The Coen Brothers: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmakers Ethan and Joel Coen, AKA The Coen Brothers.


BROTHERS' KEEPERS
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the April 1998 issue of Venice Magazine.

Joel and Ethan Coen have been labeled (perhaps rightfully so) the makers of America's most eccentric and unpredictable films. Joel (43) and Ethan (40) were born and raised in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, the second and third child born to parents who were highly-regarded academics, their father in economics and their mother in history. Joel attended NYU film school, after which he began his career in movies as an assistant editor, cutting his teeth on several low-budget horror films, including pal Sam Raimi's now-legendary übergorefest, The Evil Dead in 1982. Ethan graduated Princeton with a degree in philosophy that same year and the two decided to branch out on their own. Although their credits list Joel as the director, Ethan the producer and both as co-writers, the brothers share all their duties evenly on-set.

The brothers' first entry into the Coen collection was Blood Simple (1985), a stylish and clever film noir that earned the young siblings international critical kudos. The film also starred a fresh young face named Frances McDormand, whom Joel would later marry. They followed this with the outrageous comedy (and the first of their, so far, three kidnap-themed movies) Raising Arizona in 1987, with Holly Hunter and Nicholas Cage, creating what many agree is the finest portrayal of white trash in screen history. This was followed by the off-beat and riveting gangster drama Miller's Crossing in 1990 and then Barton Fink, the tale of a 1930's Hollywood screenwriter who slowly descends into madness. The film won Best Picture, Director, and Best Actor (John Turturro) at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, as well as two New York Film Critics Awards, three Oscar nominations and one Golden Globe nomination. Next in 1994 was the Joel Silver-produced Hudsucker Proxy, a Preston Sturges/Frank Capra homage that featured Tim Robbins as a naive young Capitalist in training and Paul Newman as the crafty industrialist pulling his strings. Finally there was Fargo, the now-classic tale of a pregnant Minnesota police chief's search for three of the most inept criminals in the annals of crime movies. The film won 1996 Oscars for Best Screenplay for the frères Coen and Best Actress for Mrs. C., Frances McDormand.

The Coens latest opus is The Big Lebowski, a mistaken-identity comic adventure in the Raymond Chandler mold, about a 60's leftover named Jeff "the Dude" Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) who's mistaken for another Jeff Lebowski--this one being the very rich Jeff Lebowski. The Dude, as he likes to be called, takes this misunderstanding and uses it as a psychedelic roadmap for one stony adventure after another through the back streets, bowling alleys and mansions of L.A. And through the Coens' eyes, L.A. has never looked quite like this! Lebowski is a feast for the eyes, the ears and the funnybone and is populated with the most outrageous cast of eccentric characters in any film since bizarro icon Federico Fellini took the long good-bye to that big studio in the sky. Check it out.

The Coens sat down recently to discuss the amazing collection of celluloid canvas that they've given the world. They are an interesting contrast. Joel, tall and thin, has a stillness and focus about him, never moving from the chair he's firmly planted himself in, while Ethan, smaller, wiry and more intense, is given to sudden fits of pacing about the room which he is currently occupying. They frequently finish each other's thoughts and, as one journalist rather perceptively put it, one can almost picture them as a latter-day Laurel & Hardy, sharing the same bed, wearing matching monogrammed pajamas and night caps. In reality, they are just a couple of nice, midwestern Jewish guys who happen to have an unquenchable appetite for movies and talent for movie-making.

So how do a couple kids from St. Louis Park, MN fall in love with the movies?
Joel Coen: Well, they had this show on TV called Mel Jazz's Matinee Movie. Mel Jazz was the guy who introduced the movie and he also sold Munce TV's and, what was the other thing, Eth'?
(Ethan Coen is pacing the room now).
Ethan Coen: His other sponsor was Downtown Chevytown.
Joel: Yeah, he was really, in a way, a very eclectic programmer...
Ethan: He was a visionary...
Joel: A visionary, yeah. And sort of a precursor to a lot of the sort of, great film programmers that turned up on cable networks later on. One day he'd show, like,
8 1/2, and the next day he'd show Son of Hercules. (laughs). Ethan's theory was that he'd bought the whole Joe Levine catalogue...
Ethan: Right...
(Ethan stops pacing and sits).
Joel:...and would just indiscriminately show whatever was...
Ethan: He'd just kind of interrupt the middle of 8 1/2 and go "Wow! This movie is really wild, isn't it?"
(Both Coens laugh)(So does the interviewer).
Joel: He had other really insightful things to say during the break. So we'd watch The Matinee Movie as kids...Steve Reeves, Fellini, Doris Day movies...
Ethan: Then later at night, at eleven, there was Downtown Chevytown Theater. And they had Tarzan movies on that frequently. And those Johnny Sheffield Tarzan knock-off movies. He played "Boy" in the old Tarzan movies, then he got too old to play "Boy," so they gave him his own series of movies.
Joel: That was Bomba the Jungle Boy, wasn't it?
Ethan: Was it?!
Joel: Yeah. Downtown Chevytown was kind of a mix of Tarzan and A Touch of Mink. That was the stuff we really liked.
Ethan: Yeah. Isn't it interesting, though...
(Ethan gets up and paces some more).
Ethan: The whole Johnny Sheffield phenomena is kind of a Jean-Pierre Leaud thing, you know? He got older so his character had to get older.

"The 400 Blows of the Jungle"?
Joel & Ethan: Yeah! (laugh).

Did you start out making little super 8 films as kids?
Joel: Yeah. When we got a little older around 11 or 12...we remade a lot of the stuff we'd seen on Mel Jazz's Matinee Movie. I remember doing a remake of The Naked Prey...
Ethan: Yeah, jungle movies really made a mark...

How did you film The Naked Prey in St. Louis Park?
Ethan: Well, we had trees. (laughs)
(Ethan sits for a spell).
Joel: Yeah, we'd have a couple kids who would be natives and much more impressive than that was the remake we did of Advise and Consent, which is a Washington, sort of political thriller. I think that was a Super 8 two-reeler. It was...
Ethan: Pretty ambitious...

Did having two academicians as parents help foster a more creative thinking style for you as kids?
Joel: Well they certainly had no connection to the movie business, although they went to movies. They were certainly very open to any kind of, you know, when we first started doing this it wasn't alarming to them in any way.

Were you guys always writing together when you were in college?
Joel: Not really until I'd started working as an assistant editor on low budget, sort of, splatter movies. Then Ethan and I started writing...a lot of these guys came in and wanted scripts written, these producers who were looking for very low budget things.
(Ethan now stops pacing, stands).

What were some of the movies you worked on?
Joel: They mostly had "Dead" in the title. The best one was The Evil Dead, Sam Raimi's first movie, and that's how we got to know Sam, who's an old friend of ours. The rest were all those sort of early 80's Friday the 13th knockoffs: Fear No Evil, Nightmare...you know, they were all...

Scantily-clad girls running from guys with big knives.
Joel: Right. Evil Dead was the only really distinguished one I worked on.

So how did Blood Simple come about?
Ethan (as he sits): Having written these things, especially for Sam, and going through the process of watching people raise the money for their own movies, starting with very limited, or no experience, as we had, in production...we figured, if they can do it, why not us?
Joel: And we'd been writing together, so we thought we'd write something that theoretically we could do for a low enough budget that we could go out and raise the money for ourselves. And Sam was very helpful in terms of he'd sort of gone about setting up a legal entity in order to raise it, what you had to do...
Ethan: And some people aren't very forthcoming with that sort of information and want to treat it as a sort of trade secret, but Sam was really generous in terms of giving us all the benefit of his experience.
Joel: Yeah, he was an early mentor of ours in terms of showing us how to get something off the ground.

How difficult was that first one? Was it a major hurdle?
Joel: Very difficult. It's a very frustrating process raising money that way, especially in the economic climate at the time...It took about a year to finally raise the money. To be honest with you, it was the last time we had any real trouble getting money for a movie.

I thought you perfectly captured Arizona in Raising Arizona. Did you research the area at all before you shot there?
Joel: We'd never even been there before we shot the movie! We liked the landscape, or the idea of the landscape...
Ethan: We had this sort of cartoon idea about cactus, really...
Joel: Yeah because you really only get the Saguaros around there, you know?
Ethan: We didn't know anything. We were going to shoot in Tuscon, but when we went there, it was much greener, not the sort of classic desert with Saguaro, which was what we were after.
Joel: It was the landscape we wanted and then the title that we came up with.

You came up with the title and then the story?!
Joel: Early on...
Ethan: Yeah, early on...

Do you guys outline before you write, or just write?
Ethan: Just write...
Joel: Generally we do. Depending on the script, we may have a sort of vague idea where we want things to end up...but never outlined or rigorously laid out in any way before we write.

How long do you generally work on a script, or is there no set amount of time?
Ethan: No set amount of time. Some take longer than others. Then it also gets complicated by the fact that frequently, actually more and more, we'll put one aside and then move onto something else, or because an actor that we're writing a part for isn't available for whatever reason. It might be years after starting a script that we actually get around finish and shoot it.

