talented. When I was fourteen or fifteen, I had a lot of interest in painting. I tried to paint, but I couldn’t. So I started studying art history instead, until I found it wasn’t creative. Perhaps my father is the reason I have trouble with male characters. But my mother was always a friend to me, and she sacrificed so much for my development. Even if I’d said I want to be an astronaut, she would have supported me. And maybe that’s why I trust women so much, and I don’t trust men.” Von Trotta met Schlöndorff in the early 1960s, when she was an actress in early Fassbinder movies, The American Soldier (1970) and Beware of a Holy Whore (1971). “Fassbinder was so insulted when I married Volker that he didn’t want to do any pictures with me. He was so obsessive. But when I directed my own pictures, he went around saying I was talented. We had a strange relationship.” The three of them had collaborated on an obscure screen adaptation of Baal (1970), from Bertolt Brecht’s first play. Schlöndorff directed, von Trotta played Sophie, and Fassbinder starred as Brecht’s nihilist bohemian hero. “He was brilliant in it,” von Trotta said of Fassbinder, but the film was poorly distributed because of the disapproval of Brecht’s widow, Helene Weigel, who lorded over BB’s estate from East Berlin. “She was very much against the film. I’m sure Brecht would have been far more open-minded.” Von Trotta coauthored several scripts of Schlöndorff films, and she starred in several of his best works, including A Free Woman (a 1972 autobiographical picture about the disintegration of von Trotta’s first marriage) and Coup de Grâce (1976). “But I became an actress with the idea of becoming a director. When I began, I had no chance to become a director. I waited for my chance.” In West Germany, there were no role models at all in the 1970s for women doing fiction films. Women produced some documentaries, but that was all. Instead, von Trotta looked abroad to the American independent film Wanda (1970), made by the late Barbara Loden. “She was married to Elia Kazan, a famous director, and that gave her courage. The fact that she was a woman got me going.” In 1977, von Trotta began direct-

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ing films alone, making The Second Awakening of Christa Klages. More features followed. Interestingly, von Trotta’s favorite directors, even today, are men: Ingmar Bergman, Carlos Saura, Robert Bresson. “If I speak of influences, then they influence me. I like Saura’s mixture of dreams and fantasy. He is always stirring up realities. And going back to the past, and to childhood, what I do in Marianne and Juliane. Bresson is less visible in my work. He has a religious seriousness in his films. He speaks about morality but not on a moralist level. He’s a Jansenist, like Pascal. And with my Protestant background, Bresson is more ascetic than I am. But I believe in suffering— a Protestant, Nordic feeling. Life without suffering is nothing.” Any discussion of von Trotta’s oeuvre must lead inevitably to Bergman, whose Jungian dream states and split-consciousness paired women are so like her own. Is there a more quintessentially von Trotta way of seeing than Bergman’s Persona (1966)? Curiously, questions about Bergman’s influence were the only ones that made von Trotta slightly edgy. She’s always queried about Bergman’s cinema. Always. “Surely when I was eighteen in Paris and seeing three films a day at the Cinémathèque, they influenced me a lot. I say ‘influence’ because I feel near to his creations, but certainly I don’t imitate him.” If anything, playwright August Strindberg seems the ultimate inspiration behind both Bergman and von Trotta, not only, obviously, A Dream Play (1901) but his earlier one-act drama, The Stronger (1889). Therein, the woman who never talks proves the powerful one, not the seemingly cocky woman across the table who never shuts up. Angela Winkler’s passive, depressive Ruth turns out to have the most indomitable will in Sheer Madness. She can sit in the dark in her apartment for weeks, thinking, thinking. Finally, the outside world, including Hanna Schygulla’s “strong” feminist Olga, must come to her and pay court, as if she were a queen. “It’s like a blood transfusion,” von Trotta explained, echoing the vampiric view of symbiotic human relationships espoused by Strindberg. “The ‘stronger,’ Hanna, becomes weaker by the end. She’s finally alone. But the ‘weaker’ Angela becomes empowered by the friendship. Also, Hanna is a kind of vampire too, without knowing it. “I feel myself split into these two persons, pulled in two directions. As with Hanna, there’s the rational part of getting money, convincing people I’m powerful enough to do films. I started so old, I was thirty-five. Volker

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did his first film at twenty-five. I have a sense of urgency. I have a feeling I have so many things ahead of me, such as a film biography of Rosa Luxemburg, the first murder victim of the German predators.3 But I have much more sympathy with losers than winners. I always fear that I’ll lose my dreamy, introverted side, attracted to death and suicide, because I must be so sufficient.” Von Trotta recalled her film Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness (1979), in which one sister slaves all day as an executive secretary at the office and the other, unemployed, retreats from the world, dreams weird dreams, and one day kills herself. The two sides of the now forty-two-year-old filmmaker. Even as she strives to become a world-renowned filmmaker, she empathizes with the frail dropout and suicide as much, or more, than the woman workaholic. “In my film Sisters, someone quotes a little sentence from Erich Fromm: ‘Not to want success can be a sign of life, not a sign of death.’”

On the Trail of World Adventures “Last year two judges were killed in Sicily in a very cruel manner. I became a real Italian and cried before the television. This gave me courage to make the film.” The “Italian” speaker is Margarethe von Trotta, the renowned German director of such films as Sheer Madness (1984) and Rosa Luxemburg (1986) and also the film in question, The Long Silence, in competition at the Montreal World Film Festival. It’s a political thriller emanating from the headline stories in current-day Italy of bribery, corruption, and murder at all levels of government. It focuses on the special horror of judges who have dared to investigate the collusion of the state and organized crime, and have been assassinated as a result. The project grew from a wellspring of feeling for the country where von Trotta settled several years ago. There she met the person who would eventually write and produce The Long Silence. Felice Laudadio, a film festival director and political journalist,4 shared the preoccupation of many of her films, the role of the left-wing intellectual in a European community of escalating terrorism and violence. “Italy is not just a country of spaghetti and mandolins,” Laudadio lectured the gathered during a Montreal press conference. “It’s one of the most important political powers in the world and has vast responsibilities. Mr. Andreotti,5 the prime minister, has been

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linked with the Mafia and the people who killed Aldo Moro.6 And at least twenty-five to thirty judges have been killed in the last two years.” I talked to von Trotta after the press conference. “Laudadio had a strong reaction to the recent murders,” she explained. “He asked if I would want to make a film about them. He knew that if the main character was a woman, I would be more at ease.” Why a female protagonist but only male murderers? “In Italy, men do all the assassinations. Women kill for passion or jealousy, not for the Mafia or politics.” Von Trotta’s five-year off-camera relationship with her screenwriter became public information during the Montreal festival. She recently divorced from her German filmmaker husband, Volker Schlöndorff. Of her Italianization: “At first, living in Italy, I skipped reading about the interior politics. As time went on, I got more and more interested. Now I think I could give a complex picture of the Italian situation, although I don’t want to sound arrogant by actually doing so.” Made in Italy and in Italian, The Long Silence tells the tragic story of Carla (actress Carla Gravina), the strong-willed spouse of an investigatory judge, Marco (Jacques Perrin). After her husband’s plane is exploded by a bomb, she fights grief and depression by carrying on the battle against the anonymous, highly placed assassins. Because of the volatile subject matter, The Long Silence was researched and shot most discreetly. Von Trotta met with the widows of murdered judges, who opened up to her about their pained lives. She recalled for me one woman’s poignant observation: “If a man dies a natural death, you can accept it after a year. But a cruel, unnatural death? You live every day as if it was that day.” In March 1993, von Trotta decided to premiere the film in Palermo, and to bring some of the judges’ widows onstage after the opening screening. However, the evening’s high drama went even further than she imagined when one woman (her assassinated husband was a government functionary caught in a cross-fire) looked out at the audience and accused them of complicity. “All of you know the murderer!” she shouted. “Afterward we had the feeling that the film was being boycotted,” von Trotta said. “You never get it clear in Italy. In Rome, the theaters announced, ‘We have no space to show it.’ The film played in other cities for a week and then it was pulled. The managers said, ‘There was no public.’ But friends who went said the theaters were full.”7

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Notes Portions of this chapter were originally published, in slightly different form, in the following: “An Interview with Margarethe von Trotta,” Boston Review, April 1984. “On the Trail of World Adventures,” Globe and Mail, September 18, 1993. 1. Von Trotta and Schlöndorff divorced in 1991. 2. Alfred Roloff (1879–1951). 3. Rosa Luxemburg (1986). 4. Laudadio (1944–) was, from 1984 to 2009, director of the festival EuropaCinema and the Taormina Film Fest. He is the president of Foundation Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. 5. Giulio Andreotti (1919–2013) was a long-serving Italian prime minister and a leader of the Christian Democracy Party. 6. Aldo Moro (1916–1978) was an Italian prime minister and leader of the Christian Democracy Party who was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades. 7. Von Trotta (1942–) has continued to make films. Her successful recent works are the feature Hannah Arendt (2012) and the documentary Searching for Ingmar Bergman (2018).

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Bill Forsyth Speaking with Scotland’s Finest Filmmaker Bill Forsyth, born in 1946, is the acclaimed Scottish director of a quartet of remarkable regionalist comedies: That Sinking Feeling, Gregory’s Girl, Local Hero, and Comfort and Joy. We talked at the Toronto Festival of Festivals, where Forsyth had been brought for a special series, Ten Filmmakers of the Future. He had been in Canada already in May 1985 for a Vancouver Film Festival retrospective of his movies, but joked that the only person who had seen them before in a row was his mother watching cassettes. After Forsyth drove around the Vancouver environs, he became convinced that British Columbia was the place to shoot his newest film, Housekeeping, the script written during a stay in New York City with his wife and one-year-old toddler. Born and raised in Glasgow as the son of a grocer, Forsyth left school after graduating at seventeen. “In those days,” he said, “it was the eccentric thing to do to go to university from my background. It wasn’t as if I was getting pressure from home to study.” He found employ as an apprentice editor on documentaries and industrial films. At twenty, he discovered the cinema through the French New Wave of Godard, Truffaut, and Louis Malle, and his earliest 16mm experimental works were in the mode of Godard. Forsyth: “That period of my life I was fairly reserved and I tried to make a collection of images that didn’t really involve people. Some might call them cold exercises in distantiation. I showed at the 1970 Edinburgh Film Festival, and talk about people walking out of movies! I actually emptied a theatre. It was a forty-minute film, and about four hundred people left during the screening.” Forsyth remains nostalgic about an extended one-shot film he made at eighteen that opened on ten minutes of his grandfather reading a book about the Marines in World War II, and then, 75

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with the camera off the tripod and taken on a car ride, concluded on a young couple kissing in a park. “The people in the park, perhaps they were the old man’s memory? Perhaps the boy was his grandson? I put a Jim Reeves record on the soundtrack, a very sentimental song about ‘Today I found your old love letters,’ country-and-western music which, like experimental film, makes distances emotional.” Did his earliest work influence the way he would shoot later? “My experimental films are under my bed,” he laughs. “I don’t really have a style, I suppose the only style I’ve got is to be as unobtrusive as possible.” At the conclusion of the interview below, Forsyth headed into the Toronto streets to purchase diapers for his baby. He’s a blue-eyed, handsome man with shoulder-length hair. He seems as gentlemanly and straightforward as his movies might indicate, and even his angry words are delivered in a soft, bemused tone. Question: What have you gained attending film festivals? Response: I’ve spent most of my life in Scotland, and I haven’t moved around a great deal. It’s only lately that I’ve firsthand experience of the international community and filmmaker people. The nice thing about coming to festivals is to discover that there is an area of understanding. In Toronto, I’ve met other directors like me in the wings of the studio industry and with a lively desire to maintain our independence, people like Paul Cox of Australia and Alan Rudolph, who works in the eye of the storm in Los Angeles. We sat around a table and ended up bitching more than anything about how rotten the studio system is. It’s given me a sense of belonging. There are things to bitch about. You don’t have to invent them. Question: I gather Hollywood isn’t eager to finance your work? Response: Financiers are suspicious because I work in low budget. It’s easier for me to get three times the amount of money I really want. If you ask for relatively little money, they worry that you are going to get involved in something that is unwatchable or, worse, unmarketable. “Unmarketable” is a much more worrying term for them because if they can find an angle to make something unwatchable marketable, they’ll do it every week.   The studio system reminds me of the stock market. People think the stock market is a place of levelheadedness but it actually works in a totally emotional way: the president gets a pimple on his nose, and the 76

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thing plummets. The movie business is very much like that: people in authority making purely emotional decisions instead of interesting rational ones. Question: Going back to the beginning: You have said in interviews that a problem you had as a young filmmaker was your timidity. Response: Yes, and I felt that if I’d ever have a career I’d have to do something about it. I’d made these experimental films but I thought the major chore of a filmmaker was to relate to actors. I went to the Glasgow Youth Theatre and they just let me in. But I was so shy that I was there for about six weeks without actually introducing myself. Finally, the director said, “You’ll have to talk to the kids, Bill. They keep saying, ‘Who is that weird guy hanging around in the back?’” So it was a big kind of moment for me when I actually had to address them: “I’m a documentary filmmaker who has some ideas for a movie.” I didn’t realize that someone coming along and saying “I want to put you in a movie” was a terrific idea for them.   They compensated for my shyness and lack of experience with [their acting in] That Sinking Feeling [1979]. Because I didn’t know any better, I tried to explain things too much. I tried to talk them into performances that they could do perfectly well already, by themselves. One of the youngsters put me in place when he said after a while, “I don’t know what you are saying, but I know what you mean.” Burt Lancaster said exactly the same thing to me on Local Hero [1983], but he said it because he couldn’t understand my accent. Question: Though you are presumably angry about poverty in Scotland, a subject of That Sinking Feeling, you chose to work in a comic mode. Response: That’s probably due to my experience in Glasgow with unemployed youngsters. Instinctively, I realized that the last thing they needed was to be told how miserable they were being unemployed. I made That Sinking Feeling more for them than for anyone else, so I knew there was no need to put a message into it. We were inside the situation so we had more right to see fun in it than anyone else. That kind of attitude has stuck with me. Question: That Sinking Feeling was the ultimate low-budget film? Response: Oh, yes, it was shot for 6,000 pounds, about $10,000. It was the first indigenous Scottish film. And being the first indigenous film, it couldn’t play. It ran for a week in Glasgow, and was taken off. Question: What were your pleasant surprises as a director? 78

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Response: There weren’t any. It was just as hard as I thought it would be. I don’t really enjoy filming. Maybe someday I will, though Comfort and Joy [1984] was more fun. Maybe I’m getting more at ease, but it’s certainly not a fun thing to do. It’s much hard work. Question: Gregory’s Girl [1981] was your breakout hit in the USA. Were you happy with the reception? Response: It was three years after I’d finished the script for Gregory’s Girl that I got to make it, but I prefer That Sinking Feeling as a film. I’m not fond of any of my films in an intimate way, but Gregory’s Girl would be number four on my list. Question: How did you get Burt Lancaster to agree to appear in Local Hero? Response: We just sent him the script. He said he doesn’t get many good scripts, and this was the best he had in so many years. This was a script he enjoyed, and he was keen to do it. Question: He’s obviously great. But so is Peter Riegert as an American businessman. Response: He’s “Mac” McIntyre, and I was determined that he not have a real first name. I was terrified that Peter would come up to me one day and say, “I just realized I don’t have a Christian name. What should I be called?” It’s the kind of thing an actor does. Fortunately, he was happy with “Mac.” The character didn’t have a real name because he didn’t know who he was. He was just pure business every time.   When I showed Local Hero this weekend at the Toronto Festival, someone asked me what film I was most satisfied with. I said Comfort and Joy, which, to me, is more dense, more psychologically solid, more concentrated—and there was a ripple of acceptance among the audience. Too many people like Local Hero—that’s what I find. Question: Why are you troubled by Local Hero’s popularity? Response: I just suspect people like it because of its nice eccentric Scottish background. Maybe there are too many signposts for a sentimental reading, such as the dance scene which settles people into the atmosphere in a way they forget everything that happened before, and that Burt Lancaster is a desperate bully. Question: Local Hero ends sadly, with Riegert in his lonely modern apartment in Houston instead of him romping about rural Scotland. Was your distributor, Warner Brothers, satisfied? Response: That was one of the earliest brushes I had with a studio. I was sat down in Los Angeles with a couple of Warners executives and asked if 79

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I’d like to reshoot the ending. I don’t precisely know what ideas they had, but I said, “No, I’m not interested.” The movie had been finished seven months before, and the last thing on my mind was to retire to one of those beaches and try to think up a new ending. That experience was quite a surprise. That was very benign pressure because Warners was very happy with the movie and happy to distribute it. “Well,” I thought, “if this is the best, God help me if they ever get serious [about changes].” Question: Do you always think regionally when you make films? Response: It’s easy for me to be a Scotsman because of the overwhelming feeling of most people in Scotland of being subservient to England and therefore having a chip on our shoulder. I think, unconsciously, I was addressing myself more with Comfort and Joy than with my other films to Scottish people. There are things that Scotsmen get and other people don’t get in the dialogue. Scottish characters can be pinpointed by a phrase, targeted very quickly. Question: So you made a story about a Glasgow deejay for Comfort and Joy. Response: It was only about ten years ago that we had the first local radio show in Glasgow, and that was so unusual it took my fancy. But the story is about a loss of identity reduced to temporary insanity. Like Alan [Bill Paterson], I went mad for about three or four months. If the film had been longer, I think there would have been a point where someone said to Alan, “It’s good to see you back on your feet again.” But he didn’t know he was off his feet. That’s certainly what friends said to me after a few months: “It’s great to see you together again.” Question: What’s the complication with names in Comfort and Joy? Response: Everybody has two names. Dickie Butts insists on being called Arlan at every opportunity. Mr. Bunny used to be Mr. Softy, but he’s Mr. Bunny again. People have a label, they also have a name. They live more to the label than to the name. It’s like the poem by T. S. Eliot about cats, that cats have three names: the name you call it, then its proper name, then its secret name, which only it knows. So somebody’s business, or the way he or she spends the day, can be confused with the real person. Question: Comfort and Joy was a commercial failure in North America. Was the project mishandled by Universal Pictures? 80

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Response: I didn’t think Comfort and Joy was going to be a box-office smash. Perhaps some people at Universal did, but the problem was more general, what can happen when a low-budget filmmaker associates with a studio. Universal wasn’t out a lot of money, a million dollars or so, so it was easy not to put a lot of effort into the movie. I don’t think that anyone at Universal actually made a phone call and said, “Let’s pull the plug on this.” But I think emotionally they did, on what basis I don’t know, maybe something as simple as a slow weekend in New York. Maybe there was a baseball game or something. Those are the things that I see affect judgments: a slow weekend, a lukewarm review. Question: Is it possible that audiences who thought (misguidedly?) of Bill Forsyth as an optimistic, cheery, whimsical director of comedy were unprepared for the darkness of Comfort and Joy? Response: I was quite surprised how easily people wanted to pigeonhole things I’ve done. Perhaps naively I thought people understand what humor was, that it was invented by the human race to cope with the dark areas of life, problems and terrors. It’s strange to me that people want humor to be in a category all by itself, as pure “entertainment.” So those who misunderstood Comfort and Joy the most were those who thought I was just trying to make a jolly farce. That is a complete misreading of the film. It means that if they misunderstood Comfort and Joy, they misunderstood my other films.   It was disappointing more than anything. I thought I’d been understood more than I’d been. But it hasn’t made me falter in any way, and I’ve been thinking that maybe it would be nice to make a really funny film in about four years. But not now. Anyway, the nice thing about coming to festivals is to discover that there is an area of understanding. Question: Why will you be shooting Housekeeping [1987] in Canada? Response: It’s set in a small lakeside lumber town in Idaho in the 1950s. We drove around the American northwestern states looking for locations, and everything is so different now. It’s become a resort area with marinas, and the lakes are papered with cabins, so it would be very difficult to recreate the fifties. But we crossed the border into Canada, just forty or fifty miles in, and the locations are there to be used. Question: What’s the story? Response: It’s from a first novel by Marilynne Robinson.1 It’s about two girls who don’t have a mother, so they end up with a succession of 81

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female relatives, and finally their late mother’s sister, a vagrant. She’s almost like a wild animal. The movie is about the girls’ desperate attempts to domesticate their aunt, and about her almost pitiful attempts to be a kind of housekeeper for them, and a mother.   When I read Housekeeping, it wasn’t from the point of filming. It was months and months later that the idea of making it into a movie caught. I gave Marilynne a copy of the script when I’d finished it. She was amazed that an actual script existed. She said that when she was writing the novel, she was so convinced that it would never be published, much less made into a movie, that perversely she wrote half the scenes to take place into complete darkness. Question: Is Housekeeping a comedy? Response: There are certain comedic elements in the domestic details of the aunt trying to be a housekeeper. If she opens a can of beans, she washes away the label and keeps the can because a vagrant doesn’t throw anything away. During the course of a year, a whole stack of cans pile up in the front room, and newspapers as well. To me, the dominant feeling about Housekeeping is “wateriness.” In the spring, the house floods, and they spend a week walking around the house in six inches of water. There are reflections on the wall from the waters, and even the walls look like they’re shaking.  Housekeeping isn’t quite tragic, but it’s too heart aching to be called a comedy, because these kids have grown up with no love at all. My movie starts with the mother delivering the two five-year-olds onto their grandmother’s porch one Sunday morning while the grandmother is in church. The mother gets into her car and drives it over a cliff into a lake. Question: What’s the story of your family? Response: My father died five years ago. My two elder sisters married Englishmen and went abroad. At the moment, my mother is the only one left in Glasgow, although it’s certainly my home. When I was a very small boy, my father was a plumber in a shipping yard, but then it transpired that he became a grocer. That’s how my parents met. He was working in one grocery store, she in another. Her store ran out of onions, and she was sent to get onions. That’s how they met, with her trying to buy onions from him. Question: That sounds like a Bill Forsyth movie.2 Response: [skeptically] Hmmmm. 82

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Notes This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Globe and Mail, September 1985. 1. Robinson (1943–) is a distinguished American essayist and novelist. Her latest nonfiction collection is What Are We Doing Here? Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) and her newest novel, Jack (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). 2. Housekeeping was Forsyth’s last successful film. Breaking In (1989) and Being Human (1994) were failures, and so was Gregory’s Two Girls (1999). Since, he has seemingly retired from filmmaking.

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A Rare-and-Brief Glimpse of Director Akira Kurosawa The mountain wouldn’t budge for Mohammed; nor would the lordly Akira Kurosawa, seventy-five, come down from Mt. Fuji for the world premiere of Ran (1985) at the First International Tokyo Film Festival. Instead, two busloads of foreign journalists were diverted for a two-and-a-half-hour pilgrimage to the countryside near Mt. Fuji so that they could meet with the great director. This rare summit was held at the Hakone Prince, a palatial hotel on a placid lake where, nearby, Kurosawa summers. The press from outside Japan would be granted precisely one and a half hours with the maker of such masterpieces as Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952), and The Seven Samurai (1954). Japanese journalists? Kurosawa banished them from attending. The ride began uncomfortably when Kurosawa’s longtime interpreter, a French woman on the bus, asked journalists to write down their questions ahead of time. Then she began reading them aloud, altering the queries that she felt might offend the filmmaker. “He doesn’t like abstract ones, about significance. He doesn’t like to answer, ‘What does this mean?’” She added cheerily, “You can ask as many questions as you like about horses. He likes to talk about horses.” What she indicated proved true when the filmmaker sat before us. Tall, erect, imperious behind dark glasses, Kurosawa seemed happiest with soft questions allowing simple, straightforward responses. Yes, he answered enthusiastically about the special horses recruited for Ran’s spectacular battle scenes. “We tried to find horses that were a little smaller than today’s thoroughbreds,” he noted. And he was glad to discuss the sixteenthcentury setting of Ran (English translation, Chaos), when samurai rode the Japanese range. “At the time, people were still free. If they were strong enough to fight, they could make something of their lives, they could be really human. Even a fighting peasant could do it, though the competition was fierce. People could express their personality much more than today.”

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Akira Kurosawa behind the camera on Kagemusha.

And tougher questions? Our interpreter from the bus shook her head unhappily whenever anything slightly probing was asked of Kurosawa. For instance, did the producers of Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), which had been rejected by the Tokyo Fest, try to enlist Kurosawa’s help to get it screened? “Of course I heard of the problems of Mishima,” Kurosawa did answer. “I’m convinced that if it were a good film, we would have shown it at the festival. However, I have nothing to do with the Tokyo festival, and anyway I didn’t see the film. I cannot say more than what I have said.” I asked what turned out to be a heretical question. Was the great battle in Ran influenced by the famous altercation on ice in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 classic, Alexander Nevsky? Kurosawa looked disturbed that I questioned his originality. A male French critic literally rose from his seat in defense. “Je proteste!” he boomed. “Kurosawa est Kurosawa. Eisenstein est Eisenstein.” “Sit down!” someone yelled at him in English, and there might have even been a “F—— you.” Finally, Kurosawa answered me. “I’ve never been influenced,” he said. “I like Potemkin [1925], but by the time of Ivan the Terrible [1944], I had stopped looking at Eisenstein.” With that, Kurosawa explained how he 85

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decided to focus Ran on the well-known history of Lord Mori. “I like his personality. He lived far from Kyoto. If he lived in Kyoto, he would have united Japan.” Mori had three sons and, according to legend, each was handed a single arrow and asked to break it. But when three arrows were held together in unity, nobody could shatter them. In Ran, Kurosawa subverts this touching parable by having son No. 3 smash the three arrows across his knee. “When I read that three arrows together are invincible, that’s not true,” Kurosawa said. It was a catalyst for his screenplay. “I started doubting, and that’s when I started thinking: the house was prosperous and the sons were courageous. What if this fascinating man had bad sons?” Replacing Shakespeare’s daughters with male siblings, he merged Ran and King Lear. Mori (renamed Hidetora Ichimonji in Ran) repeats Lear’s blunder with his three children by rewarding two wicked sons with property and banishing the good, loyal one. “About Shakespeare,” Kurosawa said, “I’m not a specialist. I’m just a reader. If you quote me some line, I won’t know it.” Still, Ran is the second time that he has utilized Shakespearean tragedy for a Japanese-set screen story: his acclaimed 1957 Throne of Blood featured Toshiro Mifune as a Japanese Macbeth. Kurosawa was queried if Ran’s Lady Kaede, who marries her dead husband’s murderer out of selfish ambition, is another version of Lady Macbeth. “It’s not especially Lady Macbeth,” Kurosawa said. “But behind every man of power there’s a lady in back manipulating him.” Much of the Western press groaned. Kurosawa, for the first time, grinned. “I don’t have a Lady Macbeth,” he added, leaning into the microphone; but Kurosawa’s jolly mood ebbed when a journalist asked why much of the evil in Ran seems caused by the women. “I don’t think anyone is particularly bad in the movie,” he replied. “It’s only different personalities.” Nor was Kurosawa pleased when it was suggested he might apologize about keeping out the Japanese press. “They put silly questions because they don’t study at all,” he said, not giving in. Nor would he agree that the anti-war apocalyptic message of Ran was aimed at Reagan and Gorbachev. “If I wanted to deliver a message, I’d write a letter,” he answered testily. And then he contradicted himself. Ran does have a message. “What I wanted to say in the last scene was that humanity must face life without relying on God or Buddha. We must try to the maximum to build for a happy future, otherwise there will be a succession of wars. A reason I couldn’t shoot this film for so long was that producers complained that the ending was tragic. We are always closing our eyes.” 86

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Kurosawa stood and signed a few autographs. Then he marched out of the hotel, loyal interpreter by his side, and climbed into a chauffeur-driven Mercedes. Smiling and waving, Kurosawa was taken back to his summer retreat.1

Notes This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Boston Herald, June 10, 1986. 1. Kurosawa (1910–1998) made three films after Ran: Dreams (1990), Rhapsody in August (1991), and Madadayo (1993).

