Sidney Lumet 1924-2011

Director Sidney Lumet.

Sidney Lumet was the first director I interviewed whose one-sheet posters hung on my wall as a kid. He was an idol, an icon, and an inspiration. I wasn't yet 30 when I met him at The Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills for our interview at the press junket for "Night Falls On Manhattan," one of his solid, authentic urban dramas that blended crime, politics and personal revelations that became his signature.

Lumet immediately put any butterflies I had at ease. Diminutive, but with the infectious energy of a teenager, his was a disarming presence. He paid me a compliment on my sportcoat, saying that I looked a bit like the young Mickey Rourke (which I still don't see, but what the hell), then went on to regale me for an hour with stories about his remarkable life in the theater, the early days of live television, and of course in film.

The other indelible memory I have of that day is this, and it remains a potent lesson to me about the fragile, complicated and often mercurial personalities artists possess: another journalist who was waiting in the "holding room" for his turn with the maestro, a man whom Lumet obviously knew as he greeted him warmly, had brought his teenage son. The boy looked at Lumet in awe. Lumet smiled, shook the lad's hand, and asked about his interests. The boy replied "I want to be a filmmaker, and you're my hero." Lumet's entire countenance changed on a dime. He immediately broke eye contact with the boy, turned and hurried away, as if the kid had just spit in his face. I'll never forget that moment.

Lumet's body of work is one that will carry on for the ages, and remains one of the cinema's most diverse. It is unlikely, given the vast changes in the movie business since Lumet's entry, that another contemporary filmmaker will ever assemble one to rival it.

Thanks for it all, Mr. Lumet. Tonight will be spent with a bearded Al Pacino, a raving Peter Finch, a haunted Rod Steiger, and a vulnerable Paul Newman, magnificent bastards all, reaching for that moment of redemption.

SIDNEY LUMET: THE MASTER SPEAKS
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the May 1997 issue of Venice Magazine.

Regarded by many as the finest motion picture director of his generation, Sidney Lumet's films have been nominated for over fifty Academy Awards. Born in Philadelphia in 1924 to parents who were veteran performers in the Yiddish theater, Lumet initially took to the stage as a child actor, making his debut on radio at age four and stage debut at the Yiddish Art Theater at five. He went on to appear in many Broadway plays, including "Dead End." He made his only film appearance at 15 in One Third of a Nation (1939). When WW II broke out, Lumet's career was put on hold as he did his U.S. Army service in India and Burma as a radar repairman from 1942-46.

Upon his return to the States, he organized an off-Broadway actors' group and became its director. During this time, he also directed in summer stock and taught acting at the High School of Professional Arts. In 1950, he joined CBS, where he soon won recognition as a gifted director of TV drama ("You are There," "Omnibus," "Best of Broadway," "Alcoa Theater," and "Goodyear Playhouse," among others). He was given his first chance to direct a motion picture with 12 Angry Men in 1957 when the film's producer and star, Henry Fonda, took a shine to the young director and his TV work. Thanks to his TV experience, Lumet was able to complete the tightly structured courtroom drama in 19 days on a budget of $343,000. With the help of cameraman Boris Kaufman, Lumet used the space restrictions of the cramped setting to advantage, generating uncommon tension from the claustrophobic confines of the jury room. The film and its director were nominated for Academy Awards. Lumet won the Director's Guild Award and the film was widely praised by critics. It would lay the groundwork for territory that Lumet would explore in many of his future films: humanity attempting to prevail amid cynicism and corruption in an urban, political setting with a righteous protagonist standing alone in this harsh world in which he is attacked from all sides, sometimes by those he loves and trusts the most.
Lumet received another nod from the DGA for his handling of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (1962), on which he applied a masterful mix of static and dynamic camerawork, turning the play into a distinctly cinematic work with a classic performance from Katharine Hepburn in the lead.

