The Ballsiness of the Long Distance Runner: A Chat With Mumia Abu-Jamal

By Alex Simon

Mumia Abu-Jamal has been one of journalism’s most outspoken voices for nearly forty years. However, Mumia’s greatest fame has come not from his written work, but from the fact that he is one of the most famous state “employees” in the country: he has been in state prison since 1982, serving on death row until just over a year ago.

Born Wesley Cook in Philadelphia, Abu-Jamal made his name as a tireless writer and journalist during the racially-charged 1970s that often portrayed the City of Brotherly Love as anything but. With his intense coverage of the M.O.V.E. organization, a black empowerment group whose ongoing battle with the police and city hall came to a fiery end in 1985, Abu-Jamal became a constant thorn in the side of the city’s powerful establishment. Things came to a sudden head for Abu-Jamal himself on the evening of December 9, 1981 when he was accused of murdering a Philadelphia police officer. He received a death sentence the following year, and had been on Pennsylvania’s death row until last year, when his death sentence was commuted to a life sentence in December, 2011.

Abu-Jamal’s case remains one of the most controversial and heatedly debated in American legal history, with participants on both sides either protesting his innocence in the murder of Officer Daniel Faulkner or his absolute guilt with equal passion and more often, great vehemence.

As the focus of Stephen Vittoria’s new documentary “MUMIA: Long Distance Revolutionary,” Mumia’s story unfolds with the trajectory of a Greek tragedy, the truly tragic aspect being that far from being set in Greece, Mumia’s story is all-too American.

In addition to their collaboration on “Long Distance Revolutionary,” Mumia and Vittoria are currently working on "Murder Incorporated: Empire, Genocide, and Manifest Destiny," began as a documentary in 2006 to also be helmed by Vittoria. After a year in production, Vittoria decided that “telling the five hundred year story of the Euro-American march of genocide and exceptionalism across the Americas was too ambitious for a two-hour documentary.” At the time, Abu-Jamal had recorded twenty-five short essays for the film - essays Vittoria says "were some of Mumia's most brilliant pieces." It was this genesis that drew both men together and they decided to collaborate on a new tome of history (same title) that hopes to pick up where Howard Zinn left off. At this point, Abu-Jamal and Vittoria are writing hard and expect to be complete by the end of 2013.

“MUMIA: Long Distance Revolutionary” is a powerful indictment of the hypocrisy inherent in the American dream and is a must-see for any and all who are concerned with upholding the constitutional rights of all Americans. The film features appearances from a disparate group of Mumia supporters, including Dr. Cornel West, Alice Walker, Angela Davis, Rubin Hurricane Carter, Tariq Ali, Ruby Dee, Dick Gregory, Peter Coyote, Giancarlo Esposito, M-1, and Amy Goodman. Eddie Vedder sings "Society." "MUMIA: Long Distance Revolutionary" is produced by Stephen Vittoria, Katyana Farzanrad, and Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio, and Stephen Vittoria, and is written, directed, and edited by Stephen Vittoria.

Mumia spoke with me via telephone from SCI Mahanoy in Frackville, PA. recently. Here is what was said:

Alex Simon: I find the title of the film, Long Distance Revolutionary, fascinating, as well as the fact that the film focuses less on your case, and more on your lifetime’s work as an activist and journalist.

Mumia-Abu Jamal: I’m told that the title came from the honorable Cornel West. Cornel speaks and we listen. (laughs) As far as the film’s focus, I think Steve felt it was important to focus on the bigger picture.

Regarding that, where do you feel your precocity came from as a fifteen year-old journalist for the Black Panther newspaper?

It came from something called Ramparts Magazine and a sister named Andrea giving me a copy of the Black Panther newspaper. Those two journals blew my fourteen and fifteen year-old mind. I didn’t think such a thing was possible. It was just electrifying and turned me on to revolutionary journalism in a way that was mind-blowing. I remember thinking while I was reading them, ‘This can’t be true. These people can’t really exist. They were like black angels from heaven.

It sounds like once you started writing, you found your voice almost immediately.

I think it should give some insight into what inspiration does. It charges you. It empowers you. It transforms you, actually. To have read those periodicals and then become part of the party. And that’s my long distance battery. Remember the old slogan: “It keeps going and going and going”? This was a great time in black America. It was basically teenagers, manning and womaning a national and international organization and learning to do what needed to be done literally on the cuff. And we were doing it. We were writers, we were photographers, we did layout. And that paper came out without ads for the better part of a decade. And I don’t know an example of another publication like that outside of the party. 150,000 copies every week. Not a bad piece of work. A lot of us were high school dropouts, like me. It shows what people can do when they get together and are inspired. Huey P. Newton was all of 24 years-old when he founded the party, with Bobby Seale.



Your late sister Lydia is prominently featured in the film. Can you talk a bit about her?

Up until the very recent time, I would never have been in existence without my sister being there. She was my older sister, although she didn’t look it, and her spirit was certainly young. She was a beautiful, vibrant, always growing, always learning person. Think about a young woman growing up with five brothers. (laughs) She was a tough cookie. I always used to feel sorry for her boyfriends, because she would take no guff. I remember being a young kid of eight or nine years old, and I saw her knock her boyfriend over a railing. She was a tough cookie, but she loved her little brother, she loved her people and in many ways, our lives followed a similar trajectory in that she became more revolutionary as she got older. And that usually isn’t the case, except with someone like W.E.B. Du Bois; most of us followed the exact opposite path: we’re revolutionary in our teens and our youth and then become more conventional as we get older. But she was a great thinker, activist and revolutionary. I will love her forever and I miss her dearly.

So far, most of the reactions to "Long Distance Revolutionary" have been either great praise or outright vilification. What’s your take on that?

I’m glad it’s like that. If it’s either/or, that shows they have an investment either positively or negatively. That’s how change happens. We’re all tempted sometimes to not rock the boat, but dammit, if we didn’t rock the boat sometimes, I was about to say millions of African-Americans would still be walking around in chains, although that’s a debatable issue still, given the mass incarceration so many of us are under. But change always happens in the face of controversy. We’re going to need a movement to challenge this mass incarceration and the growth of the world’s largest prison industry, the largest prison industry in human history. Controversy can be a good thing.

The Prison Industrial Complex is something that is addressed heavily in the film. Tell us a bit more about that.

The recent book The New Jim Crow, written by Michelle Alexander, has opened a lot of people’s heads. There are generations now of people who live inside the reality of prison. It’s a place where many sons meet their fathers and grandsons meet their grandfathers. It is an immense and stupefying industry of such proportions that most Americans have no idea. M.A. makes the point that there are more black men in prison now than there were slaves in 1860. I mean, damn! There more people in prison today in the U.S. than during the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Most people aren’t aware of this, or they don’t give a damn. So there needs to be a movement, and I hope that “Long Distance Revolutionary” plays a role in that movement.

What I wasn’t aware of, is how much money prisons make for a whole lot of people.

It’s not just prisons. It goes deeper. I watched Michelle today on C-SPAN. When she said that the drug war has cost over a trillion dollars, that blew my mind, particularly with all the economic hardship so many Americans are facing. And has the drug war been even remotely successful? Drugs are available in every prison in America. If they’re available in every prison, they’re available everywhere else in America: schools, street corners, office buildings. In fact, it’s enriched the drug cartels. So it’s a monumental failure, but it’s also a trillion dollar industry.

Last year, you were released into the mainstream prison population for the first time after spending thirty years on death row. What’s the adjustment been like?

In many ways, I’m still adjusting because I learn something new seemingly every day. I still have not gotten used to seeing long rows of men in wheel chairs, young men. That’s something I rarely saw on death row. I’m also shocked at the age of some of these men. I mean men who’ve never shaved, but have been tried and convicted as adults, then on the opposite end of the spectrum, men who are very, very old. This is an incredible experience to see what prison populations are today. It ain’t pretty, but it’s something that people are going to have to come to grips with.

What’s your opinion of the current state of American journalism?

The current state of American journalism is monstrous. I think the business of journalism has had its heyday. The reportage today, most of it is about fashion, sex, and just fluff. It’s mind blowing and just painful for me to watch.

For a listing of screening locations and dates for “Long Distance Revolutionary,” please visit http://www.mumia-themovie.com/playdates.html.

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Best Actress Nominee Jessica Chastain: The Hollywood Flashback Interview

In May of 2006, I sat down with actress Jessica Chastain, then an unknown and untested 29 year-old who was on the precipice of her first big break after being tapped by Al Pacino to co-star in his stage production of Oscar Wilde's "Salome" at the Wadsworth Theater. Then as now, Chastain's fresh-faced beauty made every passerby do a double-take as we spoke. Her ambition to succeed as a performer was palpable, and paid off in 2011 with Chastain appearing in six high-profile films: "Take Shelter," "The Tree of Life," "Coriolanus," "The Debt," "Texas Killing Fields," and "The Help," for which she received a Best Supporting Actress nomination. This year, Chastain received a nod in the Best Actress category for Katherine Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty" and is the undisputed front-runner to take a statuette home. 


JESSICA CHASTAIN TRIPS THE LIGHT FANTASTIC AS SALOME 
By Alex Simon 

Jessica Chastain is living the dream that most young actresses never get to touch: co-starring with the legendary Al Pacino in the eponymous role of Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Jessica, a Julliard graduate, has been working steadily on stage and television since graduation several years ago, but her latest foray on the boards, currently running at The Wadsworth Theater through May 14, marks the arrival of a major new talent. Directed by renowned actress Estelle Parsons (Best Supporting Actress, 1967 for Bonnie & Clyde), the production also co-stars Kevin Anderson and Roxanne Hart, and is presented as a “staged reading,” with no sets and many of the actors reading their lines directly from the script. A riveting, challenging theatrical experience, Salome is an evening that most discerning theater-goers will not soon forget. The lovely Miss Chastain sat down with us poolside at a local hotel recently.

When did you know you were an actor? 

Jessica Chastain: When I was five, my grandmother took me to see a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, with David Cassidy. And I remember saying to myself, ‘I want to do this!’ (laughs)

Chastain as Celia Foote in The Help.

So that was the catalyst? 

Yeah, my mom teases me and says that ever since I was a little kid I always wanted to crawl inside the TV, and play all the time. When my grandmother took me to that show, I realized that was my calling. So my play turned into make believe, and from then on, everyone knew that I was going to be an actor.

After high school, you went to Julliard. What was that like? 

It was great, because I showed up, and I didn’t know anything about Shakespeare, or any of the other great playwrights. I spoke with my voice in a really high register, and I was just untrained. Plus, I was in New York, and I’d never really left the Bay Area in my life. I was surrounded by all these amazing musicians, dancers, actors and artists, the cream of the crop, and it was just amazing. But it was also difficult, because we all showed up thinking we were hot. I was with 22 other people in this program, and you realized very quickly the things that you were doing to avoid the work. (laughs) I remember at one point after we’d done a Shakespeare play, the instructors had us all in a group, and asked us what we’d learned. I raised my hand and said, not trying to be funny, ‘I learned that it’s important to know what you’re saying when doing Shakespeare.’ And of course, that got a huge laugh. But before, I just would do it, speak the words, without knowing what it meant. It was just one of the most important lessons I ever learned. The fours years there was very difficult, I’m not going to lie, but that said, those four years were also invaluable.