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Norman Mailer Where Tough Guys Spend the Winter Norman Mailer, acclaimed novelist and essayist, has not exactly succeeded as a filmmaker. His three 16mm improvisatory features—Beyond the Law (1968), Wild 90 (1968), and Maidstone (1970)—were regarded warily by both audiences and critics, viewed as home-movie advertisements for himself, amusing perhaps but indulgent and inconsequential. When Mailer’s direction is remembered, it is probably for the rough-and-tumble reallife fight caught on camera in Maidstone in which Mailer’s teeth sank into actor Rip Torn’s ear. Mailer decided to try again. For the first time, he would direct a scripted movie with a professional cast and crew, and with significant money behind him. Cannon Films has provided a $6 million budget to allow the writer to compose a screenplay and direct a 35mm film of his 1984 novel Tough Guys Don’t Dance. The book was written and set in Mailer’s place of summer residence, Provincetown, Massachusetts, at the tip of Cape Cod. Here, Eugene O’Neill penned his legendary dramas, Tennessee Williams met Marlon Brando for casting A Streetcar Named Desire, Robert Motherwell painted, and the Pilgrims first landed. It’s also a gay capital of America. “I love Provincetown,” Mailer said, “and I thought it would be a wonderful place to make a film.” Instead of returning to his Brooklyn Heights home in the fall, he stayed in P-Town to shoot Tough Guys. The film stars Ryan O’Neal as Mailer’s anxiety-ridden protagonist, Tim Madden, in search of his perhaps murdered wife, and Isabella Rossellini as Madden’s ex-spouse, a world-weary Italian. “In the earlier movies I wouldn’t really call myself a director,” Mailer said. He was interviewed between camera setups in the attic office of his Commercial Street home, while, below, Tough Guys “B” interiors were

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Norman Mailer behind the camera on Tough Guys Don’t Dance.

being shot. “I didn’t spend any time with the cameramen. I’d leave it up to them what to film. There were no scripts, and I worked [on camera] as an actor. I wanted to, so I could push the stories one way or another from the center of the action. Afterward, I took forever editing them. The last film, Maidstone, had forty-five hours of sound and film, and it took me three years to get it down to ninety minutes.” Mailer acknowledged the criticism of his 1968–70 trilogy, but he also feels an affection for his old movies. “They had great stuff, but they also had great flaws. The sound was subpar. That’s what sunk them finally. You could hardly hear them. Those movies were done mostly without professional actors because I didn’t have scripts. But you can’t do a movie with a script without professional actors. That’s my conclusion, unless you have an unlimited budget. But if you’re working on a tight budget as with Tough Guys, you’d better have real pros because the irony is, once the production begins, you have no time to spend with your actors. The lighting takes so long, the sound has to work, and so on. We were lucky to have two weeks of rehearsal before we began.” How did the union technicians feel being ordered about by a novelist-turned-filmmaker? 89

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“It was no secret that this was my first film by their measure, but I haven’t felt any tension about that. They’ve been wonderful. I feel like the captain of a very good ship with a marvelous crew, and I’m trying to learn how to run the ship. I haven’t directed with any authority. I haven’t been the kind of director who says, ‘Get that person off the set!’ I don’t feel that way. I feel relatively relaxed. Most of direction is foreseeing problems and making corrections when there are problems. As you get older, you tend to have a lot of small wisdom tucked in about forty different nooks and crannies, and film direction brings that out. You must know about the carpentry, bookkeeping, the whims of actors and actresses—your mind goes to a different place every thirty minutes. I like that.” Mailer’s elegant two-story brick house has been made over, the interior redone to match the fast-lane personality of Madden’s missing dyed-blonde wife (Debra Sandlund, making her debut in movies). The home is painted yellow, and lemon-colored paintings, badly imitative of Matisse, clog the walls. The kitchen is a mess—another Tough Guys set—and blue-jeaned, parka-clad crew members busily race up and down stairs. On this day in the sixth week of a seven-week shooting schedule, Mailer spent sixteen hours in an upstairs bedroom supervising the filming, and refilming, of Ryan O’Neal, in bathrobe and underpants. His Tim Madden is in a despondent mood. He is mourning for his runaway missing wife. For the camera, O’Neal climbed out of bed looking suicidal. He went into the bathroom and wrote on the mirror with shaving cream the number of days his wife is missing. O’Neal is a funny guy, which keeps him alert through so many hours of tedious takes. Once he walked into the room like a somnambulant victim of Dracula, declaring, “The genius returns!” Another time, he collapsed on the floor, proclaiming in a Jerry Lewis voice, “Ryan is tired.” After perhaps the seventh take of him applying shaving cream to the mirror and writing numbers, O’Neal pretended to phone Cannon’s budgetconscious Israeli executive, Menahem Golan, saying, “Menahem? Hello! We need two more weeks shooting the numbers.” Mailer couldn’t keep his own humor in check, especially around an old friend and ex–boxing partner like O’Neal. While the camera set up, he wandered over and whispered to his star a smutty story about a staid Harvard University man washing his hands in a men’s room. They both laughed. A few minutes later, O’Neal needed to change his makeup in a dressing room across the street. Clothed only in his bathrobe, he charged toward the sidewalk, crying out, “Blue Velvet!” 90

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How was it for Mailer casting O’Neal? “People who think they know Ryan O’Neal as an actor are going to be surprised. He’s wonderfully adroit, nimble, mercurial. He’s a witty actor. He gives odd turns to a scene. He can work with wonderful economy. He can indicate pain with the little turn of a finger. He’s just very good. Working with Kubrick on Barry Lyndon [1975] didn’t do him any harm.” Mailer had known Isabella Rossellini socially but he had never seen her on film until Blue Velvet (1986), which he much admired. “I thought it was the first film I saw in years that dared to put evil on the screen and, in large measure, it succeeded. There is something satanic about moments in the film, a sense of how bad it is Out There.” Would Mailer compare Tough Guys with any other film? “Next to the really hardboiled, it’s more medium-boiled. Of the genre I’m invading, the film I respect the most is Chinatown [1974], a wonderful picture with a wonderful script.” He saw Tough Guys as “a commercial picture that hopefully will find a reasonably large audience.”1 He added, laughing, “What you want is for it to be seen as an art film thirty years after it was made, not two weeks after it comes out.” He said he’d like to make additional conventional films.2 “If the next film has a bigger budget, I’d like to do a scene with a couple of hundred extras, and say to the [assistant director] with his bullhorn, ‘Tell them to hurry up!’” He laughed again, and then got serious. “To begin directing at my age, it’s vainglorious to have any suspicions that you’ll end up as a great director. Kurosawa wasn’t made in a day, nor Bergman, nor Fellini. Coppola spends his days breathing films. But I think I can be a good director, and maybe a very good director. I have a literary sense that I can apply to film. Because of my writing background, I have a sense of character that is probably deeper than a lot of directors, and actors love it if you can tell them about who they are playing. Otherwise, they have a terrible problem creating the characters themselves.” Having completed five weeks of shooting Tough Guys Don’t Dance, Mailer seemed cool, confident, amiable, having a good time. Could it be that directing a film is . . . easy? “Easier than writing novels,” Mailer replied. “Writing novels is so lonely, and it demands everything in you. It’s enormous pressure. You never quit the work. As a novelist, I dream about the book and just worry all the time. It’s like being in debt and trying to keep up payments. It’s like being in prison. I sleep better as a director than I ever did as a novelist. If I were younger it might be different. But at my age, sixty-three, my character is formed. It’s not going to be changed directing films.” 91

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Notes This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Globe and Mail, January 16, 1987. 1. Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987) opened to poor reviews and even worse box office, $343,000 on a $5-million budget. 2. Norman Mailer (1923–2007) never directed another film after Tough Guys Don’t Dance. He did play Harry Houdini in Matthew Barney’s avant-garde Cremaster 2 (1999), and he appeared in 2004 in one TV episode of Gilmore Girls.

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Volker Schlöndorff and Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale Depicts Futuristic Puritans in Harvard Square Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood got the idea for her esteemed 1985 dystopian work, The Handmaid’s Tale, during a conversation in Toronto, in which she announced, “I think I’m going to write about how religious fanatics would run the world if they got their druthers.” But where would the feminist author situate her gruesome Puritan and patriarchal society, in which abortion is a capital crime and fertile women are enslaved, babyproducing machines? She chose to set it in the United States. More specifically, the bulk of her tale would happen in Massachusetts, in the environs of Boston and Cambridge, near a future-shock version of Harvard University. “The grounds in front of Harvard’s Widener Library was where they’d have public hangings,” she explained at the Berlin Film Festival at the world premiere of the movie version of The Handmaid’s Tale (1990).1 Nearby in Cambridge is where Atwood’s heroine, Offred, resided with her gentle husband and bright-eyed child—before the crypto-fascist revolution denied women of their rights and brought forth the religious republic of Gilead. The filmmaker of The Handmaid’s Tale, Germany’s Volker Schlöndorff,2 also interviewed at Berlin, said “The most daring part of Margaret’s book is that, instead of a small town in the Bible belt, she sets it in the most liberal area of the country, an Eastern campus. [But] we never even asked about [filming at] Harvard.” Instead, the movie was shot in North Carolina at or about Duke University in Durham, with a nearby abandoned Lucky Strike cigarette factory used as Gilead’s internment camp. “It’s still very

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Volker Schlöndorff and Margaret Atwood discussing the production of The Handmaid’s Tale.

much a campus movie,” Schlöndorff said, “with the pseudo-Tudor architecture and lots of young girls.” For the last five years, the German director (The Tin Drum [1979], Swann in Love [1986]) has lived in New York City. “I went there to make a film of Death of a Salesman [1985] and got so involved with America that I didn’t want to go back to Munich. I found American society so complex, so unfinished, so temporary, that when you looked from there, Europe was one big museum in which even the dust didn’t move.” What had Schlöndorff learned about the United States that he hadn’t known before living there? “Death of a Salesman showed me how important family life is in America, why politicians have to stand with their families. In Germany, nobody even knows what Mrs. Kohl3 looks like. If family is one structure in America, church is another, which I didn’t understand before The Handmaid’s Tale. “Filmmaking is about trying to find reality. When I started the film, I said, ‘This could never happen in America.’ But I saw how real-life cheerleaders in our cast could be trained to be part of a public hanging instead of a football game. At nightfall at Duke, vigilantes were patrolling the campus because there was so much rape. We gave the women in our cast a 94

Volker Schlöndorff and Margaret Atwood

week off in April for the march to Washington4 against the revising of abortion laws.” Atwood had declined an invitation to write the screenplay5 because she was occupied writing her recently published novel, Cat’s Eye (1988). Instead, with her hearty approval, British playwright Harold Pinter agreed to do the screenplay. “Nobody in Canada asked, ‘Let me write the script. Let me direct.’ If you don’t ask, you can’t be asked,” the writer explained, when I interviewed her in a Berlin hotel lobby. She had enough proprietary interest to come to Germany to help publicize the movie. She mostly approved of the adaptation, though noting, “I think it could have been a more meditative film, a slower film.” The Handmaid’s Tale got its geography from Atwood’s 1962 graduate stint in Cambridge at Radcliffe College. “One of the persons it’s dedicated to is Perry Miller,6 through whom I studied at Harvard the American Puritans in great detail. The roots of totalitarianism in America are found, I discovered, in the theocracy of the seventeenth century. The Scarlet Letter [1850] is not that far behind The Handmaid’s Tale, my take on American Puritanism.” Atwood is quick to explain that some of her forebears were these very Puritans who emigrated from England to New Hampshire and Massachusetts and, during the American Revolution, went into political exile after supporting the Loyalists. They settled in Nova Scotia, allowing Atwood to be born, generations later, a Canadian. However, her favorite long-ago relative is Mary Webster, a Connecticut woman, who was accused of witchery and hanged. “She must have had a tough neck and been very light because the next day she was still alive,” Atwood said proudly. “Under laws of double jeopardy, she couldn’t be hanged again. She was cut down and died years later of natural causes.” Returning to the movie, Atwood defended the casting of Britain’s Natasha Richardson as her protagonist, Offred, annoyed that some have said that Richardson’s character in the film is too passive a captive of the state of Gilead. “We all have this little fantasy of ourselves that we’d be brave and daring. But when the witch hunt is on the rampage, it takes extraordinary courage to resist. Also, her child has been taken hostage by the regime, like the missing children in Argentina, and therefore that limits the scope of her actions.” Atwood’s hackles were definitely raised when some at Berlin complained about the number of negative, violent females in the film. “I didn’t write the screenplay,” Atwood said, “but it’s naïve to think that all women 95

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are moral and good. It’s a Victorian attitude to shove off goodness on women instead of power. Should only men be all kinds of humans? Women must have a range of psychological types to choose from, not just Lady Macbeth, an angel, or a scarlet woman. “Are women more peaceful than men? They have a more vested interest in peace because of raising children, but we have no test case for women totally in control. If there was a special gene that every woman has, how do you explain Margaret Thatcher?”

Notes This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Boston Globe, March 4, 1990. 1. The Handmaid’s Tale returned as a remarkably successful TV series on Hulu with forty-six episodes between 2017 and 2021. 2. Volker Schlöndorff (1939–) has made ten features since The Handmaid’s Tale in the United States and Germany. His last film was Return to Montauk (2017). 3. The wife of Helmut Kohl, chancellor of Germany (1982–1998). 4. Three hundred thousand women marched in Washington in support of abortion rights on April 10, 1989. 5. Atwood (1939–) would write teleplays in 2021 for the TV series of The Handmaid’s Tale, and, earlier, in 2017, for the series Alias Grace, also based on one of her novels. 6. Perry Miller (1905–1963) was the author of many books about the American Puritans and early American religious leaders such as Jonathan Edwards and Roger Williams. He is among the founders of the academic field of American Studies.

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Three Short Encounters with Gus Van Sant Not So Gloomy Gus At this year’s Toronto Film Festival press conference for My Own Private Idaho, star River Phoenix mumbled Stanislavski jargon into his knuckles. Co-star Flea, he of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, praised Private Idaho as “one of the greatest films of all time,” dismissing other cinema as “spineless corporate drivel.” And then there was the film’s director, Gus Van Sant, bemused in the middle. He explained calmly how he came up with the Private Idaho theme of narcolepsy while recalling a youthful reading of George Eliot’s Silas Marner. He also said, “I don’t think of myself as a gay filmmaker. But I don’t mind being referred to as a gay filmmaker. It’s okay.” Van Sant’s first feature film, Mala Noche (1986), was an openly queer work about a Portland, Oregon, convenience store clerk smitten by a Mexican migrant worker. Portland is also the site of his two subsequent works, Drugstore Cowboy (1989) and his current film, a homoerotic tale of street hustlers based on Shakespeare’s history plays about Prince Hal and Falstaff. Interviewed the next day, Van Sant apologized for his wooziness from a late night on the town with his youthful cast. “Actors know all about hangovers and clear skin,” he said. “They drink down ten glasses of water, and no hangover and no pimples on their nose.” He’s a nice guy all the way, without pretentions or affectations, and happy to acknowledge how much of My Private Idaho is an homage also to films by others he admires, including Werner Herzog’s Heart of Glass (1976) and Stroszek (1977), Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984), and Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1965). He had been asked too often about his stars, River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, and how he got them to appear in his Bard-influenced queer tale. Van Sant was more eager to talk about his overlooked supporting cast, since they are essential to Private Idaho’s success. 97

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Gus Van Sant behind the camera for To Die For.

On film director William Richert (Winter Kills [1979]), who plays Bob, the roly-poly Falstaffian raconteur and lover of runaway lads: “He’d studied acting in the 1950s yet never had done it. But River, who starred in Bill’s A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon [1988], thought this larger-than-life rabblerouser with a million adventures was right for Bob. Bill Richert is into some of the most beautiful women you’ve ever seen in your life. He’s always getting into and out of stormy relationships. River loves Bill’s whopping tall stories, like ‘The Time I Almost Died in New York,’ and River likes to tell stories too. They can go on and on for hours. Once at Bill’s house in Malibu, there were apparently twenty-four straight hours of stories between them.” On German actor Udo Kier, who plays Hans, a customer involved in a threesome with Reeves and Phoenix: “I remembered him from Warhol’s Dracula [1974] and Frankenstein [1973]. He’s very handsome and yet strikingly odd-looking at the same time, and he’s a naturally funny person without doing anything. He sees the world as a hilarious circus, which is why he’s so good at comedy.” On Van Sant himself, the director is more reticent with information. He lived in Providence, Rhode Island, from 1971 to 1975 while attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). There he learned about cinema through the RISD Film Society, favored the artiest 98

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collegians (“The student body influenced me, not the teachers”), and wrote his first screenplay, The Last Living Model, a takeoff on Citizen Kane. He was also fairly certain he attended the first Talking Heads concert, featuring RISD peers Chris Frantz, Tina Weymouth, and David Byrne. “David’s the greatest!” Van Sant proclaimed. “He’s so original. But I thought then the band was so bad, though they already had their sound and did ‘Psycho Killer.’ I talked to David sometime afterward in a coffee shop, and he said, ‘I hate my job. I work as a dishwasher and I should work only with my band.’ I felt sorry for him. I thought, ‘This guy’s going nowhere. He’s the next RISD casualty.’”

Gerry Mandering Gus Van Sant began his filmmaking with avant-garde shorts during his time at RISD. With Gerry, he has returned to an arts-school conceptual aesthetic. What a shift from his conventional last feature, the Sean Connery–starring Finding Forrester (2000). Van Sant credits the change to his becoming enraptured by the dense, demanding, extreme long-take cinema of Hungary’s Bela Tarr. “I’d seen his Satan’s Tango in New York, and I met him in Toronto. We had drinks after a screening, and I helped Bela get an introduction at Sony Classics. A year and a half later, at a MOMA retrospective of his work, I told him I’d made a Bela Tarr film. I showed Gerry to him and his wife, Agnes, and they liked it and were happy with it: a very simple film.” Up front of our interview, I thanked Van Sant for having the sense to call a movie Gerry. That’s how I spell my first name. Van Sant laughed, because the title was an “in” joke from co-stars Casey Affleck and Matt Damon, and was meant pejoratively. “There are Gerrys in their lives,” Van Sant said. “They found a really funny photo of a gold-chained lounge singer, Gerry Woo, and they would refer to themselves as Gerry. Another Gerry was a theater teacher. Some Gerrys were good, some bad. It ultimately meant ‘Wrong!’ The wrong image: askew, fucked-up. They called each other Gerry, like, ‘Hey, screw-up!’” Some have accused Gerry of the emperor-has-no-clothes syndrome. Casey and Matt drive an auto in silence, then take a walk in the wilderness and get deeply lost in near silence. Is that all there is? “If you mean distributors, they want some action. But audiences have been great. To me, a whole lot happens in Gerry,” Van Sant said adamantly. “If you don’t like it, it might drive you crazy. It doesn’t drive me crazy. We’re not trying to 99

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compete with the regular cinema next door. A lot of movies don’t want you to have space to drift off and reflect on what you are thinking. Or for you to get lost, which is what this film is about. It’s really like taking a hike in the desert. I know we won’t be welcomed with open arms, but D. W. Griffith wasn’t either when he brought in the close-up.” I also wanted to hear from the filmmaker about his much-loathed remake of the iconic Psycho (1998). As I suspected, Van Sant likes his version. “People who deified Hitchcock’s Psycho [1960] felt that it was blasphemy. My idea—an appropriation of images, a frame-by-frame remake of a celebrated filmmaker—originated after Drugstore Cowboy [1989]. At Universal, there was a vice president in charge of remakes who said, ‘Here’s our catalogue. We can redo anything.’ I found the concept horrifying with lesser works, but what if we remade a great movie? Psycho! We could make it in color and update it with stars. It was a kind of wise-ass thing to suggest, but after Good Will Hunting, during the week of the Academy Awards when I was hot, they were willing to have me try.” Examined closely, the new Psycho wasn’t exactly the old. “No, my scenes are shorter. What is quite different is that I’m not obsessed with the thriller genre. I’m more interested in how characters get along than in how they are menacing. My remake was [considered] too fey a version of the Psycho story. I was too fey. But people who hadn’t seen the Hitchcock were scared. They fell into it. Psycho did make some money, but not enough to encourage further such projects. My desire had been: something like a computer virus, in which all studios would remake their old films!”

Cinema Verity At the Toronto Film Festival, I asked Gus Van Sant whether Elephant, a fictional behind-the-scenes at a Columbine-like massacre, was shaped, as was Gerry, by the cinema of the Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr. “He continues to be an influence,” the filmmaker said. “The overlapping of moments, the repeats, repeats, in Tarr’s Satan’s Tango inform part of this film. His long pieces of film are still inspirations, but also the works of Tarkovsky, Jancsó,1 and Sokurov.2 “The origin of the project was way back, when Columbine was happening. I had an idea to do a mainstream TV program, a more traditional, straight-ahead drama about the real kids. Harmony Korine was going to write a screenplay. I pitched it around LA but nobody could entertain 100

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doing a movie because of sanctions against violence. Until Colin Callender told me we could do Elephant for HBO Films. “We don’t usually in film get to work in 1:33, the television format, and also that of 16mm films projected in schools. Harris [Savides,3 the cinematographer] and I were very excited about that. I decided to continue with the way Gerry was put together: a film that didn’t have a hard script and could change every day. We started out using a very wide 8mm lens like Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange [1971], but that didn’t work. It was too distorted an image. Following all these characters with a camera [in long, long takes] is something that evolved that we liked, but we don’t know why. One of my favorite shots is holding on the back of [teenager] Alex Frost’s head while he plays the piano. We were going to hire a Seattle jazz musician to compose music. But one day during the shoot, Alex was playing piano in the high school cafeteria. Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ was one piece he’d learned, so we used that for the film.” Was Michael Moore an influence? “We’d watched Bowling for Columbine [2002] before shooting. It’s brilliant. I’m a big Michael Moore fan, glad we have him. But lots of incidents in my film come from information about what actually happened at Columbine. When Alex drinks from a cup in the cafeteria, that’s from a Columbine surveillance film.” Did Van Sant want an audience to feel emotionally connected to the people in his film? “It’s not that I don’t want you involved in the characters, but I want you involved by watching them, an observation, the way documentarian Frederick Wiseman sits back and lets things occur. We could have invented a more traditional psychological narrative. I have my ideas why Columbine happened, but that’s not this film. I wanted a poetic impression rather than dictating an answer. I wanted to include the audience’s thoughts.” Away from its high modernism,4 Elephant got what from popular culture? Van Sant mentioned video games. “I didn’t know anything about them, but people kept saying, ‘It’s those games that cause violence,’ so I started watching them. And playing them. I played Tomb Raider until I was obsessed with it. It calls for an interactive imagination, and there are some intellectual sides to some other games. When we were making Gerry, I showed Tomb Raider to Harris. What I wanted to do technically was almost impossible, without a huge budget like The Matrix. Among other things, I’d have the camera behind a character and it suddenly flips in front. But I was afraid to reference the video game in front of my actors. 101

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My soundman said to me on the set, ‘I played a couple of rounds of Tomb Raider,’ but I didn’t answer him.” So, do video games precipitate violence, perhaps the violence at Columbine? Especially ultra-violent ones like Doom? “If you obsessively do anything, like playing solitaire for solid weeks, that might influence your behavior, make you antisocial. If you play Doom, you are meeting people on the Internet, you dodge bullets, shoot them. The person you just shot might be a fourteen-year-old girl in Minnesota. If you do that for a long time, you start to fantasize. You might say, ‘Let’s get back at people we don’t like.’ In Elephant, one of the killers is briefly playing a video game. We couldn’t get rights to Doom so we designed one ourselves that resembles [what happens in] Gerry, with two guys walking in a desert.”

Notes Portions of this chapter were originally published, in slightly different form, in the following: “Not So Gloomy Gus,” Boston Phoenix, October 1991. “Gerry Mandering,” Boston Phoenix, February 28, 2003. “Cinema Verity,” Boston Phoenix, November 14, 2003. 1. Miklós Jancsó (1921–2014), the Hungarian director of The Round-Up (1966), The Red and the White (1967), and other classics. 2. Alexander Sokurov (1951–), the Russian filmmaker of Mother and Son (1997), Russian Ark (2002), and other acclaimed formalist features using extremely long takes. 3. Harris Savides (1957–2012) shot many documentaries and such wellregarded films as Zodiac (2007), Milk (2008), Margot at the Wedding (2007), and Greenberg (2010). 4. Van Sant (1952–) has made seven features since Elephant, some experimental like Last Days (2005), an idiosyncratic film about Kurt Cobain, and some more mainstream political works like the acclaimed Milk (2008) and Promised Land (2012). His latest film, little seen, is Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot (2018).

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Hybrid Identities An Interview with Agnieszka Holland In earlier times, the Polish screenwriter-director of such dark, skeptical political dramas as Woman on Her Own (1981) saw her films censored and shelved because of Communist Party restrictions. After martial law was declared in Poland in 1982, Agnieszka Holland emigrated to France and wrote a series of screenplays there for another Polish émigré, Andrzej Wajda. In 1985, she directed The Angry Harvest, about a love relationship between a Jewish woman and a Polish peasant who reluctantly hides her from the Nazis. That film received an Oscar nomination for West Germany and brought Holland her first real recognition. But it’s 1990’s Europa Europa, a major arthouse success, that has made Holland an international name.1 Here’s a movie for practically everybody, a thrilling, fabulist, basedon-fact World War II survival tale with twists galore. The hero is a young Polish Jew, Solly (Marco Hofschneider), who escaped the death camps by swimming into Russia and joining the Communists, then eluded the Nazis again by literally becoming one! He was mistaken for a Master Race Aryan and sent to an elite school for Hitler Youth. After the war, a Jew again, he embarked for Israel. It’s not in the movie, but he was inducted into the Israel Defense Forces for the 1948 Israeli–Arab War. “It’s an eighteenth-century philosophical tale, like Barry Lyndon [1975] or Tom Jones [1963],” Holland, amusing and forthright, said when I interviewed her in New York. “It’s also a bit like the movie Little Big Man [1970], an identity story. But I had Voltaire’s Candide as the model. Like Candide, Solly is an innocent, involved in the absurdity of the world.” The real Solly is now Solomon Perel, Israeli citizen, who kept his bizarre secret of how he survived a Nazi death camp hidden from everyone, even his wife and two sons.