Lumet's growing reputation was further enhanced by his intelligent handling of the Cold War thriller Fail Safe (1964), and his compassionate treatment of a complex psychological theme in The Pawnbroker (1965), the profoundly disturbing story of a Holocaust survivor's anguished existence in New York's Harlem amidst his burning memories of the concentration camps. After generating a powerful drama of the wretched life in a British military prison in The Hill (1965), the first of his four collaborations with star Sean Connery, which also included Murder on the Orient Express (1974) and the little-seen masterpiece The Offense (1973), Lumet's next big commercial splash came with Serpico (1973), the riveting true-life police thriller starring Al Pacino about an honest cop trying to expose widespread corruption within the NYPD. Lumet followed this classic with the equally-lauded Dog Day Afternoon (1975), again with Pacino in the lead in a story ripped from current headlines about a young Brooklyn man who robs a bank to pay for his lover's sex change operation. This was followed by another classic of the 70's, Network (1976), his greatest commercial triumph. Although the film, which was written by Paddy Chayefsky, was denounced by broadcasters and many critics as preposterously false, it was a huge moneymaker earned several Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. It won four Oscars in the writing and acting categories. Lumet next shared an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay of Prince of the City (1981), another true story of police corruption in New York. His subsequent films in the 80's received mixed notices, with the notable exceptions of the riveting The Verdict (1982) and Running on Empty (1988). In 1995, Lumet wrote the best-selling book Making Movies which is now in its seventh printing.

Lumet's 40th film, being released this month, is Night Falls on Manhattan, which Lumet adapted for the screen from Robert Daley's novel Tainted Evidence. The film explores familiar Lumet territory of political corruption, tough cops, and the mean streets of New York in telling the tale of one Sean Casey (Andy Garcia) an Irish-Puerto Rican former cop and wet-behind the-ears assistant D.A. who is thrust into the limelight after being chosen to prosecute a high profile, headline making case. As he moves deeper into the criminal justice system, Casey's world is torn apart, as he experiences personal and professional betrayal after discovering a crime and cover-up among those closest to him. Richard Dreyfuss, Lena Olin, Ron Leibman, James Gandolfini and Ian Holm give fine support in the large, emsemble cast. The film is a riveting drama, and ranks among Lumet's best work to date.

Although now in his early 70's, Sidney Lumet looks at least ten years younger and carries himself with the countenance and boundless energy of a man in his mid-20's. Mr. Lumet sat down recently in a plush suite at the Four Seasons Hotel to reflect on his prolific and distinguished career, and to talk about Night Falls On Manhattan.

How did someone who seemed to have a bright future as an actor, suddenly fall in love with directing?
SIDNEY LUMET: You know one of the things in everybody's life, and people always seem to think I'm kidding when I say this, luck has a tremendous amount to do with it. It's stunning to me how big a part luck plays in your life. I'd been an actor, and I was making a decent living, not great, but decent, and I was teaching--I'd set up the drama course at the High School for the Performing Arts--and a friend of mine, Yul Brynner, was directing for television at that time, and a wonderful director by the way. And Yul said (imitating him)'Come on over! Nobody knows what they're doing. It's great fun! You'll make good living!' And so I went into CBS as Yul's a.d., his assistant director. And then when Yul left to do "The King and I" on Broadway, I took over the show, which was a melodrama called "Danger." It was a half hour show every Tuesday. So I really just fell into it. I did that for some months. Then I started doing more shows from there.