Do you usually cast in your head before you shoot?
Joel: There's a little bit of a mix always going on. Even from Blood Simple on, we would write specific parts for a specific actor, someone whose work we knew or who we knew personally and were friends with. So there's always been a mix of parts for specific actors and parts where we're not sure who's going to play them. In Blood Simple, for example with Emmet Walsh's part, we wrote that for him. We knew his work. Holly's part in Raising Arizona, was written for her, but Holly was an old friend of ours.
Ethan: Yeah, Holly was Fran (McDormand's) roommate when Fran did Blood Simple.
Joel: John Turturro we knew before Miller's Crossing because he went to school with Fran...you know...

You guys have a very distinctive visual and narrative style. Were there any specific filmmakers who influenced you heavily as you got older?
Ethan: Well that's hard to say. You can look at specific movies. I mean, when we brought Barton Fink to Cannes, we said to Roman Polanski that we were very lucky he was President of the jury because that film certainly owes a lot to Polanski with films like Repulsion and The Tenant. I think it's kind of like, movie-to-movie the influences vary and I think they've tended to be more literary influences than filmic. Miller's Crossing is pretty much a Dashiell Hammett story, but it was his novels we were thinking of, not the movies (adapted from them).

The Big Lebowski actually reminded me of something Raymond Chandler would have written.
Joel: Yeah...
Ethan: Yeah...
Joel: And again (Ethan gets up and starts pacing again) we were thinking of his novels, except in certain passages. The scene where Jeff Bridges passes out and Sam Elliott narrates saying "Darkness washed over The Dude..." that was sort of lifted from a different language, from Murder My Sweet, the Edward Dmytryk movie.

Was Barton Fink partially born from your own experience as writers and the insanity that the writing process can create?
Joel: I don't know...We both read this book called "City of Nets" by Otto Freidrich...
Ethan: It was about Hollywood in the 40's, specifically about German expatriates in Hollywood. You know, Schoenberg and Thomas Mann living in Santa Monica. It just sounds so funny...There was this other book called "Faulkner In Hollywood." It was kind of reading that book and thinking, uh...
Joel: Again, we thought of the two Johns (Goodman and Turturro), putting them in a movie, one next to the other. That's sort of how that got started. And also thinking about this idea of a big, deserted hotel. So it was those three things: the Otto Freidrich book, those two actors and thinking about the hotel.
Ethan: There was a lot of Jim Thompson influence there, as well...
Joel: Yeah, Jim Thompson has this novel set in an empty hotel, called "Hell of a Woman."
So it was kind of a weird mix.
(Ethan sits).

Hudsucker was your first foray into "mainstream" Hollywood with Joel Silver producing. Were you hoping that would be your breakthrough into the mainstream?
Ethan: Well yeah, sure...
Joel: It's the lowest-grossing movie we've done. And the most expensive.
Ethan: It's not that we were looking for a mainstream success necessarily, but anytime we do a movie, we want the people who financed it to come out well.
Joel: Yeah, we generally work with people we like and they put a certain amount of trust in you to make something that's going to work. So you're disappointed when it doesn't. You know, it happens. It's hard to predict, that's for sure. I mean, I never would have predicted that Fargo would have been the movie that grossed the most of all of our...
Ethan: Right...Hudsucker was the movie that was most directly influenced by other movies, Preston Sturges and that kind of thing.
(Ethan starts pacing again)

If anything, when people read Fargo did they say that nobody outside of the midwest is going to get this?
Ethan: Yeah, but then again, we knew the movie's cost would be so cheap, that it'd be hard to lose. So we thought that, okay, maybe it wouldn't be a huge, big commercial hit, but for $6 million...
Joel: Who cares?
Ethan: Right. Who cares?

Fargo was based on a true story, right?
Joel: No. It says it was a true story at the beginning, but it was actually all made up. We wanted to write a movie that was a "true story" sort of genre. We thought that if we did something where we told the audience up front was a true story, that they'd allow you to do things they wouldn't normally allow you to do, if they thought it was fiction. So it allowed us to introduce the heroine after 40 minutes without pissing people off. Or Fran's scene with the Japanese guy that doesn't seem to have anything to do with the plot. It'll make people more accepting if they're not prepped for a thriller. That way they'll be like "Well, it must've happened this way, 'cause it's true, right?"

How did people in Minnesota react to Fargo?
Joel: Well, it was very split. People either thought it was very funny and that they were in a unique position to appreciate it, or they felt that we were distorting and exaggerating and being very patronizing and cruel. The other funny thing we kept running into were the people who'd say "I don't talk like that, but I know someone who does." (laughs) The reaction to the movie everywhere was bigger and more widespread than we expected...Even with Raising Arizona, which is pretty hard to be offended by. It's such a broad comedy. But people in Arizona were very offended by it.

You've experimented with pretty much ever genre of storytelling. What's next?
Ethan: Well, we've never done a dog movie, like Old Yeller, or a western. (Ethan sits).
Joel: Raising Arizona got close to it in parts. We wanted to do a movie with Fran and a pal of Fran's as toxic waste inspectors. They'd walk around in the big suits, you know, inspecting toxic waste dumps.
Ethan: Kind of a Troma comedy.
Joel: We did write a western actually called The Sons of Ben Coffee. It's more of a TV movie, though, because it's only like a half hour long.
Ethan: It's kind of a contemplation of man's passage on this earth in the old west.
Joel: And we've been working on an adaptation of The Odyssey...
Ethan: Updating The Odyssey...
Joel: Yeah. Set in the American south during the depression. Mostly because we want to see in the opening during the titles "Based upon The Odyssey by Homer." (Coens laugh) (Interviewer laughs)

Gonna stick Kirk Douglas in there somewhere?
Joel: No. Goodman was the Cyclops, though. He's a member of the Ku Klux Klan and he's wearing one of those hoods with only one hole cut out. (laughs).
Ethan: Yeah, we've actually written a lot of that.
Joel: We've also written a movie about a barber in northern California in the late 40's who wants to go into the dry cleaning business. It doesn't have a title, actually.
Ethan: We need someone to finance our TV movie, really. Ben Coffee. Maybe we could make it one of The Contemplations, Joel, although it's a little long for that.

What are The Contemplations?
(At this point both Coens trade knowing glances and start laughing in synch. It borders on being disturbing and the Interviewer almost bolts from the room, expecting their braying cackles of laughter to perhaps summon the Devil Himself. The laughter soon subsides, along with the Interviewer's uneasiness).
(Ethan starts pacing again).
Ethan: Over the years we've written a bunch of shorts to be used in an anthology, The Contemplations. It starts with a guy going through this dusty old library and he finds this old leather-bound book called The Contemplations. Each contemplation is then a chapter of the movie.
(Ethan stops pacing. Looks at Joel. Joel looks at Ethan. That synchronous laughter starts again. Heart-in-throat, the Interviewer musters up courage for a final question:)

Any advice for first-time filmmakers?
Joel: Make the shooting schedule as long as you can, even if you have to sacrifice other things that seem important. The trade-off towards time for shooting is always the smart one to make. The big compromises you make are the result of not enough time to shoot. Cut anything that costs money...pay people less. You're always going to be better off the more days you have.

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John Sayles: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker John Sayles.


GUNS FOR SAYLES
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the April 1998 issue of Venice Magazine.

John Sayles is the United States' preeminent independent filmmaker in the truest sense of the word 'independent.' Since directing his first film Return of the Secaucus Seven in 1980, Sayles has raised all the money for his films from outside sources or from his own pocket. Born in 1950 in Schenetady, New York, Sayles studied psychology at Williams College during the turbulent late 1960's and early 70's. Following graduation, Sayles moved around the country, sometimes hitchhiking, working various odd jobs while pursuing his passion of writing. He began writing novels and short stories, which got the attention of Frances Doel at Roger Corman's New World Pictures. Sayles was hired to write the cult classic Jaws parody Piranha in 1978. He followed this with the gangster yarn The Lady in Red (1979) and the Star Wars-inspired Battle Beyond the Stars in 1980.

Armed with $60,000 he earned screenwriting, Sayles wrote, directed and produced Secaucus Seven, which won the Best Screenplay Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics. Sayles followed this with a string of audacious, ground-breaking independent features, each one of a different genre. There was Lianna in 1983, the story of a young woman's coming to terms with her homosexuality; Baby It's You, also from '83, about the ill-fated romance between a high school hood and a girl from the right side of the tracks; The Brother From Another Planet (1984), a sci-fi satire about a mute black alien who crash-lands in New York City; Matewan (1987), a riveting exposé of a West Virginia coal miners' strike in 1920; Eight Men Out (1988) based on Eliot Asinof's book about the 1919 "Black Sox" world series scandal; City of Hope (1990) the John Dos Passos-esque story of corruption in a fictional New Jersey city; the Oscar-nominated Passion Fish (1992), about a wheelchair-bound former actress and her nurse; The Secret of Roan Inish (1995), based on Rosalie Fry's children's book about a young Irish girl who discovers a link between Celtic legends and her family; 1996's Lone Star earned Sayles his second Oscar nomination in a tale of family skeletons in a tiny Texas border town.