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“I think he was terribly afraid to be judged and misunderstood,” Holland said. “When Solomon had nightmares, his wife thought that was normal for a concentration camp victim. She didn’t know Solomon’s war was different.” In the mid-1980s, Perel suffered a heart attack. “Only then did he realize that what made him sick was the secret. Solomon decided to talk about it, wrote a memoir.2 Eventually it became three hundred pages. When I read it, it was still a twenty-page resumé of his life, only the facts. So I spent time with him, in Tel Aviv, Paris, and Warsaw, and he gave me the small details for my film. What it felt like when a Nazi woman made love to him on a train, what he saw when [in Poland] he looked from a train into the Lodz Jewish ghetto.” Even with its wide scope, Europa Europa could not contain all of Perel’s uncanny tale. Holland recalled: “He told me also about when he came back to Germany and met the people he knew from Hitler Youth. They were friendly though it was a shock to see they’d spent three years with this Jewish guy.” The mixed-up story of Europa Europa has special significance for its half-Jewish filmmaker. “For true Jews, I’m not one. For anti-Semites, I’m enough. I ask myself, what does it mean to be a Jew? The movie speaks about this question. Is it religion? Race? Is it Solly’s interior? When he’s with the Germans, what keeps him with his Jewish identity is the missing foreskin of his penis. If he weren’t circumcised, could he be a Nazi? I don’t have the answer.” Holland’s father, a staunch Communist Party member, never once mentioned his Judaism to Agnieszka, though, like Solly, he had left behind his whole family during the War, and they had perished in the Warsaw ghetto. It was up to Agnieszka’s mother, a Catholic atheist and former resistance fighter, to inform her about Jewish traditions. “Other children went to church, but I didn’t. People said, ‘You Jew!’ but my mother said, ‘It’s good to be a Jew.’ For a while I thought that to be a Jew means to be more honest and just than everyone else. When I knew more, I realized Jews were exactly like everyone, no better or worse.” Holland laughed. “But they always think they are better. In this way, they are similar to Poles.” Europa Europa begins at Solly’s birth and circumcision, with some remarkable poetic scenes of Orthodox Jewish life. How did the secular director manage to capture the texture of Orthodox ritual? “I could feel it, but I don’t know why. Maybe one life before, I lived in a Jewish family. Whatever. When I read Isaac Singer, I have the feeling that I knew it all well.” Holland was thirteen when her father tumbled from a window, murdered, she alleged, by Poland’s secret police. At university age, Holland 104

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realized that, as a daughter of an enemy of the state, she would never be admitted to film school in Lodz. “Anyway, Lodz was a terrible city and FAMU, the Czech film school, was in Prague, a beautiful city. So I was there between 1966 and 1971, at the best moment of the Czech film explosion. In some of my films, you can feel the influence of Czech cinema, the dark humor and irony. The Polish elements are much more romantic, black, patriotic, with a feeling of history and Catholicism.” Holland once faltered in her filmmaking, trying to tell a patriotic Catholic Polish story. To Kill a Priest (1986) recreated the infamous murder by Communist police of the Solidarity-supporting clergyman Father Jerzy Popieluszko. What its director conceived as an intimate, low-budget art film ballooned into an expensive epic production necessitating international stars, Ed Harris as a secret policeman and Christopher Lambert as the martyred priest. Was Lambert miscast? “I met Lambert, and he was really boyish and shy. He’s a very nice and sensitive guy. But I didn’t realize that he exists in the eyes of the people in 105

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a cartoon way.” Audiences could not forget that Lambert became famous starring in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984). Fortunately, Holland was far more successful utilizing Marco Hofschneider3 as young Solly in Europa Europa. “I’d seen many boys, some too young, some too old, some too strong, some too weak. For instance, I tried out a young French boy, but he was too fragile. I knew he’d be dead in ten minutes of the movie. But Marco had charm and he’s very natural, but he’s not too sweet, and he said the dialogue in a very true way.” But is he Jewish? Holland chuckled. “I don’t think so. He wasn’t circumcised. For his penis, I had to make a special effect.”

Notes This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Visions (Summer 1992). 1. Holland (1948–) has been a prolific filmmaker both in Europe and America. She has shot in English such high-budget projects as The Secret Garden (1993) and Washington Square (1997), an adaptation of Henry James. Holland has also been an in-demand TV series filmmaker in the United States, directing multiple episodes of The Wire, The Killing, Treme, and House of Cards. 2. His book, I Was Hitler Youth Salomon, was translated into English and published under the movie title. Solomon Perel, Europa, Europa: A Memoir of World War II (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997). Before dying in 2023, Perel had been a lecturer and motivational speaker in Israel and in Europe into his nineties. 3. Europa Europa was Marco Hofschneider’s first film role. He has continued as a German television and film actor, appearing in six films since, including the English-language The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996).

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Errol Morris and Stephen Hawking The Universe in a Mind Stephen Hawking has redefined the way we look at ourselves and our universe. As a theoretical physicist, he has shattered and reconstructed fundamental theories on such mind-bending matters as black holes and the nature of time, earning himself comparison by some with Albert Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton. Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1988), which traces our evolving understanding of space and time, has sold more than six million copies in thirty different languages. A Los Angeles producer, Gordon Freedman, acquired the rights to the book and went to Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment to ask for help in making it into a movie. Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy of Amblin approached the innovative and idiosyncratic documentarian, Errol Morris, director of Gates of Heaven (1978), Vernon, Florida (1981), and the muchacclaimed The Thin Blue Line (1988). Said Morris: “Even though, strictly speaking, A Brief History of Time was not an Amblin project, they would help me with the financing if I should decide to direct. At that time, they didn’t know that I had a background in the history and philosophy of science, that I had been a graduate student at Princeton and that John Wheeler,1 the man who had given black holes their name, had been one of my teachers.” Before I met with Morris at his production office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I wondered how he had managed to communicate with Hawking for the documentary. As Hawking’s science career has advanced, so has his well-known affliction: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, a progressive disorder that attacks the central nervous system. At fifty, Hawking is bound to a specially designed wheelchair, unable to speak, unable to move, communicating only through a computer.2 107

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Errol Morris.

Question: How did you, Errol Morris, decide to direct a film adaptation of such an unlikely work as A Brief History of Time, the same name as your documentary? Response: I have to admit I was reluctant at first about whether I really wanted to make this movie. It had been described as “an impossible task,” and nobody had a clear idea of what it might be. I expressed interest, but it wasn’t until I met Stephen Hawking in January 1990 that I became fully committed to the project. Question: What was it like to meet with Hawking for the first time? 108

Errol Morris and Stephen Hawking

Response: It’s very strange. On the one hand, here is a person who is completely incapacitated but, on the other hand, [he’s] completely in control. One feels quickly dominated by Stephen—hypersensitive, hyperaware of his presence. There is a resemblance between a visit with Hawking and a visit to a psychiatrist. The elements of transference and projection that exist in any conversation between one person and another are heightened because of the nature of how Stephen communicates. The fact that so little is said by him in the course of one hour, two hours, three hours . . . Question: And yet he is communicating. Response: It takes him a long time to put together a sentence. He doesn’t speak in the traditional sense. Instead he uses a synthetic voice and a computer program. He can use three fingers on each hand, with which he operates a clicker that controls a cursor on the computer screen. With the cursor, he picks out words from a dictionary or, if a word isn’t in the dictionary, individual letters, and then assembles them on screen. And then the sentences are spoken using his speech synthesizer. It is a long, laborious process. Question: All the while you’re sitting across from him. Response: And you can’t see his screen. And so there are long periods of time where Stephen is writing. You hear his clicking—click, click, click, click, click—and you have no idea what he’s writing and what he’s thinking. You have no idea whether you’re supposed to say something or say nothing. And long periods of time elapse—two, three, four minutes of silence, which is a lot of silence. And then Stephen “speaks.”   After a certain amount of time, you easily understand what he’s saying. It becomes his voice. But at first there’s the element of surprise. You’re never really sure when he’s going to start talking, and you’re never completely sure whether you’ve heard what he’s said correctly. And then there’s the psychiatric element. Question: You start getting paranoid? Response: You start thinking: Is this question ridiculous? Am I annoying Stephen? Does Stephen like me? Does Stephen want to be involved in this project? Am I imposing on Stephen?   As I got to know him better, instead of sitting across from him I sat next to him, so I could actually read the screen as he wrote. It became a game of twenty questions: you see the beginning of the sentence but you’re not sure how it’s going to end—whether he’s going to put a 109

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negative in at some point, changing its entire meaning. Still, when you’re sitting next to him, you become involved in the communication process in a more immediate sense. You feel part of it. And there is a strange intimacy about it. Question: I gather that you like him? Response: Oh, I like Stephen very much. He has a strange and ironic presence. And he has an extraordinary sense of humor. A perverse sense of humor. Question: Such as? Response: Very early in the shooting, I asked him about the cosmic censorship hypothesis—the hypothesis that there are no “naked singularities,” that you can never see within a black hole. Physicists assume that is true, but nobody has been able to prove it. So I asked him, “Well, what if the cosmic hypothesis were false? What would we see?” There was this very, very long pause and clicking while I was waiting for an answer. And I assumed it was a stupid question. And finally Stephen said, “Seven leather-bound volumes of Proust.” Question: Was it a stupid question? Response: I guess I will never know. Question: Can you give one more example of Hawking’s wry humor? Response: I shot in a studio set closely resembling Stephen’s actual office in Cambridge, England, down to the books on the walls, the computer, the desks, and the Marilyn Monroe poster. I remember one occasion when we hadn’t nailed the Marilyn poster to the wall, and it fell off during the shooting to the floor, and Stephen started clicking, “A fallen woman.” Question: Hawking is funny. Response: He’s very, very funny. Question: I wonder if he was amused by how many people ran out to buy A Brief History of Time but couldn’t make it through the science in it. That would be me! Response: A Brief History of Time is not light reading. What I’m struck by is, the book is literature, not just science exposition. I think that Stephen has an unmistakable style, a romantic style: the images, his descriptions of black holes as that “ultimate prison” or “the land from which no traveler returns.” Stephen is extremely well read. He certainly knows the Bible, although he told me that the main thing he learned from reading the King James version was not to begin a sen110

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tence with “And.” He is also very much interested in Wagner. He’s made a number of trips to Bayreuth.3   I asked Philip Glass to think of [Wagner’s] Parsifal and the story of the Grail while writing the music for the movie.4 Maybe there is some loose metaphorical connection between the riddle of our own mortality and the riddle of the universe. When I told Stephen this, he said, “If I hear a number of Dresden amens in the soundtrack, I will know why.” Question: Do you have a very favorite quote from Hawking? Response: There’s one aphorism I like, in a scientific paper of his that does not appear in the book. Einstein’s famous remark about quantum mechanics—that “God does not play dice”—and Stephen’s rejoinder: “Not only does God play dice, he sometimes throws them where they can’t be seen.” Question: You could get the idea that Hawking knows everything under the sun. Response: One thing I hoped to do with this movie was to show Stephen not as a saint but as a hardworking scientist. I didn’t want to be involved in some species of hagiography. Stephen is obviously a very complicated person, and I don’t profess to know him that well. But I think he’s a person of remarkable courage. I’m capable of being cynical about almost anything. But I found it very, very difficult to be cynical about Stephen. If anybody is a hero, it’s Stephen Hawking. Question: How did he participate in the filmmaking process, beyond being filmed and interviewed? Response: I would send Stephen rough cuts of the films on videotape and he would send faxes back with detailed commentary. He came over to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I live—he called it “pseudo-Cambridge”—to view one of the rough cuts and to help with editing. He sat in my editing room and made extensive comments on the rough cut, and provided all kinds of assistance. In fact, his trip to Cambridge was the turning point in editing the movie. Stephen told me a number of stories, [including] of his near-fatal accident, when his wheelchair was hit by a taxi in 1991. He wrote bits and pieces of the narration, including the story of how Roger Penrose5 called him on his birthday, following Hawking’s most important discovery of Hawking radiation, and kept him on the phone so long that his dinner got cold. Question: Did you find that Hawking is religious in any way? 111

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Response: I’ve been to a number of public lectures that Stephen has given, and one of the questions he’s inevitably asked is “Do you believe in God?” And his answer always has been, “I don’t believe in a personal God.” Notwithstanding, A Brief History of Time is filled with references to God: the question of the nature of God, the role of God in the universe, the question of First Cause. How did the universe start off? Did the universe begin somehow by itself? Yes, God and First Cause and the Creator all appear again and again. Question: Including the last line of the book, refrained as the last line of the movie. . . . Response: . . . where Stephen talks about knowing the mind of God. One thing I tried to capture at the very end of the movie, something I think is very much part of Stephen Hawking, is this combination of amazing optimism and amazing pessimism. Stephen talks about the possibility that we may know everything there is to know about the world around us, that we may know the mind of God, the deepest secrets of the universe. On the other hand he talks about how the universe might simply come to an end, that 15 billion years from now it may all go down the tubes. Question: So Stephen can be very gloomy in his point of view? Response: Stephen has told me, in fact, one of the most pessimistic stories I have ever heard, in response to the questions, “Is there extraterrestrial life out there? If so, why haven’t we found evidence of it?” Stephen’s answer was, “Think of our DNA. In the last million years, our DNA hasn’t changed at all. It’s really much the same as it was in the jungle. But in the last two hundred years, our destructive capacities have increased many, many millions of time over. Why don’t we see intelligent signals from outer space? Because in all likelihood, once the civilization reaches the point our civilization has reached, it destroys itself.” Question: Is there anything about your film that Hawking doesn’t like? Response: He was always opposed to the chicken at the very beginning of the movie. But it was something I was quite adamant about, simply because I felt it was the first and only opportunity I would have to put a chicken in the stars, and I thought I should avail myself of the opportunity.6 Question: What was Hawking’s most immediate pleasure in seeing the film? Response: He thanked me for making his mother into a movie star. 112

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Notes This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Interview, September 1992. 1. John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008), American theoretical physicist. 2. Hawking (1942–2018) was at his death the director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. He had survived for more than fifty years with his motor neuron disease. 3. Site in northern Bavaria, Germany, of an annual Wagner music festival. 4. Glass has also provided music for Morris’s films The Thin Blue Line (1998) and The Fog of War (2003) and for the TV mini-series, Wormwood (2017). 5. Sir Roger Penrose (1931–) is a British mathematical physicist and Nobel Laureate in Physics. 6. Since, Morris (1948–) has made many documentaries, including Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997), Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999), and the Oscar-winning The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003). His most recent documentaries are for television: Wormwood (2017) and Wilderness of Error (2020).

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Two Interviews with Gillo Pontecorvo Gillo Pontecorvo’s back-to-back revolutionary classics, The Battle of Algiers (1966) and Burn! (1969), were championed—and even studied for combat-in-the-streets strategy—by campus radicals protesting the Vietnam War and by Black Panther cadres fighting the police. Even after these monumental movies, the Italian filmmaker struggled to put together film projects—the more ambitious, the harder to finance. If Pontecorvo was unhappy and disappointed about his often-thwarted career as a filmmaker, it didn’t show when he was interviewed. He’s a smiling, ebullient presence with humor-adoring blue eyes. The discussion below was conducted in two parts, with a two-year break in between. The first part happened at Pontecorvo’s hotel when he was on the jury of the Berlin Film Festival. The second part occurred over breakfast at the Istanbul Film Festival, soon after Pontecorvo had taken over as the director of the Venice International Film Festival.

Berlin, 1991 Question: Everyone asks, why have you directed so few movies? Response: It’s true I make one film every eight or nine years. I am like an impotent man, who can make love only to a woman who is completely right for him. I can only make a movie in which I am totally in love. If you had the list of films I’ve refused—The Mission [1986], Bethune [The Making of a Hero, 1990], etc., you’d have a telephone book. When I do a film, they pay me very well. I live modestly, and I can live ten years in Rome on what I am paid for a film. My wife agrees to live with me modestly but to be very free. We are very close. She teaches music aesthetics at a conservatory and, if I ever changed professions, I’d push to be a composer. I like music more than movies.

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Two Interviews with Gillo Pontecorvo

  I play piano very badly, but enough to write a score. I wrote the music for all my documentaries, and for Kapo [1960] and The Battle of Algiers. In my opinion, a film is a synthesis of form and content, but a synthesis based on a counterpoint of sound and image. It’s not always that the visual image is more important than the sound image. In writing my next film, I’ve changed four scenes because of the music. Question: Few in America have seen your last feature Ogro, or The Tunnel [1979]. Response: It’s the contemporary story of the Basque fight for independence. I don’t consider it a good film. I was telling a story of an act of terrorism against Franco at the same time I was strongly against the 1978 terrorist death of Aldo Moro.1 You can feel it in the film, that I am contradictory.   Because of European stars Gian Maria Volonté and Angelina Molina, Ogro made money in Italy and I won the prize in Italy that year for Best Direction. Critics were divided. In Spain, right-wing people threw things at the screen, so they had to stop showing it. Question: Could you talk about your brilliant casting in Burn!, using a non-actor as the West Indian guerilla leader, José Dolores, opposite Marlon Brando. Response: It was a fight! United Artists wanted me to use Sidney Poitier. I didn’t want to, though I like him as an actor, because his face wasn’t wild. Then I went looking to off-Broadway for Black actors. I didn’t find the right one.   In Colombia during a location scout, we were searching for a forest to burn. We drove very far into the wild in a jeep. Suddenly we saw this peasant man on a horse. This is the face I’d been looking [to find] for four months. But instead of coming to me, he ran away! It was very hot, people around me were furious when I said, “Sorry, we have to find this man.” We asked the local chief to order the playing of a drum. All the people came out, including this man, Evaristo Márquez. He’d never seen a movie but he understood money. He said, “OK.”   I called Marlon on his island. He said, “If you believe he’s right, don’t worry about me.” We saw that Márquez was very good photographically, but then, God help us! At first during the shooting, Brando was very generous. But after many days with Márquez, he was frustrated

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Gillo Pontecorvo.

Two Interviews with Gillo Pontecorvo

and tired. One scene required forty-one takes. Brando was so furious that phlegm was coming out of his nose. Question: What happened to Márquez? Response: He made two films later on, and he was very bad in them. But he came home as a rich peasant and bought a lot of cows.2 Question: What are your thoughts now on Brando, who once said to Life magazine about you, “I would like to kill him”? Response: I like Brando very much, even if I fought strongly against him, and he strongly against me, making Burn! We finished the film without a handshake. But two years later, I decided he was a profound, sympathetic man, so my wife and I sent a postcard saying, “Merry Christmas.” He didn’t answer, so I thought, “I don’t like this man any more.”   Yet five years later, he recommended to Columbia Pictures that we make a film together, with Brando playing a lawyer for the [Native Americans]. I went to LA and said to Brando, “You are crazier than I think. If we go on the set, we’ll fight again.” He said, “No, no, you are the right person to make this movie.”   It was a very strong story written by Abby Mann, and I worked to adapt it. I had the marvelous experience to live in a hut for twenty days on an Oglala Sioux reservation in South Dakota near Wounded Knee. I liked these people, who were so very attentive to political problems. They were also so very poor. Yet when I went away, they gave me a present covered over with paper. On the plane, I opened it and found a new blanket I recognized from one of the beds. It was very moving. Question: Why wasn’t the picture made? Response: It’s a supposition of mine that Brando signed over his control of this film property to the [Native Americans]! [laughs] If you choose a genius like Brando, you have to give him space for creativity . . . though not when it goes outside the lines of the script. Still, he remains for me the greatest actor ever to play in movies. Also, he’s a very deep and nice person. Just a little crazy. [laughs] Write that! Question: Would you talk about the film you have been composing? Response: It’s a love story set in the North of Italy during World War I about a priest for the military who falls in love with a girl, and fights against feeling this love. The film is terribly against war. In the script, there’s a line, “Incest once was allowed and then became taboo. Why, in the future, won’t war become a taboo?” The man who says this is a sympathetic anarchist. 117

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  This film would be extremely costly, so my producer suggests I choose stars. My idea is to contact Kevin Costner and Julia Roberts. Costner has a very clean face—I’ve seen him in The Untouchables [1987], Field of Dreams [1989], Dancing with Wolves [1990]—so he’s right for the priest. Seeing Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman [1990], I thought she’s not right. But she impressed me very much in Flatliners [1990]. She’s incredible: all those changes!   The young girl in my story is dying, with three months to live. She’s passing from laughing to crying, she’s very fragile. A very good role for a woman. So I’m coming to the States for the casting. These actors I want are young. Perhaps they don’t know my films, especially not Julia Roberts.

Istanbul, 1993 Question: What’s the progress on your anti-war World War I movie? Response: I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it. It’s a very expensive film, including a battle scene at Caporetto involving one thousand people. We need a great star, not a half-star, but someone like Costner or Pacino. No, I haven’t talked to Julia Roberts. I did get the script to two great male stars. If they do it, we do it, but I don’t consider it probable. So I’m writing a different script, Signals, a very unusual interior kind of story. It’s about a man who feels these signs more and more often that indicate “the nostalgia for protection.” I have very, very quick flashes to the only period when he feels really protected: at age one, three, four . . . Question: But you did make a TV documentary last year revisiting the people in The Battle of Algiers and locales. Gillo Pontecorvo’s Return to Algiers [1992]. Response: It was not exactly a documentary. It was my on-camera return twenty-five years later to Algeria but to a completely different situation there. I made a one-hour short, shot in six days. My lead actor, Saadi Yacef, was still there. We spoke, he gave me advice, and he showed me the situation in the Casbah. It was useful for the filming to have such a friend.   The program was on prime time in Italy. It proved a great curiosity since few had ever seen the Casbah from the inside. Because of the film twenty-five years earlier, the Algerians let me go wherever I 118

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wanted. They were very kind to let me film in prison. We even shot inside a mosque and at a Muslim burial. When I went to the university, I argued strongly with a young fundamentalist student, and some people there were for, others were against. There was nearly a fight.   My son, Marco, was the cameraman. He was twenty-six, and had been in the city of Algiers before, in my wife’s belly. Nevertheless, he’d seen it. Question: Did you reach a political conclusion for your documentary about the current situation in Algeria? Response: I was not sure of my impression because in six days you can only be superficial. I spoke with the president of Algeria—it’s in the film—and he said something very impressive. Because a month later, he was killed, we don’t know by whom. He said, “I don’t know if I’m able to finish the job, to bring Algeria in the right way. But even if I don’t do it, the people of Algeria and the youth”—he underlined very much “youth”—“will have the strength to pass through.” Question: So what he said is very much like your message in The Battle of Algiers and Burn! Response: Yes, the same idea. Question: Would you consider a version for the English-speaking market? Response: It would be very hard to subtitle, because the characters speak French and Arabic. The program was dubbed and synchronized at Cannes, and I hate this kind of mechanical dubbing. When you do something that looks like stolen reality, you have to prepare a thousand times more. If I don’t put the right sound, the right noise, in the right moment, it gives me a stomach pain. But I do know there’s interest. A thousand journalists asked for interviews when it played Italy. Question: Probably the biggest change in your life since the conversation last time is that you recently became the director of the Venice Film Festival. Why would you assume such a position? Response: A lot of us felt that, as film “authors,” our work was losing fascination and going, year after year, downward. Each time that we met— Italians, French, Americans, etc.—we’d think sadly about these things, how, with 99 percent of film as entertainment and/or communication, we have less and less space in which to operate. Having the chance to direct Venice, I told myself, “We have to stop this useless melancholy, we have to give a new face to the festival as an open space for film artists . . . if possible, ‘the capitol of authors.’” 119

Question: And what of recent Italian cinema? Response: Until about three years ago, our cinema was every year getting worse, worse, worse, from the highest moment of neorealism. But we are beginning to have an Italian cinema to defend. I really liked Stolen Children [1992, directed by Gianni Amelio]. I think of Ricky Tognazzi, Marco Risi, perhaps [Gabriele] Salvatores. They are parents of a new way of realism. They open, at last, the eyes of reality and find the poetry. Of course, we still have the great ones like the Tavianis, Bertolucci, Rosi, Scola, and old ones like me. But the sign is that something is finally rising again. I am much more optimistic. Question: Will you stay on at Venice forever? Response: No, no, no, no. Not even if they cut off my balls.3

Notes This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Boston Phoenix, undated. 1. Aldo Moro was an Italian prime minister who was kidnapped and murdered in 1978 by members of the Red Brigade. 2. Evaristo Márquez (1939–2013) made six films in all in Colombia after Burn!, some of them shorts, while working as a herdsman. Gillo Pontecorvo (1919–2006) never managed to finance another feature film. 3. Pontecorvo directed Venice from 1992 to 1994. After 1993, he made one short and two feature documentaries, none of which were shown in the United States.

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Two Short Interviews with Liv Ullmann On Directing Sofie That’s Liv Ullmann, Norwegian star of Ingmar Bergman movies, walking down the streets of Boston. She is married to a Massachusetts realtor, Donald Saunders, and has a New England residency. “Nobody knows who I am in Boston,” Ullmann reports. “I rent videos at Videosmith. It’s a wonderful way to start a day, to watch a classic movie at six in the morning. Maybe Bette Davis, who’s so great, or my own little festival of stars.” There are also less tranquil times in her life when Ullmann is involved with humanitarian work for UNICEF, or filmmaking in Europe. “When I come home to Boston, people ask if I’ve had a good vacation.” Last year, Ullmann left New England for a long, arduous stay in Copenhagen. There she cowrote, directed, and helped edit an ambitious film, Sofie, which had its North American premiere at the 1992 Montreal World Film Festival. The actress’s first film as a director was a success there, both with audiences and critics. “I didn’t choose Sofie, somehow it chose me,” she said at Montreal. The producers had sent her the 1932 Henri Nathansen novel, asking her to write the screenplay, then requesting that she direct it. Sofie tells of a Jewish woman at the end of the nineteenth century who rejects the great love of her life, a Christian painter with a burning soul, for an amiable dullard, who placates her religious family because he is an Orthodox Jew. As an American critic succinctly described the tale, “It’s a Jewish Madame Bovary.” Ullmann said, “This story is very important to me. I am a Christian but for many years, I’ve had many Jewish friends. I’m married to a Jewish man, and Elie Wiesel is one of my closest friends. As a Christian, I didn’t want to slip up.” Ullmann enlisted members of the Copenhagen Jewish community and a Danish rabbi as advisors for scenes of Jewish ritual, including kosher meals and a full-scale bar mitzvah. “This rabbi was as 121

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interested in making a Jewish film as I was. Sometimes I had to fight him over the writing and directing.” Also, Ullmann found herself being tested by the overwhelmingly male crew. She opined, “Sometimes when they want you to be insecure, they put names on things. A technical language. I wasn’t going to let that happen. I think it’s important for women’s voices to be heard on the set, feminine voices. We must be allowed to talk a language descriptive of feelings. We don’t have to be so clever always, conquer everything. We can even say, ‘I don’t know.’” Was she influenced in directing by her acting for Bergman? “I would be stupid if I tried to avoid what I learned with him. We did ten pictures. But my life has been very different from Ingmar Bergman’s life. I’m of a different sex. I wasn’t born with Ingmar, and I’ve had more than thirty-five years as an actress. I’ve also worked in many other films which influenced me, and I had bad directors too, who could kill the ‘fantasy luggage’ carried by the actor.” One thing Ullmann is adamant about is the final length of her film. Sofie is almost two and a half hours long, and that’s where it will stay. Ullmann said, “I knew all the time during editing it would be this length. The rough cut was four hours. At three hours, I said, ‘This is my film. But I don’t know what to do more. This is killing me.’ I’m fifty, and to keep awake during the editing, we were eating a lot of chocolate. It cost me a lot, though not as a person: my forearms are fine for my grandchild.” What did she finally achieve on the screen? “This is my cut of Sofie. There has been no interference. From the heart, for the heart. When people go out today, why not spend three hours in the cinema? You don’t want the dream to end.”