Plus you were so far from your family. 

Yeah, that was very hard, and then I was there for 9/11, and the next year there was that blackout in New York, so I really had to grow up. It was baptism by fire. But I got to do Chekov, Strinberg, and so many other playwrights I’d never been exposed to before. I’d never been to a classical music concert or a dance concert before. My family was really not into art. The closest we got was David Cassidy. (laughs)

You started working on stage and in TV soon after graduation, but Salome must make you feel like you’ve arrived at a whole different level. It’s the role of a lifetime. 

It’s just amazing! Working with Al Pacino, first of all, that’s great, because he’s one of the most amazing artists I’ve ever met. Even if I was doing it in my basement, it would still be the best role I’ve ever had.

Chastain with Al Pacino in his stage production of Salome, 2006.


Tell us about Salome herself. She’s a very complicated character. 

She’s so complicated, and many people have different takes on her. What I got from her, and from Oscar Wilde’s play, was that she’s this 14 year-old girl who’s grown up in this household with everyone drinking and partying, with a very promiscuous mother, with a step-father who’s lusting after her, and she’s just becoming a woman through all this. She decides that she’s going to be pure. She’s going to be a virgin, and she won’t be sullied by all that’s going on around her. Then she meets John the Baptist, who is all that she aspires to be: this chaste, beautiful man who is condemning her mother, and this awakens this very pure love in her. But she’s so young and naïve and used to getting what she wants that by the end of the play she loves him so much that she doesn’t understand the difference between selfish love and selfless love, so she needs to possess him. She needed to own him. Once she gets his head, she realizes that she wanted that intangible thing that you can never have, which is that you can’t possess someone else. So she destroys the only tangible thing she ever loved. It breaks my heart, because I realized that when I was doing research on Oscar Wilde, he wrote this as a love poem to Lord Darlington, knowing it was a doomed relationship.

Tell us some more about Al Pacino. Were you intimidated before meeting him?

I actually met Estelle first, which was really intimidating, because she’s such a brilliant artist. Plus, she doesn’t sugarcoat anything. She’ll tell you like it is. She doesn’t play games. When I met Al, I was auditioning again at the call-back. I was so nervous, knowing that I was going to meet Al Pacino, I was afraid I was going to blow my audition. So I said to myself ‘Okay Jessica, you know Al Pacino. You’ve seen all his movies. He’s been in your living room during those movies. You’ve seen his most vulnerable, personable moments. You should be more nervous meeting a stranger than you should with Al, because you know him. There’s not going to be anything that’s going to surprise you.’ So I went to meet him, and he couldn’t have been nicer. Since then, he’s never made me feel like he is “Al Pacino, the icon.” He’s always approached him as an artist who wants to create good work. I’ve never felt like he’s pulling rank with me.

Chastain with Brad Pitt in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life.


Generally people who are at his level aren’t insecure, and don’t need to pull rank on people. They’re usually the coolest ones on the set. 

Yeah, exactly. There are so many actors whose work I admire, but then I hear these horrible stories of how they treat people. But so far, you haven’t succumbed to the old adage of “never meet your idols, for they’ll disappoint you.” Hopefully never!

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Baz Luhrmann: The MOULIN ROUGE Hollywood Interview Flashback

(Baz Luhrmann, above.)

(This interview with Baz Luhrmann first appeared in Venice Magazine in June of 2001. I would later interview Baz for his opera production of "La Boheme" - check out that interview here. I seem to be in the minority, but I really enjoyed his Australia, a sprawling epic with unabashed sentimentality, reminiscent of many films from the old studio era.)

The Man Behind the Red Curtain
Director Baz Lurhmann Reveals the Secrets of Moulin Rouge

by Terry Keefe

The "Red Curtain" is a descriptive phrase coined by filmmaker Baz Luhrmann to describe his style of filmmaking, and it is apt - cinema which is also so highly theatrical that it feels like it was birthed from the stage. Think of the fevered final dance competition of his debut feature, Strictly Ballroom (1992) which was so colorful and high-octane that it almost seemed to be an animated film come to life. Or the swirling camera and dazzling production design which breathed new life into the oft-told story of Romeo + Juliet (1996). Luhrmann's films take place in a world that can best be described as heightened reality, and they combine elements of theater, opera, traditional cinema, and numerous elements of pop culture to create an almost completely new genre. The universe behind Luhrmann's red curtain is always on 10, and it demands that the audience be anything but passive. In a Luhrmann film, you know you're watching a movie, but it sometimes feels more like a live performance. So much, in fact, that audiences at the Cannes Film Festival this year were applauding at the end of each of the songs in Luhrmann's newest feature film, Moulin Rouge, as if they were at a Broadway show.

Moulin Rouge takes place in turn of the (last) century Paris and tells the story of a young musical playwright, Christian (Ewan McGregor), who falls in love with Satine (Nicole Kidman), the star of the decadently infamous Moulin Rouge nightclub. Satine also happens to be the city's most famous courtesan, and this is where trouble comes into paradise. Zidler (Jim Broadbent), the Moulin Rouge's P.T. Barnum-like impresario, has promised the hand of Satine to the Duke of Worchester (a delightfully evil Richard Roxburgh). In exchange, the Duke will finance a renovation of the Moulin Rouge into a legitimate theater, where Satine can become a true actress. It's a tale of love vs. money. Did we mention that it's also a musical? A musical in which McGregor and Kidman sing everything from the title track of The Sound of Music to David Bowie's "Heroes."

With Moulin Rouge, Luhrmann reinvents the movie musical by delving into the past. It's almost as if he took all the music videos, studio musicals, pop albums, and stage productions of the last 100 years, stuck them into a Cuisinart, and proceeded to shape Moulin Rouge out of the mixture. There are so many pop culture references in Moulin Rouge that there are references within the references -- such as the scene in which Nicole Kidman croons Madonna's "Material Girl" while a bunch of tuxedoed male suitors chase her around with gifts, the imagery of which references the 1985 video for the Madonna song. But wait, that video was itself an homage to Marilyn Monroe's scene from the film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) in which she sings "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," which, incidentally, Kidman also sings here. Moulin Rouge showcases the Red Curtain style at its most full-blown yet. It even opens with a shot of a red curtain which pulls back to reveal one of the most dazzling opening sequences in recent cinematic memory, as Luhrmann's camera flies over a recreation of the cityscape of Paris, zips into various apartments to introduce some of the lead characters, then rockets into the Moulin Rouge nightclub for the opening number.

The roots of Luhrmann's groundbreaking cinema can be traced back to his extensive theatrical background in his home country of Australia. While studying to be an actor at Sydney's National Institute of Dramatic Arts, Luhrmann co-wrote, staged, and directed a play which he would develop into his film Strictly Ballroom. But before he made the jump to film, Luhrmann would produce his first opera, "Lake Lost," which is where he began his long collaboration with his wife and production designer, Catherine Martin. During subsequent opera productions of "La Boheme" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Luhrmann and Martin would develop their signature style which would eventually be brought to the world of cinema.

We caught up with Baz Luhrmann on the eve of the nationwide opening of Moulin Rouge, which had already completed a highly successful limited release in New York and Los Angeles. In both cities, audiences were lining up around the block to get a glimpse of what's behind the red curtain.

When you were at the conceptual stages of Moulin Rouge, did you know that you'd basically be re-inventing the movie musical by the time you were done?

Baz Luhrmann: Yes, that was what we set out to do. Apart from the other things that feed the process of deciding what to make, it's always been a desire of mine. I grew up in the middle of nowhere and we got lots of old television and my dad ran a cinema for a while, so I loved musicals as a kid. You know, music cinema, all this artificiality making you feel things, I've done a lot of opera and theater, and I just thought that somebody's got to get around to making that work in the cinema again. And so that was the project.

With all the songs, dance, and production design you had to try out, this couldn't have been a traditional scripting process.

You know, this is the third in this kind of film we've done. We set out to make a cinematic form which is the antithesis of the current cinema vernacular. Where the audience participate. Where they are awakened. Where they are alive in the cinema. Where they are actually uniting with the rest of the people in the cinema and participating. Now, the film's played in both New York and Los Angeles, in just two cinemas, but the audiences are clapping in exactly the same places during the movie in every single session. And that's good news for us, because that's why the film is different. I mention this because we built Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet, and this film in the same manner. And it's very, very labor-intensive. We spend a lot of time doing very detailed academic research, then we build the plot line. And the difficult thing is to build a very simple plot. They all require simple, recognizable stories that the audience knows the ending of when it begins. They require that. And that's very hard to do. We found it much easier when we were doing naturalistic work, because when you're revealing plot as you go along, you've got something to hang it on. Whereas, when people know the plot, it's about the execution. What we had to do, for example, is you're writing the scene and you've got the boy going, "Love is everything," and she's going, "No, I'm a career girl. I can't fall in love." Then you have to convert that into musical form. And we've already set up the rule, which is an old rule, that the audience had to have a familiar relationship with the music and that the music had to be of our vernacular. So it was incredibly labor-intensive. But really, that's true of all musical work. No opera and no musical has been a quick job. I mean, "Cats" when it opened did not have "Memories" in it, for example.

A lot of the rehearsal for Moulin Rouge occurred at a place of yours in Australia called "The House of Iona," described in the production notes as a "sprawling Victorian mansion." Tell us about that.

The key actors would come down for four weeks, It's a production facility but we also live there. The same thing happened on Romeo + Juliet - Leonardo DiCaprio came and lived with us for a while as we developed it. And we take very seriously working with the actors in the sense that they do their work and we redraft based on what happens in the rehearsals and the workshopping.

What was the casting process for the leads like? Was it always a mandate that they could sing, or did you ever consider casting non-singing stars that you could dub?

They had to be able to sing. I cherish the fact that I know of many, many famous actors and I know that they can sing beautifully. But both Ewan and Nicole I had had some contact with before, because I shot Nicole for Vogue which I was the editor of for an issue, and I knew she was very funny and warm and unlike the Nicole that most people know about. And Ewan I almost cast as Mercutio (in Romeo + Juliet). I went through the process of finding out what actors could fulfill the roles and then convey emotion through voice. They didn't have to be big singers, but they had to be able to move you emotionally. They had to be able to act through voice. Basically, Ewan and Nicole were the best for the job. That's the bottom line of it.

Is it true you weren't able to screen-test Ewan and Nicole together before making the final casting decision?

Yes, Nicole was on stage on Broadway in "The Blue Room" and Ewan was in the West End in a play as well. So I really had to take a punt on that chemistry and I must say Ronna Kress, my casting director, really held my hand and said, "Look, you've got to take the leap of faith." And we did and it really is a chemical reaction between the two of them.

How was the on-camera singing filmed?

We used all the techniques. There's the traditional technique of playback, which is your basic one: They record and we do playback (on the set). But we did use a very groundbreaking technique which is where they sing live and then you replace the voice later with digital technology. It's a program which locks what you've sung to lip-sync. And then the other thing is that for a few moments in the film they're actually singing live.