Sayles makes his living writing and script doctoring (for no credit) screenplays for other people. Among his non-directorial credits are The Howling (1981), Breaking In (1989), and Alligator (1980). Recent script doctor duties were done on Apollo 13, among others. Sayles also has written for TV, creating the pilot for Shannon's Deal on NBC. He also directed three Bruce Springsteen videos from his "Born in the USA" album.

Sayles' latest film is one of his most intriguing, Men With Guns. Shot in three different states in Mexico and done entirely in Spanish (Sayles taught himself Spanish while researching his 1991 novel Los Gusanos, about Cuban expatriates in Miami), the focuses on a prominent physician (Federico Lupi) in an unnamed Latin American country, who goes out to find a group of his medical students that he has left at various clinics he's established in rural parts of the country. As he comes to learn of each of their individual fates, the doctor learns hidden secrets about his country, and himself.

Sayles, who has the unpretentious, casual appearance of a college professor crossed with a baseball coach, sat down recently in Santa Monica to discuss life as one of the last true independents in American film.

What were you like as a kid growing up in New York?
John Sayles: I was a jock, not an especially good one, but that's what I was into. Baseball, basketball, football. Mostly basketball. I went to the drive-in when I lived in the country, then later to theaters when I lived in the city. Watched a lot of television. Had insomnia (laughs), so I watched into all hours of the night. I read some books, but not as much as I watched television and movies.

So you fell in love with movies from an early age, it sounds like.
Yeah. Mostly when I was a kid I watched westerns, because they were in color and had horses going through water and people shooting each other, stuff like that. The black and white movie afterwards was almost always about the man in the gray flannel suit, and I didn't get it.

Do you remember what was the first film was that really did it for you?
Probably a cartoon, like Lady and the Tramp. I also remember seeing a trailer for a monster movie that scared the shit out of me. It was a giant locust movie, or something.

So the Corman influence started early then?
(laughs) Right. I loved monster movies. Mothra, Them, those kinds of things.

Why did you choose psychology as a major in college?
There wasn't even a drama major when I was there. I did do a little acting and directing my senior year in the theater, but I wasn't really a theater jock there, I was just a bad student, an all-around bad student! (laughs) Then I got into a summer stock theater company with some people there. I made a whopping $80 a week doing that for a couple summers, and did a lot of job-jobs: working in hospitals, factories. I was a meat packer for a while and got a union scale instead of an hourly wage, which was great. Then I started writing fiction and sending it out and was then able after a couple years to actually sell some short stories.

The first one you published was in The Atlantic Monthly, right?
Yeah, they had a series called The Atlantic Firsts, where you could publish your first short story. That won an O. Henry Award. They asked if I had any more stories. So I sent them a few that they'd already rejected, but different people had read them and they printed those as well...then I began to write novels and I got a literary agent. The agent had a contact in Hollywood, and they wanted to represent my book as a possible film property. I told him I didn't think it would make a very good movie, but what's the guy's phone number, because I'm interested in screenwriting...so I adapted Eliot Asinof's book Eight Men Out. The agent I met with turned out to be Asinof's agent when he wrote the book and he said "This'll never get made, but you did a great job." So they took me on and I moved to Santa Barbara. Within a few months I got the job to re-write Piranha for New World...I had always had a vague idea that I'd be able to write my way (into directing) like John Huston had, David Ward, who did The Sting, he got to direct, Walter Hill, Francis Coppola, Oliver Stone...and that just wasn't happening as quickly as I wanted it to. So I took the money that I'd made and did what, I guess Stanley Kubrick is the oldest example I can think of, who took money that he made doing something else and made a first film with it.

Let's back up a bit and talk about your Corman days.
Well I was only a writer, so I wasn't there around the studio a whole lot. The great thing was between Roger and Frances Doel, the story conferences were very compact and very specific. I never got these very vague directions like "We've got problems with the second act," or something like that. I did a lot of re-writes based on very specific notes. The other great thing about working there was that Roger only paid someone to write a script that he was going to make. There's not a lot of development of material that's not going to be produced. So I wrote three things that got produced in a very short order. I wrote very quickly, usually two or three drafts, that made Roger happy because he got to see something concrete right away. Then you'd get the director on board and I'd get a panicked phone call from the director, like Lewis Teague, who did The Lady in Red. "John, I've got $800,000 to shoot this movie in Los Angeles. You've written a period epic 130 pages long with 68 characters. Help!" (laughs)...So I'd simplify things and you learn a lot doing that, what certain costs are, and so on. And the other nice thing was I got to work with good people: Lewis Teague, Joe Dante, Frances Doel, who's a very good script supervisor. And Roger made a lot of movies as a producer or as a director and had very good story instincts, about the rhythms of a script, about when the next attack should come. Maybe here you should have a fake attack or here give the audience a little breather. He always talked about the rollercoaster effect, bringing them up really high before you bring them down.

And then you took your Corman earnings and did Secaucus Seven.
Right. Then I did another job for Roger (Battle Beyond the Stars) so I could get an editing machine to cut Secaucus Seven...We were all really naive about filmmaking at that point. We shot Secaucus Seven in TV ratio because we didn't think we'd get a theatrical release. Then it played at Filmex out here and got a distributor and had to blow it up. I got a couple offers to do screenplays out of that, but no directing offers. It's not like today where if you get that kind of buzz, you've got a three picture deal...With Lianna, I put a little money into it and the rest was raised as a public offering.

Tell us a little about how you raise money for an independent film.
Well, you read the script, and if it has any commercial potential that the studios might be interested in, you run it by the studios first and say here's who we think of having in it. Here's the story. We want final cut and we know that usually you don't do that, but it's not going to cost that much for you. And usually they say 'no.' Then if you think it has enough of a commercial upside that it merits a sort of platform release like Miramax does, you may run it by them. For a while when Larry Estes was at Columbia-TriStar home video, they were pre-financing things you could sell at home video presales, then with them go look for a theatrical distributor. Both Passion Fish and City of Hope were financed that way, with a $3 million video pre-sale. So it's been every way you can think of, really. With Roan Inish, I put in 1/3 of the money and a cable company in Denver put in the other 2/3.

I read that your budget on Men With Guns was only $2.3 million. That's pretty amazing considering the final product, which looks like a big-budget film.
Remember, that's a healthy budget for a Mexican film, but most Mexican films aren't this ambitious with locations. And we had a Mexican crew.

Are you influenced by John Dos Passos at all in your writing?
I've read U.S.A., but not anything else of his. I imagine, given my shaky literary background, since I wasn't an English major, I was probably influenced by people who were influenced by him, in that kind of mosaic kind of storytelling. Certainly my fiction is more like that than my films are...the writer's I've been most influenced by directly are Nelson Albren, John Steinbeck, Faulkner, Hemingway, James Farley, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain. I've read very little world literature...a variety. When I went to college I hadn't read that many books and didn't go to that many classes, but I did go to the library a lot. I started at the "A's" and by the time I graduated I was about to "M" or "N." (laughs) I skipped ahead and did some Twain, but a lot of the guys later on in the alphabet I'm not too versed in.

What was your feeling about people accusing The Big Chill of ripping off Secaucus Seven?
What I felt like was that it was much more thoughtful than the usual Hollywood movie. It certainly shared the same genre, or sub-genre, "the weekend movie," "the reunion movie." But I really didn't think they were that similar...I mean, generic things are generic things, but what you do and where you go with them are very different. So I felt like, okay Return of the Secaucus Seven is about a bunch of people trying to hold on to their idealism and, for the most part, doing it, in spite of the fact that...the world hasn't changed in the way they wanted it to. The Big Chill was called that for a reason. It was about a bunch of people who realized that they've lost their idealism, or never had it in the first place. They're both really about people who were probably at the same marches. The Big Chill people have that upwardly-mobile drive, the Secaucus Seven people have been very consciously downwardly-mobile. So it's like their pasts were the same, then it just went (snaps fingers) like that, you know? I found it really a very kind of cool, very different movie.

What do you think has happened to the characters from Secaucus Seven in the past 18 years?
The people that the characters are based on are still doing jobs that are socially involved. They haven't actually gone corporate. They've had children. They've had a lot of problems with children and a lot of problems with their relationships...If anything they're a little more radical because they don't have a mass movement to plug into. So they're frustrated with politics, but still active, more on a community level than a mass march level...One of the things that inspired me to make the film to begin with were all the articles in publications like Time and Newsweek saying how all the 60's radicals had sold out and gone to work for banks and corporations, which just wasn't my experience.