On Directing Faithless “Today, I talked to Ingmar in Sweden on the phone and asked him what I should say about Faithless,” Liv Ullmann said, during a hotel balcony interview at the Cannes Film Festival. There, the Ingmar Bergman– written and Ullman-directed film was having its world premiere. Bergman told Ullmann not to worry, and to say to critics what she wanted about the movie: “When I gave it to you, I gave it to you with trust.” Ullmann had felt an unbearable responsibility, being handed in 1998 this frighteningly honest, guilt-ridden screenplay based on an incident of 122

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infidelity in Bergman’s life half a century ago. She tried to convince Bergman to direct Faithless himself, or, at a minimum, to oversee the pre- and post-production. No, he insisted that Ullmann was the qualified person to do it.1 She had starred in Persona (1966), The Passion of Anna (1969), and many other Bergman masterpieces and has a grown daughter2 from their long-ago relationship. She should make the movie, interpret the story her way. He would watch Faithless only when it was finished. The script had germinated for decades, until Bergman found the actress who made sense for him as the object of his adulterous desire. Lena Endre had performed for Bergman at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre in Romeo and Juliet, The Misanthrope, and Peer Gynt. “I think he didn’t know what face he needed to write this story of a woman’s emotions,” Ullmann said. “But the memories of Lena were with him. She has everything he needed: discipline, experience, and she’s a great actor. If he hadn’t picked her, I would have picked her anyway.”3 Bergman’s stipulations: Endre must play Marianne, the married woman with a daughter who becomes embroiled with him in the extramarital affair. Erland Josephson, featured in such Bergman classics as Hour of the Wolf (1968), Scenes from a Marriage (1973), and Fanny and Alexander (1982), should be cast as “Bergman,” the forlorn octogenarian thinking back, via flashbacks, to the key indiscretion of his thirties. “I’m a woman who has known Ingmar the most, thirty-seven years. Erland has known him for more than fifty years and is the closest to him.” So close that Josephson could embody “Bergman,” and the filmmaker could walk away from the filmmaking. “That way, Ingmar isn’t sitting here in Cannes,” Ullmann said. “He’s scared of being found out, like we all are.” Bergman’s real-life assignation occurred in 1953. Ullmann: “He made Summer with Monika, and fell in love with the actress, Harriet Andersson. They went together to Paris, he came back to Sweden. He was married, had children, and said to his wife, ‘I’m leaving you.’ Faithless is about living through betrayal, loss.” But Bergman and Ullmann really differed in what to emphasize. Ullmann’s direction took a personal turn, in dwelling on Marianne’s daughter, Isabelle, nine, caught up in the dire consequences of her mother’s adultery. Ullmann hinted that there might be a repressed memory from Bergman’s boyhood: “Maybe he was that little child. I think that one time when he was very young, something bad happened to him.” In Bergman’s script, the little girl is talked about in a monologue but never appears on screen. “He didn’t think of putting in the child. He didn’t 123

see the scale of suffering. I asked him about the children he had abandoned. But his generation didn’t see it as havoc. Though I had to be truthful to him, I also had to be true to myself. The scene I’m most proud of for Lena is when she talks to the child and cries about leaving. The first take she did as an actress, the second as the character.” And what did Bergman think of all this? He really appreciated the film when he saw the finished version. “Ingmar cried twice. First, when Marianne looks at her image in a mirror, a shot like the double mirror in Persona. Second, when Marianne comes home from the night of lovemaking.” I wondered if the little girl cast as Isabelle, Michelle Gylemo, was sheltered from the film’s traumatic implications. Ullmann said, “I told the child that your parents are divorcing, your mother is leaving you. When we shot, I saw her tears. But she’s an actress! She screamed out, ‘Did you like it? Should I do it again?’”

Notes Portions of this chapter were originally published, in slightly different form, in the following: “On Directing Sofie,” Boston Herald, September 3, 1992. “On Directing Faithless,” Boston Phoenix, March 2, 2001. 1. Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) would direct only one more film, the TV movie Saraband (2003). 2. Linn Ullmann, born in 1986, is a Norwegian journalist, essayist, and author of six novels. 3. Besides Sofie and Faithless, Liv Ullmann (1938–) has directed two more features: Kristin Lavransdatter (1995) and Miss Julie (2014).

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Two Interviews with Jim Jarmusch Jarmusch and Crazy Horse Jim Jarmusch knows his concert film history, and he considers D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (1967), young Bob Dylan touring England, and Robert Frank’s Cocksucker Blues (1979), backstage with the Rolling Stones, the two masterpieces of the genre. “I don’t think Year of the Horse [1997] has nearly the depth,” he said, when I complimented his stirring documentary about Neil Young and the legendary band, Crazy Horse. “But it doesn’t intend to be in that category. I’m very Zen about it. I had no blueprint at all, no plan, which was very liberating, and also that it didn’t come out of my soul. We were on the road shooting a music video for Neil’s [album] Broken Arrow [1996] and he said, ‘Do you want to shoot some more? If we don’t like it, we can throw it away.’ “So we just started shooting, and I liked the way it looked: super-8 beauty with 40-track Dolby sound. It became a celebration of Crazy Horse’s longevity, how they’re just getting better and better, a little insight into the greatest garage band in the world. They dress more like garbage collectors than a band, but when they aren’t fighting with each other, it’s the music!” Yes, there’s fabulous music. Crazy Horse can cook! Guitarist Frank “Poncho” Sampedro, bassist Billy Talbot, drummer Ralph Molina. And there’s Young singing in that inimitable tenor, and, properly, Jarmusch lets the numbers build and build. “Tonight’s the Night” is among the most thrilling numbers ever in a concert film. “I’m a fan,” said Jarmusch. “I don’t ever get tired of hearing the Horse play.” But he asked pointedly that I write down what he is tired of. “I’m sick of the term ‘independent film,’” declared one of the kings of the American movement with such admired non-studio works as Stranger Than Paradise (1983), Down by Law (1986), Mystery Train (1989), and Dead Man (1995). Complained Jarmusch: “It’s a label used over everything 125

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Jim Jarmusch.

as a marketing device. Shine [1996] and The English Patient [1996] are ‘independent’? I have a hard time looking at myself in this ‘independent’ context. I thought it means having control over the cutting and creativity. Now, John Cassavetes, he was independent. “I was lucky enough to be an assistant to Rebel Without a Cause [1955] filmmaker Nicholas Ray. He said you can learn about filmmaking from poetry, literature, and also watching the way people flip a pancake. From everything! When I was a film student at Columbia University, we fought 126

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to convince the professors of the value of pop culture and rock, saying we love James M. Cain and Dante. But now you have to defend Dante!” And, Jarmusch would contend, defend having a film-history obsession, a respect for what in cinema went before. “I discovered Sam Fuller, Nick Ray through Rivette and Godard. I love when things lead you to other places: the Cubists to Cézanne, Ginsberg and Burroughs, our great lost Beatnik godfathers, to Reich and Blake and Nikola Tesla. Everything overlaps. When you look in the ocean, you can’t label waves 155 or 156. I’ll go through various obsessions like watching every film Steve McQueen was in, every Max Ophuls film made.” What’s clear with Jarmusch: he’s a bad fit in the 1990s celebritydrenched film scene. He’s polite and patient being interviewed at the Toronto Film Festival but he wished to be home in New York out of the spotlight. He cited as an inspiration the way of Neil Young working with Crazy Horse: “Neil has a very specific circle around him so that nothing interferes. That’s what I learned important from him: to keep elements out of your eyeline so they don’t distract you.”

Samurai 101 Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai is prime Jim Jarmusch: a moody, minimalist, formally elegant slice of estrangement and alienation by the sleek New York hipster. It’s filtered through self-conscious French and Japanese films that remade the American gangster movie. Jarmusch’s protagonist, the eponymous Ghost Dog (a stirring Forest Whitaker), is a melancholic, monosyllabic African American hit man who resides on a rooftop among carrier pigeons. He steps through his solemnly violent life by adhering to, and constantly quoting, the rules of an early eighteenth-century Japanese warrior text, The Hagakure: The Way of the Samurai. His required path is to find a master and then devote his very being to obeying and defending that master. Ghost Dog chooses Louie (John Tormey), a below-the-line Mafia capo who once saved his life. Now it’s Ghost Dog’s turn, and he stands up for Louie, kills for Louie, whether Louie wants him to or not. There’s grim humor in his following such seemingly outmoded chivalric rules. “He is Don Quixote as a fool in a way,” Jarmusch said, when we talked at the Toronto Film Festival. “But there’s something beautiful too. By choosing a code from another century and another place, he keeps it intact and in focus. It comes from a spiritual 127

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place, where the gun is an extension of his body and being.” Jarmusch makes it all ambiguous. The viewer must decide whether Ghost Dog’s trip toward his own annihilation is nobility or stupidity. Or a bit of both. How did Jarmusch conceive his film? “I started with the actor. I wanted to write something about Forest. He has this big physical presence that could be intimidating and also there’s his soft side. I like watching him. I like that poignancy. I collected a lot of fragments and details and observances. Eventually, I connected the dots, and a story came from that.” Jarmusch was also inspired by a remark from his late friend, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) filmmaker, Nicholas Ray. “I remember Nick saying that dialogue is in the left hand, melody is in the eyes. I wanted to make Ghost Dog a character who doesn’t speak much and yet who is very expressive. The lonely hit man.” What about the other gangsters in his movie, who are slow-witted, subpar Scorsese? Losers. “They may have had a code, but it’s unraveled. It’s outmoded. They came up from the street in the fifties and early sixties and it started unraveling in the late sixties and seventies. They are dinosaurs. I saw the Gambino guys in New York on Mott Street, and they are patterned after these guys. I worked with the casting director, Ellen Lewis. Some of these guys were in Casino [1995], but I was trying to get faces that were not so well-known. John Tormey, who plays Louie, is a theater actor. I met him and he seemed like Louie. He has a particular spirit and look, he’s not a leading man type, he’ll never be a movie star. He’s a capo, not a boss.” Could Jarmusch offer some of his inspirations for his film? “I’ve been a fan of crime fiction: Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, Dashiell Hammett. I also like gangster films: Public Enemy [1932], White Heat [1949]. There are a lot of inspirations and references, from the book Frankenstein to John Boorman’s Point Blank [1967] to the Japanese films of Seijun Suzuki such as Branded to Kill [1967]. Suzuki’s films about a lone hit man, black-and-white and wide-screen, were so strange that Toho canceled his contract.” I note another definite influence: the great French gangster works, Le Doulos [1962] and Le Samouraï [1967], of Jean-Pierre Melville. Jarmusch agreed. “There was an inside joke in Melville’s films: the killers wore white film editor’s gloves. Ghost Dog also wears these gloves, and, like Ghost Dog, Melville also refers to Eastern philosophies.” Jarmusch offered a term he has coined for Melville which, by extension, might apply to his own cinema: “melange films.” Jarmusch asked me, “How do you classify 128

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Melville’s works? They are so French, and yet he wants them to be so American. Is his vision American? Western? Eastern? Hip-hop? What is it?” Would Jarmusch talk about the person behind the soundtrack, RZA (pronounced “Rizzah”), producer and founder of the hip-hop group the Wu-Tang Clan? “He’s twenty-nine, and a brilliant businessman, marketing genius, and I’ve been a fan since the first Wu-Tang CD. His music is very cinematic and always refers to martial arts films, quoting their music tracks or their dialogue. He’s an incredible aficionado of martial arts projects. He said to me, ‘You make films like music. I make music like films. We’re both stupid.’ He’s a very busy man. He’d look at a rough cut of the film, then he’d make music, give me a tape and say, ‘Check this out.’ He’d say, ‘Meet me at a van at Fifty-Third and First.’ He’d have a tape for me. By our third meeting, he gave me so much beautiful stuff I couldn’t use all of it. I would have drenched the film.” And Tricia Vessey, who plays Louie’s daughter? Amidst piles of dead bodies, she watches TV cartoons and reads the story of Rashomon. “She was a young actress I met while auditioning in Los Angeles. She’s not an ambitious, bustling actor. But there’s something about her presence. She could be a silent movie star. I wanted her enigmatic, with not much to do. I wanted her off-balance psychology. As for Rashomon, I like [having] people [whom] you don’t expect to read books. I love books and that people still read them.” I tell Jarmusch that critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, a friend of the filmmaker and an enthusiastic booster of his western, Dead Man (1995), had been puzzled a bit by the extended sequences of violence in Ghost Dog. He couldn’t decide if Jarmusch had tried in some way to deconstruct them. “The hell if I know,” Jarmusch said. “That’s for me to find out from critics like you and Jonathan. Also, I don’t look back on my films.1 They’re shadowy. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about them.” Still, he stopped to consider if the violence in Ghost Dog was somehow undercut. “In a less conscious way than Dead Man,” he decided. “Some of it is elaborate and dramatic, the way Ghost Dog kills people. It’s his efficiency as a warrior. But it’s not meant to be visually dramatic in a Peckinpah way, or the remake of Scarface [1983]. Violence is part of human culture, and this is a story about a warrior. God in the Old Testament is violent, when people piss him off. The Bible is extremely violent, and I don’t hear a lot of right-wing Christians complaining about that.” 129

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Notes Portions of this chapter were originally published, in slightly different form, in the following: “Jarmusch and Crazy Horse,” Boston Phoenix, November 1997. “Samurai 101,” Boston Phoenix, March 17, 2000. 1. Since Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Jarmusch (1953–) has made five features. The last was The Dead Don’t Die (2019).

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Interview with Frederick Wiseman Frederick Wiseman has made thirty nonfiction features in thirty years, starting with his two classics, Titicut Follies (1967) and High School (1968). The Cambridge, Massachusetts, resident and ex–Boston University law professor has been world celebrated for his scrutinizing of American institutions in such rich, multilayered works as Hospital (1970), Juvenile Court (1972), and Welfare (1975), and for the corrosive humor (some W. C. Fields? some Buñuel?) of such films as Primate (1974) and Meat (1976). Everyone agrees that Public Housing (1997), about a predominantly Black housing project in Chicago, is among his finest works. This interview, about Public Housing and other documentary matters, was conducted at Wiseman’s office at Zipporah Films in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We squeezed in next to his non-digital Steenbeck, which Wiseman bought used from WGBH-Boston, the PBS affiliate, and on which he is editing his thirty-first film, Belfast, Maine. Question: Why Public Housing? Response: It’s consistent with what I’ve done before, looking at American institutions that affect a lot of people. Public housing has been around in the USA since the mid-thirties, and I was interested in what daily life is like in a public housing development. It seemed a subject that lent itself to the technique I use. I try to immerse myself, to the extent I can, in the life of a place of which I have little prior knowledge, and I don’t go in with a thesis I try to prove or disprove. The shooting of the film is the research. My response to that experience is what the final film is about. Question: So why did you decide on a housing project in Chicago? Response: I picked Chicago not as a result of a search or a survey but because in my mind Chicago was synonymous with public housing. The Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), the city agency responsible 131

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Frederick Wiseman editing on a Steenbeck.

for operating public housing, has always had difficulties; and what happens in Chicago has always been national news. That’s probably what led me to Chicago, knowing that public housing there had a lot of problems, that there wasn’t money for renovation, that many buildings were rat-infested, that a high percentage of people were unemployed and on welfare, that some people used drugs, that other people sold drugs, and that there was often gang warfare. Question: Once you picked the city, how did you proceed? Response: A friend of mine introduced me to Vincent Lane, who was CHA head, and Lane made arrangements for me to be taken around to a number of developments. There’s a four-mile area on the South Side of Chicago where there’s just one Black housing development after another, separated from lower-middle-class White suburbs by a tenlane highway, deliberately placed there by the late Mayor Richard Daley to separate the Black and White communities.   I knew that I didn’t want to do a movie solely about a high-rise development because it would be difficult to get to the people. I settled on the Ida B. Wells development because it was a combination of lowrise, medium-rise, and high-rise, which constituted the different 132

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architectural styles associated with public housing. Wells is spread out over seventy-five acres, and there was good likelihood of meeting people on the street. Some apartments were ground level, and I thought that would be easier for access. Questions: Who was Ida B. Wells? Response: She was a prominent Black resident of Chicago who was a social worker. Question: Many amazing scenes in Public Housing involve interactions between the citizens of Ida B. Wells and the police. How did you arrange to film these episodes? Response: The CHA has its own police force, who have exactly the same training as regular Chicago city police. The rule is that they get the first call on CHA property. Vincent Lane introduced me to the chief of the CHA police. I told him I was interested in making a film, and that in order to do it I’d need his cooperation. Through the chain of command, he informed the lieutenant who was in charge of the station at Wells, and the lieutenant notified the police working at Wells that a movie was being made. Any time I wanted to ride in the patrol cars, I would just go in and say, “Can I ride today?” Word was out among the officers who patrolled Wells that it was OK to let me film, so I didn’t have to ask permission every time. Question: Did the police put you to a test? Response: I was conscious of the fact that they would be sizing me up, but that’s not just true of the cops. It’s true of everybody. You see many policemen in Public Housing. I went out with different cops on twocop patrols, different one night than another night. Maybe the cops were more self-conscious but, for reasons I never understand, there’s no difference in the validity of the material between the first time and later times I spent with the participants. In my experience, neither the police or anyone else has the capacity to act for the camera. Question: How do you compare your documentary scenes of police and those on the so-called reality-based cop shows that proliferate on American TV? Response: I’ve never seen those shows, so I’m really not able to respond. Question: How big was your crew for Public Housing? Response: Me with sound, a cameraman, and an assistant, who helped with the equipment and changed the magazines. Question: Did you ever feel danger while trying to shoot? 133

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Response: Not with the card players in the scene you see in the movie. But there was another card game that I walked up to, and people said, “out!” Question: Did you try to shoot a distance away from the action so that “reality” wouldn’t be interfered with? Response: It’s odd, but we were really right in the middle of it. The microphone was always just above or below the frame line. Sometimes it even crept into the frame line. The camera was only five, six, seven feet away. It was really rather funny. Sometimes I’d be on the ground right below the people, and everything still went on. Question: Were some of the people miked? Response: Occasionally, I’d use a radio mike. If I was with a cop in advance, I’d use the mike in case he suddenly ran. It’s useful when you’re shooting several people who are going to be separated to mike someone. If you just use a boom, you’re not going to get very good sound. If there was a meeting in Public Housing, I’d try to put a radio mike in advance on the person I’d been told was chairing. I could do the rest with a boom. Question: What do you do if someone in a film looks obviously into the camera? Response: First possibility, I don’t use it. Second, I’ll think about a cutaway. I’m always collecting cutaways in order to condense a sequence in the editing. If what is going on is very important, from time to time I’ll keep the look. But it’s rare that anyone looks for more than a brief glance, so the issue rises so infrequently that it’s not really a problem. Question: Do you ever say ahead of shooting, “Please, everyone, try not to look into the camera”? Response: That’s the worst thing I could say, because, if anything, it will make everyone self-conscious. If someone starts to look, I might say, “I’d appreciate it if you don’t look into the camera.” But again, this happens so infrequently. Question: Do you socialize with the people you are filming? Response: I deliberately try not to do that. I try to be friendly, and I hope I am friendly but not phony. I try not to convey the impression that we’re going to be friends for a long period of time because it’s not going to happen. I mean, with Public Housing, we live in different cities. It’s a professional situation. I was there in Chicago to make a movie. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t have a sandwich when I was riding around

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in a cop car. But to make plans, so to speak. I wouldn’t do that because it’s misleading. Question: A sandwich is OK. How about going to someone’s house that you’re filming for dinner? Response: My sense is that it’s not a good idea, that you get too familiar and people say on camera, “Fred, is that all right?” I don’t want it, and it’s been like that on all my films. Question: Are you looking for “drama” while shooting? Response: The first thought: I’m trying to make a movie. A movie has to have dramatic sequence and structure. I don’t have a very precise definition about what constitutes drama but I’m gambling that I’m going to get dramatic episodes. Otherwise, it becomes Andy Warhol’s movie on the Empire State Building. So, yes, I am looking for drama, though I’m not necessarily looking for people beating each other up, shooting each other. There’s a lot of drama in ordinary experiences. In Public Housing, there was drama in that old man being evicted from his apartment by the police. There was a lot of drama in that old woman at her kitchen table peeling a cabbage. Question: What did you see in the latter scene above? Response: I saw a woman alone in a very sparsely furnished apartment who once was independent. The way she examined and peeled the cabbage, there was an element of control. The patience and endurance suggested to me the way she led her life. When she talked on the phone, she was clearly disappointed that what I took to be a member of her family was not going to show up. I read into that a whole history of family relationships. She was disappointed but accepted it with the same stoicism she’d examined the cabbage. So I found that dramatic, not in a shoot-’em-up sense but dramatic in a sense of the expression of feeling. Question: There are sex education scenes in which someone demonstrates the use of condoms in both High School II [1994] and Public Housing. In High School II, the demonstration is to an eager audience of concerned liberal teachers. In Public Housing, it’s a lecture to a group of lost-looking young girls, many already teen mothers. Response: I was interested in the contexts of the sex education talks. In Public Housing, there was maybe 5 percent social consciousness on my part in the scene. There was something funny about the nurse giving a lecture on using condoms in the foreground, the babies crying and 135

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those young girls reacting to the talk, especially their reaction to a female condom! With a scene like that, which operated on many levels, the trick was to identify the combination of what was really going on with the unintended effect of what was going on. Question: Could you explain the street-scene montages in Public Housing? Response: They’re so important in my films because they give a sense of geography, of taking you from one place to another. For the shots from Ida B. Wells, I tried to select those that, even though many were very short, suggested a story. I was very deliberate about using shots with enough visual information—whether it was a little girl walking out of the frame with a bottle, a woman slapping a man, etc.— to prompt a little imagining on the part of the viewer. The shots don’t have to show all that was happening, but simply suggest. These shots, too, give you quiet moments. After a dramatic scene, you can’t immediately go to more drama. And sometimes after a long meeting, a long talk, it’s important to absorb some of that talk. You don’t want to hear any more speaking right away, so I give you these suggested stories which take place in your head before you start on something else. Question: In Public Housing, you focus especially on two people with disparate philosophies of government. There’s an old lady who is a veteran of Ida B. Wells, and she’s a world-weary pragmatist about the hard life there. She battles for tiny improvements, but she’s skeptical of government promises. She’s contrasted with a young Black man bursting with optimism, who tells the people of Ida B. Wells they can start their own businesses, that Bill Clinton’s America is filled with economic opportunities for Black people. Who are they? Response: Mrs. Finner was head of the Ida B. Wells Tenants Council for twenty years, for which she was paid a very small amount, more a stipend than a salary. The guy is Ron Carter, a former point guard for the Los Angeles Lakers in the National Basketball Association. He started off as a private developer then went to work for the Department of Housing and Development under Clinton as an economics development expert. At the making of Public Housing, he’d just come to Chicago, checking to see what programs he could try out. He was trying to familiarize himself with Wells and some other developments. He had a key federal job connected with training people and finding them work, and helping start new businesses. Question: Did you choose them as protagonists before shooting? 136

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Response: I didn’t choose them in advance. I chose them in the editing because of the meetings they were in, and because the things they said were important expressions of themes that I felt were the material. Mrs. Finner represented to me old-time politics in the Tammany Hall sense: a Tammany captain who knew her territory, helped her constituents and expected them to support her, vote for her. “You do this for me, I do this for you.” She liked exercising power, and she was very effective in representing the residents. She’s a strong woman.   Ron Carter represented outside ideas, some kind of government hope. I was interested in the language he used, the educated explanation of economic ideas at the first meeting, the street language at the midnight basketball-court meeting. Were the changes in language made consciously or unconsciously? There’s also the interesting issue of he, a middle-class Black coming out of a similar environment to Wells, who now wanted to do something. What kind of interventions could he make? Question: They come together only once. Response: In the scene where Ron Carter talks to the tenants council, and Mrs. Finner makes the complaint to him that people from Wells get job training but afterward there are no jobs. Question: Did you show the completed Public Housing to the residents of Ida B. Wells? Response: I wanted to, but I got caught in a power struggle at the tenants council. There’s no movie theater in the neighborhood, so I needed the cooperation of the council to arrange a screening. I was going to rent buses, and bring people to a showing. But Mrs. Finner is no longer the head of the council, and the interim head didn’t want the movie shown to the tenants. This woman was somewhat fearful that screening it would enhance Mrs. Finner’s prestige. So I couldn’t get anybody to help me. Question: Did anyone at Ida B. Wells inform you that they watched Public Housing when it aired nationally on PBS, public television? Response: I did hear from a couple of people there who liked it. The response I’ve had from Black people in general has been very enthusiastic. The film shows a lot of competent Black people, and people really trying. I have great admiration for people like the drug counselor I show, or some of the social workers, who do their best to work the issues, day in and day out. These people never get attention: 137

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the patience that’s required to be a drug counselor is just extraordinary. Question: Maybe the great scene in Public Housing is where a savvy drug counselor listens to the chronic drug taker’s tale of woe and decides whether to recommend to a judge that the drug taker get help instead of a jail sentence. Response: He was really good! I have an hour and three quarters of that interview edited down to ten minutes in the film, which only begin to suggest the complexity of that man’s life. Question: Public Housing seems to me consistent with a softening toward humanity in your more recent films. I detect your desire, without getting sentimental, to show more of your people in a better light. Earlier, there were blocks of films in a row that were deeply cynical. Response: I don’t agree at all with that. I think what’s shown in any movie is not a reflection of my attitude toward humanity in general, which I’d be hard pressed to express, but my response to a particular place. In Hospital, my fourth movie, the nurses come off quite well. Even in Titicut Follies, the guards in their own way were more tuned to the needs of the inmates than the so-called helping professionals. The principal guard, Eddie, was a nice guy who responded to the inmates as human beings.   Law and Order, which was made in 1968 after the Democratic Convention in Chicago, is not a film that, in my mind, “does in” the police. They do some nice things as well as horrible things. There’s the cop who takes the little girl who is lost to the police station. On the other extreme, there’s the cop who strangles the woman accused of prostitution. And you have lots of police in between.   To me it’s too complicated to say that one group of films is more cynical than another. I cannot make sociological generalizations about human behavior. Question: What do you think of the view of documentary as a reformist vehicle? Response: A lot of people think the purpose of documentary films is to expose injustice to those victimized, or that the films are made to correct the filmmaker’s idea of injustice. I think that’s a strand of documentary but it’s certainly not the only use. My first films, High School and Titicut Follies, were partly an example of that strand, somewhat didactic. But since Law and Order, to the extent that I’m trying to do 138

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anything, it’s to show as wide a range of human behavior as possible, its enormous complexity and diversity.   But even High School is somewhat open-ended. When it was first shown in Boston in 1969, one of the people who saw it was Louise Day Hicks, a very conservative member of the Boston School Committee. I thought she’d hate the movie. But she came up and said, “Mr. Wiseman, that was a wonderful high school!” I thought she was kidding me until I realized she was on the other side from me on all the value questions. Everything I thought I was parodying she thought was great. I don’t think her reaction represents a failure of the film. Instead, we have an illustration that reality is ambiguous, a complex mirror, that the “real” film takes place where the mind of the viewer meets the screen. It’s how the viewer interprets the events. With Public Housing, some people think the film represents hope, others that it’s pessimistic. Question: Some people wonder how you can make a film of seeming social consciousness with Public Housing but also do The Store [1983] about the wealthy Dallas department store Neiman Marcus, or about the privileged White Colorado citizenry in Aspen [1991]. Response: Aspen, I think, was a little mean on my part. One of my favorite scenes in the movie is a discussion of Flaubert’s story “A Simple Heart” by an adult education group that meets once a week. They’re talking about this great story about a poor woman who sacrifices herself for a family and then gets dumped by the family. The discussion by the people is very revealing of their values, this echo between the life of this poor woman in the story and these people’s lives in Aspen, Colorado.   As for The Store, think of it on a double feature with Welfare or Public Housing. I’m interested in class in American life, and movies like Aspen and The Store give an opportunity to look at people from a different walk of life. There’s a question of what’s a legitimate subject for a documentary, and some people think the only subject is to show poor people and how they are victims. But I’m interested in showing all classes of American life, how rich people live as well as poor people.  Racetrack [1986] is another movie about class, from Haitian immigrants who work at the track to some of the richest people in the world who own the horses. I don’t just take the more obvious subject of people who haven’t made it, but I show the people who have made it. 139

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What their values are seem just as important. My goal is to make as many films as possible about different aspects of American life.1

Notes This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Boston Phoenix, March 1998. 1. Wiseman (1930–) has made fourteen feature documentaries since Public Housing. The last was City Hall (2020).