I have to ask you how you created the fantastic opening where you're zipping in and out of all those buildings and all over the city of Paris.

It's a combination of very old techniques and very new techniques. The illusion that it's black and white film and then we zoom in -- that is all model work, they're old-fashioned models that are built. And then we used digital technology to put in boats and water and sky and people. We shot hundreds of little extras. There's tiny little people walking on the bridge and things to make it real. And so it's a combination of old and new. We spent all of our digital money, and we didn't have a lot of it, making things not good but BAD. Basically stopping it from looking digitally perfect, to make it look "cinematically imperfect."

What types of techniques were used to make it look imperfect?

You can equate this with the difference between digital sound and analog. They're like CDs vs. vinyl records. Because life in digital is absolutely mathematically perfect. Unfortunately, real life is nothing like that. In fact, it's the imperfections between individual violin strings that make an orchestra warm. They're all slightly out of tune. That's why when you get a digital sample of a violin and you put hundreds of them together, they sound nothing like the real thing. Because it's the imperfection that makes something warm. And we've done that a lot on Moulin Rouge. For example, when we have our camera sweeping through buildings over Paris (in the opening), we had to actually program in digitally the imperfections of bumps and shakes. At first you really do believe you might be in a bit of black and white footage, and that's because it shakes. Also, if you look at the shot it goes out of focus. We had to digitally put it out of focus.

What are some of your favorite movie musicals?

I think that I have tastes that range from "Top Hat" to "Bandwagon" to "Cabaret." I love the early Elvis musicals, but I also love "West Side Story," which is a tragedy.

You're willing to take a lot of risks that most directors would never hang their career on. Can you even allow yourself to get scared or can you put it out of your mind completely when you're starting a project like this?

It's a paradox. I'm paradoxical about it in a really big sense. Because people say to me, "My God, you're so brave," and all that. And I'm just thinking, "What are you talking about?" I'm sort of like, "Well, gee, somebody's got to make the musical work now. I guess I'll have to do that job," you know? On the other hand, it would be a lie not to say that every morning I wake up with a sort of sick feeling in my stomach as I go towards what we're doing. But it's usually just about making the day work. It's like, "Oh my god, I've got 300 shots. I'll never get there." I have no question mark whatsoever that whether a billion people go off to see this movie or only the crowds that are now lining up in L.A. or New York, there's no question that the genie is out of the bottle (in terms of bringing back the musical). And there's no question in my mind that the genie was going to get out of the bottle. If it wasn't me, it was going to be someone else. So I'm like, "What's the big deal?" How many absolutely monolithic heads of monolithic companies in the last four days are going, "You know, this is a billion-dollar idea. We own music companies. We own film companies. You bring the two together and they work? Hmmmm." [laughs] It's not rocket science to work out that the world goes around in circles and this, at some point, was going to come around again.

Given the fact that the movie musical had been considered a dead genre by the major studios for so long, did it take a lot of convincing on your part to get the green light from Fox?

No. In the old days maybe, but just think -- I've made a film about ballroom dancing and a film about Shakespeare. Nobody was knocking on my door going, "Please, we really need somebody to make a ballroom dancing film. We know it's going to be huge." or "Shakespeare! That's a great idea!" So after the first two -- they made a lot of money and won a lot of awards. I have a deal anyway at Fox where I'm about making new culture. My company is Bazmark Films, and you either want the Bazmark thing or you don't. I went in and I just basically outlined in words the basic notion of [Moulin Rouge] and they said, "Not a cent over 45 million. Come back when it's ready." And to be really honest, as much as I'd like to go into a kind of horror story about the studio, the real truth is that they've been unbelievably, relentlessly supportive, like at a ludicrous level. People lose their jobs over squandering 50 million on having a crack at the musical. And they were the ones who said, "Hey, we think this is a summer picture." I was a little bit more like, "Art house September looks good to me." They're the ones who have gone, "This is something for everybody. This can play broad." And you know, if they believe in my commitment, I've got to believe in their commitment. We're very family-orientated, in the sense that we work with the same people over a long period of time, and I know it sounds corny but I feel really great that all the people at that studio feel really proud about the achievement of this film. It gives the studio a great sense of higher morale that there are actually people saying, "Oh, you're doing something edgy. Must be great to work there." It makes Fox an interesting place to be.

Let's talk a little about your early work. Your first film Strictly Ballroom actually started as a play.

Yes, we developed it as a play when I was at drama school. And then I further developed it in my theater company and we toured Czechoslovakia; this was before the Wall came down. It won a lot of awards as a play. Then I set out to make it into a film. I realized that if I naturalized it, and this is not to demean Dirty Dancing, it would become like a naturalistic Dirty Dancing. So one had to find a cinematic language that kept the irony, that kept the sense that it had a resonating comment about artistic oppression. That's when I began developing this idea of theatricalized cinema. And it's not brand-new, you know. It's looking back to the movies of the '30s and the '40s which have a contract with the audience. I was also very influenced by Bollywood movies, or Hindi movies. Cinema where the audience participates in a movie. Where they know they're watching a movie at all times.

While you were working in theater, was it always a goal to cross over into films?

You know, I made movies as a kid and I made plays. It's never been any different for me. I've always made little movies and I've acted in movies and I've acted in plays and I've made records. We come from a small country, Australia, so everybody does a little bit of everything. You've got to. [laughs]

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HALLE BERRY: The Hollywood Interview

This interview with Halle appeared originally back in the February 2002 edition of Venice Magazine. It was on the eve of her Best Actress win at the 2002 Oscars.

WITH A LANDMARK OSCAR FOR HER SEARING PORTRAYAL OF THE GRITTY BELLE OF MONSTER'S BALL, HALLE BERRY'S ON A ROLL
by Terry Keefe

Halle Berry wasn't looking to take the easy path to fame and fortune when she went in to read for her first movie role in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever (1991). Originally called in for the fairly conventional role of Lee's wife, Berry pushed Lee to cast her in another part - that of Vivian the young crack addict. It was a telling move as to the type of acting career Berry was seeking. This totally unglamorous role was not what most people would have expected from the young and beautiful Ms. Berry, but it presented a challenge for the young actress that she embraced with passion. Berry's Vivian was a strung-out bundle of nervous tics, grime, and explosive anger. It was a great career decision because it established her as a serious talent in her very first film; she clearly was not just another beautiful-model-turned-beautiful-actress. Of course, it's undeniable that her near-perfect looks and charisma hark back to the Golden Age of Hollywood when stars were stunners who could stop traffic. But she's also that rarity of rarities, a movie star with true acting talent to burn and a desire to continue to push that talent as far as she can. And as we all know, some 11 years after Jungle Fever, that combination of talent and desire earned her the honor of being the first African-American woman to win the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, for her work in Monster's Ball. The entire world watched on March 24th as she was overcome with emotion and gushed, "This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. It's for the women that stand beside me, Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox. And it's for every nameless, faceless woman that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened." She had come a very long way.

How long a way? Well, all the way from a land quite a few miles east of Hollywood - Cleveland, Ohio, where Halle was born on August 14, 1968 and named after the nearby Halle Brothers Department store. Her teenage years saw great success in beauty pageants, as she won the Miss Teen All-American Pageant at the age of 17 in 1985 and was first runner-up in the Miss USA Pageant a year later. She became a model shortly thereafter and then segued into acting with a few television appearances, followed by her big-screen debut in Jungle Fever. Lead roles followed in the films Strictly Business (1991), The Last Boy Scout with Bruce Willis (1991), Boomerang (1992) with Eddie Murphy, The Flintstones(1994), Executive Decision (1996), and Bulworth (1998). Then came the HBO film Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999), which also re-introduced Halle Berry to the world in a sense. Berry produced the movie and gave a performance that was quite simply a revelation.

It was no easy role to pull off. The real-life Dorothy Dandridge was a complex individual who was incredibly talented, driven, and loving to her friends and family. But she also harbored a great inner loneliness and a self-destructive streak. This was partially due to the sexual abuse she had suffered as a young woman and which seemed to send her on a lifelong series of destructive relationships with all the wrong men. Berry wrapped all of those diverse threads into her portrayal, giving us a glimpse into Dandridge's golden soul in the process, along with the demons that haunted her. There were also the challenges of recreating the singing and dancing of Dorothy Dandridge, performances which left audiences spellbound so many years ago. And yes, Berry managed to leave us equally spellbound, particularly when she recreated the musical numbers from Dandridge's landmark film Carmen Jones (1954). You forgot you weren't watching the real Dandridge, which is perhaps the greatest compliment for any actor starring in a bio pic. The film was to earn Berry a Golden Globe and a great deal of critical respect.

The box office would also show its respect for her as she donned the black cape of Storm, the mutant superhero goddess who controlled the weather, in director Bryan Singer's smash hit X-Men (2000) which was based on the most popular comic book series of all time. Then there was last summer's Swordfish where she starred opposite John Travolta and was also reunited with X-Men co-star Hugh Jackman. Both films were hits, further cementing Berry's star status. It would have been easy for her to coast on her fame with less challenging roles. But she did exactly the opposite when she jumped into the cauldron of Monster's Ball.

Directed by Marc Forster, Monster's Ball features Berry as Letitia Musgrove, an emotionally beaten-down woman in the rural south whose convict husband Lawrence (played by Sean Combs) is put to death in the electric chair. Through a series of tragic circumstances, Letitia meets Hank (played by Billy Bob Thornton), the prison guard who presided over her husband's execution and who also is dealing with his own personal tragedy. Despite being the most unlikely of couples, they fall in love and manage to heal each other amongst the turmoil around them. Letitia's life is an ongoing train wreck which is difficult to watch, but you can't take your eyes off of her thanks to Berry's performance. She creates a subtle, nuanced arc in which Letitia slowly regains her strength and dignity. The film also features one of the rawest love scenes in recent memory between Berry and Thornton. But it's also one of the only times in recent memory that this type of scene is absolutely integral to the plot. These two characters have been through such hell at that point in the story that only an extreme physical catharsis could bring them together. Monster's Ball was shot on an extremely low-budget with all of the actors reportedly working for scale.

I reached Halle by phone while she was shooting the new James Bond film in London, where she plays a character named Jinx.

Tell us how you first became involved with Monster's Ball.

I first received the script from my manager who had gotten the script from (director) Marc Forster's agent. She passed it onto my manager already knowing that Marc really wasn't interested in me. But she thought I would be right for the role, and if my manager got me to read it, then maybe I would like it and I would fight for it. Which is exactly what happened. She kind of went behind his back (laughs).

So after you decided to fight for the role, what happened?

After I read it, I said `You're right. I have to play this part!' and so we worked on getting a meeting with Marc. From there it was just a process. There were no auditions - it's hard to really audition for a part like that. It was just a series of meetings and conversations and lunches and dinners, talking about it and just sort of fleshing out the character, and me trying to express how much passion I had for the project, how much I connected to her. How I saw her and ultimately how I saw her living through me. And also convincing Marc that I would do all the things it called for. So it was trying to convince him that I was really down to do it.