A lot of your films seem to take a very grass-roots viewpoint, that of the "common man," as opposed to the white upper middle class, which a lot of mainstream Hollywood films tend to do. What do you think this comes from?
I think it comes from the fact that I don't have a heroic view of the world. One of the kind of backbones of motion pictures is a heroic point of view. You have individuals put in extreme situations, and those individuals triumph, against the crowd, against nature, against the bad guys, whatever. If Hollywood is doing a historical epic, they say "Okay, now let's get something heroic for Tyrone Power to do, so he can triumph and save the French, or save the Spanish..."

Whereas you send in someone who's very ordinary-seeming, like Chris Cooper (Matewan, Lone Star).
Yeah, and he's also not very heroic. Like in Matewan, he's a pacifist. And there's a good question in the end whether his pacifism, which certainly didn't do him much good, is possible in that situation. And there's even some question whether it's desirable in that situation. The heroic mode would be to say "Well, the mining company men are the bad guys and I used to be a pretty good shot and a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do..." and he takes the guns off the wall, says "I'm not a pacifist anymore," and he shoots the bad guys.

How did you hear about what went on in Matewan, West Virginia in 1920? That was a chapter of American history that was unknown to me until that film came out.
I had hitchhiked through the country a couple times. Going through Kentucky and West Virginia in the late 60's, there was a very violent competition between who was going to win the next United Mine Workers Presidency...eventually the one guy and his family were murdered by the other guy's people. I would get picked up by miner's on both sides and they'd say "Well, it's pretty bad right now...We're just hopin' it doesn't end in another Matewan massacre." Then they'd tell me the stories...I did some book research after that about that whole era. It seemed like a perfect historical story that epitomized America's labor history...nowadays manufacturing has really become international, so you really can't talk about the American labor movement anymore. They've just been busted by industry's tendency to say "Well, we'll just make it somewhere else, even if the raw material does come from here." I'd say the next chapter in labor history is going to be international.

It's evident from these last two films (Lone Star, Men With Guns) and your book Los Gusanos, that you're very interested in Latin culture. How did this come about?
It started when I was a kid and my mother's parents lived in Miami and I kept going down there every year before, during and after the Cuban revolution and saw the exile community growing...more and more in different places that I lived, my neighbors spoke Spanish and I got into it not only to find out, who are they? How do they think? How come they're here? I got into, which of them here are new and which of them have always been here? So really I think it's an admission by the United States that this has always been a part of our culture. And the United States as we know it, that territory, had a lot of languages that were native to it. Spanish was one of the main ones of the southeast and the southwest. Then that got kind of pushed back after the Mexican war and now with integration it's becoming more a part of the culture again. So do we recognize that? Do we punish it? What do we do with it? Certainly I don't see it as being interested in the exotic...I'm always interested in saying "How inclusive can you make us?" If you're in a city and it's a multi-ethnic city, where do you draw the line and say "us and them"? Los Angeles, for example, is one of the most segregated cities in the United States. How do you break through that and say "This city is about us and if anybody in this city isn't doing well, it's our problem. It's not 'their' problem."

That's what City of Hope was about.
Absolutely. It was interesting, coming here (in 1990) talking about City of Hope. We did a panel discussion with the pro-police and the anti-police and city councilmen, poverty workers...and it was very clear that most of them just viewed one small neighborhood as being Los Angeles, and the rest of it was just some other place.

Another theme I see in a lot of your films is people searching for home.
A community, I think. The United States, the culture that we know, is really not a traditional culture. It's fairly rare nowadays for someone to do what their grandfather did or even live where their grandfather lived. But when you don't have a traditional culture and you have a restless, mobile culture, the idea of community becomes something very different. It's not a geographical community anymore, it's a community of people who're into stock car racing, or Miss America contests, or into cyberpunk, or into a certain religion...these communities aren't linked by living together, but by a similar way of thinking about the world...so I think that many people are really hungry for a sense of community and at a certain point in their life, sort of grab onto anything there is, whether it's a Nazi hate group or something more positive.

Where do you see the assimilation in this country going? Will we ever find home?
Well, I think that it goes very, very slowly. If you look at where media was, say twenty years ago, when there were almost no black filmmakers, and most minorities had just a small chance to even get into the conversation, or into the business world...so that little wedge, talented people are going to fill that wedge. Same thing for the Hispanic community. But it takes a long, long time. And certainly there is that kind of Pat Buchanan backlash of "Let's forget all that multi-cultural stuff. I'm fighting a holy war here for my values, which don't include those people!" So there's going to be a lot of conflicts. But I think the important thing is if you're really serious about this American dream shit, about this democratic country shit, you have to include as many people as possible in the weave.

What's next on your slate?
We're going to be making a movie this summer up in Alaska that's based on a script I've written called Limbo. And it's a very strange story...(laughs) It's hard to describe, but the main characters are a commercial fisherman who hasn't been back to sea in 25 years because he had a couple guys drown on his boat. He hooked up with a woman who's a lounge singer who's a lot more positive and optimistic than she should be, considering what her life has been like, and she has a daughter that has psychological problems. They attempt to form this kind of new family, with all this baggage that they carry into it. It's going to star Vanessa Martinez, who was in Lone Star and Elizabeth Peña, David Strathairn, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio.

Do you rehearse a lot?
Not a lot. The only rehearsal we really do is on the set when we're setting up the lighting. I think there's two ways to do that: rehearse the hell out of it and get to a certain point where you're doing different versions of a performance that's been very thought out, or have the actors really know who they are and what they're doing and then have that sort of shock of discovery on camera. So I prefer to end up using one of the first three takes...I write a biography of all the characters for the actors, as well. It gives them their backstory, what the relationships are that maybe aren't spelled out in the script. We'll talk about those things a lot together before we get onto the set, so that by the time we're on the set, it's really just the logistics and the blocking. If I have a certain technical idea of what I want to do, I don't burden the actors with that. I try to give them something physical to do that will put them in the places that I need them to be.

Any advice for first-time directors?
I think the main thing is if you haven't worked with actors a lot, really try to think as though you're that actor. How would you want to spend your energy during this day of shooting? What I find is that often first time directors have a bunch of shots in their head and they, just because it's convenient for the day, start in the wide shot and do eight takes of the wide shot, which might be an emotional scene, and they go until they have a perfect take...and then they're gonna cut back to the wide shot and the actors are emotionally spent from having done that scene, and you're not even into a two-shot yet! Think about "Where are my actors going to have to do their most emotional stuff? Where would I like the camera to be when that first moment of recognition, that first moment of tension happens?" Because that may be your best stuff, that first time they say those words to each other. Also, you've got to scope your actors out very quickly. Ask them, and they may all work differently. Some may need a little rehearsal, a little warming up. That handicapping of actors and how they work is really crucial. Also it's good, if you can avoid it, to not leave the set...so if your crew has any questions or things they want to do a certain way, it won't be a surprise to you after you've come back from your trailer and start to shoot. If I'm there, I find that the lighting and the rest of the technical stuff goes much quicker. Try not to waste the crew's time, just like you try not to waste the actors'.

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ANTHONY MICHAEL HALL: The Hollywood Interview

THEN AND NOW: The comparison between these two photos should give awkward teenagers everywhere hope.

This interview with Anthony Michael Hall, or "Mike" as he calls himself, was conducted in the summer of 2003, while he was shooting the television series of "The Dead Zone."

by Terry Keefe
Shaking hands with Anthony Michael Hall these days might be a little disconcerting for you if you've been following his USA Network series "The Dead Zone," based on the Stephen King novel of the same name. It's often a handshake with a person that triggers the visions of Hall's character Johnny Smith, a survivor of a near-fatal car accident who has been blessed, or perhaps cursed, with psychic powers that enable him to see parts of a person's future, as well as their past. The operative word here is "parts," and the visions are not always what they appear to be, more like jigsaw puzzle pieces that Johnny has to decide exactly what to do with. Since the series debuted last June with the highest ratings for a dramatic series in the history of basic cable, Hall's Johnny Smith has strode through a psychic landscape which has found him chasing serial killers and kidnappers, flashing back to the 40s to help a war veteran find his lost true love, and trying to make sense of a horrifying vision of Washington, D.C. in apocalyptic flames. Hall's performance operates on many levels and is truly the glue holding all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together. He must sometimes play Johnny as reactive to the overwhelming visions that he's experiencing, but he also must keep Johnny interesting as he interprets those visions, a difficult dichotomy for an actor which Hall more than succeeds at. Part detective story, part religious parable, part hero's journey, and part thriller, "The Dead Zone" ranks amongst the most unique and entertaining television on the air today, and it's a terrific showcase for the talents of Hall who, like the character he plays, has been on a interesting journey for some time now.

