Director Alan Rudolph. ALAN RUDOLPH:
THE RELUCTANT AUTEUR
By
Alex Simon
Editor's Note: This article orginally ran in the July 2000 issue of Venice Magazine.
Alan Rudolph was born in Los Angeles in 1943. The son of director Oscar Rudolph, he grew up in the film industry, quitting college to learn about filmmaking by watching studio people at work. He consistently points out that he successfully avoided film school, although he eventually did enter the Director's Guild training program for assistant directors.
By 1970, Rudolph was writing screenplays for low-budget features and had made several short films set to rock-and-roll hits—an early indication of his concern with musical themes and desire to use music as an inspirational element for his screenplays. During a long association with Robert Altman, Rudolph worked as an assistant director on The Long Goodbye(1973), California Split (1974) and Nashville (1975) and wrote the script for Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976). Altman, in turn, produced Rudolph's first "official" feature, Welcome to L.A. (1977). (His first feature was 1972's Premonition, virtually forgotten until its appearance on home video.) Welcome offered an ironic view of laidback LA hustling, and established Rudolph's blend of dark satire and quirky characters as a signature style.
In his second film, Remember My Name (1978), Rudolph gave Geraldine Chaplin full rein to create an enigmatic character study of a woman released from prison to haunt the man who has abandoned her; the film's sense of menace was underlined by a sound track featuring celebrated blues singer Alberta Hunter. Roadie (1980), a look at life on the road for pop performers, abandoned laidback stylishness for funky, chaotic comedy and marked the beginning of Rudolph's long association with producer Carolyn Pfeiffer.
Having been acclaimed very early on as an important new auteur, Rudolph subsequently lost a certain degree of control when his films continued to have relatively little impact at the box office. Endangered Species (1982), a political thriller, was an unhappy experience for Rudolph; he was locked out of the editing room during the film's post-production. Its resulting, impersonal quality was echoed in later hired-gun efforts such as Songwriter (1984) and Made in Heaven (1987). Return Engagement (1983), a documentary of the debates between 1960s guru Dr. Timothy Leary and Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy, was provocative and bizarre. Rudolph then enjoyed his first big success with Choose Me (1984), a moody musing on the convoluted romantic entanglements of an LA bar owner and her lovelorn patrons, including a radio talk show hostess called Dr. Nancy Love. The film was inspired by soul singer Teddy Pendergrass's song of the same name.
By his next film, Trouble in Mind (1985), Rudolph had gathered a dedicated following for his meditations on love and loneliness in peculiar settings, this time a town called Rain City in an unspecified dystopian future. The Rudolph brew had also come to mean cryptic performances by, typically, Chaplin, Keith Carradine and Genevieve Bujold, and a whimsical absurdity. The Moderns (1988) marked the realization of a long-cherished project, a story of an American artist in 1920s Paris who witnesses the transformation of "art" into a commodity. The film deftly satirized an era of art history and high culture whose reputation has enjoyed great reverence; it mixes fictional characters with historical figures such as Gertrude Stein, who sums up Rudolph's approach in one line: "I'm not interested in the abnormal; the normal is so much more simply complicated."
Rudolph once again tackled material very close to his heart in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Cirle (1994), creating a finely tuned tribute to the celebrated writers and artists that comprised the legendary Algonquin Round Table of the 1920s. Noteworthy performances from Jennifer Jason Leigh as celebrated wit Dorothy Parker and Campbell Scott as humorist Robert Benchley elicited some positive buzz from both filmgoers and critics.
Rudolph's biggest hit thus far with his fans and with critics has been 1997's Afterglow starring Nick Nolte, Julie Chrisite, Lara Flynn Boyle and Jonny Lee Miller as two couples who switch mates in an attempt to find some meaning in their empty lives. Last year's Bruce Willis-starring Breakfast of Champions, adapted from Kurt Vonnegut's novel, while not a hit at the box office, also had its legion of fans.
Rudolph's latest film marks a return to his roots of quirky comedy with Robert Altman. Trixie (which Altman produced) features Emily Watson as the title character, a malaprop-spouting neophyte private eye who unwittingly uncovers political corruption while working a security job at a casino. The wonderful ensemble cast also features Nick Nolte, Brittany Murphy, Dermot Mulroney and Will Patton. The Sony Pictures Classics release is currently playing throughout Southern California. Alan Rudolph sat down with Venice recently to discuss his career as one of filmdom's most distinctive auteurs.
I've really enjoyed your work for a long time, and your mentor, Robert Altman, is one of my great heroes.
Alan Rudolph: Thank you. Brother Bob, he's a wonderful guy. He's still the most ferocious artist I know. He's the youngest guy I've ever met. People talk about artists, and what not, and in the film business, in America anyway, I think there's been maybe two or three, at most, true film artists in the last 50 years and Bob is certainly at the top of that group. I think he's at the rank of having a signature vision.
It's true. No one else can make films like he does.