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A Talk with Benôit Jacquot Interview by Gerald Peary and Peter Brunette (1943–2010) Benôit Jacquot, born in 1947, an assistant director for Marguerite Duras and others before turning filmmaker, has quietly built a body of subtle, serious feature films in France, which, added up, constitute an unarguably important career. Today’s Cahiers du Cinéma endorses Jacquot. But his films—thoughtful, talky, literary—don’t have the cachet of other current Cahiers director picks, who are more youth-oriented and with a technoHollywood feel. Though his first feature was made in 1975, Jacquot has only slowly been distributed around the world. With A Single Girl (1995) and Seventh Heaven (1997), he became a critics’ favorite. Credit the Toronto International Film Festival for creating a space at the top for Jacquot. The French filmmaker was the surprise choice in 1997 for the much-coveted Spotlight series, which offers one international filmmaker a retrospective each year. Fest director Piers Handling noted of Jacquot’s oeuvre: “Narrative assumes no great importance, although there is a story. . . . Jacquot creates a tapestry or a puzzle that, when one stands back, depicts a vision of the modern world that may appear fragmented but which certainly is comprehensive. . . . The moral center of all the work I have seen is always a woman.” It may be that the women in Jacquot’s films are no more “moral” than anyone else. But certainly, because the females are usually younger, poorer, less economically viable, men are the predators who take advantage. And female beauty, the kind without moneyed power such as that of Judith Godrèche in The Disenchanted (1990), Virginie Ledoyen in Marianne (1990) and A Single Girl, is often a curse. Everyone (females too) is jealous of it, wants to grab it, consume it, destroy it. It’s with the upper-middleclass wife, Sandrine Kimberlaine in Seventh Heaven, that women start to fight back. It’s with the single and financially independent Isabelle 141

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Benôit Jacquot.

Huppert of The School of Flesh (1998) that women finally control the sex by controlling the purse strings. This career interview with Benôit Jacquot, the first in America, extended over two years, at the 1997 and 1998 Toronto Fests. We talked to the filmmaker at great length in 1997 at the time of the Spotlight retrospective. At Toronto 1998, we collaborated on an addendum, concerning his latest work, The School of Flesh. It’s an old cliché to say that a filmmaker looks and feels “professorial,” but Jacquot really does, even though he was an undergraduate dropout. He’s comfortably scholarly and intellectual in an appealingly mild-mannered way. In life, he reads books and goes to lots and lots of movies. He’s 142

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an unabashed film freak who, he says, has seen John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) about fifty times. He’s also unspoiled about talking about his movies and seemed genuinely to enjoy the exchange with a couple of American critics. Question: Were you always a film person? Response: Yes. I was twelve or thirteen when the Nouvelle Vague came out in Paris. I was very impressed by the movement, and started to go often to the movies. I decided at that time to become a filmmaker. I went to Henri Langois’ Cinémathèque for retrospectives of American directors, and Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, and especially Rivette went there too, the whole Cahiers group. Truffaut came sometimes. Langois was conversing with everyone, and I had talks with Rivette. A man whom I knew who was very important to me from Cahiers du Cinéma was the critic, Jean Douchet. Question: Were there other children besides you who regularly attended the Cinémathèque screenings? Response: When I was thirteen or fourteen, I was the only one. But I learned very much: a small boy listening in on adults’ conversations, like the boy in Lang’s Moonfleet [1955]. Question: When you made your own films, you show an obvious debt to the directors of the Nouvelle Vague. Marianne [1994] is a bit in tone like Rivette’s La Religieuse/The Nun [1966]. Also, your very first feature, The Musician Killer [1975], starred Godard icon Anna Karina. Response: I was thinking of La Religieuse when considering how to film the French eighteenth century for Marianne. At the same time, I hadn’t seen La Religieuse for twenty years. My using Anna Karina was a kind of homage to Godard; but, more, Karina was the actress who interested me the most from the period before I started making films. The appeal? Her very free way to be in a film, and a kind of charm and grace. Question: Was Karina attracted to the role you offered her in The Musician Killer [1975], as a poor maid with a child who becomes involved with the petulant violinist-protagonist? Response: Yes, she liked the scenario and she liked the part. I was twentyseven at the time, and I’d stopped very early going to college and I’d worked in the industry as an assistant director. Question: Did you also write film criticism? 143

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Response: Two or three times for newspapers, but it wasn’t my way. It would seem that normally I should have been writing for Cahiers du Cinéma, where, for the Nouvelle Vague, criticism was a step toward making films. But when I came of age, that way was finished. People who wrote in Cahiers by that time did not make films. Question: Are you consciously part of a group? Response: Post–New Wave, of course, but not a group. We are a few: [André] Téchiné, maybe [Jacques] Doillon. That’s all. What we make is quite difficult to describe. Maybe these are films where the directors are not afraid to film people talking. Yes: “talking films.” Question: Where would you place Jean-Jacques Beineix? Response: That’s the opposite kind of film! Somebody like Beineix hates it when his people aren’t moving, when there’s not something “to see,” “to show,” with beautiful, sophisticated locations. Question: And Maurice Pialat? Response: Of course, Pialat! To me, he is the greatest director now in France. In his films, people are always talking! Question: Is the source for “talking films” the cinema of Rohmer? Response: No, it’s what we like most also in classic French cinema: Renoir, Pagnol. Even Bresson: it’s a very singular, particular way to talk, but his are “talking films.” Question: Had you met Bresson? Response: Yes, because my first producer was his producer. Bresson saw my first films and said he liked them. But at the time, I was very disturbed by the commentary saying that I was a spiritual son of Bresson. I didn’t feel like that. Bresson is phobic about actors, and the very beginning of my thinking what to do with a film is casting actors. Question: But starting with your decision to adapt a Dostoevsky story, you can understand why someone would connect The Musician Killer with Bresson? Response: Naturally. Yet to me it’s nearer to Dreyer or even Fritz Lang, directors like that than to Bresson. Question: But it seems so Bressonian! This is asked politely: couldn’t you be a bit blind about your movie? Response: [laughs] I am completely blind about my movies. But when I see them again, I can feel if they are “mine” or not. The first one is like the film of another director, even if I know I made it. I ask myself, “Why 144

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did you make this?” I know at the time I had to make it. But why? That film shows a world that I don’t know very well. Question: When we talked before the interview, you said that you only like your recent films, starting with The Disenchanted [1990], your sixth feature. What did you do wrong before? Response: I don’t think it was wrong. They might be interesting films, just not what I really wanted to do. I’m sure that now, for the last three or four films, I’ve done what I always wanted to do. A Single Girl is exactly the film I wanted to do at age fourteen or fifteen. Exactly. From the first shot. Question: How are the newer features different? Response: That I like them, that I’m very proud to have done them. The others? I’m a little ashamed. Why inflict films like those on people? [laughs] Question: After The Musician Killer was screened at Toronto, we saw two young men about twenty-two came out of the theater. One said to the other: “Did you like that movie? God, it was so boring!” Response: So boring? [laughs] I think my early films are kind of boring. And I don’t like the way the actors talk. It’s all too theoretical, too much an illustration of false principles about cinema: long shots, time passing, long takes. Now I’m more interested in the cinema to reach something human. Question: It’s like, in your twenties, being interested most in form. But when you are fifty, now, you are interested in human beings. Response: Exactly! Though I wanted all of that when I was in my twenties also. But at that time, I wanted to make trouble in the landscape. My first films were remarked about because of that. I wouldn’t like that now to be the reason to be remarked about. Question: Your protagonist in The Musician Killer is very spoiled, and thinks he runs the world. Was that like you at the time? Response: [laughs] Probably! Question: Let’s discuss The Disenchanted, which is about a seventeen-yearold Parisian girl named Beth (Judith Godrèche). Why do you place so many men in her life, from her teen boyfriend to a young man she meets in a club to the strange older man whom she starts to see? Response: Those you mention are three different ages of manhood. Beth’s initiation is to pass through the three ages. She’s losing her childhood, becoming a woman, and becoming disenchanted. At the end, the 145

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older man is waiting for her decision by the Seine, whether she’s going off with him or not. She’s decided: she’s growing up, and with him it’s over. Question: There’s a lovely scene at school where the girl quotes Rimbaud about enchantment/disenchantment. Response: The actress wrote that speech. In life, Rimbaud was like a religion for her, so I asked her to be in a college class in the movie and make an “exposé” about him. Question: In her room at home, Beth has a lot of books. Are books a chance for her? For a better life? Response: Maybe. I don’t know. Question: What about the older man who pursues Beth? He’s quite hard to figure out. Response: He’s the kind of guy who had a life, including mourning, but he’s at the point of having another life. Maybe he thinks he could have an affair with her. Question: But when he brings her to his room, he sits and writes and doesn’t touch her. Response: He’s a good guy! [laughs] Question: Nobody is allowed to tell such film stories today in America. In France, there’s still the possibility of an older man sleeping with a younger woman. Response: Oh, it’s very frequent. Question: How did you find your lead, Judith Godrèche? Response: For The Beggars [1987], I’d made a casting and used her for a girl of fourteen. I recommended her to Doillon, who also made a film with her, The 15 Year Old Girl [1989]. Afterward, I wrote The Disenchanted just for her. Maybe you saw her in Patrice Leconte’s Ridicule [1996]? She’s the main female character. Question: If The Disenchanted is typical, you don’t seem driven to find psychological or sociopolitical explanations for what happens in your movies. Response: It’s not my first interest. When I introduce people, they are enigmas, just like human beings in real life when you first see them and you don’t know anything. But by the end of the films, they have to have psychological verity. I like to show where the people live, what they eat, at what time they sleep. My characters have a world, and jobs. 146

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Question: What kind of work do you do with your actors to situate them in their worlds? Response: There are no rehearsals and very few takes. But I live with them very much before and during the film shooting, and I try to provide a kind of documentation of their characters’ lives, even if it is fiction. Question: But aren’t your scripts completed before the actors get there? Response: Yes, but I write a script knowing already who the actors are, and that they are not others. They can change anything they want while we are shooting. If they don’t feel comfortable, I tell them to change their lines but very quickly. Don’t stop and go and think. We’ll do it now! Question: Surely, those long, elaborate tracking and traveling shots in A Single Girl [1995] were photographed again and again? Response: No, no, maybe two or three times. But I had very good technicians, and the Steadicam person was the best in Europe. Question: Some old-time purists disapprove of the Steadicam. Response: I like it very much. I could make a whole film just with the Steadicam. Question: Could you tell of something about Caroline Champetier, the great cinematographer of A Single Girl and other recent post–New Wave movies, such as Laetitia Masson’s To Have (or Not) [1995]? Response: She’s now past forty and I’ve known her since she was nineteen, a student at cinema school and an interviewer on radio for cinema programs. She was very radical. and she has a frightening reputation in the industry because she is very demanding. Everyone admires her talents but everyone is afraid, especially those who don’t know exactly what they wish to do with the camera. Rivette, for example, made one film with her, Joan the Maid [1994], but he’s not hired her again though her photography was very beautiful. Question: And your relationship with her? Response: Maybe it’s a fault, but I know very well when I come in the morning where I’ll put my camera, what I’m going to shoot all day. Caroline likes to obey! That’s all. Like an actress! And for me, that’s very convenient. I need someone who can act a character, who is the camera. I direct her directly as I direct my cast. I give her the same kind of indications. Question: So who, or what, is the camera in A Single Girl? Response: It’s a kind of projection of me, I think, my shadow walking in back of the girl, or in front of the girl. 147

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Question: A great moment of cinema occurs when, after the opening interior scene with the camera up close on the girl and her boyfriend in the coffee shop, there’s a cut to the street, and the camera begins a long track with the girl as she walks down the sidewalk. The feel of a different movie! Response: Yes, and real people on the street look at her and they look into the camera. It’s OK. I wanted that, I didn’t cut it out, because it’s completely paranoiac. Question: How did you find Virginie Ledoyen? She has starred in two of your films, A Single Girl and Marianne, the latter about a young woman, an ex-foundling, who is passed from hand to hand in aristocratic eighteenth-century France. Response: I knew her through Olivier Assayas, who is the filmmaker in France that I’m closest to in friendship. I see him often and, when we’re making films, we talk about whom we are going to hire. When I was writing Marianne, I didn’t know what young girl of sixteen or seventeen I could use because the film is very heavy, and there’s not one shot without her. Olivier told me about Virginie, whom he was using for Cold Water [1994]. I made two tests with her. I knew that she was a good actress, but I didn’t know if she could be quite natural in the French language of the eighteenth century, which is very special.   She was seventeen, so I couldn’t ask a young actress like that to be a perfect technician, say like Sandrine Kimberlaine. I could see that she was gifted, and I tried to film that. And I didn’t want a French painting of the time: you know, blonde, with a pink carnation. I wanted a girl . . . with something aristocratic. I wanted a girl who could be . . . a princess. Question: Is Virginie Ledoyen’s charisma that she is incredibly beautiful? Response: I’m not sure the appeal is the beauty. She has a kind of grace, and it’s not only physical. I mean, Virginie is a beautiful girl, but it’s not a beauty that makes her an exception among others her age. When she walks into a room where there are several other people, nobody notices her especially. But Olivier knew recommending her, and I soon knew, that she’s the kind of girl that I can look at with my camera and make her the only one. Question: She’s like Sandrine Bonnaire in the eighties. Response: Maybe. I admire very much what Pialat did with Bonnaire. It’s the kind of thing I try to do. 148

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Question: Pialat used Bonnaire twice in a row, with A Nos Amours [1983] and then Under the Sun of Satan [1987]. You also cast Ledoyen in successive leads. Response: I’d already written A Single Girl before shooting Marianne. I thought then that, if it was possible, it would be fortunate to have the same actress in the two films. Question: Because the characters they play get passed around the same way? Response: Yes, yes, to show a “line of life” of a young girl, one in the eighteenth century, one now. It’s not the same story in each film, but the same kind of position of a young girl in the world. Question: Many of your films are chamber dramas, focused on personal relationships. Do you ever have a desire to make something largescale, perhaps a Cyrano kind of movie? Response: I should very much like to make a big epic. Why not? I’d like to try. When I was an assistant director, I worked on a film like that and enjoyed it very much. But there’s an economic question. I like to print film, to print as many kilometers as I can, so I can’t wait four or five years to prepare a big film. I don’t have the strength for that or the desire to get all that money needed by such a filmmaker. Question: It’s not that you are saying that “man/woman/domestic relations” are the essence of life and of cinema? Response: No, but what I admire most in the great masterpieces is that, after the big battles, the big fights, the intimate scenes are fantastic. Like in the John Ford films, even his big Westerns. That’s what I like. If it ever came to me to film this kind of movie, I’d focus on the domestic scenes. Question: Your film Seventh Heaven [1997] is a little chamber drama in CinemaScope. Is that a contradiction? Response: For me, the definition of beauty is an actor or actress acting in a close shot in CinemaScope. This is my third film in CinemaScope, also The Beggars [1987] and an adaptation of Henry James’s Wings of the Dove [1981] with Isabelle Huppert and Dominique Sanda. Question: With Dominique Sanda, we are back to Bresson and Une Femme Douce [1969]. You both feature young girls in tough, minimalist films. Response: I don’t know. Maybe I’m in that family and can’t do anything about it, like being the son of somebody. To me, minimalism is an American art concept, more to do with people like Hal Hartley and Jim Jarmusch. Also, minimalists never film in CinemaScope. 149

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Question: Maybe Seventh Heaven is minimalist CinemaScope. Response: [laughs] It’s true: I very much like paradox. Question: In this film, it seems that characters say some very bizarre things upon meeting others, like, “Do you have orgasms?” Response: If you are very attentive, you can hear very strange things in life. Also, though it’s not a good answer: the dialogue occurred to me, so it could happen. But I do like familiar situations with strange things in them, like fairy tales, the German idea of “the uncanny.” I like to film that. My narrative form is “the tale.” I try to film bizarre tales. Question: Why did you use Sandrine Kimberlaine as your troubled married heroine, who has become a kleptomaniac? Response: It was a question of age, a woman in her thirties, and Sandrine is one of the most important actresses in France. You saw her in To Have (Or Not)?1 She was great in it. Question: What does your title, Seventh Heaven, mean? Response: I don’t know if it has the same connotation in English and French. In French it has a sexual connotation. When a man and woman go to “seventh heaven,” that’s a sexual accomplishment. Question: Is this film autobiographical? The husband feels like a very strong man until his wife becomes strong, and then he is threatened. Response: It’s not autobiographical but something I feel in general about men and women. In a way, I live in the opposite condition from these people. They are married people, I’ve never been married. Unlike me, they have a place they go to work every day at the same time. I wanted to film people very far from me but who are acted upon in a way that anyone can experience. Question: Is the husband missing something? Response: He’s blind. That’s why I wanted him to be a surgeon, someone passing his days opening bodies. He believes everything can be cured or fixed, just like the motor of a car. He can’t see what she’s trying to show him, but I do think he loves his wife. Question: The wife, Mathilde, seeks a cure through going to a hypnotist. And you? Response: I’ve never experienced it, though I’ve seen people hypnotized and I was very impressed. I chose hypnosis to be in the center of the film because to me there’s a very obvious analogy between cinema and hypnosis. When you pay your ticket to go into a dark room and be immobilized in a seat with a light behind you and a screen in front of 150

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you, and you have to forget the world outside, you are exactly in the position of hypnosis. You are asleep and awake at the same time. Question: So is it a deficiency in the husband that he can’t be hypnotized? Response: At this time, he can’t do it. Maybe at a later time, he’ll be able. I think if the film was continuing, his wife would hypnotize him! Question: A formal question: the way you cut away from significant situations, like when the wife faints at a party. Is it a question of rhythm? Response: It’s musical, like trying to find the right note. When I cut, I try to have my eye in my ear like a composer writing music. As for movie music: I like it, but very often what I film refuses music. Question: But your films never are without young women. Response: You are right. I am obsessed about young women. [laughs] You can’t be a cinephile without loving young women. That’s Lubitsch’s definition of cinema: “Doing pretty things to pretty women.” Question: Feminists say that film has always been made by men for men to look at women. Response: Yes, that’s right. [laughs] Question: Would you ever make a film with an all-male cast? Response: No! In filmmaking, I don’t want to discover myself. I’m not interested in that. I make cinema to know something about women. I can’t envisage life without women. And to me, cinema is a way to live.

One Year Later: Toronto Fest 1998 Question: Does it seem that The School of Flesh [1998] could be your breakthrough film internationally, with a big star, Isabelle Huppert, and a narrative pleasing a larger audience? Response: My friend, Olivier Assayas, saw it three days ago. He liked it, and said it’s not in the same “regime” as the earlier films. In the others, the story was always “destructing” itself, and it was difficult to know what the story was. This story is simply told. Maybe that’s why you think there will be a meeting with a large audience. About casting Huppert: I don’t realize at which point it’s important about having a great star. In France it doesn’t matter that much. Sandrine and Virginie in my previous films are also very popular there and very great actresses. Question: Once again, Caroline Champetier2 is your cinematographer. 151

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Response: The last time was A Single Girl, and this was the same kind of “bête,” the challenge to be as close as possible to the figure of a woman. Caroline wanted very much to photograph Isabelle, who is her favorite actor, and I thought maybe it was important to have a woman filming a woman. Caroline knew where I wanted to go with the camera better than anyone, and in both movies I had the big question: what does a woman want? Before, it was a young woman. Here, a less young woman. Question: So where do you look with the camera on Huppert for this subtle investigation? Response: In the relationship between the situation and maybe her face? No, it’s something between the actor and the character. With Huppert doing the role, I decided to do more with the actress than there is character. Filming that, I tried to know, to arrive at some little précis of an answer. Maybe I’ll know in four or five films. I’ve never filmed a mother. I’d like to film a mother, in relation to her children. Question: This film is built on close-ups of Isabelle Huppert. Response: Of ten shots of her, nine are close-ups. Extreme close-ups. This movie is about sex and sexuality. It’s about flesh, but it’s all on the face, a paradox for me. Godard said, talking about Hitchcock, “He filmed women’s faces like they were their asses.” There’s something so specific in film. The closer you are to faces, the closer you are to the sexual nerve. There are also one or two scenes of my couple making love. I asked myself whether to do them. I finally decided it would be very mechanical just to see their faces. Question: Your lead actor, Vincent Martinez, who plays the young gigolo? Response: It’s his first movie. He’s twenty-one, brother of the actor Olivier Martinez, who is famous in France. I chose him very quickly. Directors say, “I saw 100 people.” I saw four or five boys. He was one of the first ones. I tested him with Isabelle. At once, she told me, “That’s him.” Question: Does the camera love certain actors? Response: Not the camera. It’s a mechanical eye, a go-between the director and light. The camera loves a face if it is loved by the director and light together. Question: What if the director loves a face but light doesn’t? Response: [laughs] There’s nothing on-screen. A blank spot. But if the light loves a face and the director doesn’t, sometimes there is something. I think the light is stronger than the director! 152

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Question: For this film, you are shooting in the homosexual milieu of Mishima. Was that a challenge? Response: I’ve never forgotten that it was a homosexual story. I was very interested in the constant inversion of everything. The main female is a male character. Obviously, Mishima identified with that woman. I don’t know exactly who I identify with. Question: Talk about working with Huppert. Response: She’s not acting for an audience. It’s not for the scenario, the script, the part. She’s acting for the director she decides to work with. As an actress, she needs only a few indications. She doesn’t ask more: something about costumes, one or two psychological cues, and that’s all. She wants to act as if she’s going on the set to sleep and dream. She has a day life and shooting a film is her night life.  For The School of Flesh, we read the script together. She read it to me. That’s all. We talked about how her character, Dominique, would be dressed, how short her hair would be. That’s it. And Isabelle likes very much A Single Girl. She asked me to do something like I’d done with Virginie Ledoyen. So the first energy of this film is similar to what I’d done before: a long shot on the face. Question: But surely some actors want to know far more about their roles. Don’t they approach you to supply the backstory, since you wrote the script? Response: If they want to know something they don’t know, I ask them to answer for themselves. I ask them to answer by acting instead of thinking. But I’m very interested in what they have to say, and I always say, “OK! If it’s OK for you, it’s OK for me.” It’s very rare when I say, “No, that’s not true.” I also believe that it’s no use when we talk about the characters before filming. It always changes during shooting. Question: The ending of this film, with a character going into the metro, echoes A Single Girl. But it’s resonant of other people’s movies too, isn’t it? Response: There’s a “Mankiewicz touch,”3 though I don’t know which film. But I never think of another movie or of great masters when I am shooting. Only when they’re done can I think of reminiscences of other films. Generally, it’s someone like you who tells me. The paradox is that I love film, and I make films because people like you like them. Question: The quick ellipse to the future, the poignant meeting of old lovers, recalls Jean Renoir’s great short A Day in the Country [1936]. 153

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Response: My epilogue? Of course, it’s true! Yes, yes, why not? Renoir is so much the greatest one, a kind of father of French cinema, much more than Bresson or any other master. Question: And the other movie ending it recalls: the sad encounter after a few years of Streisand and Redford in The Way We Were [1973]. Response: Of course! Yes, yes! But I didn’t know it when shooting. But I very much like epilogues: “Two years after.” Question: You are planning another film with Isabelle Huppert, about a captain of industry who gets out of jail and how he relates to his previous cohorts? Response: No Scandal [1999], which has four main characters. It’s very Dostoyevsky. . . . It’s like Iris Murdoch . . . or [Patricia] Highsmith. Question: Will you be shooting a film in America? Response: Yes, in English, with Catherine Deneuve. Edith Wharton’s The Mother’s Recompense [1925].4 It’s the story of a woman in France who was married twenty years to a man who has just died. She has a child whom she hasn’t seen for eighteen years. She comes to New York and meets the child, now a young woman, who, later in the film, is going to marry in secret her mother’s new American lover. Question: Who is playing the daughter? Response: I’m going to New York to find a girl who is twenty-two to twentyfive, and to see films that I’ve missed with young girls. I didn’t see films of Drew Barrymore, Claire Danes. But Winona Ryder is too old!

Notes This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Cineaste 25, no. 3 (Summer 2000). 1. A well-regarded 1995 film by the French director Laetitia Masson. 2. Champetier (1954–) has worked with many important directors, including Margarethe von Trotta for Hannah Arendt (2012) and Leos Carax for Holy Motors (2012) and Annette (2021). 3. Hollywood director Joseph Mankiewicz (1909–1993), famous for A Letter to Three Wives (1949), All About Eve (1950), and other pictures. 4. Jacquot (1947–) never filmed The Mother’s Recompense, but he has made sixteen features since A School of Flesh. His latest is Suzanna Andler (2021).