You, of course, remember him from the trilogy of John Hughes high school classics from the 80s - Sixteen Candles [1984], The Breakfast Club [1985], and Weird Science [1985] - where Hall played different variations on the same geeky nerd and quickly became a household name. There are many films from that period which do not hold up very well anymore, particularly the teen-themed ones, but all three pictures that Hall did for Hughes are comedy classics. After Hall moved on to older and more leading-man type roles, Hughes cast other actors to fill Hall's shoes in some of his subsequent high school films, but the magic was never the same without Anthony Michael Hall playing the lovable and hilarious nerd. Of course, typecasting is an evil force in Hollywood and most of the other teen stars from that period have had a rough road. It seems enough to just survive teen stardom with an adult career intact, but Hall has done more than just survive. He's thrived. However, a look through his filmography reveals that it's been a long road from the gangly Geek to the smoldering psychic Johnny Smith.

His first steps away from the nerd persona would be in the film Out of Bounds in 1986 where he played a farm boy named Daryl who gets mixed up with a bad element in Los Angeles. Then he would take on the role of a high school football star in Johnny Be Good in 1988, followed by his turn as the muscular, violent bully Jim in Edward Scissorhands [1990]. But it was in Six Degrees of Separation in 1993 when he was really able to display the depth of his acting chops again. As Trey, the young gay man who gives Will Smith's character all the information he needs to infiltrate Manhattan high society, Hall was creepy, conniving, sympathetic, and altogether riveting. In short, the performance gave notice that he was truly around for the long haul as an actor. By 1999, he would do his best work yet as Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates who manipulated and charmed his way around Noah Wyle's Steve Jobs in the Emmy-nominated Pirates of Silicon Valley. More great work followed in 61*, directed by Billy Crystal, where Hall played another real-life legend, left-handed pitcher Whitey Ford.

Venice spoke with Anthony Michael Hall from the set of the "The Dead Zone" in Vancouver where he was shooting 6 new episodes which will begin airing on Sunday, July 6th. During the course of our conversation, Hall will bring up the phrase "body of work" often. It's safe to say he's building a very impressive one.

Your role as Johnny Smith in "The Dead Zone" requires that you not only play Johnny but also that you sort of travel through time in his psychic visions, sometimes even playing other characters within those visions. It's a challenging part. Is there any particular aspect of the role that you've found the most challenging?

Anthony Michael Hall: Probably just making very unreal circumstances plausible and real for an audience. I think that more than any other role in my career I feel like a storyteller, I guess sort of like a writer would. It's interesting because the show sort of unfolds on two levels. There's the storytelling aspects which are linear and then once I sort of go into the vision mode, then the audience really travels with me into these vision flashes. More than any other character (that I've played) I try to give a mind, body, and spirit to the character. It has to have been my most challenging role to date. The idea of exploring a character who is an empath, who is somehow drawn to helping people, is very challenging. To not make it any type of cliche or becoming cheesy in any way, to make it real. It's also been a challenge to keep a bright side to the character, to inject some humor into the role.

What's in store for Johnny in the new group of episodes that you're shooting now?

I think the slant for this season, Season 2.5 we're calling it because technically it's still Season 2, is that the network wanted more sort of action-adventure shows. So the first one coming out of the box is kind of like Twister in a way. Not to be too heavy-handed in the references, but I'm chasing a storm, this tornado. Then we did one which is sort of inspired by the SARS epidemic. It's similar to "Law & Order" in a way, in that it's ripped from the headlines. We're not calling the epidemic SARS, but this mysterious flu virus has potentially hit my son's school. That's a real intense episode. Then there are four others that we've completed. They're kind of all over the map, but I think the scripts are really good and that the network did the right thing in the theme of the shows, in trying to keep the same audience but bring a new audience in as well.

Is there any particular reason that you think the show was so popular from the moment it hit the air?

That's a good question. I think now more than ever there's a generally greater interest in things that relate to the paranormal. Whether you go back to the success of "The X Files" or not, I think that all things supernatural really strike a chord with people, because I think now more than ever the news is very depressing. Post-Iraq, just sort of the global temperature. For that reason, the tone and the feel of the show appeals to people. And also I think the writing is excellent and we have a great ensemble.

How has the series changed the types of roles that you're being offered in Hollywood?

There are more things coming in now but I've been so tied up with the show that it's difficult to say. But just in general, I think it's a wonderful watershed role for me because of the fact that the things I did in the 80s attached me to the whole John Hughes thing. And I've had a lot of great roles in my so-called adult life, as Bill Gates in Pirates of Silicon Valley and Whitey Ford in 61*, but with this it's a breakthrough in that hopefully it'll transition me into the next half of my life as an actor in the industry.

What type of research did you do to craft your performance as Bill Gates?

I just read everything I could. There were 3 or 4 biographies that I could get my hands on and used as reference material. I also read a lot of business books on Microsoft, on the computer industry itself. I also had an acting coach, Steve Bridgewater. He was excellent and when I worked with him for about 5 or 6 weeks prior to the start of the show, we broke it down - some days we'd isolate Gates' body, other days we'd work on his voicing. I kind of approached it from all angles, playing Gates. Ultimately what happened is that I think it was the first method performance that I've given, in that after awhile I found myself doing things that were very "Gates-ian." Competitive things like getting to the set two hours before the other actors. That was a breakthrough role for me, just in terms of my preparation. It was an honor to play the richest man in the world, but I had to really get under his skin to find out what motivated him and what his backstory was.

Tell us about the experience of playing Whitey Ford in 61*.

Billy Crystal was just great to work with. He's like an almanac when it comes to Yankee baseball. What Jack Nicholson is to the Lakers, Billy is to the Yankees. We all just knew that it was such a labor of love for Billy. After awhile, it was like Billy became Joe Torre in a way and we became a team. We spent the whole summer traveling together. It was just the highlight of my life. Not just working with Billy, but also the guys who were hired to play the rest of the team. A lot of them were actually minor league baseball players or college baseball players. I also got to meet Whitey Ford. After the premiere, HBO threw a party at one of the armories. I was standing there talking to my mother and a friend, and Whitey Ford walked over to me. He goes, "Great job. But I threw with my left and I drank with my right!" [laughs] We were drinking in the film and I must've had my drink in my left hand, so he had to correct me afterwards.

When you look through your filmography, Six Degrees of Separation really feels like the point when you crossed over from one type of films to another.
That's cool with me. I think it's about the range of work, you know? I think the great actors - whether its going back to Olivier, or in modern day, Hopkins or De Niro - people that I admire, I look up to, it's about the body of work certainly. And I've always wanted to show that diversity. I think with that, playing a gay man was really a challenge for me, being a straight guy and playing a gay man who also functioned as a sort of Svengali to Will Smith's character.

Around the time of Six Degrees of Separation you started taking a lot of off-beat character type roles that really allowed you to stretch as an actor, and I think you earned a great deal of respect as an actor as well during that period. Was it a conscious decision to take the types of roles you did?

I'd like to say that it was all conscious, that would relate to having been offered everything. But the reality is that I had to hustle and go for those parts. But I think that cultivated in me a greater desire to maintain a greater career and a face in the industry. And for my work to grow in that respect. So I think that whereas I started off with some very off-the-cuff performances as a teenager in those John Hughes films, I've certainly learned the craft over the last 15-20 years and I've worked with a number of good coaches. It's just about getting better with the work.

What was your experience like as the youngest cast member ever on "Saturday Night Live" in the mid-80s?

[laughs] Forgettable. As I'm sure you've heard and read, it was a very, very competitive environment. In some ways very cutthroat. As many people will tell you about Lorne Michaels , he's a brilliant guy, but there's this sense of always trying to please Lorne because he's the creator of this show that became this phenomenon. It's competitive because you never know what the writers are thinking because they're all sort of vying to be in the cast, and the cast is looking for the help of the writers, and you just sort of have to fend for yourself. I think the people that found the most success came from a stand-up background where they had their own material and they had that competitive nature. Not to say that I'm not competitive, but I think comedians are far more competitive than actors are with each other. It's a different vibe - it's sort of a hybrid of everything - rock and roll, theater, everything rolled into one. But here's the dichotomy - the doing of the show, as was described to me by Dan Aykroyd, he said that it's going to be unbelievable when you get up there and see those three cameras beaming into your head and know that there's 350 people in the audience but you're going out to millions of people. So the dichotomy lies in the fact that despite the frustrations of the 6-day preparation and the around-the-clock rehearsing and all that, just the doing of the show is amazing. That hour and a half when you're going out live to the world. And also, I have to admit, the parties afterwards were unbelievable [laughs]. You know, I'm 17 or 18 years old and we did the show and okay, Madonna's the guest host. You look up into the crowd and there would be Sean Penn. And then at the post-parties at the Rainbow Room, I get there and I look to my right and there's Andy Warhol with Jean Michel Basquiat and I look to my left, and there's David Bowie. It was just surreal.

Of the John Hughes movies you did, which was the most fun to work on?