Once you were cast, what was your preparation process to become Leticia?

There was no real research. It was really just discovering how she lived in me and discovering things in my own life or my own experience to help bring the colors to her. So that was really my work as an actress - trying to figure out the nuances of her.

Leticia went through such tragedy in her life that it seems like hers would be a difficult skin to inhabit. Did you take her home with you at night?

When we worked on it, I really didn't leave her. We only shot in 21 days and we worked such long days that at the end of the day all I had time to do was go home, sleep, get up, and do it again. And I was in Louisiana, without my family. So for those 21 days, for all practical purposes, I was her. It was a good way to work on this character. I didn't have to worry about my family and going home and switching gears because I was on location by myself.

Monster's Ball is filled with so many intense scenes. What was the most difficult to shoot?

I think the scene where I sort of had to abuse my son (played by Coronji Calhoun). That was really hard because he was a real little boy. 10 years old and struggling with issues of obesity, you know? He wasn't an actor, never acted before. And I thought, 'Wow, I could psychologically really damage him.' I thought I could. I was afraid I would.

Was there anything you did during the shooting to make those scenes easier on him?

I just talked to him about the process of acting a lot. Explained things to him, methods that different people used, you know? I tried to give him a crash course in all the acting I knew. And then tried to hug him and kiss him a lot. Before the takes and after the takes. When I'd see him in the morning, I'd try to be as nurturing and as loving as I could all the time. We had a really good connection so that when we did work, he felt more like it was work and not me.

The film wouldn't have been as effective if the first love scene between you and Billy Bob Thornton wasn't as raw as it was. Did you have any hesitations about taking the role for that reason?

No, not at all. I knew it when I read it. I thought it was so pivotal. As a reader for the first time with the script, I kind of knew where it was going to go, where those two characters were going to end up. It's like when you read a romantic comedy, you know where they're going to end up, but it's the journey of how they get there that makes it interesting. I kept thinking, `How are these two polar opposites going to come together?' So when it did happen, it all made sense for me. I thought, `Oh, now I get it.' So I knew how important that scene would be to the movie.

You and Billy Bob must've had a real level of trust built up to do that scene.

He was great. He was as invested in it as I was. He was as naked, as committed to it, as vulnerable, as free as I was. I felt like I had a real partner. It wasn't the typical situation where the woman is usually the one who is sort of exploited, you know? We were in this scene together and that felt really good.

Is it true that Marc Forster gave you final cut over the scene?

Yes. That's the only way I think we both felt free enough to just go there. Because we knew that if we went too far and woke up the next morning and saw it, we could say `Oh-oh. What were we thinking? Axe it all out.' That gave us the freedom. We had that power. But we ended up leaving it all in (laughs). We didn't cut anything.

On a smaller film like Monster's Ball, there are fewer perks and luxuries than on a studio film. But are there more freedoms for an actor also?

What was great about it for me, because I had never really worked like that before, is that because there was no money we didn't have the luxury of time. We didn't have the luxury of shooting things over. It was a way of working where you come to the job totally prepared. And every day just following our instincts and going for it. Because we knew that we'll probably only get two shots at all the scenes, so it heightened our level of concentration and sort of our level of commitment because we knew we only had one or two takes and then we had to move on, because time doesn't allow us to do this all day. It heightened everyone's intensity. It was really great and felt really organic as a result of that.

Are you surprised at the level of acclaim the film has received or did you always think it had a shot at that?

I never thought that people would be nominated for Academy Awards. That was never in my thinking. I knew that it was a jewel of a movie. I knew that it was special when I read it. That's why I was willing to fight so hard for it. But I thought, `I don't know if people are really going to get this. I don't know if people are ready to deal with some of these issues.' But as an actor, I knew that the roles were just brilliant for actors to play, brilliant characters. Really colorful and full. I just didn't think anybody would be nominated for an Oscar, especially me (laughs).

I wanted to ask you a little bit about your earlier films. You had done some modeling and television work when you landed your first feature role, as the crack addict in Spike Lee's Jungle Fever. Was that first break tough to land?

Yeah, that was my first movie. Spike called me in to audition for the role of his wife originally. All I was up until that point was a model and I had done some beauty pageants, and I thought, `How can I shed this image?' And I asked him if I could read for the part of the crack kid in the movie and he let me do it and he eventually offered me that part. So that was a great way to start in the industry, sort of shedding my physical self and doing a little bit of a character piece. That was a great entry.

I understand your preparation for the role was pretty method-based and you went out and sort of lived the role?

At that point that was all I could do (laughs). I had no technique. I said, `Let me go and live on the street and try to be this girl as best I can.' So yeah, I didn't shower, I didn't shave. I went to a real crack den with an undercover police officer. These are things that today I doubt I would ever do, because it's too dangerous and it really doesn't make a lot of sense. But at that time, I was young and I was like, 'I don't know anything about crack. I've got to go see'(laughs).

A few years later you did such an amazing job playing the legendary Dorothy Dandridge. I wanted to ask about your preparation process.

The producing end was like 7 years on it. We tried to shop it around for 7 years, so that was a long prep time (laughs). But playing her, I had to work on singing, I had to learn to tap dance, all that physical stuff I had to do beforehand. I did a lot of interviewing with Sidney Poitier, Diahann Carroll, people that actually knew her. I spent a lot of time with these people, picking their brains, and sort of trying to get to the essence of who she was. And if I could find some common thread that they all said about her, I could use that. Basically I read every book, every piece of material there was to read about her. I saw tons of pictures. Her manager, who is still alive, let me go through everything that he had of hers, from personal private letters to all of her clothes, her jewelry he had, her family photo album. It was just about a six-month period before the shoot of finding every piece of information I possibly could.

You mentioned that you were looking for a common thread when you interviewed Dorothy Dandridge's close friends and associates. Did you find that common thread?

I would ask each one of them, `If you can tell me one thing that I must capture in order to play her, what would that be?'. They all said the same thing, `You have to find a way to be sad on every day, in every scene, in every moment. And always try to hide the sadness. And you'll get the essence of who she was.' I thought that because they all said that, it had to be true. I thought that was a good place for me to start.

Then you won the Golden Globe for your role as Dorothy. How were you feeling at that moment?

That was the first time I had ever been nominated for an award like that. And playing her life, there were so many opportunities she was not afforded. A lot of it had to do with the state of racial relations in the country at the time. And the other 50% was her own masochistic personality that led to her own downfall, you know? I felt very much when I was up there, that I was sort of up there for her. For all the things that didn't come her way, that in that moment I felt that it was really about her too. Because I was winning for telling her story, I felt very much like it was her moment.

And right now you're shooting the new Bond film. As the villain it`s reported. How does it feel playing the villain?

Well, that sort has been a little bit of a misrepresentation. It's not really clear exactly who this girl Jinx is (laughs). She's a little mysterious. Even to me right now.

Can you talk about the story at all?

No, I'm sorry. They make you sign your life away (laughs).

No problem. And after Bond, you've got the X-Men sequel coming up. How was it working with director Bryan Singer on the first one?

That was good. Directing that movie, there was so much pressure. The fans were just like, you know (laughs). Oh my god, I was so glad I wasn't him. And I thought he did a really great job dealing with all of the pressure. Every day he'd be on the internet, wanting to know what they said next. He did a really good job. He took those comic book characters and made them real. And I really loved that we weren't wearing, you know, silly suits and spandex. He really made them real people. I'm hoping that in the next one they'll even become more real.

Did you read a lot of the old X-Men comics before playing the famous character of Storm?

You know, I didn't. Bryan didn't want it. The people who didn't grow up with the series, he didn't want us to. He wanted us to read the script and read the back story that he provided us. Because all the characters changed from decade to decade, and they sort of went off in different directions. So he thought it would be really confusing and he thought it would be easier, and I think rightfully so, not to go back and read all the comic books. I read some, that pertained to the way he wanted Storm to be played. Those were the ones he suggested that I read and he gave me.

So what's next after the X-Men sequel?

It won't be being a superhero, I can tell you that much, after Bond and X-Men (laughs). I want to go do another Monster's Ball, another little character. I'm seeking that out right now.

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Ben Gazzara: 1930-2012 and Remembering Cassavetes

We're sad to report that actor Ben Gazzara has succumbed to pancreatic cancer at age 81. Over Gazzara's nearly-sixty year career, his greatest screen moments occurred in collaboration with close friend John Cassavetes, along with actors Peter Falk, Seymour Cassel, and Cassavetes' wife Gena Rowlands. With Falk's passing last year and now with Gazzara's, it seems an opportune time to revisit a 2004 chat I had for Venice Magazine with the surviving members of the Cassavetes "company" that coincided with Criterion's release of their "John Cassavetes: Five Films" collection. Cassel was the only member not present during the conversations, which took place in the home that John and Gena shared from 1962 until his death, and which served as a location for many of their films together.

REMEMBERING CASSAVETES:
The Legacy of America’s Most Important Indie Film Pioneer Is Preserved in the Criterion Collection’s New Release John Cassavetes: Five Films
By
Alex Simon

John Cassavetes, while primarily known to most of the public as a veteran character actor, left behind his greatest artistic legacy as an independent filmmaker with a unique voice and vision. This legacy was a small one unfortunately, with John writing and directing only 11 films before his untimely death in 1989 at age 59. The Criterion Collection, regarded by cineastes the world over as the Rolls-Royce of DVD labels, has meticulously restored and released five of John’s most renowned films in a new box set entitled John Cassavetes: Five Films, which was released September 21. 

The five films: Shadows (1959), Faces (1968), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), and Opening Night (1977) all illustrate John’s unique capacity for capturing human behavior at its most honest and vulnerable moments. Also featured is Charles Kiselyak’s documentary A Constant Forge, a comprehensive look at Cassavetes’ life, art and career, featuring dozens of candid interviews with John’s friends, family members and colleagues.

Three of John’s closest collaborators: Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, and his widow/muse Gena Rowlands, sat down with Venice recently to reflect on John’s legacy. Here’s what transpired:

Ben Gazzara was born August 28, 1930 in New York City, the son of Sicilian immigrants. After studies at The Actor’s Studio, Gazzara made a name for himself on Broadway in the original productions of Cat On a Hot Tin Roof and A Hatful of Rain in 1955. Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder made him a bona fide star in 1959, with his powerful portrayal of a rape suspect on trial.

Gazzara’s first collaboration with John Cassavetes was the 1970 drama Husbands (available on DVD from Sony), in which he co-starred with Cassavetes and Peter Falk in the story of a trio of friends who decide to mourn the death of the fourth member of their group (played by Gena Rowlands' brother, David) with an extended wake that takes them overseas on a wild binge in London. Gazzara followed this with his seminal role in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, playing Cosmo Vitelli, an L.A. strip club owner in debt to the mob. He also appeared in Cassavetes’ Opening Night the following year.

Gazzara, Falk and Cassavetes remained close friends after the experience of filming Husbands, and formed a tight-knit group much like their characters in that film. Here are some of Mr. Gazzara’s memories and reflections about his time spent with John:

When did you and John first meet?