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Two Interviews with John Waters Pecker Head I was invited by John Waters down to his hometown, Baltimore, to watch him shoot his latest feature, Pecker. It’s a comic satire about a local Maryland boy who becomes an unlikely New York art star. Waters has been directing his films here since his weird shorts with Baltimore misfits in the 1960s. If anyone imagines Waters behind the camera as a ditsy, wacky presence, guess again. He is sharp and tremendously organized, and his union crew for Pecker jumps at his commands. I was lucky to mingle between shots with his disparate cast including non-actors photographer Cindy Sherman and Patty Hearst, Waters’s close pal since he was an observer at her infamous trial. Hearing I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Hearst told me that she had wanted to go to Boston University but her parents insisted she stay in San Francisco where it was “safe.” And then came the Symbionese Liberation Army. In a production office after a day of filming, I met with Waters for an interview about his movie. Question: How did you pitch your new film, Pecker? Response: It’s an R-rated rags-to-riches comedy about a goofy, cute, eighteen-year-old blue-collar kid who works in a Baltimore sandwich shop, takes pictures of his loving but peculiar family with an old broken-down camera he found in his mother’s thrift shop, and he’s discovered by a New York art dealer and turned into an art star against his will. I gave potential backers a ten-page treatment and an ad campaign. Question: And did you entice your backers with your casting? Response: I never do that, in case they hate my choices. That’s one of two things you should never do, say who you want to be in your film. The 155

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John Waters directing Hairspray.

other: if they say “Yes” to your film, don’t question it. Get out of their office quickly, before they change their mind! Question: Did Fine Line Features, a division of New Line, agree quickly to make Pecker? Response: Not as quickly as Savoy with Serial Mom [1994]. We left a meeting [for Serial Mom], and the executive came out as we pushed the elevator button. He said, “Don’t fuck with us, don’t go anywhere else, cancel the rest of your meetings, and ‘Yes,’ is the answer.” Question: Was it a gamble for Fine Line to finance Pecker? 156

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Response: No, Pecker is cheap, 6.5 million. When lately has someone made a full union movie at that price, with Teamsters, IA, etc., and, well, all those actors? They didn’t work for scale, but they didn’t work for huge salaries either. The only thing in my contract was that Fine Line had to approve of my casting of Pecker and of Pecker’s girlfriend. So Eddie Furlong as Pecker was the first cast. Question: Can I assume that there was trouble with your film title? Response: I’m not that innocent not to know there’s a double entendre. But it’s a joke, the boy’s nickname, because he picked at his food as a child. Originally, the MPAA turned down the title, and we went to court about it. My lawyers had a list of titles to show them like Shaft, Free Willy, In & Out, and I gave a little speech saying, “Pecker might be vulgar, but it’s not an obscene word” and “This is a movie about someone who wants his good name back. And in this case the good name is Pecker!” Question: Your team’s argument was very Frank Capra. Response: The only people who use the word are mothers to their sons, “Shake your little pecker.” Question: Meanwhile, back in court . . . Response: The MPAA turned out to be very nice. They said, “We saw your title and had to flag it,” but they approved it. They weren’t being fascistic. Although when I first found out I had to see them, I had flashbacks of anger to the Maryland Censor Board, which I dealt with for my early movies. Question: But what about ads in “family” newspapers? Will they print the title? Response: I think so, now that the MPAA has registered it. Also in our ad copy, he’s not going to be holding his camera as a penis or anything! What should we call the film instead? Pucker? Question: What were your reasons for casting Edward Furlong as Pecker? Response: The fact that he was twenty, could look very innocent, very cute, and I could imagine him in Pecker’s outfits. And he had the right kind of hair, which is very, very important. Also, because of a movie I saw him in with Meryl Streep called Before and After [1996] and there aren’t many kids at twenty with a body of work. That’s one of my favorite things, kids with a body of work! I thought he was a very good actor, but I was worried that, though he played fucked-up insane kids so well, he never played comedy before. So I had a meeting with him 157

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and I saw him smile. I needed to know! Meanwhile, the foreign territories people at New Line said, “They love him in Japan.” That’s good: I try to make them happy. Question: And Christina Ricci? Response: I’ve been a fan since she was a child, and I really loved her in The Ice Storm [1997]. I interviewed her right on that couch—It’s not a casting couch! She and Ricki Lake for Hairspray [1988] were the same. They read with no direction from me, and it was exactly the way I’d been playing the parts in my head. They just got it! Christina’s part, Shelly, is a laundromat workaholic who has trouble understanding anything but work. Pecker explains to her about art, and she expands in a humorous way. She does pinup shots for Pecker in the laundromat. She’s his top model, sort of his muse. Question: And Martha Plimpton? Response: She plays Pecker’s older sister, Tina, who works in a gay bar, hiring and firing the go-go boys, who are all “trade dancers,” straight men who dance for the amusement of homosexuals. She’s a “trade hag,” which is really complicated. And Pecker takes pictures where she works, at the Fudge Palace. It’s a real Baltimore bar, next to the prison. When I first went there, it was the place prisoners went to get a job, so it was pretty good: nude burglars! Lots of Love and Hate tattooed on each finger! Martha, who was quite at home under a wig, really warmed to her part. She [is] very, very funny, and reminded me in a way of my Dreamland girls. She should play Cookie Mueller, if anybody ever does Cookie’s story. Question: Finally Lili Taylor, who plays the New York art dealer who discovers Pecker when she’s visiting Baltimore. Response: She’s a really good actress who doesn’t think of herself as a really good actress. Also, Lili’s a serious actress, who doesn’t hang around the set cracking jokes. But I liked the idea of her trying to seduce Eddie, and I don’t think she’s ever played a part where she looks so glamorous. I also didn’t want the New York art person to be a cardboard villain. She likes Pecker’s artwork for the right reasons, but the right reasons in New York are very different from Pecker’s motives. He’s a good artist, and takes pictures every day, though he says, “I’m amazed they turn out.” But he doesn’t realize that his breaking rules, not knowing any better, is on the cusp of trendy New York photography, that the pictures he takes are very “in”: out-of-focus, bad framing. When he 158

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gets fame in New York, he likes it. What he doesn’t like is how it soon affects his world, his family, that he can’t be a street photographer any more without people knowing who he is. The bad things that happen to him don’t have to do with photography but with success. Question: Some people have compared Pecker’s family to the Beverly Hillbillies? Do you agree? Response: I don’t think of this family as rednecks. I don’t have them speak incorrect English and I don’t want condescension. I think they’re a great family. Pecker is a movie about class but that’s not something I would say in my pitch. It doesn’t sound commercial! Titanic [1997] has the same message: people like to have sex with the class they’re not. Everyone who comes to Baltimore always get laid. Nobody gets laid in New York. They’re too cool to get laid. Question: In Pecker, people from New York also come to Baltimore and get “teabagged.” Is that a real thing? Response: It’s a “term.” When someone hits you on your forehead with their balls! But I exaggerate: people don’t go to that bar to get “teabagged” or anything. Even gay people don’t know the term. It’s obscure, but I hope my movie will make “teabagging” a pastime. [laughs] It’s safe! Question: In your film, it’s a New York Times art critic who gets “teabagged.” Pretty blasphemous! Response: If you read my script, it only says “the Times.” Well, there’s the Trenton Times. Question: One last Baltimore element in Pecker. Pecker’s grandmother runs a pit beef stand. What is that? Response: You have a grill and you cook this horrible meat in a pit. It’s not like filet mignon, believe me, these slabs of beef which you slice. In Maryland, they’re really popular. They have them everywhere. I did my research and went to the biggest “real” pit beef stand and was told that amateurs sell it on the weekends because health inspectors work Monday to Friday. Yes, Pecker’s grandmother runs a stand. They’re just traditions in Baltimore and nowhere else: pit beef and “teabagging”! Question: A heavy question at last! Is Pecker autobiographical? Response: The character is and isn’t. Some of the things that happen to Pecker happened to me, things about success, people thinking I made a billion dollars off of Pink Flamingos. And people coming to Baltimore as in the film and saying, “Show me the low life,” that’s definitely based on reality. Also, I did do photography the last five years, I was 159

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heavily involved in the art world, which I know something about. But when I started, I didn’t live in a blue-collar neighborhood like Pecker; I was ambitious, I was “in on the joke,” I wasn’t naive about any of it. So I’m not Pecker. If anything, I’m Pecker’s sugar-crazed little sister, Chrissy. I eat candy every day of my life.1

Waters Trouble What to expect when filmmaker John Waters arrives in your town for his one-person show, “The World of Trash”? “It’s my vaudeville act, one hour of my obsessions,” Waters told me in a phone interview. “It’s an ever-changing monologue about my movies, about crime, my advice to young people . . . how to be juvenile delinquents. It’s my position paper, my highly opinionated but joyously friendly rant about show business.”2 Then there’s a Q&A, with the audience encouraged to ask weird things. “I’ve never been stumped yet,” said Waters, and he doesn’t mind either when youngsters make mundane queries about how to become a filmmaker. Waters: “I tell them the way to break in, depending if they want to make Hollywood films or indies. But they can’t wait around for someone to ask them to direct a movie.” A warning: don’t dress cuckoo to impress Waters to put you in his next picture. “My shoot is union, and if you’re not from Baltimore, I’d have to offer you a per diem and first-class travel. I’m not really casting. That’s not my mission.” Time permitting, he will sign autographs. On whatever. “I’ve signed dicks, asses, parole cards (that’s my favorite), a colostomy bag while it was pumping. A couple of years ago, I signed a bloody Tampax. That’s one you don’t forget. I’m not asking for someone to top that!” The title of his show in Boston is “The World of Trash”? “Actually, I give about ten titles to choose from. My favorite is ‘This Filthy World.’ They never pick that one!” The night of Waters begins with a showing in 35mm of his 1974 cult classic, Female Trouble, concerning the rise and demise of one Dawn Davenport (Divine3 at his most in-drag fabulous), a sleazy teenager who becomes an abusive single mama, a criminal, and finally dies in the electric chair, frying triumphantly because she’s become a famous celeb. Female Trouble is off-the-charts anti-PC. The most outrageous of its shock moments: Divine being raped by his butch male self! “It’s the favorite of my older movies,” said Waters, “in a beautiful print, and the dialogue has been cleared up. There are words that I’d never heard before.” 160

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Waters thinks this is the most complete print, including one scene missing from earlier versions in which Divine, in full female costume and pursued by police, swims across a fast-moving river on a chilly November day. Said Waters, “Unless you’ve watched Female Trouble theatrically, nontheatrically, in 16mm and 35mm and in video in three different European countries, there are probably scenes you haven’t seen.” Was Divine a big movie fan? “He liked anything with Elizabeth Taylor. It didn’t matter. And he liked movies about rich people. I made him see Ingmar Bergman’s The Hour of the Wolf [1968] when he was tripping on acid. He thought Bergman was OK, but his movie taste was more conventional than the Divine character. I didn’t see many movies with Edie [Massey].4 She liked old movies. Don Ameche was her favorite star. [Of my actors,] I went most to movies with Mary Vivian Pearce.5 We’d take diet pills and see three movies in a row.” John Waters’s history in Boston began ignominiously in 1974, with the first screening outside of Baltimore of his then-unknown film, Pink Flamingos. “An executive at New Line (he’s long gone) booked it, to my horror, at the only gay porno theater in town. Not that I have anything against porno theaters, but it’s pretty hard to jerk off to Pink Flamingos! David Lochary6 [Pink Flamingos actor] was in Provincetown and came up to see it. He had quite a hissy because everyone was having sex in the bathroom and nobody was watching the movie. “Nobody reviews movies in porno theaters! I went crazy over that. I was living in New Orleans without a nickel, stealing people’s drinks when they went to the bathroom, using fake credit cards for phone calls. I remember I was making one of those phone calls when I found out about Pink Flamingos in Boston. I’ll never forget that moment! But it’s ancient history. New Line really did it right when Pink Flamingos played at the Elgin in New York, and then it came back to Cambridge at the old Orson Welles Theater and was a hit.”

Notes Portions of this chapter were originally published, in slightly different form, in the following: “Pecker Head,” Boston Phoenix, August 7, 1998. “Waters Trouble,” Boston Phoenix, May 10, 2002. 1. Waters (1946–) has made two features since Pecker: Cecil B. Demented (2000) and A Dirty Shame (2004).

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MAVERICKS 2. In 2022, after a hiatus because of COVID-19, John Waters planned to resume his live one-man shows across the United States. 3. Divine (1945–1988), born Harris Glenn Milstead, appeared in the following Waters features: Mondo Trasho (1969), Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974), Polyester (1981), Lust in the Dust (1981), Hairspray (1988). 4. Edith Massey (1918–1984), eccentric barmaid and thrift shop owner, appeared in five Waters features: Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974), Desperate Living (1977), Polyester (1981). 5. Mary Vivian Pearce (1947–), Waters’s Baltimore childhood friend, appeared in Waters’s short films beginning in 1964 and in twelve Waters features from Mondo Trasho (1969) to A Dirty Shame (2004). 6. David Lochary (1944–1977) appeared in Waters shorts beginning in 1967 and in the following Waters features: Mondo Trasho (1969), Multiple Maniacs (1970), Pink Flamingos (1972), Female Trouble (1974).

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Set This House on Fire William Styron and Charles Burnett “I was the great-grandson of a slave owner and he was the great-grandson of slaves,” Sophie’s Choice novelist William Styron, seventy-six, recalled his friendship with the late James Baldwin. “Jimmy wrote fiction involving White people, and dared write from a White point of view, and I thought that was admirable. It was at his prodding that I decided to jump into the soul of a Black man. I never regretted it, though Jimmy predicted I would catch it. And I did.” The book that Baldwin inspired was The Confessions of Nat Turner, a bold imagining of the thoughts of the leader of a true-life 1831 slave rebellion. The 1967 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, a novel that Baldwin adored, is a perennial literary best-seller and is sometimes taught in high schools and colleges.1 It also has been stigmatized by those outraged that Styron, a White writer, had any business writing in the first-person voice of a Black slave, and that he had in effect stolen the story from African Americans. Further, he had distorted it, they said, by projecting his own fantasy and fears, implying that Turner was motivated to organize a slave revolt because of raging sexual desires for a young White girl. Black protests stopped the making of a James Earl Jones–starring 1968 Hollywood picture based on his novel. Of these arguments, Styron remained, in 2001, totally unrepentant. “It pleases me that the book remains widely read, and it’s survived a lot of attacks and criticism. I find almost all the complaints invalid, irrational, and hysteric, and based on bigotry and prejudice. I don’t want to seem selfassured, but I wouldn’t change much.” And on the exciting day in late June that we spoke, on an outdoor movie set on a working plantation in central Virginia, the writer felt especially vindicated. Coming from Connecticut, he’d taken an early morning flight to Richmond, then driven here to rural

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Charles Burnett.

Louisa County. Styron had been invited to observe, and perhaps comment on, the shooting of key dramatic episodes from a film being made, inspired in part by his version of the Nat Turner story. And it was being directed by Charles Burnett, the acclaimed African American filmmaker. “It’s high time, after thirty-three years of attempts,” Styron said. The film-in-the-making—Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property—is probably meant for PBS: part documentary, part fictional recreation. It focuses, as does Styron’s book, on the messianic Black leader of the notorious 1831 revolt in Southampton County, Virginia. The insurrection led to the violent deaths of maybe sixty Whites from slave-owning families (numbers are debated) and then of most of the sixty to eighty slaves who dared participate. The slaves not killed immediately were imprisoned, put on trial (allCaucasian, all-male juries), and most were hanged, Turner among them. The trio of collaborators for this new telling of the Nat Turner legend—director and co-screenwriter Burnett, social-activist producer Frank Christopher, co-screenwriter (and scholar of the nineteenth-century slavery South) Dr. Kenneth S. Greenberg—debated for several years among themselves how to frame their remembered history, finally opting to pursue a radical, postmodern approach. Rejecting an omniscient voiceover, they forefront the idea that there are as many Nat Turners as there are poets, playwrights, novelists, and academics who have envisioned him. Six different actors play Turner in shifting narrations of the slave rebellion, including a scene of a “nature-boy” Nat from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s abolitionist novel, Dred (1856); a trickster Nat from a cobwebbed memory of 164

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actually meeting him by an aged ex-slave for a WPA interview; and an immensely noble, stalwart Black leader put forth in Nat Turner, Randolph Edmonds’s 1935 agitprop play. Styron’s self-conscious, literary, Freudian Turner? The most famous version, but here just one of the competing, contradictory Nats being dramatized. “I like that a lot,” Styron said, endorsing the movie’s Rashomonlike aesthetic. “Nat Turner has conformed to all those who consider him. He’s constantly being rewritten in the image of people writing about him, though he’s a mystery, an enigma; and even his actual confession is very suspect, taken down when he was imprisoned by a lawyer, Thomas R. Gray, who had every reason to twist the words.” Today would be a filming of episodes from Styron’s telling. Quiet on the set! The three collaborators, Christopher, Greenberg, and Burnett, had been consulting together in a field. They had been reading aloud Xeroxed pages of Styron’s novel so they could recreate as closely as possible how Styron imagined things on the page. Styron, white-haired and gaunt, a most courtly, approachable gentleman, planted himself in a director’s chair, trying to get by in the ghastly 97-degree Virginia heat. He was to witness rehearsals and shooting of a horrific scene that is at the climax of his novel, the only occasion during the bloody raid when Nat Turner personally murdered. Turner (today, actor James Opher) chases, stabs, and then finishes off with a raised log, Margaret Whitehead (Megan Gallagher), the honey-tongued and so-innocent daughter of a slave owner. This is the section in the book, pure invention, that got Styron in the thorniest trouble. There are steamy episodes such as one in which Margaret appears before Nat semi-clothed, causing Nat’s love/hate libido to explode. “In the novel, she teases him mercilessly, practically does a striptease in front of him,” Styron said. “That’s the way slaves were viewed, as dogs who couldn’t be turned on. “In his actual confession, Nat admitted this one murder, so it had to be incredibly significant that he chose this particular person. Novelistically, it was important that there was a connection with the girl. I’m convinced that there was a connection. And if justification is needed, the relation of Nat Turner and Margaret is just a carbon copy of Bigger Thomas murdering that White woman in Native Son [1940]. Nobody complained that Richard Wright, the most illustrious Black writer, had done that.” Before the camera: poor Margaret fled down a country road before tripping, fatally, and falling into a wooden fence. Coming up behind her, 165

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Nat drew his fatal sword. “I never thought I’d see this scene I dreamed up,” Styron said, obviously stirred. He’s persuaded by the casting of both Opher, a Virginia-based stage actor, and Gallagher, a blonde-and-petite high school girl from Virginia Beach. “This fence is the absolute replica of what I had in mind,” he praised the minimalist outdoors set. He gladly signed a paperback of his novel offered him by the pearly-toothed youthful actress: “To Megan, Best Wishes for the new Margaret Whitehead.” “I studied Nat Turner in my history class,” she told him. “When you read about slavery in a textbook, you kind of feel unaffected. Your book personalized it, so you felt the moral injustice.” “I’m glad it came home to you in that way,” Styron said, shaking her hand. Then he reminisced about that Hollywood attempt at The Confessions of Nat Turner, for which producer David Wolper purchased rights for the then-insane price of $600,000. “They gave me a lot of money. Fox went bankrupt, I kept the money. They were going to change the story, which bothered me a great deal. They wanted to give Nat a wife and turn it into a bourgeois family. Norman Jewison was going to direct, then Sidney Lumet. I myself got a Black screenwriter, Louis Peterson, who’d done a respectable play called Take a Giant Step [1953]. But it didn’t help [getting it made] that it was always a White director. “Later, Spike Lee was thinking of doing it and took an option, but his company decided not to. There had been disasters like Beloved [1998] and Amistad [1997] which seemed to indicate that historic movies about Blacks are poison at the box office. I didn’t see either but heard they were Worthy with capital letters and rather empty. Spielberg I find an atrocious sentimentalist, vastly overrated. This time for Nat Turner there’s a Black director who is also respected as a filmmaker. It makes lots of difference. It stamps the project with authenticity.” Charles Burnett is perhaps the quietest person in the very integrated crew (including African American cinematographer, John Demps), and the most peculiarly dressed in the now-noon sun. To guard against virulent mosquitoes, he had kept his blue jean jacket buttoned to his neck. He had been explaining softly to his Margaret how to act when Nat swiped her with the sword: “When he sticks you, scream out. Then scream again, and stumble back a bit.” “Very good! Very powerful scene!” Styron announced after three quite moving takes of Margaret’s brutal demise. Styron’s faith seemed justified that the Nat Turner film was blessed in having its director and co166

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screenwriter. Burnett, a UCLA film school graduate, is responsible for the masterly, LA-set first feature, Killer of Sheep (1977), selected for preservation through the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. A revered African American cineaste among critics and scholars, he is best known for the Danny Glover–starring To Sleep With Anger (1990), a subtle, complex tale set in a contemporary middle-class black family, and the wonderful TV movie Nightjohn (1996), celebrating the private lives of slaves on a harsh Southern plantation. The cast-and-crew call that day had been for 6:45 a.m. It wasn’t until 10:15 p.m., following a thirteen-hour shoot, that Burnett sat down with me for an interview. I realized he was being enormously gracious: he was weary, he hadn’t yet eaten dinner, and, being a reticent, private person, he loathes doing publicity. But his co-filmmakers had urged him on: maybe a favorable story could interest a theatrical distributor in taking a chance on Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, before it moves to public television. Maybe, but Burnett suspects the reality: “It’s a small film, and it’s a major proposition, a theatrical release. It’s not just having good material and good actors, but the market is such that it costs a lot of money to distribute. Chains are obligated to the studios, and there’s so much competition for people’s attention: football, basketball, now e-mail browsing.” Is Burnett upset that his earlier films, despite magnificent reviews from serious critics, did little at the box office? “To Sleep With Anger wasn’t marketed correctly by Samuel Goldwyn. It wasn’t a gangster film, so you need to have a relationship with the community, know what organizations to contact. Goldwyn refused. “I do feel somewhat frustrated. That’s what films are about, sharing with the public, but I can’t really complain. The films were financed, they exist, they are what they are, and I hope they have a long shelf life. My films appeal to a concerned, issue-oriented, thinking crowd. They’re not just for entertainment’s sake. We need to have a variety of Black films, not just targeted to twelve-year-olds.” Would Burnett comment on his methodology for unfolding the saga of Nat Turner? “Usually you have creative license to make changes. Here we don’t. We take the Nat Turner stories we’re given as almost etched in stone. We don’t presume to present our image of Nat, only that of others. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Nat is a simple, angelic innocent, so we show him with a skunk and a mountain lion. In another story, there’s the murderous Nat, so this violent person emerges with a sword when the militia approaches. That’s the view of White people in Southampton County, still 167

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fighting the Civil War. They say of Nat, ‘He’s a murderer!’ They can’t reconcile that his men killed women and children who were sleeping. They identify with the dead Whites but not with the rest of humanity. They don’t think about this institution of slavery that didn’t care about human life.” At an earlier day of filming, Styron had appeared on camera, telling his version of how his novel had been misconceived by its enemies. For balance, Burnett also conducted interviews with activist Louise Meriwether and actor Ossie Davis, who had led the Hollywood opposition to the movie, and with many of the original essayists—including Charles Hamilton, Vincent Harding, Dr. Alvin Pouissant—who had written polemically in the late sixties against the novel in the fiery 1968 collection of essays, William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. Three decades later? Burnett said, “Their positions are the same, that someone had taken liberties with one of their principal heroes. They were very friendly but had the same intensity as then, still a negative reaction to Styron’s novel.” But nobody begrudged Burnett’s approach to the Nat Turner story. “They knew we were sampling just portions of Styron’s book, not filming it.” It was 11:30 p.m., and perhaps after seventeen hours straight of thinking about his film project, the filmmaker had his guard down. His movie stubbornly refuses to decide who is the “real” rebellion leader. But, away from the camera, away from postmodernist relativism, who is Charles Burnett’s Nat Turner? Would he say? A racist psychopath? A tragic killer? Styron’s sympathetic but tormented figure? The answer came boldly: “I think he’s every man who’d fight for the liberation of others, who realized the evils of slavery and wanted to make it possible for his people to live in a normal way.” An African American hero! Also, a mainstream patriot. Charles Burnett said, “His decision to do something so positive made this country a better place. Everyone has inalienable rights, and he, in a sense, was interpreting the Constitution. Nat Turner was more American than those who denied him!”2

Notes This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Village Voice, September 4, 2001. 1. In the years before, William Styron (1925–2006) had remained in the public eye with Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (New York: Random House,

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Set This House on Fire 1990), telling of his bouts with depression, and with A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth (New York: Random House, 1993). His final books were published posthumously, Havanas in Camelot: Personal Essays (New York: Random House, 2008) and The Suicide Run: Five Tales of the Marine Corps (New York: Random House, 2009). 2. The work of Charles Burnett (1944–) subsequent to Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property include several TV documentaries, a TV movie, Relative Stranger (2009), and a feature documentary, Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation (2007).

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Voices in the Middle East Samira Makhmalbaf in Kurdistan

When Samira Makhmalbaf made The Apple (1998) at age seventeen, about Tehran sisters held captive at home by their fiercely patriarchal dad, skeptics speculated that Samira’s father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, had directed the precocious documentary. The famous Irani filmmaker is credited with the story and with the editing, so wasn’t The Apple, in truth, a film by Mohsen Makhmalbaf? It wasn’t, and neither is Blackboards, talented Samira Makhmalbaf ’s second picture, a narrative feature, which premiered in Official Competition at Cannes in the year 2000, when the director was twenty. Mohsen is credited as executive producer, co-screenwriter, and editor. But once again, Samira is the auteur, the person who was behind the camera during the grueling, dangerous shoot in the high mountains of Kurdistan, along the Iran–Iraq border. That’s where the once-warring countries clashed by night (1980–1987), and where Saddam Hussein tried to destroy the Kurd populace with ghastly chemical weapons. For the three months filming Blackboards, Samira was alone with her crew filming there. Without Makhmalbaf family. Without a phone connection to Tehran. “I was traveling around Iran searching for a story and location that would really move me,” she explained, interviewed at Cannes. “During a stay in Kurdistan with my father, we found little topics, little stories, and I preferred this story: about the journey of teachers with blackboards on their backs as they traveled Kurdistan. My father gave me the outline of the story, and I drew up the screenplay as we went along.” The Kurdishspeaking characters in the movie—impoverished teachers and youthful smugglers—shuttle back and forth between Iran and Iraq, with threatening helicopters overhead. Is it intentional that, in certain scenes, it’s difficult to identify the nationality of those plaguing the Kurds? 170

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Samira Makhmalbaf.