Well, The Breakfast Club was certainly the most prominent of the films but it was actually the two that bookended it that I had the most fun on - Sixteen Candles and Weird Science. One of the things that John was most gifted at, which is often overlooked, is that he just enabled people. With me, he was always liberating me to try something different and to go for this or that. Even if I had an idea to change a line or to come up with something. For example, the scene in the black bar in Weird Science, that was spawned from the fact that we loved Richard Pryor. We'd watch Richard Pryor movies on the weekend. And we would imitate this character called Mudball that Richard Pryor would do. And so it was really just a product of being Richard Pryor fans that John said, "Hey, why don't we create this scene where you go into a bar and do that?" That's the type of guy he was. To have a writer-director who was so empowering, who really builds you up, who made you feel strong enough to take those chances and to have fun, was a great person to begin my career with. I'll always tip my hat to John Hughes. He gave me my start in my career and I'll never overlook that.

For such a young actor, you seemed to be very aware that you were in danger of being permanently typecast. I read that you turned down roles in Ferris Bueller's Day Off [1986] and Pretty in Pink [1986] because of typecasting worries. Is that true?

It is true and it was for that reason. And I don't know what the repercussions were industry-wise but I felt that I was being true to myself in doing that. Even as a teenager, I've always thought in terms of longevity. My family's always been wonderful in terms of supporting me in that regard, in thinking of the long term. Robert Downey Jr.'s father, Robert Downey Sr., had a great line to me years ago. He was with Downey and I when we were writing a script together. He blurted out this line, "In the long haul, the short one won't make it!" [laughs] I had my mind set even at that age that I would continue to make films and hopefully be a presence in the industry for many years.

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Lynn Collins and THE MERCHANT OF VENICE: The Hollywood Flashback Interview

(Lynn Collins, left, and Heather Goldenhersh in The Merchant of Venice.)

(I did this interview with actress Lynn Collins for Venice Magazine a day after the premiere of The Merchant of Venice at the AFI Film Festival in 2004. Her work in the film was excellent, although few outside the festival circuit and the Shakespeare die-hards seemed to see it. It took a few years for Hollywood to catch up with her, but it's nice to see her landing some big studio roles now, such as last year's X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the upcoming John Carter of Mars. She also had a stint on "True Blood" last season. And now that she's done some real populist entertainment, her next on-screen shot at Shakespeare should get the attention that her work in Merchant deserved six years ago. She was great as Portia. )

LYNN COLLINS
The Lady of Belmont Keeps It Real

By Terry Keefe


Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Joseph Fiennes, Lynn Collins. One of those names might not seem to belong with with the others at first glance, but that will likely change when director Michael Radford's The Merchant of Venice hits theaters in December. Even if you caught 13 Going on 30 and 50 First Dates this past year, you might not remember Lynn Collins for her small roles in those films. But you won't easily forget her work as Portia in this latest Shakespearean adaptation. The term "revelation" is thrown about a little too easily at awards time, but there are occasions when it's entirely appropriate to use. Lynn Collins' performance in the film is one of them.



The plot of The Merchant of Venice is one of Shakespeare's most complex, and it is also highly challenging for any creative team to pull off properly. The brash young aristocrat Bassanio (Fiennes) has nary a cent, but still wishes to win the hand of fair Portia. This will require money which he does not have, thus, he goes to his friend Antonio (Irons), the wealthy merchant of the title, and asks him for financial backing in his romantic quest. Antonio agrees and goes himself to obtain a loan from the Jewish money lender Shylock (Pacino), who has a deep animosity for Antonio. Anti-semitism pervaded 16th century Italy, and Shylock has felt his share of discrimination at the hands of Antonio in the past. Nonetheless, Shylock agrees to the loan, with one condition: if Antonio defaults, Shylock will be entitled to take "a pound of flesh" from the merchant. Newly flush with borrowed money, Bassanio travels to Belmont where he must pass a test laid out in advance by Portia's late father: the man who is to marry his daughter must correctly choose one of three caskets. Portia has already fallen in love with Bassanio at first sight, and when he does choose correctly, she is thrilled. But Bassanio must then travel back to Venice because Antonio's ships have been destroyed, and Shylock wants to exact this pound of flesh. Like many other Shakespearean heroines, Portia dresses up as a man, specifically a judge, and follows Bassanio to Venice where she attempts to save Antonio's life.

Despite numerous stage and small screen productions, "The Merchant of Venice" has rarely been mounted as a major theatrical film. It's not hard to understand why that is the case. The play is a mix of heavy drama and comedy. It also takes place in two very different locations, the gritty streets of Venice and the almost mythical land of Belmont, where Portia resides. And any film adaptation must be handled with extreme care, because the wrong tone could cause the play itself to be interpreted as anti-semitic, rather than a story which takes place in an anti-semitic time. Director Radford does a skillful job of balancing all these challenges. While his adaptation is largely faithful to the original text, he has made some key excisions and has also added a largely dialogue-free opening sequence in which the source of the animosity between Shylock and Antonio is very clearly presented. And in Collins, Radford has made a true find. Portia must be a charming, romantic figure during her introductory scenes in Belmont, but she must also be an empowered, sharp, almost modern woman when she arrives in Venice. She is the character who bridges both worlds, and in that sense, is the glue that holds the entire film together.

Although this is her breakthrough film role, Collins is no stranger to Shakespeare, having performed his works extensively while a student at Juilliard. And after graduation, she played Ophelia in "Hamlet," opposite Liev Schrieber at the NYSF Public Theatre. She has also played Juliet in Sir Peter Hall's production of "Romeo and Juliet" at the Ahmanson Theatre.

Landing the role of Portia was a huge coup for you, as you were virtually unknown outside of the theater world. How were you cast?

Lynn Collins: Originally I auditioned for (Shylock's daughter) Jessica. And Michael Radford saw it and said, "No, this is Portia." So they put a lot of me on tape, and Michael sent the tape to the producers and to Al Pacino, and everyone approved me. And they basically spent two and a half months convincing the financiers that there were already enough Oscar winners in the production. [chuckles]

Although you were well-versed in Shakespeare in the theater, did you require much coaching to develop a film technique for performing his work?

My coaching really came in watching everyone else. Having done so much theater, it was about taking that energy and not decreasing it, but focusing it even finer, like a laser. And I watched these men, who were all also theater actors, do that. It's also funny how much you can learn if you're willing to take your ego out of it. There's an actor in the film called Charlie Cox, who plays Lorenzo. I remember at the read-through that he was so natural in his delivery of his lines in Shakespeare. And I was like, "I'm going to add a little bit of that." Then, I watched the way that Joe Fiennes can combine the poetry, and it's so lyrical in what he does. And then I saw how Al brings such earthiness to it. Everybody had their own thing, so I was just thinking, "Okay, I can take it all." I was so lucky to have such amazing actors to work alongside of. In that way, all I had to do was to remember to focus on them.

What was your biggest personal challenge of the production?

I felt very secure in my handle on Shakespeare, since I had done so much of it (in the theater). I was a little worried about not knowing how big or small to be on-screen, but that was taken care of immediately. I was really able to trust Michael with everything. The dramatic timing, the amount of any sort of energy, movement, or emotion. I think the bigger challenge was working with these men who I had grown up idolizing, and really sort of having to “own” what maybe I had apologized for a lot of my life, which is my strength and my intelligence. And walking into a room and not apologizing for those things, but in fact, having to really own them. Because you can’t fake Portia’s journey into her power. That’s something, as an actress, you have to go along with. You can’t not be doing the same thing as her. Which is why every young actress should at least work on one of her monologues, because the way Shakespeare wrote her, it’s almost haunting what it does to you. It really sort of possesses you. It was a pleasure to dance with her for a while.

(Lynn Collins in publicity shots for last year's Wolverine, above.)

Did you find that playing Portia affected the rest of your life outside of the film?

Oh, absolutely. Michael and I were doing DVD commentary last night, and we were in the car on the way to the studio. He said, “Wow, a year ago we started rehearsing this. You’re a really different person now.” And I said, “Really? Why?” He said, “Well, you ride in the back of limos.” [laughs] And I said, “No, I don’t! Only for this.” Then we actually got into it, and he said, “No, you became a woman.” He hired a girl and at the end of the shoot, said goodbye to a woman.

Portia had to be a lot of things at once. She had to be witty and kind. Sweet but strong. Was there a process by which you were able to find that balance?

Michael would be like, “She’s innocent but knowing. Go!” [laughs] We made jokes about it, because of the dichotomy. He'd be like, "I want her to be really fresh but wiser than everyone else. Go!" These sort of impossible dichotomies. I remember one day realizing that it's not so difficult, because that's how we are as human beings. Changing all the time and 100 different personalities. I sort of had to tap into myself, because I'm all those things. In one moment, with my significant other, he can be like, "My god, you're so vulnerable and sweet, almost like a child." And then something will happen and he'll be like, "Where the hell did that come from?!" [laughs] So it was more of accepting those facets of myself, and allowing myself to be fully innocent and in the next take, be completely in command.

Let's talk about shooting the scenes when you dressed up as the male judge.