Ben Gazzara: We were young actors in New York together. We were friendly, would say ‘hi’ to each other, but we were also rivals, up for the same parts and things, so we never became friends at that point. I was doing this TV series here in LA years later called "Run For Your Life," and he was doing a couple pilots over at Universal. I asked him “If they both sell, which show are you going to do?” He said “Neither of them. I don’t worry about that stuff. I’m not doing it for the money. I’m doing it for the raw stock and a hand-held camera, because I’m going to shoot a picture up at my house.” And of course, that was Faces. So, time goes on, and I’m finished with the series, and I saw very little of John, and I’m leaving the studio the day I finished shooting the 86th episode, the final show of my series, and John is driving off the lot. He says “Ben, did Marty (Baum, their agent) tell you?” I said “No, tell me what?” “We’re gonna do a picture together!?” I said “Oh, okay.” I thought, ‘bullshit!’ because you hear that all the time, as an actor. Sure enough, a week later, we go to the old Hamburger Hamlet on the strip, and he tells me I’m going to be the star of Husbands, more or less. He said “I’m going to Europe to shoot this gangster picture (Machine Gun McCain, 1968). I think I can get the money from this Italian producer.” So I said, ‘okay, sure,’ still not quite believing him. I had to go to Czechoslovakia to do a war picture with George Segal and Robert Vaughn (The Bridge at Remagen, 1969), then the day the Russians moved in, that day in August, I get a call from John: “Ben, don’t get killed! I got the money! I got the money to make the picture!” So I went to London, and we started rehearsing Husbands. That was 1968. And for me, it was like getting out of jail. As a young actor, I was in on the creation of projects. My first plays in New York were written around improvisation, which is what I love. Being on the TV series, sure I was making a lot of money, but I was playing the same guy in the same fuckin’ predictable situations. But here, I was free, able to let it go.

Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara and John Cassavetes: Husbands. 

Tell us more about the experience of doing Husbands.

Well, John and I became dear, dear friends. We did a couple films together after that and we would’ve done more.

What was the process like, working with John?

A lot of people had the misconception that John improvised his films, which wasn’t true. We rehearsed for two or three weeks before we shot. Occasionally a scene would be completely improvised, but only occasionally. The rehearsal was in order to give the impression of it happening for the first time, and also for the purpose of rewriting. John loved to rewrite on his feet. He’d just tear things apart, and try six, seven different ways of doing things. So by the time you got on the floor, with the camera present, you were pretty secure with where you were. John’s films were made through his actors. He loved being surprised during rehearsals and wanted you find things within yourself that would even surprise you. He wasn’t afraid of taking any trip you wanted to take. The only thing John hated was if you didn’t try, if you didn’t “put it up,” as he used to say. “Put it up!” So I felt right at home, because that way of working was my idea of joy: where everything is open and everything is possible and nobody can do wrong. There is no wrong. It might not be right, but it ain’t wrong.

Emotionally, John’s films can be very tough to watch. Did they take a toll on you as an actor?

Only when they were drawing to an end. It was always very tough to say goodbye to the experience, especially on Husbands, because there was a lot going on there. It was about friendship. We became friends, and who knew if we were ever going to see each other again, because most films are “I’ll call ya, I’ll call ya, I’ll call ya,” and nobody ever calls anybody. But John was the glue that really kept my friendship with Peter together. Since John died, Peter and I see each other very infrequently. But when John was alive, we all used to see each other constantly.

He also did that cameo in your film Capone (1975), playing the gangster Johnny Torrio.

Yeah, he did that as a favor, he was so sweet. He walked on the set, did the scene, went back to his office on the lot! For no money! He didn’t get paid for that.

There are many filmmakers now, particularly on the independent scene, who have been highly influenced by John’s work. He’s left a lasting legacy.

I know, isn’t that interesting? When he was making these films, he couldn’t get a dime to make them. And now, every kid in film school is talking about his work. That was the thing about John, a lot of guys could get beaten down by rejection, but ‘no’ didn’t exist for him.

“That which does not kill you makes you stronger.”

That’s right! The major studios didn’t want to do it, fine. He put up his own money. “I’ll do it!” The people at the studios just didn’t get it, didn’t get the stories, didn’t get the characters.

John wasn’t afraid to have characters that weren’t necessarily likeable. Your character in Husbands, for example, was a real son of a bitch on many levels, but you still cared about the guy!

I know. Well, he was scared, and he was ignorant. John loved that. He used to say “I love ignorance.” What he meant was, the ignorant are ingenuous, but they would vent with such a strong belief. John used to say, I don’t know if he was serious or not, that he was going to make Husbands II, and the opening would be on the Grand Canal in Venice. I would be with a new, young wife, he and Peter would pull up and we’d all meet on motor boats. Wouldn’t that have been a great opening?

Yeah. They probably would’ve been there for a dental convention, right?

(laughs) Yeah, that’s right!



Let’s talk about Cosmo Vitelli, a great character.

In his heart, in his gut, although he’s an unsophisticated man, he’s really an artist. He lives in his art, his art being this cockamamie strip show he puts on at this seedy fuckin’ joint he owns. That’s his life. And when these gangsters come to take that away, it’s thing he cares about the most. To the point of, in one of my favorite scenes, when he’s on his way to do the hit and could possibly get killed doing it, he stops to call to see how the show is going! To me, that film was a metaphor for John’s life: the never-ending battle against those nuisances who try to keep you from doing your work. (pause) Do you think Cosmo died in the end?

Yeah, absolutely. I think he sat down in front of his club and bled to death, but like a good captain, he stayed with his ship, and in that sense, he won the battle.

Yeah. And you know something, John and I never talked about that, about whether Cosmo died or not. I never asked him and he never asked me.

But it doesn’t really matter because ultimately, that’s not what the film is about.

Right.

Gena Rowlands and Gazzara in Opening Night. 

Let’s talk about Opening Night.

Again, we have a film about the theater. John’s theater life was very limited. He was the stage manager for a play called The Fifth Season, but I don’t think he ever acted on Broadway. But, obviously his love of the theater and memories of the theater were present here, because it’s a remarkable film. Not only is it about the theater, but it’s about aging. It’s about doing good work and what you have to call on in order to do good work. The work was the thing that was most important to John.

Was it all downhill working with other directors after you had been directed by John?

I wouldn’t say “downhill,” but it was certainly different. It such a rare and unique experience being in on the creation of an event. It’s rare to find a director with the lack of ego to do that.

Gena Rowlands has rightfully earned her title as “The First Lady of American Film” with a career that has spanned more than 40 years on the stage and screen. The Wisconsin native first encountered her future husband John Cassavetes when the young actor visited her backstage after a Broadway performance. Following their marriage in 1954, both pursued very separate careers as actors, not working together as actress and director until Cassavetes’ landmark 1968 hit Faces. John and Gena would collaborate five more times in this arena: Minnie & Moskowitz (1971, available on Anchor Bay Home Video), A Woman Under the Influence (1974) which garnered Gena her first Oscar nomination as Best Actress, Opening Night (1977), the cult sensation Gloria (1980, Columbia-TriStar Home Video) which earned Gena her second Best Actress nomination, and Love Streams (1984, not yet available on U.S. home video). The Cassavetes-Rowlands partnership arguably was the most fruitful of its type in American film history, giving birth to a body of work that continues to resonate with audiences and filmmakers the world over.

Gena sat down with Venice recently in the house she and John shared for nearly 30 years (and where much of Faces and Love Streams was shot) to reflect on his legacy.

How does it feel now that Criterion has finally given these great films the treatment they deserve?

Gena Rowlands: I’m delighted. They do such quality work that I’m really very happy, because the last DVD release that was done (on Pioneer Home Video) were not of good quality. I really appreciate that Criterion made the effort to do it right.

Do you think this will expose the work you both did to a new generation of viewers?

I hope so. I just would feel terrible if John and his pictures were forgotten. But, it’s been a long time, you know. A lot of young people who are studying film now weren’t even alive when the films were first released. I’m hoping that they will now be accessible enough that those people will be exposed to them.

Gena and John, circa 1960.

Ben made a very interesting comment: he said the first time he worked with John, he felt as though he’d been set free, because it was the first time he’d been able to collaborate with a filmmaker on the creation of a character.

I think that’s very true for all of us. There was such freedom. The way other pictures are set up, there isn’t quite that freedom. They’re set up in a much more businesslike way. For example, most films are shot out of sequence, usually scheduled according to cost. John would always shoot his films in sequence with the script, and that made such a big difference for the actors. You never felt as though someone was about to come down on you when you were working with John. He would never let you stop yourself during a scene. Oftentimes a plane will go overhead during a shot, and the actor will just stop, because he or she knows that they’re going to cut. John insisted that you keep going always, until he said “cut.” What happened was that you kept your concentration and pretty soon, you didn’t hear the plane, or the fire engine, or whatever it was. It was a very valuable way of working. He did so many things that were unique. His use of body mikes for sound were great because you didn’t have to hit any marks, you could just go more or less where you wanted. And the lighting was such also that you could move quite freely. He lit in a very flat way that was more natural. You didn’t get to have a good light or a bad light, and most actors know what that means. We all had to work in the same light.



What strikes me about all of John’s work is that it’s like jazz: when you listen to jazz, you have to let it wash over you and take you on that ride, like an ocean wave. And after getting carried away by John’s work, you really feel like you’ve been inside his head. There’s not many filmmakers you can say that about, even the best ones.

John always said “Don’t give interviews about what I was thinking, or what I was doing. If anybody wants to know me, let them look at my work. That’s it.”

Guess there’s not much more to say after that, is there?

(laughs) No.

Peter Falk first achieved notice on the big screen in Murder Inc.(1960), playing notorious mob killer Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, garnering a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his chilling turn. It was the small screen, however, that gave him his signature role, as the intrepid Los Angeles Police Detective Columbo, whom he first played in a 1968 TV movie, "Prescription for Murder," and has continued to portray up to the present day.

Falk did his best work as an actor, however, in his two collaborations with John Cassavetes. First, in Husbands, and then in A Woman Under the Influence, playing Gena Rowlands’ beleaguered spouse. Falk and Cassavetes remained close friends after Husbands (along with Ben Gazzara), and the actor sat down with Venice recently to share some of his memories of that friendship, and of their collaborations.

I said to both Ben and Gena that John’s films were like jazz.

Peter Falk: That’s very interesting, because Elaine May once said that the difference between ad-libbing and improvisation is that when jazz musicians improvise, they do so off a pre-existing theme. So if you are ad-libbing, and you’re just throwing out words that aren’t in the script, you’re not improvising off any kind of theme. So true improvisation has to do with improvising off something that exists. And that’s the difference between boring, realistic ad-libbing, which is spontaneous, but it has no shape. It has no form. But real improvisation, the kind you see in Cassavetes films, is related to a pre-existing theme.

How did you first meet John?

I was at a Laker game. It was during halftime and I was walking down the aisle to get a hot dog or something, and we bumped into one another. We recognized each other, and it turned out that he went to high school with Alice, my first wife. He remembered Alice vividly, and it turned out she remembered him vividly as well. Four or five years later we did Husbands and that’s when we became pals.

Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara and John Cassavetes in Husbands. 

How did he come to you with Husbands?

(long pause) I don’t know if I should tell this story or not. (pause) I think I’m gonna save it for the book! (laughs)

Fair enough. Tell us about working with John.

I guess there are all kinds of memories, and when you get to be seven-six, a lot of them slip away. Some of them with John have slipped away. But John himself, knowing him, spending time with him, will never slip away. He was, with one possible exception, the most fertile man I ever met. He was extraordinary. In the thing I wrote for the memorial to John, I said he was very shrewd about money. He knew it was worthless. It only had one purpose: to buy a piece of film, or rent a stage, and to try and capture life as he knew it. And that aspect of John is something I’ll always remember. He totally had something in mind other than fame or money. He was possessed with the need to try and capture life as he felt and saw it. I’ve never met anyone who’s the equal of him for that.

I think you worked with him more than any other actor, both as actor and director, and as co-stars, including an episode of "Columbo."

Yes, the thing people don’t know about that, is one day I called him up to discuss a scene in that episode, in the back of my mind thinking that if I got him talking about it, maybe he’d rewrite it. And you know what, he rewrote the whole fuckin’ thing on the phone! Took him about six minutes. He didn’t think he was rewriting it, he just started talking about it, and I scribbled it down! (laughs) So he never directed an episode of the show, which apparently a lot of people think he did, but he did do some writing for it.



Let’s talk about your character in Husbands. He was a really interesting guy. I think my favorite scene in the movie, is your scene with “The Countess.”

“Take your hand off my hand!” (laughs) I always want to correct the popular assumption that John’s reputation for having improvisation in his films is exaggerated. It is exaggerated, if you look for example at that fantastic scene in A Woman Under the Influence when Gena breaks down, if you think all that dialogue was made up on the spot, you’re crazy! As much as being an actor, director and filmmaker, John was a writer. If he’d lived prior to the invention of the camera, he would’ve written plays and gotten a bunch of actors together and had his own reparatory company to act his plays. But the scene with the Countess was, in fact, improvised. John saw this woman, and I don’t know what transpired and what it is that captured his imagination about her, but I know that scene was never on paper and never scheduled for that day, but he came up to me and said we were doing it. And that’s how that scene came about! (laughs)

What are your recollections of the shoot?

Most of them revolve around my confusion and anxiety at working the way we did. I knew this Cassavetes guy was really interesting and really onto something, but on the other hand, I didn’t know what the fuck he was saying! (laughs) I couldn’t follow him when he talked. I didn’t understand my character, didn’t know who he was or what he was doing. And I kept telling him, “Benny’s got the best fuckin’ part! Every scene is about Benny’s character while we’re outside lying around somewhere!” (laughs) He kept saying “Just wait til we get to London, just wait. Your part’s gonna cook!” “I don’t wanna fuckin’ wait 'til we get to London! I wanna cook now!” (laughs) But, as always, John was right. We got to London, and my guy cooked.

Falk and Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence. 

Let’s talk about A Woman Under the Influence. You could almost call it the first feminist movie, and it arrived right when the women’s movement was taking shape. Your character was very interesting because he was basically a good guy, but a guy from the old school who didn’t understand the new rules of the situation he was in.

Yeah, from Nick’s point of view he absolutely loved her, but there’s no question that she was a little wacky. But at the same time, that craziness is something that appeals to him, in his own way. But again, in Nick’s defense, she did have a screw loose! (laughs) I always felt the film was a love story.

And it’s regarded by many people as John’s best film.

Yeah, I just read an article by John Sayles, where he talks about how seeing A Woman Under the Influence made him realize he wanted to be a filmmaker. And he went onto say that he knows a lot of filmmakers whose lives were changed when they saw their first Cassavetes picture. (reads from the article) “It’s not a Technicolor dream or a cartoon with live actors. It was recognizable human behavior.” I think if you spoke to a lot of filmmakers they would say the same thing.

What do you think is John’s greatest legacy?

I think his greatest legacy is when somebody who is possessed by some kind of an artistic need to either dance or to write or to make a movie, independent of fame or money, but because that’s in them, because God put it in their bellies, and they’ve gotta do it. His legacy is, if you remain true, and if you’re willing to make a fool of yourself in the name of your obsession, it’s worth it. It will happen. And he did that. That to me is a legacy for guys who are endowed with that kind of gift. They can look to John and say “He did, so I can do it.”

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Robert Altman: The Hollywood Interview

Director Robert Altman.



ROBERT ALTMAN: ECLECTIC MAVERICK
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the April 1999 issue of Venice Magazine.

It's the Fall of 1977 and I'm a bored and rebellious ten year old in search of a new movie to occupy my underworked and creativity-starved brain, feeling far too mature for previous favorites Wily Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) and Return of the Pink Panther (1975), and wanting something more up-to-date and edgy than Chaplin's City Lights (1931). I needed a movie to call my favorite that would be symbolic of my own new-found manhood (and something that would really piss off my parents and teachers). Mom and Dad were going out for the evening, leaving me with whatever unfortunate baby-sitter happened to need the $10 badly enough to play mother hen to an obnoxiously precocious only child like myself. I scanned the TV Guide for what the evening's entertainment offered and that holiest of holy phrases in the world of the suburban 10 year-old boy caught my eye in the ad for the big Saturday Night Movie on channel 5: "Parental Discretion Advised." Praise be to God! When my parents happened to catch me looking at the ad for the movie, they very sternly said to my baby-sitter and myself: "Under no circumstances let him watch this. He's too young." That clinched it, this movie must be the coolest thing ever! The minute my parents left, the baby-sitter, Lisa, said that I could watch whatever I wanted, as long as I didn't tell my parents that her boyfriend was coming over to make out and smoke a little grass. A deal was struck. We shook on it. She smoked and smooched. I watched the movie. It was called M*A*S*H. It was directed by a guy named Robert Altman. And it changed my life.
I sought out Robert Altman's films feverishly after that. Altman's work made me aware at a very early age what the medium of cinema had the potential to do in terms of transporting the viewer to another world--that is, another very real world. Never before had I seen a film that seemed so much like real life. Instead of one central character, there were dozens. People interrupted each other, talked over one another, left thoughts and situations unfinished and unresolved. They had sex without love, exposed hypocrisy and made the hypocrites themselves pay dearly for it. People bled when they were hurt and seemed to be hurt when they bled. Everyone in a position of authority was portrayed as something of a buffoon. People seemed to move through his films without a shred of sentimentality, but instead with a weary ambivalence. No crocodile tears in sight.
Robert Altman was born February 20, 1925 in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of a successful insurance broker. Educated in Jesuit schools, Altman served as a bomber pilot in WW II, and was stationed in Southern California during his stint with the Air Force. Following his discharge, he attended the University of Missouri, studying engineering and attempted a number of aborted business ventures, including a dog tattooing machine of his own invention. At the same time, he began writing screenplays and stories in collaboration with George W. George, with some minor success. Altman also did some extra work in the Danny Kaye classic The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1946, look carefully for young Altman smoking a cigarette during the nightclub scene). Unable to make a go of it in Hollywood, Altman returned in 1947 to his native Kansas City and began work with the Calvin Company, a leading producer of industrial films. The Delinquents (1957), his first feature, was followed by The James Dean Story (1957), a docudrama that mapped out his intentions of using film to explore the reality behind pop culture icons.
From 1957 to 1965, Altman worked in Hollywood on a wide variety of TV programs including "Combat," "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," and "Bonanza;" his resistance to conformity, however, delayed his progression into feature filmmaking for another decade. Countdown (1968) and That Cold Day in the Park (1969) garnered some critical attention, but Altman's career took a dramatic turn with M*A*S*H (1970), a box-office and critical smash which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. Success led him to form his own Lion's Gate production company—complete with state-of-the-art editing and sound recording facilities—where the creative process was once described as "controlled chaos."
Altman's ensuing films, Brewster McCloud (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Images (1972), The Long Goodbye (1973) and Thieves Like Us (1974), added to his reputation as an artist, but were all disappointments at the box office (most are available on video, and are highly recommended!). They also demonstrated his interest, doubtless nurtured during his restless TV days, in revising genre conventions, hence the downbeat turns of the grim yet humorous Western McCabe, and the oddly relaxed quality of his excursion into noir with The Long Goodbye.
Nashville (1975), though, won back the audience, was nominated for several Oscars, and invariably appears on critics' "Best of the 1970s" lists for its layered narrative, breezy character treatment and witty music. Technically, the film was perhaps most remarkable for its dense, multi-track sound, which enabled Altman to subtly merge a diverse and often satirical group of stories set in the world of country music and contemporary politics. The accolades stopped with the still underrated Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (1976), Altman's bicentennial film, which explored the marketing of American history. His feud with producer Dino De Laurentiis over its editing led to his dismissal from Ragtime(1981), eventually directed by Milos Forman.
Altman debuted as a producer with Welcome to L.A. (1977), by his protégé Alan Rudolph, and The Late Show (1977), by screenwriter Robert Benton, both films echoing his fondness for quirky characters and situations. Altman's own directorial style continued to evolve and diversify with 3 Women (1977), which won Shelley Duvall the best actress prize at Cannes, the freewheeling satire A Wedding (1978) and Quintet (1979), an obscurely poetic film set in a snowbound post-apocalyptic world. Two comedies of this period, the offbeat romance A Perfect Couple and H.E.A.L.T.H. (both 1979) were not widely seen. His final Lion's Gate film, Popeye (1980), was a curious cartoon recreation that, like all Altman films, has its champions and its detractors.
In 1981, Altman sold Lion's Gate and turned his attention to the theater. He staged and then filmed the drama Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982); Secret Honor (1984) portrayed Richard Nixon (Philip Baker Hall) delivering an "mea culpa" monologue; and Streamers (1983), a film of David Rabe's play about stateside barracks life in the early days of the Vietnam War, garnered some critical support and a Venice Film Festival award for its ensemble cast. Paradoxically, Altman returned to carving a niche in the small screen, working on several made-for-TV productions including The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1988) and Tanner '88 (1988).
Treading water as a film director for much of the 80s, Altman helmed such little-seen misfires as Beyond Therapy and O.C. & Stiggs (both 1987) before regaining critical attention with his handsomely filmed, quietly intense portrait of the Van Gogh brothers, Vincent & Theo (1990). He followed up with his most acclaimed film in years and one of his most commercially successful ever, The Player (1992), a bravura, scathingly satirical look at Hollywood opportunism that reunited Altman's restless camera stylistics with his ironic take on popular culture. Short Cuts (1993), meanwhile, suggested a return to the collage of portraits from Nashville, as 22 actors in nine different tales enacted Altman's take on writer Raymond Carver's stories of families and marital problems in a darkly rendered vision of Southern California life. Altman continued in a lighter but similar panoramic vein with Ready to Wear/Pret à Porter (1994), as another highly varied collection of current and past stars and character players enacted roles in a satirical look at the world of couture fashion during the Paris shows. Altman followed this with Kansas City (1996), a homage to his hometown and the 1930's subculture of jazz and gangsters, and an adaptation of John Grisham's bestseller The Gingerbread Man (1998) starring Kenneth Branagh.
Altman's latest, his 35th film, is the delicious black comedy Cookie's Fortune, a southern fried treat that tells the serpentine story of what happens in tiny Holly Springs, Mississippi when town matriarch Jewel Mae "Cookie" Orcutt (Patricia Neal) is found dead from a gunshot wound. Everyone from the inept local authorities (Ned Beatty, Chris O'Donnell) to Cookie's estranged nieces (Glenn Close and Julianne Moore, both brilliant), to her handyman and best pal (Charles S. Dutton) try to unravel the mystery, with delightful chaos ensuing. The screenplay by Anne Rapp is a delightful mix of William Faulkner-esque southern eccentricities and homespun humor, and the film itself resonates with auteur Altman's own distinctive signature, as always. The October Films release also stars Liv Tyler, Donald Moffat, and Lyle Lovett and is being released in Los Angeles April 3.
In person, Robert Altman is as genuine a person as the characters in his films, exuding the boundless energy of someone decades younger than his 74 years. Mr. Altman sat down recently with us to talk about Cookie's Fortune, his other legendary films, and the rich life he has led as one of the world's premiere filmmakers.