“I didn’t want to be too specific about any country or region,” Makhmalbaf agreed. “It’s a rather surrealistic film, with the bombings as a bad dream, a nightmare, I imagined in my head. So it is hard to tell who is responsible, Iraq or Iran. But the problem isn’t just war between Iran and Iraq. It goes back to former kings and former politicians. Today we have inherited their legacy. The issues of smuggling, of people without homes, I could have made in other Iranian provinces. However, I couldn’t make a film about Kurdistan without talking about chemical bombings, the human side of war. I was obliged to go every day with the cast two 171

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hours to the frontier. My crew would say, ‘We don’t want to go to the Iraqi border. We can shoot here.’ But I wanted to be impregnated by the energy of a border city, Halabceh, which had been bombed in chemical warfare.” Many of those in the cast are citizenry from Halabceh; only one actor is professional, Behnaz Jafari, the sole female in Blackboards. Makhmalbaf: “I liked the contrast between one woman and a whole group of men. Since women are so ignored in Iran, I wanted to give special value to this woman character, a young widow with a child. One day, I saw a woman going from one village to another, depressed because she had lost her husband, carrying water in a kettle. My actress was inspired by this woman, who was a bit deranged. “Originally, an actor was cast as the primary teacher. One day he talked to me: could I fire him? The person who now plays the part [Said Mohamadi] came to me spontaneously. For the role of the father, I also opted for a well-known Irani professional. As others were natural, he stood out. He was too exaggerated. I found myself with a dilemma. How to blend his acting with the others? He solved the problem himself: ‘I’m going. Take someone else.’ I chose instead this old man. His skin, his pain, showed all the right information. “Using such non-actors was both difficult and easy. It was easy in that the people were not as complicated as urban actors. They knew nothing about the sixth art. Many had seen no films at all. Less than a year ago, they still had no electricity. It was difficult because they would stop working for prayers, for local feasts. I told them they couldn’t, they wouldn’t listen to me. In order to encourage them, I had to set an example. I had to go into icy waters, and I climbed mountains, but not out of machismo. They would do it if I, a woman, did it first.”1

Hany Abu-Assad: Palestine Now This is how Warner Independent Pictures chose to advertise Paradise Now from the Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad: “From the most unexpected place, comes a bold new call for peace.” Why is it “unexpected” that a Palestinian would want peace in the Middle East? Actually, Abu-Assad, who was born in Nazareth in 1961 in a Muslim family, refuses to push any overt political line in his scary tale of two Palestinians entering Israel with bombs in their belts. It’s true that there’s an implied pacifism to the movie, 172

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but the Nazareth-born filmmaker wants audiences to make up their own minds how Palestinian rights might be achieved. He’s kept music from his soundtrack because, as he explains, “Music is pushing you to what you think and feel, but the film is about opening up your thinking.” He realizes the difficulty of clear reasoning, as ideology about Islamic terrorists breaks into resolute camps: “Either suicide bombers are evil, or suicide bombers are holy, angels.” I talked to Abu-Assad, very friendly and eager for dialogue, after a Paradise Now (2005)2 Toronto International Film Festival screening. “In the 173

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beginning,” he told me, “I thought I’d shoot in a classic style, and in a ‘documentary’ place, the West Bank town of Nablus. But we were endangering our lives, under siege. It was very difficult, very physical, no civil rights, so we moved to Nazareth, a safer place.” Did he have trouble casting Palestinian actors? “A few actors refused, who weren’t in agreement with the vision of the film.” The others are professional actors in the local theater. “Now there are about a hundred people [in the Palestinian territory] who live by producing their own work, tough, professional actors who’ll do anything in order to survive in this field. Every two years, we can produce but one film, so I hope they’ll have work outside the Palestinian territory. For Paradise Now, we could pay [salaries]. They couldn’t believe I had money for them.” I praised his actors, especially those who play the leaders of the terrorist underground. Frightening! “They are so good!” Abu-Assad agreed. “In reality, they are such nice people. They went with me to the world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, and we’ll be at the premiere in Ramallah, on the West Bank.” How did Paradise Now manage to shoot also in Israel? “We had an Israeli coproducer, so all scenes in Tel Aviv were shot in the real place. It was logical to be there. We were very quiet and polite and behaved, so we could claim this place as our studio. That’s a real Israeli bus we use, and the driver wanted to know if our actor really was a suicide bomber.” The Palestinian bombers in his film are promised, of course, a glorious Islamic afterlife. What does Abu-Assad think? “I don’t know what happens,” he answered frankly. “It doesn’t matter. When your life on earth is hell, it’s unacceptable, then you start to believe in heaven and paradise. There’s a need to have this belief when there’s no justice. “Still, I’m always optimistic, because there’s no choice for human beings than to go forward. You have to come to the point that we accept each other as humans. We are all equal, no matter the color of our skin or our religion.”

Notes Portions of this chapter were originally published, in slightly different form, in the following: “Samira Makhmalbaf in Kurdistan,” Boston Phoenix, January 2001. “Hany Abu-Assad: Palestine Now,” Boston Phoenix, November 2005.

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Voices in the Middle East 1. In 2003, Samira Makhmalbaf (1980–) returned to Cannes to premiere another film in Competition, At Five in the Afternoon, a documentary-style film about life after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Her last work to date is TwoLegged Horse (2008), shot in Afghanistan. Afterward, the whole Makhmalbaf family left Iran and are reported to have been living in London since 2011. 2. Paradise Now would go on to be an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. Abu-Assad (1961–) would repeat with an Academy Award nomination for his 2013 film, Omar, about a Palestinian baker who becomes a victim of the Israeli Army but who is also suspected by his people of being a traitor.

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Index Abu-Assad, Hany: casting of Palestinian actors, 174; making political films in Palestinian territories, 4, 174; no music in Paradise Now, 173; optimism of, 174; shooting in Israel, 174 Actor’s Studio, the, 66 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother, The (1975), 36 Affleck, Casey, 99 Aitken, Will: on “gayness” of Bertolucci, 32–33 Alexander Nevsky (1938), 85 Alias Grace, 96 Alien (1979), 61 Alk, Howard, 2, 10; and “The Cry of Jazz,” 5; death of, 12; documentary proposal to Black Panthers, 7; and Don’t Look Back, 5; and Eat the Document, 5; later films directed and edited, 12; living in Ottawa, 5; meeting Michael Gray, 5–6; and The Murder of Fred Hampton, 5–12 All About Eve (1950), 154 Allen, Woody, 37, 52, 67 Almendros, Nestor, 56 Altar of Lust, The (1971), 49 Amblin Entertainment, 107 Ameche, Don, 161 Amelio, Gianni, 120 American Cinema, The (Sarris), 1 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 5 American Revolution II (1969), 7 American Soldier, The (1970), 70

America Revisited (1971), 21; filming scene with liberals, 27–28; inability to attract distributor, 21, 23; unlicensed film footage and music, 26 Amistad (1997), 166 Andersson, Harriet, 123 Andreotti, Giulio, 72–72 Andy Warhol’s Dracula (1974), 98 Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein (1974), 98 Angel Number 9 (1974): based on Goodbye, Charlie, 51; disparate readings of film, 44; filmmaker Findlay’s favorite erotic scene, 51–52; protested by women’s groups, 52; publicity campaign as “erotic film,” 51 Angry Harvest, The (1985), 103 Annette (2021), 154 Apple, The (1998): speculation about actual director, 170 Ashby, Hal: character and personality, 39; director of first pacifist film about Vietnam, 2, 41–43; final years, 43; optimism of films, 39; pre-Hollywood biography, 41; rich lifestyle, 40–41; as a Vietnam War protestor, 41; work as editor, 40 Aspen (1991), 139 Assayas, Olivier, 148, 151 Atwood, Margaret, 3; Cambridge, Massachusetts, as setting for Handmaid’s Tale, 93–94; choosing Pinter for screenplay, 95; defending casting of Richardson as Offred, 95; defends having violent women in 177

Index Atwood, Margaret (continued) film, 95–96; inspiration for The Handmaid’s Tale, 93, 95; Puritan forebears of, 95; writing teleplays, 96 auteur theory, 1 Baldwin, James, 163 Ballhaus, Michael, 68 Banana Peel (1963), 22, 25 Bancroft, Anne, 34; artistic relationship with husband Brooks, 38 Banned (1989), 53 Barbarella (1968), 40 Barney, Matthew, 92 Barry Lyndon (1975), 103 Barrymore, Drew, 154 Bartók, Béla, 50 Battle of Algiers, The (1966), 2, 66, 114–15, 118–19 Battleship Potemkin (1925), 85 Bazin, André, 54 Beatles, the, 41 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 101 Before and After (1996), 157 Beggars, The (1987), 146, 149 Beineix, Jean-Jacques, 144 Being Human (1994), 83 Belfast, Maine (1999), 131 Beloved (1988), 166 Bergman, Ingmar: decision to have Ullmann direct Faithless, 122–23; finding the right actress for Faithless, 123; influence on Trotta, 71, 91, 121; influence on Ullmann, 122; inspiration for Faithless, 123; later life, 124 Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), 62n3 Berlin Film Festival, the, 68, 93, 114, 174 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 2; appearing at New York Film Festival, 29, 31; on casting 1900, 32; commentary on sex in Last Tango in Paris and 1900, 29–30, 32; his Communism,

31; defense of 1900 ending, 32; on pornographic cinema, 32; view of homosexuality, 32–33, 120 Bethune: The Making of a Hero (1990), 114 Beware of the Holy Whore (1971), 70 Beyond the Law (1968), 88 Birds, The (1963), 37 Black Girl (1966), 20 Black Panthers, the: cooperating on The Murder of Fred Hampton, 7; informing filmmakers about police, 8; political philosophy, 9, 114; setting up mock trial, 8 Blazing Saddles (1974), 34, 37 Blue Velvet (1986), 90; puts evil on the screen, 91 Bogarde, Dirk, 57 Bonnaire, Sandrine, 148–49 Boorman, John, 128 Boston School Committee, the, 139 Boston University, 131 Bound for Glory (Guthrie), 39; and Ashby, 41 Bowling for Columbine (2002): influence on Elephant, 101 Branded to Kill (1967), 128 Brando, Marlon: changing relations with filmmaker Pontecorvo, 117; film project with Native Americans, 117; in Last Tango in Paris, 29, 32, 88; reaction to being in Burn! 115–16 Bravo Channel, the, 33 Breaking In (1989), 83 Brecht, Bertolt, 70 Bresson, Robert: differences from Jacquot, 144, 149, 154; influence on Trotta, 71 Bridges, Beau, 39 Brief History of Time, A (Hawking), 107; religious references in, 112; style of book, 110 Brief History of Time, A (1992), 107–12; and Amblin

178

Index Entertainment, 107; Hawking’s feelings about the film, 112; Morris interacting with Hawking, 107–10 Brooks, Mel, 2, 34–35; on Gene Wilder, 36; on his movie sets, 35–36; meeting Hitchcock, 35–36; on politics, 38; on scripts, 36; on the social responsibility of films, 36–37 Brunette, Peter, 4 Buffalo Springfield, 41 Buñuel, Luis, 131 Burn! (1969), 114; Brando’s reaction to being in, 115–16, 119; casting of the lead role, 115–16 Burnett, Charles, 167–68; admiration for Nat Turner, 3–4, 168; filming Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, 165–66; later works of, 169; on the marketing of his films, 167; strategy for telling Turner story, 167–68 Burroughs, William, 127 Byrne, David, 99 Cahiers du Cinéma, 1; on didactic films, 2; edited by Rohmer and Bazin, 54; endorses Jacquot, 141, 143–44 Cain, James M., 127 Callender, Colin, 101 Canby, Vincent, 63 Candide, 103 Cannes Film Festival, the, 122–23, 170 Cannon Films, 88, 90 Capra, Frank, 157 Carax, Leos, 154 Carey, Ron, 35 Carter, Ron, 136–37 Cassavetes, John, 63 Cat’s Eye (Atwood), 95 CBS, 66 Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, the, 113 Cézanne, Paul, 127

Chabrol, Claude: as coauthor of first book on Hitchcock, 56; and Rohmer, 56 Champetier, Caroline: as cinematographer for Jacquot, 147; filming The School of Flesh, 151–52; later career, 154 Chayevsky, Paddy, 66 Chevalier, Maurice, 21, 35 Chicago Housing Authority, the (CHA), 131–33 Chimes at Midnight (1965), 97 Chinatown (1974), 91 Christopher, Frank, 164–65 Cinémathèque Française, the, 71, 143 City College of New York, the (CCNY), 45–46 City Hall (2020), 140 Clamdigger’s Daughter, The (1974), 50 Clark, Mark, 9 Clinton, Bill, 136 Clockwork Orange, A (1971), 101 Cobain, Kurt, 102 Cocksucker Blues (1979), 125 Cold Water (1994), 148 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 59 Columbia University film classes, 126–27 Comfort and Joy (1984), 75; addressed to Scottish people, 79; autobiographical elements, 79; characters have two names, 79; disappointment at audience reaction, 81; opinion of filmmaker Forsythe, 79; and Universal Pictures, 80–81 Coming Home (1977), 2, 39; Ashby’s defense of melodramatic scene, 41; ending of film, 42; the film’s score, 41; Voight and Fonda’s love scenes, 41–42 Confessions of Nat Turner, The: arguments for and against the novel, 163, 168; attempts at Hollywood production of, 166

179

Index Connery, Sean, 99 Conrack (1974), 63; praised by white liberals, 64 Constantine, Eddie, 28 Coppola, Francis Ford, 31, 91 Costner, Kevin, 118 Coup de Grâce (1976), 70 Cox, Paul, 76 Crawford, Joan, 55 Crazy Horse: band featured in Year of the Horse (1997) 125, 127 Cremaster 2 (1999), 92 Crime of Monsieur Lange, The (1936), 39 Crosby, Bing, 26 Crowd, The (1928), 46 “Cry of Jazz, The” (1959), 5 Cubism, 127 Daley, Mayor Richard, 5, 132 Damon, Matt, in Gerry (2003), 99 Dancing with Wolves (1990), 11 Danes, Claire, 154 Dante, 127 Danton (1983), 68 Darrieux, Danielle, 21 Davis, Bette, 121 Davis, Ossie, 168 Day in the Country, A (1936), 153 Dead Don’t Die, The (2019), 130 Dead Man (1995), 125, 129 Death in Venice (1971), 57 Death of a Salesman (1986), 94 Deep Throat (1972), 32 De Gaulle, Charles, 16 DeLuise, Dom, 36 Demps, John, 166 Deneuve, Catherine, 154 De Niro, Robert, in 1900 (1977), 29, 31, 32 Depardieu, Gérard, in 1900 (1977), 29, 32 Department of Housing and Development, the, 136

Dern, Bruce, in Coming Home (1977), 41–42 Despair (1978): class differences in, 59; and Nabokov novel, 57; set in Weimar Republic, 59 de Troyes, Chrétien: author of poem basis of Perceval (1978), 54–55 Devlin, Bernadette, 26 Diolas, the, 18–19; seeing themselves in Emitai, 19 Director’s Guild, the, 63 Disenchanted, The (1990), 141, 145–46 Doctor Knows Best, The (c. 1971), 49 Doillon, Jacques, 144, 146 Don’t Look Back (1967), 5, 125 Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018), 102n4 Doom, 102 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 154 Douchet, Jean, 143 Doulos, Le (1962), 128 Down by Law (1986), 125 Dracula (1979), 61 Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995), 38 Dream Play, A, 71 Dred (Stowe), 164 Dreiser, Theodore, 45 Dreyer, Carl, 60, 144 Drugstore Cowboy (1989), 97 Duke University: filming of The Handmaid’s Tale (1990), 93–94 Duras, Margaret, 56, 141 Dylan, Bob, 5, 125 Eat the Document (1972), 5 Earrings of Madame de, The (1953), 25 Edge of the City (1956), 63–64 Edinburgh Film Festival, the, 75 Einstein, Albert, 107, 111 Eisenstein, Sergei, 85 Elephant (2003): camera style in, 101; origins of, 100–101 Elgin Cinema, the, 161 Eliot, George, 97

180

Index Eliot, T. S., 80 Emitai (1971), 13; banned in Africa and France, 16; filming and historical background of, 18; reaction of urban Senegalese audiences, 19; shown in a Diola village, 19; women as heroes, 18 Endre, Lena, in Faithless (2001), 123 English Patient, The (1996), 126 Erotikon (Findlay), 49–50 Europa Europa (1990): casting of lead, 106; inspiration for, 103–4; Orthodox ritual, 104 Europa, Europa: A Memoir of World War II (Perel), 106 Faithless (2001): Bergman’s insistence that Ullmann direct, 122–23; Bergman’s search for right actress, 123; inspiration for, 123; treatment of character of little girl, 123–24 FAMU (Czech film school), 105 Fanny and Alexander (1982), 123 Fassbinder, R. W., 2; acting in Baal, 70; anger at von Trotta, 70; decision to make film of Despair, 57; disinterest in critical opinion, 58; disinterest in discussing homosexuality in films, 59; life after Despair, 62; physical appearance and character of, 58; political themes in Despair, 59, 61 Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997), 113 Fearless Vampires, The (1967), 61 Fellini, Federico, 36, 91 Fellini Satyricon (1969), 36 Female Trouble (1974), 160–61 Femme Douce, Une (1969), 149 Field of Dreams (1989), 118 Fields, W. C., 131 15 Year Old Girl, The (1989), 146 Finding Forrester (2000), 99 Findlay, Michael, 44–45; attending

Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society, 45–46; death of, 45; running film society, 46; and Snuff, 47; split from Roberta Findlay, 49; teaching Roberta Findlay to make films, 46 Findlay, Roberta, 3; as camera operator, 46; as camera person on Acting Out, 52; as cinephile, 44, 46; directing Angel Number 9, 44, 51–52; directing under men’s names, 44; hatred of pornography, 46, 51; introduction to movies by Michael Findlay, 45–46; making “faux” sex documentaries, 45; making Snuff, 47–48; married to Michael Findlay, 44; pornographic directing career, 49–51; reclusive life of, 45; shooting Sweet Punkin’ I Love You, 52; split from Michael Findlay, 48; starring in sexploitation film, 44–45; and Triumph of the Will, 53 Fine Line Features: financing of Pecker, 156–57 Finner, Mrs., 136–37 Fire at Will (1965), 28 First International Tokyo Film Festival, the, 84, 85 Fitzcarraldo (1982), 62 Five in the Afternoon (2003), 175 Flatliners (1990), 118 Flaubert, Gustave, 139 Flea, 97 Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, The (2003), 113 Fonda, Jane, 40–41; love scenes with Voight in Coming Home, 41–42 Ford, John, 61, 143, 149 Forsythe, Bill, 2, 75, 82; and Comfort and Joy, 80–81; disappointment of audiences, 81; early experimental films, 75–76; and Gregory’s Girl, 79;

181

Index Forsythe, Bill (continued) on Hollywood system, 76–77, 79–81; last films, 83; making Local Hero, 79–80; making That Sinking Feeling, 78–79; planning Housekeeping, 81–82; at Toronto Festival of Festivals, 75–76 Fox and His Friends (1975), 59 Franco, Francisco, 115 Frank, Robert, 125 Frankenstein (Shelley), 128 Franklin, Joe, 51 Frantz, Chris, 99 Freedman, Gordon, 107 Free Woman, A (1972), 70 Fromm, Erich, 72 Front, The (1972), 63; criticized for “up” ending, 67 Frost, Alex, in Elephant, 101 Fuller, Samuel, 127 Furlong, Edward, in Pecker, 157–58 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 5 Gallagher, Megan, 165–66 Garbo, Greta, 46 Garfield, John, 66 Gates of Heaven (1978), 107 Gazette du Cinéma, 54 Gerry (2003): audience reaction to, 99–100; influence of Tarr, 99; title of, 99 Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (2000), 127; casting of Louie’s daughter, 129; film conception, 128; filtered through French and Japanese cinema, 127–29; literary inspirations, 128; and RZA soundtrack, 129; and samurai code, 127–28; violence, 129 Gillis, Jamie, 51 Gillo Pontecorvo’s Return to Algiers (1992): making of, 118–19; argument with fundamentalist student, 119; subtitling, 119 Gilmore Girls, 92

Ginsberg, Allen, 127 Glasgow Youth Theatre, 78 Glass, Philip: and music for A Brief History of Time, 111; music for other Morris films, 113 Glover, Danny, 167 Godard, Jean-Luc, 24; Rohmer on his sociability, 56, 61, 75, 127, 152 Godrèche, Judith, 141, 145; discovered by Jacquot, 146 God’s Bits of Wood (Sembène), 13, 18 Golan, Menahem, 90 Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), 52 Golden Boy (1937 play), 66 Goodbye, Charlie (1964): as inspiration for Angel Number 9, 51 Good Will Hunting (1997), 100 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 86 Grand Illusion (1937), 39 Gravina, Carla, 73 Gray, Michael: meeting filmmaking partner Alk, 5–6; shooting Black Panther breakfast program, 11; writing The China Syndrome, 11 Great White Hope, The (1970), 63 Greed (1924), 46 Green Berets, The (1968), 41 Greenberg (2010), 102 Greenberg, Kenneth S., 164–65 Gregory’s Girl (1981), 75; as least-favorite film of director Forsythe, 79 Gregory’s Two Girls (1999), 83 Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), 106 Griffith, D. W., 100 Grimaldi, Albert, 29 Grossman, Albert, 7 Group Theatre, the, 66 Guey, Makuredia, and Mandabi, 16 Gurevich, Carl, 53 Guthrie, Woody, 41 Gylemo, Michelle, and Faithless, 123–24 182

Index Hagakure: The Way of the Samurai, The, 127 Hairspray (1988), 158 Hammett, Dashiell, 128 Hampton, Fred: growing up in Maywood, Illinois, 8; killing of, 8, 11; as a model for behavior, 11; role as a teacher, 8; as a teller of truths, 7–8; those who defended his killing, 9 Handling, Piers, 141 Handmaid’s Tale, The (Atwood), 93, 95 Handmaid’s Tale, The (1990), 3; casting of Richardson as Offred, 95; filmed at Duke University, 93–94; Pinter screenplay, 95; and violent women, 95 Handmaid’s Tale, The (2017–2021 television series), 96 Hannah Arendt (2012), 74n7 Hanrahan, Edward: elected state’s attorney of Cook County, Illinois, 9; defeat in election, 12; in The Murder of Fred Hampton, 9; raiding home of Fred Hampton, 11 Harold and Maude (1971), 39 Harris, André, 24 Harris, Ed, 10 Hartley, Hal, 149 Harvard University and The Handmaid’s Tale, 93 Haskell, Molly: critical analysis of Angel Number 9, 44 Hawking, Stephen: in A Brief History of Time film, 108–12; death of, 113; issues in A Brief History of Time book, 107, 110, 112; knowledge of Bible and Wagner, 110–11; looking at rough cuts of film, 111; Lou Gehrig’s disease, 107; meeting with filmmaker Morris, 108–10; and pessimism about the cosmos, 112; religious nature of, 111–12; as a scientist and a man of courage,

111; on seeing black holes, 110; sense of humor of, 110 Hayden, Sterling, and 1900, 32 HBO Films, 101 Hearst, Patty, 155 Heart of Glass (1976), 61, 97 Herzog, Werner, 3; influence of Nosferatu, 59; opinions about vampire films, 60–61; suspicion of the press, 61, 97 Hicks, Louise Day, 139 High Anxiety (1977), 34; Hitchcockian elements in, 35–36, 37 High School (1968), 131, 138–39 High School II (1994), 135 Highsmith, Patricia, 154 History of the World, Part 1 (1981), 38 Hitchcock, Alfred: approving of parody in High Anxiety, 37; and Brooks, 36–37; remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho, 100, 152; similarities to Rohmer, 61; study of by Rohmer and Chabrol, 56 Hoffman, Abbie, 11 Hofschneider, Marco, 103; casting in Europa Europa, 106; later acting career, 106 Holland, Agnieszka, 3; attending film school, 104–5; casting of lead in Europa Europa, 106; failure of To Kill a Priest, 105–6; on growing up half-Jewish, 104; influenced by Czech cinema, 105; later career, 106; making of Europa Europa, 103–6; murder of father, 104–5 Holliday, Judy, 4 Holy Motors (2012), 154 Horror of Dracula, The (1958), 61 Hospital (1970), 131, 138 Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988), 28 Hour of the Wolf (1968), 123, 161 Housekeeping (1987), 75; comedic elements, 82; plot, 81–82; searching for locations, 81

183

Index Howe, James Wong: filming of The Molly Maguires, 66 Hud (1963), 63 Huff, Theodore, 53 Huppert, Isabelle, 141–42, 149; acting preparation of, 153, 154; in The School of Flesh, 151–53; shot in closeup, 152 Hussein, Saddam, 170 Ikiru (1952), 84 I Married a Witch (1942), 46 In the Heat of the Night (1967), 40 Intolerance (1916), 46 Island of Dr. Moreau, The (1996), 106 Istanbul Film Festival, the, 114 Ivan the Terrible, Part One (1944), 85 I Was Hitler Youth Salomon, 106 Jacquot, Benôit, 141–43; on actors’ backstories, 153; on actors doing without rehearsals or scripts, 147; aspiring to make an epic film, 149; early films, 145; honored at Toronto Film Festival, 141; influence of Nouvelle Vague, 143–44; later films, 154; learning about women, 151; making The Disenchanted (1990), 145–46; making The School of Flesh, 151–54; peers in French cinema, 144; plans to shoot in America, 154; on Seventh Heaven, 150–51; shooting in Cinemascope, 149–50; working with Champetier, 147, 151–52; working with Huppert, 152–53; working with Ledoyen, 148–49; women in films, 141–42 Jafari, Behnaz, in Blackboards, 172 James, Henry, 106 Jancsó, Miklós, 100, 102n1 Jarmusch, Jim: conceiving of Ghost Dog, 128; dislike of the term “independent film,” 125–26;

favorite rock concert films, 125; filming of Year of the Horse, 125, 127; French and Japanese influences on Ghost Dog, 127–29; later career, 130, 149; literary influences, 128; other influences, 126–27; and RZA, 129; on violence in film, 129 Jaws (1975), 31 Jewison, Norman, 166 Joan the Maid (1994), 147 Joe (1970), 7 Jones, James Earl, 1963 Josephson, Erland, and Bergman, 123 Juvenile Court (1972), 131 Kael, Pauline, 1–2 Kahn, Madeline, 36 Kapo (1960), 115 Karina, Ana, and The Musician Killer (1975), 143 Kaufman, George S., 67 Kazan, Elia, 70 Kennedy, Kathleen, 107 Kier, Udo, in My Own Private Idaho, 98 Killer of Sheep (1977), 167 Kimberlaine, Sandrine, 141, 148; in Seventh Heaven, 150–51 King Lear, 86 Kiss, The (1929), 46 Kohl, Hannelore Renner, 94, 96 Kohut-Svelko, Jean-Pierre, 56 Korine, Harmony, 100 Korman, Harvey, 36 Kristin Lavransdatter (1995), 124 Kubrick, Stanley, 101 Kurosawa, Akira, 3; denial that Ran was influenced by Eisenstein, 85; end of career, 87, 91; on Ran, 84–86; at Tokyo Film Festival, 84–86 Lake, Ricki, 158 Lambert, Christian, and To Kill a Priest, 105–6 184

Index Lancaster, Burt: in Local Hero, 79; in 1900, 31–32; unpaid work on 1900, 30 Landlord, The (1970), 39, 40 Lane, Vincent, 132–33 Lang, Fritz, 143–44 Langella, Frank, 61 Langois, Henri, 143 Last Days (2005), 102 Last Detail, The (1973), 39 Last Tango in Paris (1972): reception of in Italy, 32; sex in, 32–33; and sexist treatment of female versus male actors, 29 Laudadio, Felice: involvement with The Long Silence, 72–73; relationship with von Trotta, 73 Law and Order (1969), 138 Leachman, Cloris, 36 Le Carré, John, 65 Leconte, Patrice, 146 Ledoyen, Virginie: and filmmaker Jacquot, 148–49, 151 Lee, Spike, 166 Leigh, Janet, 37 Lenin, Vladimir, 17 Leone, Sergio, 31 Letter to an Unknown Woman (1948), 25 Letter to Three Wives, A (1949), 154 Lewis, Ellen, 128 Lewis, Jerry, 90 Library of Congress, the, 167 Life, 117 Life Stinks (1991), 38 Little Big Man (1970), 103 Local Hero (1983), 75; and Burt Lancaster, 79; Mac’s lack of a last name, 79; popularity of, 79; Warners executives’ attempts to change ending of, 79–80 Lochary, David, 161 Loden, Barbara: influence on von Trotta, 70 Lolita (Nabokov), 57