It ended up being so sort of bizarre. The meeting of the fantasy world of Belmont and the earthy, gritty, dirty Venice, the combination of those two things is Portia dressed as a man. So there is this suspension of disbelief, fantasy/almost grotesque quality about it. Personally, I had loads of fun. I remember when my manager came to Venice to visit on set, he didn't recognize me. I was standing next to him for a while. With my boyfriend, I relished kissing him with the mustache. [laughs] Those are the weird things you didn't think you'd enjoy. And yet there were moments when I'd look at Heather Goldenhersh (who plays Portia's handmaiden Nerissa in the scene, also dressed as a man) and say, "I'm feeling really sort of emotional, and I'm not sure why." And she'd be like, "God, me too." And it's because there is something sort of unnatural about facing that part of you. I looked like a boy. Convincingly or not, it was, to me in the mirror, showing that side of me that, unless you're an actor, you never see. It's like a "glitch in the Matrix" sort of thing. [laughs]

You basically had to carry much of the courtroom scene, with the performances of Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons and Joseph Fiennes revolving around yours. Did you allow yourself to feel the pressure of that?

You know, Michael was very, very clear and adamant about [my] losing any sort of awe about working with these guys. As far as status was concerned, [Portia] is the highest status in the film at every moment, regardless of whether she realizes it. Michael said, "You, Lynn, need to start inviting that now. You have to be assuming this status all the time, so get comfortable with that." So I think the other actors, the guys, knew that. Power cannot be taken, it's only given. And they really allowed me to spread my wings and strut like a peacock sometimes. [laughs] And I'm so grateful to them for that.

We've talked about your personal challenges playing Portia. What do you think were the biggest challenges facing the overall production?

I think Michael's adaptation is the reason this film turned out so lovely. Even as a play, "The Merchant of Venice" is incredibly difficult. Because you have the fantasy of Belmont and the opposition of this gritty Venice. And they're two so distinctly different storylines that cross at one moment and then leave each other again. For a director and a producer, I think that poses just an immense amount of, you know, brain hemhorraging. [laughs] I think Michael's adaptation sort of brought it all together. Bits and pieces that he added, that he fleshed out the skeleton of the story with, really brought it to life. I think we're also showing a slice of history, and sadly enough , it was incredibly anti-semitic in Italy at that time. It was sort of the beginning of what really created anti-semitism. I think people can get easily confused by thinking that this is an anti-semitic play. That's sort of like thinking that Schindler's List is an anti-semitic movie. Because it's showing a piece of history, which is definitely what Michael chose to do. We've had a lot of questions like, "Do you think it's anti-semitic?" Well, Michael's mother is Jewish, so technically, he's Jewish. He would not be making an anti-semitic movie. We were all adamant that we make it as realistic as possible. I can only speak for myself in this; I can speak for everyone else but I'm not going to. I hope that people leave this movie inspired by many things, inspired by the positive things in it, but having learned something. And more than that, walking out going, "We haven't actually changed that much. It was in 1595. What is the difference?" And there isn't any.

Let's talk about your background a bit. You were born in Texas.
But my family actually moved to Singapore when I was four, and I was there until I was ten. So it was sort of Singapore-via-Texas. Then I went from Singapore back to Houston. And I graduated from high school in three years, because the culture-shock of returning did not really leave me. I was really a fish-out-of-water in Texas. I was exposed in Singapore to every different situation, race, religion, everything. I was a minority as an American there. And to come back to the white-bread Republican, right-wing town I came from was really difficult for a young girl. To have been opened up to everything and then in a way to be told, "Forget everything you saw, because this is the way it is now." I just didn't adjust very well. [laughs] I basically came to New York as fast as I could.

What was it like doing high school theater in Texas?

Texas is incredibly competitive. The football teams are just insane. But also in every other area. Academics are very competitive. The drama department I had was the best in the state, so that was also very competitive. The drama teacher sort of scouted me out. He had seen me doing something in junior high. I don't know how good I was in junior high, but he saw something that he wanted to nurture. My first role at 14 was as Ophelia and, ironically, I played Ophelia in my first professional job, as well. It's interesting. Shakespeare has sort of been the first on a lot of things for me. He's sort of taking my virginity on all levels. [laughs]

From Texas you went to Juilliard.

Well, because my high school drama department was so intense, the amount of time I was spending on the craft in high school was comparable to that of Juilliard. I think my first two years at Juilliard were very difficult because I came in very young and did not know who I was. Not that we ever know that, but I was especially aware of my personal, physical, emotional, and spiritual boundaries. And it can really bring out the worst in you and you have to grapple with that at an age where you may not have the tools to. So I went into an extreme depression after my first year and really went to some dark places. But in the end, I came out so grateful that I went to the school. The last two years you're able to perform for an audience. And then there's this thing called "Repertoire," which is at the end of the spring. They do one play one weekend, then they break it down and do the next set. And you do them basically in three weeks. Because I had leads in every one of them, I was terrified. I didn't know how I was going to remember everything. But it ended up being the groundwork for probably the rest of my career. Even if the training is actually never utilized, you have the mental belief that, "Okay, I'm trained. I can do whatever I'm asked to do." It's sort of the psychological backbone that it gave me, and I'm so thankful for. At some point, I hope they'll let me come teach.

It feels like Hollywood is on the verge of really discovering you. Are you being swept up in that whirlwind right now and offered a lot?

Yeah, it's good. I'm so grateful to have had the experience to do this film. It's so lovely that it's being received so well. Having learned so much from the process, I want to continue to do work of its caliber. That's the tricky part now. When you're given such a huge opportunity, you have to be careful about what you do next. I'm excited and ready to work again. But I have a lot of people to keep me grounded. So being swept away like you said, I try not to believe too much of the hype. I try to keep it real. [laughs]

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AAMIR KHAN: The Hollywood Interview

(Aamir Khan, above.)



by Terry Keefe

To fans of Bollywood, even the most casual ones, actor-producer-director Aamir Khan needs no introduction. He is one of Indian cinema's most popular actors, and consequently, he is also one of the biggest stars in the world. Here in the United States, he is perhaps still best known to foreign film fans as the star and producer of the extremely successful 2001 release Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India, the first feature shepherded by Khan's production company, Aamir Khan Productions. Khan isn't known for doing a tremendous amount of interviews, so the opportunity to speak with him recently was one that I jumped at. Khan was in the United States as part of the promotional tour for Peepli Live, the new feature which Khan has produced, but has opted not to star in.

Peepli Live, written and directed by first-time helmer and former journalist Anusha Rizvi, is an intoxicating and extremely entertaining mixture of social satire and neorealism. The story centers around a poor farmer in the Central Indian town of Peepli named Natha (Omkar Das Manikpuri) whose family is about to lose their farmland, due to massive debts. Via his brother Budhia (Raghubir Yadav), Natha discovers a government program which pays significant compensation to the family of any farmer who commits suicide. Natha decides that he will take this fast and horrible solution to his problems, but word quickly spreads throughout not only the village, but also the national news media, about Natha's impending demise. Every manner of opportunistic politician and reporter descends upon Peepli with their own take on what Natha should do. The resulting national circus is delightfully absurd enough to have been orchestrated by Fellini, but visually, the presentation also feels extremely realistic, as it is shot in a verite fashion which nonetheless still manages to find humor in the frame.

I spoke with Aamir Khan via phone at the end of July.




Aamir Khan: Hello?

Hi, Aamir. This is Terry Keefe from the Hollywood Interview. Thanks for talking with me.

Pleasure, pleasure.

I really loved the film, Peepli Live. The right balance of satire and realism was vital in this.

That's correct, yeah.

Was it evident from the script stage, that the balance was right, straight away, or did you have to fine-tune it over the acting and the post-production quite a bit?

Um, no, I think it was there in the script. When I read the script for the first time, I just loved it. I thought it was funny and real, and also very heartbreaking, you know, on certain levels. And thought-provoking. So I loved the script the way it was, and that's what Anusha as the writer and first-time director has executed. When I saw the film, I thought she did a great job of translating on the screen what she had on paper.









(Natha, played by Omar Das Manikpuri, flanked by government soldiers, above.)


Are there many satires in Indian film?

No, it's very unusual. Satire is not usually made in India, and it's not known to do very well with audiences back home. But I'm hopeful for this one. It's not a film that falls into the mainstream category. Usually films in India are not…they're not social or political films usually…so this, when I read the script, I loved it, and I wanted to do it, but I realized as well that it's going to be a challenge to market this film to the mainstream Indian audience.

You know, I thought the humor was very universal, though. Was that something that was important to you, that it would be universal beyond the Indian audience? Because I think it will play very well in the United States.

Well, that's what we're hoping. I mean, when I read the script, while I recognized that this was going to be a tough one for mainstream Indian audiences, I also saw the potential in the material to engage a world audience and to entertain a world audience. And that's the attempt I'm making as a producer -- I'm trying to give it the best I can. To reach out, not only to the audiences for Indian cinema, but to audiences who may not have seen an Indian film before, or may [only] have seen Slumdog.