This film, like all your work, can be categorized into a genre on the surface, but still retains your very distinctive style. What was it that drew you to Cookie's Fortune?
Robert Altman: Anne Rapp, who wrote it, has been under contract to me and we developed it together. She's from the south, from Texas, and is writing my next film as well. It's called Dr. T and the Women, about a gynecologist who's pussy-whipped (laughs). It's a Texas story. Anne is very good at this type of story.

Your work seems to have a very specific painterly influence, with your fluid camera, as well as a strong literary influence with your John Dos Passos-style ensemble of colorful characters.
I'm sure I've been influenced in both areas (by different artists), but with the multi-character thing, mainly what I'm trying to do is make the story dense, fill the corners, rather than deal with just one or two characters. The problem is, of course, to really get the most out of it, you've got to see these pictures a couple of times. With Cookie's Fortune, for example, on the first viewing it's a whodunit. You want to know who's responsible for the mysteries that unfold. Then the next time you see it you know all those questions and you can then deal with all the details. But you can't ask audiences to do that, especially nowadays. Although I think it's always been like that. It's a shame that anything that's complicated seems to turn many audiences off, but I don't know how to do it any other way.

You've always done that, though. Even as far back as The James Dean Story, which was also very dense with characters.
Yeah, George W. George and I did that together, shot it, edited it...The thing I think that made that film interesting was the way still photos were used.

And that style is still being used on news magazine shows and in documentary films today.
Yes, that's true.

Let's talk about your early TV work. I just saw your famous episode of Combat, where Vic Morrow surrenders to the dead German soldier. It's now regarded as one of the greatest episodes of television ever. Is it true that doing that controversial episode got you fired?
(laughs) Yeah.

It sounds like you've always had a maverick sensibility.
Well, that's what I've been labeled as, but I certainly don't think of myself that way. What happened with Combat was I produced the episodes that I did, and really liked those. The executive producer at the network turned the script down flat, said it would stir up too much controversy. He went out of town one week and I said "to hell with it," and just went ahead and did it while he was gone. He came back, found out, and fired me. And it turned out to be the show's premiere episode. I think it was nominated for an Emmy.

I've also always loved the ambiguity of the endings in many of your films, especially in Cookie's Fortune. We never know whether (a certain character) is aware of what they did or not.
Yeah, and I'm still not sure myself. Sometimes I think they knew exactly what they were doing, other times I don't. I don't know the answer, so how can I tell you?

In many ways Cookie's Fortune could be looked at as the portrait of a culture war--the old south ways grappling with more up-to-date values.
In many ways it's a comment on the culture that exists, especially the notion of family pride. And it's true, suicide in those small communities is considered a disgrace. And most suicides, and this is true in all cultures, which are done in a reasonable way, like taking pills or putting a pillow over your face, many family members don't know that the person has committed suicide. It's kept hidden...the old south values are colliding and disappearing every year. The population of the town, Holly Springs, where we shot the film, is 50% black and 50% white. There's no racial problems there, but there's also no mix. It's silent. The chief of police is black. The mayor is black. But I had a situation there where I had a knee problem, and I called this woman who was our sort of coordinator and contact to the city, and I said "I need a doctor. Do you have anyone you could recommend to me?" The lady said (southern accent) "Well...there's two doctors, and they're both very good, I hear. Either one would be good." I said "Could you recommend one?" She said "Well...one of them is black, and the other one is white." And I said "Well, could you recommend one, please?" She said "Well...that would be your preference." Finally I said "Who's closer?" (laughs) It's amazing that that's still there, and I guess it always will be.

You grew up in the midwest. How did you fall in love with film?
I don't know, I just did. I went into the Air Force when I was barely 18 and started writing when I was overseas. Long letters to my family members...I had a cousin who worked in Hollywood as a secretary to a big agent, and I was pretty impressed with all that. I was stationed here at March Field before I went overseas, and just ate all that up. I thought all those beautiful starlets were just delicious, you know? (laughs) That's what really attracted me.

How did you get that bit part in Walter Mitty?
The director, Norman McLeod, was a friend of my dad's. I was paid as an extra. It was fun.

Where did you see your action during WW II and how did it affect you?
I flew B-24's in the South Pacific, Borneo. I don't know what affect it had on me. I didn't think about it very much. I flew 40 some-odd missions...I got out, was stationed at March Field in Riverside and got a taste of the glamour of it all, more than anything else. Then I started doing writing for the radio. I was a big fan of radio. Norman Corwin was my big hero then. He was a great artist. Radio, after the war, of course, lasted about six years, then television came along and dumbed it all down to zero. Then I went back to Kansas City and got a job with an industrial films company for a few years. I was always pushing toward setting up dramatic scenes in those, things like that.

Is there any one film you saw as a kid that made you say "this is what I have to do with my life"?
Yeah, there were a couple. But the film that, I think, changed my attitude and showed me what film was, was David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945). Before that, films were all flash and action, pussy, and all that stuff. I remember seeing Brief Encounter here, somewhere in the Melrose/Fairfax area, and leaving the theater and just walking for blocks, and blocks. Lean really opened up the medium. The British films of that time were the best. Then later, Kazan did it here, in the theater first, then brought that sensibility to film, the naturalism in the acting. I was influenced by all those kinds of films and consequently my films, I guess, reflect that. I'm the last person who really knows what it is my films do. Most of this stuff is just instinctual and I don't pay much attention to it. I don't know and I don't really want to know. I find myself during the last 30 years of having a lot of accolades and so forth, and I'll be on the set and asking myself "Wait a minute, am I doing this because this is what the critics expect me to do? Am I trying to follow that, or am I dealing with this honestly?" And it's very difficult. You tend to believe your own publicity. It's hard not to, because it's very pleasant. Suddenly you're the expert and you begin to believe it. And that's very destructive.

Is the only way to balance that out to stumble a few times?
I think you just have to keep working, which I have. There's not a filmmaker who's ever lived who's had a better shake than I have. I've never been without a project since I started. And they've all been things of my own choosing. A lot of times I've been offered things that initially I think are awful, but then after taking some time, I think I see something. Nashville, for example, was a dreadful script. But I had been working on a project for several years called The Chicken and the Hawk, about WW I fliers. But I saw in Nashville and in M*A*S*H something where I could to an ensemble piece and not have to zero in on "stars." So much so, that Elliot Gould and Donald Sutherland halfway through shooting (M*A*S*H) went to the studio and tried to get me fired, saying I was paying more attention to the extras than I was to them. And they were right! I never knew about that until years later. Had I known, it would have broken my heart. Gould is the one who told me about it. I offered him the lead in McCabe and he turned me down. Then after he saw McCabe he came to me and said "Listen, I have to tell you something..." and told me the whole story.

Even in your first feature, Countdown, you used an ensemble.
Yeah. I had been very comfortable in television. I had been offered features before, but most of the scripts were just dreadful, dreadful things. I wasn't going to do a feature until I found the right one. But I had read this book by Hank Searls called "The Pilgrim Project," about the first moon mission...Warner Brothers at that time had a program for doing films for around $1 million, or under. Bill Conrad (TV's Cannon) was the executive producer and he offered it to me. Normally I would have turned it down, but I loved the book so much.

I also heard the studio cut about half an hour from your version. True?
I don't know. I doubt it was a half hour, but they did change the ending. Jack Warner had been in Europe the whole time I was making the film. He returned just when I'd finished the final day's shooting. I got a call saying "Don't come in the studio tomorrow. Warner's seen your footage and he's barred you from the lot." I said "Well I have my cut, per the Director's Guild rules. I get to do that." The guy said "Even if you do that, he'll just recut it anyway. Don't bother." So I went to the studio, and sure enough, they wouldn't let me in, and they had all the stuff from my desk sitting outside in this cardboard box...the original ending had James Caan going off in a direction on the moon, using his son's toy mouse for a compass. As he was going off, the camera pans back and you see the shelter in the opposite direction. So you know that he missed it. No happy ending.

M*A*S*H was really the first film to address what was happening in Vietnam, even though it was set during the Korean war.
Yeah, and I did everything I could to hide the fact that it took place in Korea. They made me put that legend (Gen. MacArthur's speech) at the beginning so that people knew it was Korea. Most people missed it, but in our minds, it was all about Vietnam.

Almost all of M*A*S*H was shot right here on the Fox ranch, right?
All of it was shot here. There had been, on the Fox ranch, a dreadful fire and some floods that went through that place. When we went out to look out it, it was really virgin material, with all the vegetation coming in. Before that there had been pieces of tracks, and old sets, shit like that all over the place. They were willing to send us far away on location to shoot it, but we shot it all here and it worked out well.

You got a lot of high-profile offers after the success of M*A*S*H, but you chose the quirky and offbeat Brewster McCloud as your next film.
Yeah. I thought it just a really crazy, interesting story. All these things are really capricious, you know. It's all about how you feel at the time...and unfortunately Brewster was released the same year as M*A*S*H was (1970), M*A*S*H in January and Brewster in December. And I remember MGM just threw Brewster away. A new studio chief had just come in. I don't think it ever would have been a mainstream success anyway. It was just too bizarre.

With McCabe & Mrs. Miller, you re-thought the western. Many experts on the period site it as the first film to capture the old west as it really was.
Yeah. All those people in the west were first generation Europeans. They didn't have that Texas drawl. Most of them spoke with Irish, Italian, German accents. They carried their own stuff and styles with them, also. Nobody wore those big, ten gallon hats! The thing that really gave me the kick-off on how to do McCabe, because the book had all these classic elements of the western: the hero, the whore with the heart of gold, the three gunslinger villains...so I knew that people would pay attention to that, then I could pay attention to the detailing. The genesis of all that was the logic of how much a photographic plate cost in those days. You didn't have instamatic cameras with guys running around taking 40 pictures back then. Photographic plates were glass negatives, and very expensive, so nobody wasted what went into them. So in the book, you'd see pictures of this cowboy with this huge hat on. What happened was, a cowboy would wear this sort of hat on purpose, to get noticed by a photographer, so they'd take his picture! So when all the classic westerns were made, this is what the makers used as reference, never thinking for moment that it was very rare. So that's the premise that we used.