No, they can't, although now it seems that everyone is trying to! (laughs) I could imitate Bob if I wanted to, but it would be an imitation. He's an amazing friend and force.
Like all your films, Trixie blends genres and is a genre unto itself.
Makes it hard to advertise. (laughs) The story I wrote many years ago actually, with John Byner, a fellow writer, and I didn't do anything with it. About two elections ago, I was watching the news, and there was George Bush with both feet in his mouth, and I thought "This is brilliant." That guy from Saturday Night Live (Dana Carvey) really got him. If it wasn't so hilarious it would have been scary, the way he was misusing the language. So then I knew what the character of Trixie was about: she speaks the truth, but can't express it. I've always been interested in the fracturing of phrases. From the beginning, in all my films people have always told me "People don't talk that way, the way they talk in your films." Of course, I don't know that. I think that's the way people do speak. Then I started thinking, who really speaks the truth? Here's a politician, then the curren President running for re-election, who made absolutely no sense whatsoever, yet you understood what he was saying because Americans speak in slang and numbers. "In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king," right? So in a country of liars, it's the person who mis-speaks who tells the truth. And that's what Trixie does.
Emily Watson seems to disappear into every character that she plays.
She's tied for first anyway, as one of the best actresses in the world. And she has no visible technique. She just is. The only thing she does better than act, is be. We decided really early that these curious lines should never be underscored. She just made it the way her character spoke, and threw it away.
This is the fourth film you've done with Nick Nolte.
I have an internal deal with myself. No matter what movie I'm doing, Nick gets the script first. It's his to lose. (laughs) I think if you stepped back and removed the dominant subject of all movie talk, which is box office, and really talked about film patterns, Nick's sojourn is maybe the most important path taken in this so-called industry. Here's a guy who was among the first franchise players, I think it was him and Burt Reynolds, who turned his back on it. I know when I worked with Bruce Willis and Nick in the single best work I will ever do, and I know it was the best because it was so hated (laughs), Breakfast of Champions. If I had to quit, I would feel that I had made one (great) film. But in moments of candor on the set, Bruce would say that Nick was the guy. Nick, like Emily, also has no visible technique. He just does it. I just love actors. They're the only real artists in the bunch. You put a frame around their face and you create a work of art.
It sounds like you really make films for yourself, not according to what "sells."
The two things I know about film are 1)the natural human creation. It just seems like the ultimate cave drawing. If you were from another solar system and said the human race invented one thing, what would it be? Well, the ability to see themselves, to observe themselves. 2)the other thing I know that since its invention 100 years ago, it's been under constant assault, and it's indestructable, the essense of it. It's like that Picasso thing, the lie that enables you to understand the truth.
Your dad was a filmmaker. What was your relationship like with him, and how did his work influence you?
I loved my dad, and we had a terrific relationship. He's passed away now. But it's your job to rebel against your parents, especially during the 60's. My father's career spans the history of filmmaking. He was a child actor, starring with Mary Pickford in silent movies. He was Cecil B. DeMille's assistant director. He was one of the original members of the Director's Guild. He directed thousands of television shows from Playhouse 90 to The Brady Bunch (laughs). I remember visiting him as a kid on the set of The Lone Ranger TV show, which they'd shoot in a day and-a-half! They'd finish one at lunch, then start a new one. They'd just move the rocks around the set. Probably used the same scripts, too. (laughs) He knew a lot of people, but he wasn't about that. He was a real person. But none of that interested me. First of all, everything was changing. But my brother bought me a super 8 camera in the early 60's, one of the first ones ever made, and I started shooting home movies. Then I thought "Hmm...maybe there's something to this after all." And I've not changed my technique since then! (laughs)
You didn't go to film school.
No, I was not a necrofilmiac, but I was Cyrano De Filmiac, in that I used to shoot films for other people that were in film school. I'd charge them, make them buy me more film, and that's what happened. I even won a couple awards for other people. I never really finished school myself.
Any of those student filmmakers go on to prominence?
Of course not! Anyone who wants someone else to make their films is going to become an accountant, politician, or lawyer! (laughs)
Any advice for first-time directors?
Show up early and drink a lot of water. (laughs) We're all first-time directors. Here's a funny story for you. A couple years ago a friend of mine who's a playwright, and has also written several screenplays, calls me up and says "I want to direct a script I've written." Then over the years he said "I've got somebody to put up the money for this, and so-and-so wants to star in it," and so on. So he goes in to meet these people. He's in his late 50's, but it's his first film. And they see him walk through the door and all the producers, who were probably in their 30's, their spirits go straight downhill because they saw him as being "middle-aged." But he said to me, "The fact that I was older was less important than the fact that I was a first-time director." The fact that he was a first-time director was reason enough for them to give him a shot at directing. When I started it was just the opposite. Nobody would take a chance. So any first-timer has that going for them. Also, never make the film for anybody else but you. The only other advice I can give is what Altman says: "Don't take anybody else's advice."
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