Long Silence, The (1993): inspiration for, 72–73; premiere in Palermo, 73; von Trotta’s research for, 73 Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, The (1981), 68 Love at Twenty (1962), 22 Löwitsch, Klaus, in Despair, 57 Lumet, Sidney, 166 Luxemburg, Rosa, as film subject of von Trotta, 72 Madden, Tim, in Tough Guys Don’t Dance, 88, 90 Maddox, Lester: in America Revisited, 27; segregationist governor of Georgia, 28n5 Maidstone (1970), 88; editing of, 89 Mailer, Norman, 3; casting O’Neal, 91; directing Tough Guys Don’t Dance, 88–91; earlier films of, 89; filming in his Provincetown home, 88–90; hoping for larger audience, 91; on Last Tango in Paris, 32; making films versus writing novels, 91; sharing a joke with O’Neal, 90; shooting with a professional crew, 90 Makhmalbaf, Mohsen, 170 Makhmalbaf, Samira: casting of amateur actors, 172; directing Blackboards, 170–72; filming in Kurdistan, 170–73; later biography, 175 Mala Noche (1986), 97 Malcolm X, 11 Malle, Louis, 75 Mandabi (1968): ending of, 17; first film in Wolof, 16; nonprofessional cast of, 16; pressures of filmmaker’s relatives and friends, 16; reactions of African audiences, 17; theme music of, 16 Mandat, Le (1966), 13 Manhattan School of Music, the, 45 Mankiewicz, Joseph, 153–54 185

Index Mann, Abby, 117 Manson, Charles, 47–48 March, Fredric, 42 Marcuse, Herbert, 17 Margot at the Wedding (2007), 102 Marianne (1990), 141, 143, 149 Marianne and Juliane (1981), 68, 71 Márquez, Evaristo: casting in Burn! 115–16; later career, 117, 120 Marriage of Maria Braun, The (1979), 62, 68 Martinez, Vincent, 152 Marty (1955), and Martin Ritt, 66 Marx, Karl, 17 Marx Brothers, the, 26 Mason, James, 42 Massey, Edith, 161 Masson, Laetitia, 147, 154 Matrix, The (1999), 101 Matthau, Walter, 66 Maywood, Illinois, 8 McGilligan, Patrick, 2, 4 McGovern, George, 42 McQueen, Steve, 127 Meat (1976), 131 Melville, Jean-Pierre, 128–29 Meriwether, Louise, 168 Mifune, Toshiro, 86 Milk (2008), 102n3 Miller, Glenn, 26 Miller, Perry, 95, 96 Mishima, Yukio, 153 Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985), 85 Mission, The (1986), 114 Miss Julie (2014), 124 Mohamadi, Said, in Blackboards (2000), 171 Molina, Angelina, 115 Molly Maguires, The (1969), 2, 63; as favorite film of filmmaker Ritt, 65 Mondo Cane (1962), 10 Monroe, Marilyn, 110 Montreal World Film Festival, the, 68, 72, 121

Moolaadé (2004), 20 Moonfleet (1955), 143 Moore, Michael: influence on Elephant, 101 Moreau, Jeanne: on making Banana Peel, 22 Moro, Aldo, 73, 74, 120, 115 Morris, Errol, 3; and Amblin Entertainment, 107; decision to make film, 108; and Hawking, 107–10; hiring Glass, 111; later film career of, 113; making of A Brief History of Time, 107–12; sharing rough cuts with Hawking, 111 Mother and Son (1997), 102 Mother’s Recompense, The, 154 Motherwell, Robert, 88 Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999), 113 Mueller, Cookie, 158 Munch, Edvard, 60 Murder of Fred Hampton, The (1971), 2, 5, 8; aesthetic sloppiness of, 10; and Panther breakfast program, 11; police opposition to, 9; problems securing documentary footage, 9–10; trying to sell film to distributor, 10 Murdoch, Iris, 154 Murnau, F. W., 60 Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), 99 Musician Killer, The, 143, 144, 145 My Own Private Idaho (1999): casting of Richert and Kier, 98; at Toronto Film Festival, 97 Mystery Train (1989), 125 Nabokov, Vladimir, 5 Namibia: the Struggle for Liberation (2007), 169 Nathansen, Henri, 121 National Basketball Association (NBA), 136 National Film Registry, the, 167 186

Index Native Son (Wright), 165 Nat Turner (1935 play), 165 Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property (2003), 3; filming strategy of filmmaker Burnett, 167–68; inspired by Styron, 163; the making of, 163–68; plot of, 164; rape scene in, 165–66; retelling of story, 164–65 New Line Cinema, 156, 161 Newman, Paul, 66 Newton, Huey, 11 Newton, Isaac, 107 New York Film Festival, The, 2, 29, 54–55, 57 New York Post, the, 40 New York Times, the, 59, 65, 67, 159 Nichols, Bill, 4 Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon, A (1988), 98 Nightjohn (1996), 167 1900 (1977): casting, 32; conclusion of, 31; length of, 29, 31; plot of, 29–30 Norma Rae (1979), 2; filmmaker Ritt defends optimistic ending of, 67; popularity with critics, 63; racial themes in, 65 No Scandal (1999), 154 Nosferatu (1922): influence on Herzog, 60 Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979): homage to Murnau, 60; painterly look of, 59–60 Nothing in Her Way (1953), 28 Nouvelle Vague/New Wave, 54, 56, 143–44, 147 Ogro (1979), 115 O’Hara, John, 45 Omar (2013), 175 O’Neal, Ryan: casting of, 91; humor on the set, 90; rapport with filmmaker Mailer, 90; in Tough Guys Don’t Dance, 88, 90 O’Neill, Eugene, 88

Opher, James, 165 Ophuls, Marcel: and America Revisited, 21, 26–28; biography, 22; a contentious interview, 2; on interviewing unpleasant people, 27; later career, 28; and Love at Twenty, 22; moving to America, 22; pessimism of, 28; on presenting differing viewpoints, 24; and A Sense of Loss, 25–26; as son of Max Ophuls, 22; and The Sorrow and the Pity, 22–25; use of interview material, 27 Ophuls, Max: father of Marcel Ophuls, 22; filmmaking philosophy of, 25, 127 Orson Welles Cinema, the, 161 Pacino, Al, 118 Pagnol, Marcel, 144 Paradise Now (2005): casting of Palestinian actors, 174; lack of music in, 173; promotion of, 172; shooting in Israel, 174 Paramount Pictures: considering tax write-off for 1900, 29; release of the full-length film, 33; seeking “R” rating for 1900, 31 Paris, Texas (1984), 97 Paris Blues (1961), 63 Pascal, Blaise, 71 Passion of Anna, The (1969), 123 Passion of Joan of Arc, The (1928), 46 Paterson, Bill, 80 Pawnbroker, The (1964), 52 PBS, 137, 164 Pearce, Mary Vivian, 161 Pecker (1998); as autobiographical, 159–60; Baltimore filming, 155–59; casting, 155, 157–58; on family and class, 159; financing film, 156–57; pitching film, 155 Peckinpah, Sam, 129 Pennebaker, D. A., 125 Penrose, Roger, 111

187

Index Perceval (1978): antirealism, 56; artificial mise-en-scène, 55; inspired by medieval poem, 54; music, 56; stages in Perceval’s life, 56–57 Perel, Solomon: decision to write memoir, 104; later life, 106; mixed identity of, 104; as real-life hero of Europa Europa, 103–4; secret life in Israel of, 104 Perrin, Jacques, 73 Persona (1966), 7, 123 Pete ’n’ Tillie (1972), 66 Peterson, Louis, 166 Phoenix, River, in My Own Private Idaho, 97–98 Pialat, Maurice, 144, 148–49 Pictures at an Exhibition, 46 Pink Flamingos (1972), 159; first Boston screening of, 161 Pinter, Harold, 95 Plimpton, Martha, 158 Point Blank (1967), 128 Poitier, Sidney, 63 Polanski, Roman, 61 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 114; The Battle of Algiers, 2; becoming director of Venice Film Festival, 119–20; and Brando, 116–17; casting of Burn! 115–17; documentary shot in Algeria, 118–19; film about Native Americans, 117; interest in casting Costner and Roberts, 117; interviewed at Berlin Film Festival, 114–18; interviewed at Istanbul Film Festival, 118–20; on new Italian cinema, 120; late career of, 120; modest married life of, 114–15; Ogro, 115; work on antiwar film, 117–18; writing music for films, 115 Pontecorvo, Marco, 119 Popieluszko, Father Jerzy, 105 Pretty Woman (1990), 118 Primate (1974), 131 Producers, The (1967), 36, 37

Promised Land (2012), 102 Psycho (1960), 37, 99 Psycho (1998): defended by filmmaker Van Sant, 100 Public Enemy (1932), 128 Public Housing (1998), 131–35; contrast of protagonists Finner and Carter, 136–37; cooperation with police, 133; crew size, 133; montage scenes, 136; not socializing with people in documentary, 134–35; response to, 137–38; sex education talks in, 135–36 Querelle (1982), 62 Racetrack (1986), 139–40 Ran (1986): based on story of Lord Mori, 86; at First International Tokyo Film Festival, 84; message of, 86; sixteenth-century setting, 84–85 Rashomon (1950), 84, 165 “Rashomon” (short story) and Ghost Dog, 129 Ray, Nicholas, 61, 66, 126–28 Ray, Satyajit, 66 Reagan, Ronald, 86 Real Paper, 235 Rebel Without a Cause (1956), 26, 126, 128 Red and the White, The (1967), 102 Redford, Robert, 154 Red Hot Chili Peppers, 97 Reeves, Jim, 75 Reich, Wilhelm, 127 Reiner, Carl, 57 Relative Stranger (2009), 169 Religieuse, La, 143 Renoir, Jean, 39, 144, 153–53 Return to Montauk (2017), 96 Rhode Island School of Design, the (RISD), 98–99 Ricci, Christina: cast in Pecker (1998), 158

188

Index Richardson, Natasha, 95 Richert, William, 98 Ridicule (1996), 146 Riefenstahl, Leni, 53 Riegert, Peter, 79 Rimbaud, Arthur, 146 RISD Film Society, 98–99 Risi, Marco, 120 Ritt, Adele, 66 Ritt, Martin: antiracist films of, 2; on being blacklisted, 66–67; as a Brooklyn Jew in California, 65; defender of Shaft and Superfly, 65; defense of audiences, 67; didactic left-wing cinema of, 65; early biography, 66; eligibility for Medicare, 63; favorite films of, 66; films attacking racism, 63–64; on finding something affirmative in every film, 67; late career, 67; making films away from Hollywood studios, 66; visual quality of films, 66; on why some cineastes avoid his films, 63 Rivette, Jacques, 56, 127, 143, 147 Roberts, Julia, 118 Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), 38 Robinson, Marilynne, 81–82 Rohmer, Éric, 54–55; as coauthor of a pioneering book on Hitchcock, 56; and the French bourgeoisie, 3; and Novelle Vague filmmakers, 56; on Perceval, 55–57; similarities to Hitchcock, 6, 143–44 Rolling Stones, the, 41, 125 Roloff, Alfred, 74 Ronde, La (1950), 25 Roots, 65 Rosa Luxembourg (1986), 72 Rosebud (1972), 50 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 129 Rosenblum, Ralph, 52–53 Rosi, Francesco, 120 Ross, Herbert, 36

Rossellini, Isabella, 88, 91 Round-Up, The (1966), 102 Royal Dramatic Theatre (Stockholm), 123 Rubin, Jerry, 11 Rudolph, Alan, 76 Russian Ark (2002), 102 Ryder, Winona, 154 RZA, 129 Salt, Waldo, 4 Salvatores, Gabriele, 120 Samouraï, Le (1967), 128 Sampedro, Frank “Poncho,” 125 Samuel Goldwyn Films, 167 Sanda, Dominique, 29, 32, 149 Sandlund, Debra, 90 Saraband (2003), 124 Sarris, Andrew, and auteur theory in America, 1, 2, 63 Satan’s Tango (1994), 99–100 Saunders, Donald, 121 Saura, Carlos, 71 Savides, Harris, 101–2 Scarface (1983), 129 Scarlet Letter, The, 95 Scenes from a Marriage (1973), 123 Scherer, Maurice, 54 Schlöndorff, Volker, 3, 68; directing Baal, 70, 71–72, 73; on filming The Handmaid’s Tale, 93–95; as husband and codirector of von Trotta, 68, 70; living in New York City, 94; recent career, 96 Schneider, Maria, 29, 32–33 School of Flesh, The (1998), 142; making of, 151–54 Schrader, Paul, 85 Schygulla, Hanna, 68, 71 Scola, Ettore, 120 Scorsese, Martin, 128 Searchers, The (1956), 143 Searching for Ingmar Bergman (2018), 74 Seattle Film Society, the, 63 189

Index Second Awakening of Christa Klages, The (1977), 71 Second City troupe, the, 5 Secret Garden, The (1993), 106 Sembène, Ousmane, 13; death and final film, 20; definition of an artist’s role, 17; making of Emitai, 16–19; making of Mandabi, 16–17; popularity of films in Africa, 14; speaking at the University of Wisconsin, 2, 13; switch from fiction to films, 13–14 Senegalese cinema, 14–15 Senghor, Léopold Sédar: presidency of, 20; and Senegalese cinema, 15, 17 Sense of Loss, A (1972): 21–22; lacking political reflection, 25–26; Swiss film crew, 26 Serial Mom (1994), 156 Seven Samurai, The (1954), 84 Seventh Heaven (1997), 141, 149–51 Shaft (1971), 65 Shampoo (1975), 39 Sheer Madness (1983), 68; male characters in, 69; Strindberg influence, 71; von Trotta split between characters, 71–72 Sherman, Cindy, 155 Shine (1996), 126 Shoah (1985), 21 Show Business, 48 Silas Marner (Eliot), 97 Silent Movie (1976), 37–38 Simon, Neil, 37 Sinatra, Frank, 26 Singer, Isaac, 104 Single Girl, A (1995), 141, 145; filmed with Steadicam, 147; great camera shots, 147–48, 149, 152 Sirk, Douglas, 61 Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness (1979), 72 Six Moral Tales, 61 Sky Above, Mud Below, The (1961), 10 Sofie (1992): Jewish themes in, 121–22;

length of cut, 122; Ullmann as director, 121 Sokurov, Alexander, 100, 102 Sony Pictures Classics, 99 Sorrow and the Pity, The (1969), 2; plot, 21; women’s roles, 22–24 Sounder (1972), 63, 64 Spaceballs (1987), 38 Spielberg, Steven, 107, 166 Spy Who Came in From the Cold, The (1965), 63, 65 Star Is Born, A (1937), 42 Star Is Born, A (1954), 42 Stevens, George, 1 Stolen Children (1992), 120 Stoppard, Tom, 57 Store, The (1983), 139 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 164 Stranger Than Paradise (1983), 125 Streamers (1983), 57 Streep, Meryl, 157 Streetcar Named Desire, A (1947 play), 88 Streisand, Barbra, 154 Strindberg, August, 71 Stronger, The, 71 Stroszek (1977), 97 Styron, William, 163–66; disputing arguments against The Confessions of Nat Turner, 163, 168; friendship with James Baldwin, 163; on Hollywood attempts to film novel, 165; later career, 168–69; on the set of Nat Turner: A Troublesome Property, 163–66 Summer with Monika (1953), 123 Superfly (1972), 65 Sutherland, Donald, 30, 32 Suzanna Andler (2021), 154 Suzuki, Seijun, 128 Swann in Love (1984), 68, 94 Sweet Punkin’ I Love You (1976), 52 Take Me Naked (1966), 44–45 Talbot, Billy, 125

190

Index Talking Heads, 99 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 100 Tarr, Bela: influence on Van Sant, 99–100 Taviani, Vittorio and Franco, 120 Taylor, Lili, 158 Téchiné, André, 144 Teenage Milkmaids (1973), 50 Tesla, Nikola, 127 Thatcher, Margaret, 96 That Sinking Feeling (1979), 75; filming of, 78–79 Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society, the, 44, 46 Thief of Baghdad, The (1924), 46 Thin Blue Line, The (1988), 107 Thompson, Jim, 128 Thousand Clowns, A (1965), 52 Throne of Blood (1957), 86 Tin Drum, The (1979), 68, 94 Titanic (1997), 159 Titicut Follies (1967), 131, 138 Tognazzi, Ricky, 120 To Have (or Not) (1995), 147, 150 To Kill a Priest (1986), 105 Tolstoy, Leo, 35 Tomb Raider, 101–2 Tom Jones (1963), 103 Tormey, John, 127, 128 Torn, Rip, 88 Toronto Film Festival, the, 75, 79, 97, 100, 127, 141–42, 173 To Sleep With Anger (1990), 167 Touch of Evil (1958), 46 Tough Guys Don’t Dance (Mailer), 88 Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987), 92; filmed in Provincetown, 88–90; and Ryan O’Neal on the set, 90–91 Triumph of the Will (1935), 53 Trouble in Paradise (1932), 46 Truffaut, François, 22, 24; commentary on Rohmer, 54, 56, 75, 143 Turner, Nat: documentary on, 163–68; filmmaker Burnett’s positive

opinion of, 168; and slave rebellion, 4 Turning Point, The (1977), 36 Turim, Maureen, 2, 4 Twelve Chairs, The (1976), 37 Two-Legged Horse (2008), 175 Ullmann, Linn, 124 Ullmann, Liv, 121–24 Under the Sun of Satan (1987), 149 Universal Pictures and Comfort and Joy, 80–81 University of Cambridge, 113 University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1, 3, 5, 13 Untouchables, The (1987), 118 Vampyr (1932), 60 Vancouver Film Festival, the, 75 Van Sant, Gus, 98–99; on Elephant, 100–101; on Gerry, 99–100; influence of filmmaker Moore, 101; influence of filmmaker Tarr, 99–100; influence of Tomb Raider, 101; on musician Byrne, 99; on Portland, Oregon, 97; on Richert and Kier, 98; at Toronto Film Festival, 97; on video games, 101–2 Variety, 48, 67 Venice International Film Festival, the, 33, 114, 119–20 Vernon, Florida (1981), 107 Veronika Voss (1982), 62 Vertigo (1958), 37 Vessey, Tricia, 129 Vidor, King, 1, 46 Violette Nozière (1978), 56 Voight, Jon, 41–42 Volonté, Gian Maria, 115 Voltaire, 103 Von Trotta, Margarethe, 3; biography of, 68; defending male characters, 69; early career as filmmaker, 70–71; and her father, 70; influence of Strindberg, 71; life as theater

191

Index Von Trotta (continued) actress, 70; on The Long Silence, 72–73, 154; shaken by reception for Sheer Madness, 68; sympathy for “losers,” 72 Voyageur, Un (2012), 28 Wagner, Richard, 111 Wajda, Andrzej, 68, 103 Wanda (1970), 70 Warhol, Andy, 135 Warner Brothers, 79–80 Warner Independent Pictures, 172 Washington Square (1997), 106 Waters, John, 3; Boston screening of Pink Flamingos, 161; casting Pecker, 157–58; making Pecker, 155–60; seeing movies with friends, 161; “The World of Trash,” 160–61 Wayne, John, 41 Way We Were, The (1973), 154 Weigel, Helene, 70 Welfare (1975), 131, 139 Welles, Orson, 66, 97 Wells, Ida B., 133 Wenders, Wim, 61, 97 Wexler, Haskell, 39 Weymouth, Tina, 98 Wharton, Edith, 154 Wheeler, John, 107, 113 Whitaker, Forest, 127–28 White Heat (1949), 128 Wiesel, Elie, 121 Wilder, Gene, 36 Wilderness of Error (2020), 2013

Wild 90 (1968), 88 Willeford, Charles, 128 Williams, Charles, 28 Williams, Tennessee, 88 William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, 168 Wilmington, Michael, 4 Wings of the Dove (1981), 149 Winkler, Angela, 68, 71 Winter Kills (1979), 98 Wiseman, Frederick, 3; approach to filmmaking, 133–35; considering people from all classes, 139–40; films as more than reformist vehicles, 138–39; films as a response to place, 138; influence on Elephant, 101; later career, 140; on the open-endedness of films, 139; on Public Housing, 131–32 Wolper, David, 166 Woman on Her Own (1981), 103 Woo, Gerry, 99 Woodward, Joanne, 66 World’s Greatest Lover, The (1977) Wormwood (2017), 113 Wright, Richard, 165 Wu-Tang Clan, the, 129 Yacef, Saadi, 118 Year of the Horse (1997), 125 Young Frankenstein (1974), 34, 36, 37 Young, Neil, 125; and band Crazy Horse, 127 Young Patriots, the, 7 Zodiac (2007), 102

192

Screen Classics Screen Classics is a series of critical biographies, film histories, and analytical studies focusing on neglected filmmakers and important screen artists and subjects, from the era of silent cinema through the golden age of Hollywood to the international generation of today. Books in the Screen Classics series are intended for scholars and general readers alike. The contributing authors are established figures in their respective fields. This series also serves the purpose of advancing scholarship on film personalities and themes with ties to Kentucky. Series Editor Patrick McGilligan Books in the Series Olivia de Havilland: Lady Triumphant Victoria Amador Mae Murray: The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips Michael G. Ankerich Harry Dean Stanton: Hollywood’s Zen Rebel Joseph B. Atkins Hedy Lamarr: The Most Beautiful Woman in Film Ruth Barton Rex Ingram: Visionary Director of the Silent Screen Ruth Barton Conversations with Classic Film Stars: Interviews from Hollywood’s Golden Era James Bawden and Ron Miller Conversations with Legendary Television Stars: Interviews from the First Fifty Years James Bawden and Ron Miller They Made the Movies: Conversations with Great Filmmakers James Bawden and Ron Miller You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet: Interviews with Stars from Hollywood’s Golden Era James Bawden and Ron Miller Charles Boyer: The French Lover John Baxter Von Sternberg John Baxter Hitchcock’s Partner in Suspense: The Life of Screenwriter Charles Bennett Charles Bennett, edited by John Charles Bennett Hitchcock and the Censors John Billheimer A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Violence in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch Edited by Michael Bliss My Life in Focus: A Photographer’s Journey with Elizabeth Taylor and the Hollywood Jet Set Gianni Bozzacchi with Joey Tayler

Hollywood Divided: The 1950 Screen Directors Guild Meeting and the Impact of the Blacklist Kevin Brianton He’s Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly Cynthia Brideson and Sara Brideson Ziegfeld and His Follies: A Biography of Broadway’s Greatest Producer Cynthia Brideson and Sara Brideson Eleanor Powell: Born to Dance Paula Broussard and Lisa Royère The Marxist and the Movies: A Biography of Paul Jarrico Larry Ceplair Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo Warren Oates: A Wild Life Susan Compo Improvising Out Loud: My Life Teaching Hollywood How to Act Jeff Corey with Emily Corey Crane: Sex, Celebrity, and My Father’s Unsolved Murder Robert Crane and Christopher Fryer Jack Nicholson: The Early Years Robert Crane and Christopher Fryer Anne Bancroft: A Life Douglass K. Daniel Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel Nick Dawson Bruce Dern: A Memoir Bruce Dern with Christopher Fryer and Robert Crane Intrepid Laughter: Preston Sturges and the Movies Andrew Dickos The Woman Who Dared: The Life and Times of Pearl White, Queen of the Serials William M. Drew Miriam Hopkins: Life and Films of a Hollywood Rebel Allan R. Ellenberger Vitagraph: America’s First Great Motion Picture Studio Andrew A. Erish Jayne Mansfield: The Girl Couldn’t Help It Eve Golden John Gilbert: The Last of the Silent Film Stars Eve Golden Strictly Dynamite: The Sensational Life of Lupe Velez Eve Golden Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story Mollie Gregory Jean Gabin: The Actor Who Was France Joseph Harriss Yves Montand: The Passionate Voice Joseph Harriss

Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King, updated edition Foster Hirsch Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design Jan-Christopher Horak Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real-Life Tough Guy Burt Kearns Hitchcock Lost and Found: The Forgotten Films Alain Kerzoncuf and Charles Barr Pola Negri: Hollywood’s First Femme Fatale Mariusz Kotowski Ernest Lehman: The Sweet Smell of Success Jon Krampner Sidney J. Furie: Life and Films Daniel Kremer Albert Capellani: Pioneer of the Silent Screen Christine Leteux A Front Row Seat: An Intimate Look at Broadway, Hollywood, and the Age of Glamour Nancy Olson Livingston Ridley Scott: A Biography Vincent LoBrutto Mamoulian: Life on Stage and Screen David Luhrssen Maureen O’Hara: The Biography Aubrey Malone My Life as a Mankiewicz: An Insider’s Journey through Hollywood Tom Mankiewicz and Robert Crane Hawks on Hawks Joseph McBride John Ford Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington Showman of the Screen: Joseph E. Levine and His Revolutions in Film Promotion A. T. McKenna William Wyler: The Life and Films of Hollywood’s Most Celebrated Director Gabriel Miller Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood’s Legendary Director Marilyn Ann Moss Veit Harlan: The Life and Work of a Nazi Filmmaker Frank Noack Harry Langdon: King of Silent Comedy Gabriella Oldham and Mabel Langdon Mavericks: Interviews with the World’s Iconoclast Filmmakers Gerald Peary Charles Walters: The Director Who Made Hollywood Dance Brent Phillips Some Like It Wilder: The Life and Controversial Films of Billy Wilder Gene D. Phillips

Ann Dvorak: Hollywood’s Forgotten Rebel Christina Rice Mean . . . Moody . . . Magnificent! Jane Russell and the Marketing of a Hollywood Legend Christina Rice Fay Wray and Robert Riskin: A Hollywood Memoir Victoria Riskin Lewis Milestone: Life and Films Harlow Robinson Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film Alan K. Rode Ryan’s Daughter: The Making of an Irish Epic Paul Benedict Rowan Arthur Penn: American Director Nat Segaloff Film’s First Family: The Untold Story of the Costellos Terry Chester Shulman Claude Rains: An Actor’s Voice David J. Skal with Jessica Rains Barbara La Marr: The Girl Who Was Too Beautiful for Hollywood Sherri Snyder Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley Jeffrey Spivak Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master Michael Sragow Aline MacMahon: Hollywood, the Blacklist, and the Birth of Method Acting John Stangeland My Place in the Sun: Life in the Golden Age of Hollywood and Washington George Stevens, Jr. Hollywood Presents Jules Verne: The Father of Science Fiction on Screen Brian Taves Thomas Ince: Hollywood’s Independent Pioneer Brian Taves Picturing Peter Bogdanovich: My Conversations with the New Hollywood Director Peter Tonguette Jessica Lange: An Adventurer’s Heart Anthony Uzarowski Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ordet: My Summer with the Danish Filmmaker Jan Wahl Wild Bill Wellman: Hollywood Rebel William Wellman Jr. Harvard, Hollywood, Hitmen, and Holy Men: A Memoir Paul W. Williams The Warner Brothers Chris Yogerst Clarence Brown: Hollywood’s Forgotten Master Gwenda Young The Queen of Technicolor: Maria Montez in Hollywood Tom Zimmerman