What struck me about it as a kid was the grubbiness of it, how all the people looked like they smelled, had bad skin, like they had head lice and bad teeth. No John Wayne with capped teeth in sight.
I got Warren (Beatty) to go as far as to put a gold tooth in. Leon Erickson, who was our production designer, was up in Vancouver with us building the town. It was all done organically, being built as we shot it. I shot it in sequence. Warren came up for a visit. Leon was there, looked at his teeth and said "You know, we've got to put some stuff on there and dirty those teeth up. Nobody looked like that back then." Of course Warren was horrified at this prospect, called me back later and said "I'll wear a gold tooth up front, but that's it. That oughta satisfy your friend." (laughs)

Let's talk about Images, which is a very overlooked film. I have an interesting story about this. Phil Ochs, who was a famous folk singer in the 60's, went to see Images with a friend of mine. Halfway through the film, when it's still not quite clear what Susannah York's visions are all about, Phil turned to my friend and said "I get it now. This chick's gonna kill herself." And three years later, Phil committed suicide. I can't think of any other film before or since that's captured the psychology of a suicidal mind so vividly.
That's very interesting, I didn't know about that. I like that movie a lot. (Susannah York's) character was going through all that, and the images that she kept seeing led to that confrontation with herself. So I think we did succeed in capturing that psychology. The only thing that dates it is that goddamned wardrobe, with the boots and the mini-skirts, all those Carnaby Street fashions. Susannah York did her own wardrobe, and again, that's the only thing that I don't like about the film today. The clothes just date it so badly.

Nashville remains one of your signature films and doesn't seem dated at all today.
We're coming up on its 25th anniversary. We're hoping to get it re-released theatrically and on to DVD, but the trouble with doing that with so many of these pictures is that it's hard to find out who really owns them now. They don't even know themselves. We've chased Nashville down to get new prints made for the year 2000, and we couldn't figure out who the fuck owned it! We finally figured out that the real owner is Disney because they own ABC...but with most of my films it's very difficult. Many of these executives at the studios don't know that these films of mine ever existed, let alone do they know that they own them!

Was Nashville a difficult shoot? I'm thinking especially of the freeway scene.
It took seven weeks to shoot. I did a lot of set-ups each day, but it wasn't a terribly tough shoot overall, no. Quintet and The Gingerbread Man were probably the toughest just because of the weather we had to deal with.

Quintet is another film that was overlooked.
It was very badly distributed, and received even worse. People just think it was junk. As was Popeye. Oddly enough, more eyes have seen Popeye than any of my films, because it's been used as a baby-sitter for 15, nearly 20 years.

The question is, are you happy with them?
Oh of course, all of them. But that really doesn't matter to me. I don't think there's one person who can look at my films and say "I love them all." But I have to like them all, or I wouldn't have done them.

You tend to work fairly quickly. What's your average shooting schedule?
40-45 days. Cookie I shot in 36 days, but I've never worked so many hours on a film before, ever. Nashville was shot for under $2 million. I didn't have an art director. I just used two cameras and shot it.

I noticed a lot of your films are family affairs: your son Stephen is your production designer...
Yes, I have another son who's a camera operator. My youngest son Matthew works in the art department, props and set-ups.

And your grandson played Swea-Pea in Popeye, right?
Yes. He's now in his second year at the University of Michigan.

The Long Goodbye is dedicated to Dan Blocker (Hoss on Bonanza).
Dan was supposed to play the Sterling Hayden part, then died right before we started shooting. I canceled the picture. I wasn't going to do it. This agent calls me the day after Dan dies, saying "I've got the perfect guy for the part." Disgusted, I said "Don't even tell me his name!" and I hung up. Then John Huston was going to play the part, and I agreed to start the picture again. Then John got sick and couldn't do it. Then that agent called back, and told me about Sterling Hayden. By that time I had already started shooting the picture, so we went with Sterling. And I'm glad we did.

I think The Long Goodbye would be a great double-bill with The Player, because both pay homage to Hollywood in different ways.
Absolutely. In the beginning of The Player we had the opening shot from Touch of Evil (1958) and in the end of The Long Goodbye we had the end shot from The Third Man (1949).

I also loved the fact that you changed the ending from the one in the book. Every time I've seen The Long Goodbye with an audience, there's nearly a standing ovation when Terry gets his comeuppance from Phillip Marlowe.
That wasn't in the novel, but it was in the script that Leigh Brackett wrote. I said "I'll do this picture, but I want it in writing that nobody will change this ending, otherwise I won't do it." I remember one of the first screenings we had of it, there was this publicity woman who brought her sister with her, they were both little old ladies, and the sister came up to me and said "Oh Mr. Altman, that was such a wonderful film, but tell me, isn't (Marlowe) going to get in trouble for that?" (laughs) She was so concerned...

Tell us about Leigh Brackett (screenwriter of The Big Sleep (1946), Rio Bravo (1959) among others). Not much is known about her.
I never got to know her that well. We had kind of a mutual admiration going on. U.A. wanted me to do her script of The Long Goodbye with Elliot (Gould). They didn't want me to use Nina Van Pallandt, but they gave in after I shot some tests with her. Sterling Hayden was great, though. He was stoned all the time, drunk all the time. As a young man, at 20 or 21, he was the best merchant captain in the world. He'd run those routes and would drive his crew so hard...but he made all those routes on schedule. Then he was discovered for the movies, met Madeleine Carroll (The 39 Steps), who was 10 years older than he was, and they got married...he was really remarkable. I was very fond of him. Remember the party scene where Henry Gibson comes up and slaps him? I was actually living in that house where we shot. Sterling lived in an apartment three doors away on the beach. He would just walk to work. The wardrobe he wore in the film was just the clothes he happened to wear to work that day. Anyhow, he'd gotten drunk the night before we were going to shoot the party scene. The next day he showed up, carrying a bottle of scotch. Henry Gibson was scared to death of slapping him, because Henry's this little guy and Sterling was this giant, 6'5, 225 pounds. Sterling just started improvising through the whole thing "You little albino prick..." (laughs) just letting him have it. He had a little Irish cap on that he always wore. We had two cameras on it and it was going well, but then I looked down and noticed how badly Henry's hand was shaking. I said "Henry, there's only one way to do this: you've got to hit him as hard as you fucking can. You're not going to hurt him, and he's too drunk to know it, anyway. Just let him have it." And he did, in such a way that Sterling's hat went off of his head, turned around and came back on his head, and the bill was now facing backward, and that was in the shot. Then he takes the scotch bottle, and slams it down on this redwood table. That thick glass bottle of Johnny Walker just disintegrated! Just disappeared! Nobody was even hurt because it was just powder! I've never seen anything like it. He went into the house, flopped down on the couch. I had two angles on him, one master shot. I went in and said "Sterling?" He went "Aarrgghhh!!!" and he hit me (on the arm)! I said "Sterling we've got to do this again. Can you do it again?" He said "Aaargh, you fuckin' son of a...aarrggh!!" So he gets up and I use a tighter lens to shoot the close ups. He was saying not the same things, but kind of the same things. So Henry hits him again, only this time, the hat doesn't turn around. So I'm thinking "Oh, shit!" Now Sterling's playing the scene with a wine bottle, made of breakaway glass, because we weren't going to see the bottle in this shot. I said "Just throw the bottle on the table, otherwise you're going to hurt somebody." I knew by that time he was completely drunk. So we do the scene again. Henry slaps him. The hat doesn't turn around again. I thought "Shit, I'm dead." Sterling smashes the bottle, turns around, and turns his hat around with his hand, and played the rest of the scene like that. How he remembered, I don't know. He went back inside and passed out on the couch, and we shot the rest of the day without him. The next day, it was a Saturday, I think, and we weren't working. I woke up late and he was down having coffee with my wife. I came down, he walks up and says "Bob, I'm so sorry. You can have my whole salary. I'm sorry for not showing up yesterday. I'll repay whatever it cost you." He didn't remember that he'd done the scene the day before! He did the whole thing in a blackout! I said "Sterling, you showed up," and we had to show him the dailies before he'd believe me. Something in his instincts kept him going.

Tell us about adapting stage works such as Jimmy Dean and Streamers for the screen.
When I did the play Jimmy Dean, we did 60 some-odd performances, but (critic) Frank Rich just killed us and we had to close down. So I decided to film it with those six ladies (Sandy Dennis, Cher, Karen Black, Sudie Bond, Kathy Bates, Marta Heflin). We just put four walls on the set and did it. I loved it and got interested in that, did Streamers, Secret Honor, and Beyond Therapy, I shot in Paris, but redid it as a screenplay. That was fascinating work, opening up the medium for the screen. I did it for a couple years. With Fool for Love, I adapted the screenplay and opened up the set of the motel outside to the courtyard, but still tried to keep it claustrophobic.

The Player is considered the best Hollywood satire ever made. Tell us how you came to it.
It's not as tough in the picture as it really is in real life. These people are much uglier in real life than they were in that film. There's a lot more buck-passing that goes on. They actually came to me with The Player while I was putting Short Cuts together. The success of The Player allowed me to do Short Cuts.

How difficult was it arranging all the cameos in The Player?
Not that hard. I just got on the phone and called these people up. The big coup was when Julia (Roberts) and Bruce (Willis) agreed to do it. Julia did it because she and Tim Robbins were friends and Bruce did it because Bruce just does that kind of thing. We had a list of who could show up on what day and shot accordingly. I actually had Jeff Daniels and Patrick Swayze in a scene that didn't make the final cut (you can see it on the DVD version). Most of the people did the cameos, I think, because it made them look human. The scene where Malcolm McDowell attacks Griffin Mill in the hotel lobby, for example, or when Burt Reynolds is sitting with (critic) Charles Champlin, calls Griffin an "asshole." That was all improvised, by the way.

How much time do you rehearse before you shoot?
It depends on what is required in the rehearsals. Is it for lighting, for the prop man, for the crew, for the actors? Whatever seems to be necessary...most improvisations, unless you're doing a big scene like the church burning in McCabe, you improvise in rehearsal, and then it becomes set by the time you shoot.

Do you storyboard?
No, except for certain scenes, like when Sterling walked into the ocean in The Long Goodbye. Logistically that was complicated, so it had to be fairly well-plotted. I don't do them, but my son Steve storyboarded the whole chase on the dredger in Gingerbread Man. So I shot it that way, based on his storyboard.

Your battles with studio execs have been legendary. How would you advise young filmmakers to handle situations like that, to not let their work be compromised?
Well, I think you either fight for your child, or you don't. You also have to be prepared to suffer the consequences if you start the fight and lose.

Any advice for first-time directors?
The same advice I give my children and anybody else: never take advice from anybody! Anybody who gives you advice is giving you what they think is correct for them if they were in your position. But they're not you! And you're not them.

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