(laughs) Right.

(laughs) It's an Indian film. It's about India, of course. But, so yeah, I think this film does have the potential to travel across to different audiences, and that's what we are hoping will happen.

I think it will. You're effectively able to greenlight a film on your own at your production company, I assume. Was it just a matter of finding a project that moves you, or was there some niche that you were trying to fill with this particular type of project?

Well, no, you know, as a producer or even as an actor, I don't have any preconceived ideas as to what I want to. I see what material excites me. When I come across a script that mostly connects with me, that excites me, then I go for it, whether it's as an actor or a producer. So I'm not really a business producer, if you know what I mean. I mean, in the last ten years that I've producing, I've done just three films.

Right, right, because I assume that after Lagaan you could've had a whole slate of pictures going at once, and you opted not to. The Natha performance is very reminscent of some of the great silent film performances. I thought Omkar Das Manikpuri was terrific. He says little in terms of dialogue but so much with his physicality. Was that something you knew you had to cast for, the silent ability?

Well, Natha is a particularly difficult character to play, and quite honestly, Anusha, the director and I, were flirting with the idea of [my] playing that part in one point of time--

Okay.

--with the idea that, if I'm in the film then it reaches out to a larger audience, and this is a film that we wanted more and more people to see, because we feel it's an important film. But of course I would have to transform myself physically to be able to pull it off, and we thought that I should test for it, and see how that goes. But when we came across Omkar who finally plays Natha, we realized that we'd found Natha, that there was no need for me to test. And I didn't think I'd ever come close to what he's managed to pull off.

He's really wonderful in it. Did you know from the start of casting that you'd be using largely unknowns in many of the supporting roles?

Yes, that was the idea. We wanted to be very honest with the casting and get people who look real, and who look the part, and who -- when you're watching the film, you should feel that it's really happening, as you pointed out at the beginning. So yes, we wanted to go in for a cast which was very real, and as a result most of the cast that you see in the film have never acted in a film before.



Was Italian Neorealism discussed as an influence? It feels very much out of the classics such as The Bicycle Thief, in terms of some of the actors and performances, as well as the visuals.

Uh, yeah, I think, yeah, I think it is reminiscent of films like that, and it is most encouraging that you take films of De Sica along with Peepli Live.

You also used some theatre actors, and my first reaction would be theatre actors might have to bring down their acting volume, so to speak, for this type of tone, but everyone feels very realistic. Was coaching necessary a lot, or did they pick it up the transition pretty quickly?

Well, a lot of the actors are from theatre and are very well-trained actors. In fact, a lot of them are from group called Naya Theatre, which is a theatre group that was run by Habib Tanvir. And Mr. Tanvir actually passed away six months ago, but for all his life he worked with villagers from Central India, and this theatre group was essentially, all of these people had been working with Mr. Tanvir in theatre, and so having worked with him, they're all very well-trained actors. And they've done all kinds of stuff, I mean, you know, combining folk and modern theatre, and they've even done adaptations of Shakespeare in their own dialects and languages.

So what Anusha did was, after the cast was finalized, he spent three weeks in a workshop with all of them, and went through rehearsals of the film. And I actually came in at the end of the rehearsals, the last three or four days, just to see how things were going, and how things were playing out. And when I saw the rehearsals there was very little for me to add to it, really. It all seemed to be going exactly how it ought to.

What was amazing for such an inexperienced director was how this felt like a real village. Visually, this could be a documentary, and that's got to be so hard to pull off.

That's all credit to Anusha, you know, she's making her first film, she's never been to film school, she used to be a journalist before this. And when I saw the first cut I was quite amazed at how she had pulled this off, because there are so many layers in the film, and it almost feels like it's really happening and she's got cameras hidden here and there, and is capturing what's really happening, and that's quite an amazing quality to bring to a film.

Before you actually hired Anusha on as director, how did you become convinced she could handle this level of production, as a first-timer?

First of all, I loved the script, and then I actually told her to shoot four or five scenes, and I picked her some really tough ones. (laughs) So she shot them and cut them and showed them to me, and I really liked that, so that gave me the confidence that she's going to pull it off.

Was the post-production period long, because once again back to the tone, this could go wrong so many ways with the mix of satire and realism?

That's true. Well, the edit was a fairly extensive process, once I saw the first cut. After that, I got involved with Anusha and the editor, in reaching the final-cut stage, and we also tested the film extensively in that period, before we locked the cut, so we tested it on a lot of people, a lot of audiences, Indians, and, in fact, people from outside of India.

We got hold of people from consulates, the French consulate, the German, the American, the British consulate people, invited them to see the film, and they gave us their responses, so we tested the film extensively before we locked the cut, and it was really encouraging to see how well the film was actually playing with audiences.

Do you test screen much? Is that something that you traditionally do, like the studios do here, or not?

Uh, well, in India test screening is unheard of. But I'm one person who's been doing it from my first film actually.

I believe here you have agencies who do that, and they have forms that they fill in and stuff like that. But I like to do it myself, you know, the creative team, the director and me and another few people watch the film with the audience and then spend a couple of hours talking to them about it, and kind of, you know, feeling our way around them. Because I think when an audience speaks to you, they're communicating with you not only with their words, but you get a lot of signals along the way, as you watch the film with them, and you can read between the lines of what they're saying as well.

So, I find that process really useful and really helpful.

Did you do any Frank Capra watching in preparation? Meet John Doe maybe?

No, we didn't, but I'm a huge fan of Capra. I've read his autobiography as well, and I think he's someone quite amazing. In fact, at Sundance we got a response from-- because of being with an American audience, and someone in the audience mentioned a film by Billy Wilder called Ace in the Hole.

The film hits on almost every level of society in its satire, and nobody is really spared. Was that one of the goals? To just make sure everybody got hit?

(laughs) Well, yeah, I think Anusha was, I mean, it is a satire in its true sense, so it is in fact not leaving out anyone, including children, who, you know, the son asks his dad when he will die.

Right, right.

So yeah, it takes in everyone, actually. And that's the quality of the satire. Also, what a satire does is it looks at things from one point of view. And so this is not how all the media is, or all the politicians are, or all administration is not like this. But a lot of them are. And everything shown in the film is actually very, very accurate and true, and this is how things do happen back home in India, so in a sense this is a great film. I mean, it's a film which is a great window into how things are in rural India today. And I'm hoping that, you know, it sensitizes a lot of people. For people outside of India, it gives them a window into India, and for people in India, it sensitizes them about life in rural India.

The film has not been released back home in India yet, or has it already?

No, it's releasing on the thirteenth of August in the U.S., in India, in Australia, in South Africa and the Middle East. And in the U.K. it's releasing in September. And that's Germany as well. It's Germany and Poland and U.K. in September.

It's interesting that the film is being released simultaneously in the U.S. There is often a several month lag, before the top foreign films get here.

Well, you know, traditionally Indian films release simultaneously all over the world because of, we have a huge issue with piracy, and, but of course most of the films don't reach out to a non-traditional audience, so you have Indians and Pakistanis living in the U.S. who watch, so for the first time we're actually wanting to reach out to a larger audience, to an audience that has perhaps never seen an Indian film before, with the hope that it is something that they will find exciting and engaging.

Just a couple of questions about what you're up to next, Aamir. I know you get the question a lot about whether you'd like to star in an American film. Have decent American roles been offered to you? And what would be necessary for you to take one of those roles?

Well, over the last ten years since Lagaan, in fact, there have been a number of offers which have come my way, but nothing that excites me. Nothing that excites me yet, and I think for me to do a film, whether it's Indian or American or from anywhere else in the world, I guess it has to be a script that excites me, and a director who I trust. If that comes up, I'd be happy to.

And upcoming you have a couple of films - Delhi Belly is one -

Yeah, that's correct. So the roll-out on Peepli Live on thirteenth of August, and then the next one is Dhobi Ghat, which has been written and directed by my wife, Kiran Rao. That's actually premiering in Toronto, in, I think in the Special Presentation category. So that's premiering in Toronto in September. And then we, we haven't fixed a release date for the film yet, but it would be sometime January or thereabouts. And then there's Delhi Belly, which is the third in line, which is a comedy. And it's about these three kids living in Delhi in a rented apartment, and they get in trouble with the mafia and they don't know why.

Okay, one last question. What was your biggest surprise, or biggest surprises, when you took on directing for the first time?

Well, hmm, the fact is, when I took over as director on (Taare Zameen Par), it was, that was a surprise in itself, because I was not meant to direct that film originally. And, um, it was a bit of a crisis situation, and I kind of had to take over as director one week into the shoot of the film.

Trial by fire, it sounds like.

I was shooting from the hip.

Aamir, thank you again. Enjoy your stay here.

Thanks so much.

Peepli Live is released today, August 13th, in the United States and numerous other countries. Check out their website for more info at http://www.peeplilivethefilm.com/

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