Henry Fonda was apparently instrumental in bringing you onto 12 Angry Men. How did the two of you hook up originally?
Again, luck. I had worked with Reggie Rose, who wrote the script, on "Danger." We had done some of Reggie's first scripts. He always liked what I did with his work. So when the movie came up--I had not done the original television show--Reggie wanted me to do it. Before I began directing, I and another group of actors had formed a workshop off-Broadway. And we'd be there doing exercises, vocal exercises, physical exercises, and work on scenes. And I had done some directing there, that's actually where I started directing. There wasn't an official director in the group, but somebody had to say 'You go over here,' 'You do this,' So I started doing it...and at the end of every year, we tried to find a new American play that we would mount in a workshop format...now, we're talking about luck again. One of the actors in the workshop, a guy named Joe Bernard, was also in "Mister Roberts" at the time on Broadway...when it came to the year end project, Fonda came down to see him. Two or three years later, Reggie brought (Fonda) 12 Angry Men and mentioned my name to direct, and Fonda said "Oh yeah, I remember him. I saw something he did down in the Village two or three years ago that was extraordinary! Yeah, I think he could do it." And that was it. Again, talk about luck!

How did you build and then maintain the tension in 12 Angry Men since you were working in such a confined space on such a tight schedule. Was it what you did with the actors, was it camerawork...
A combination of both. Technically it's an enormously complicated movie. You'd think that shooting in a tight space would be the easiest thing in the world, when in fact the easiest thing to shoot is a cattle round-up! Just put six cameras on it and all the footage will be so marvelous you won't know what to choose because the action is so terrific. Here, through the slow intensification of performance, and then also through a very subtle use of the camera: use of lenses, use of lighting...not trying to avoid the claustrophobia, but trying to take advantage of it. Make it more claustrophobic. Make the ceiling feel lower, make it seem as if the walls are closing in on them. We weren't kidding anybody. We were going to be in one room. Let's use it dramatically!

With Night Falls on Manhattan, I noticed that you return to some familiar themes in many of your films: the lone protagonist fighting and exposing corruption, and so on. Is there something specific that occurred in your life that interests you in these themes?
Nothing that I know of. It's an age-old interest. What I find interesting about Night Falls on Manhattan is that (Andy Garcia's character) doesn't pursue anything, it pursues him. And slowly the world that he's living in keeps closing in, and closing in with a complexity he never thought possible, and what he always thought was simple. And suddenly it becomes like peeling an onion, layer after layer, until there's no bottom to it. It just never stops. So that circumstances kind of overtake him, and it's a question of what he does in those circumstances. So in that sense it's different, but it's in the same area. For want of a better word, we'll call them 'The Justice Movies.' (laughs)

Is that what drew you to the book Tainted Evidence initially, those same themes?
The book is actually quite different from the screenplay. Both begin with the same incident--which really happened. It may not have happened exactly that way, but it certainly happened. That was the kickoff, that if this story was true, that a bunch of cops had gone up to knock off the biggest drug dealer in Harlem, and that he had took out four of them and escaped anyway, and the defense that was offered in the real trial was that (the cops and the dealer) were in business together, and that this was self-defense because he knew they were coming up there to execute him, and that if that is so, since that is so ass-over-tea kettle to begin with, such a reversal from what you normally think would happen, all of a sudden it's 'Wait a minute, where am I. None of this makes sense.' I thought, okay, now let's take the prosecutor, the prosecutor's office, all those people, and what happens afterwards. How do they cope?

So that part of the screenplay was all original?
Everything (in the film) from the trial on was original.

I know you've only written two of your other films prior to this, Prince of the City (with Jay Presson Allen) andQ & A. How do you find writing and directing as opposed to just directing?
I love the writing process. It's fairly new to me. And I don't consider myself a full-fledged writer yet. A full-fledged writer is really someone who can invent people, who can get that individual sound of people. So far, I have been, again, very lucky in the sense that, because of my interests, I wind up dealing with cops, so I know how they sound. I've spent so much time with them--thirty years. And the three pictures I've written, the first one in a sense was even easier. The protagonist in that, who was based on a guy named Bob Lucie, I had all his tapes, because he was wearing a wire all those years. So we just transcribed exactly what was said into a lot of the scenes. With Q & A I branched out a little bit more, with Night Falls branched out a little more and who knows, maybe one day I'll be a writer. We'll see. (laughs)

It's a great life.
It's wonderful way, isn't it? And I'm not an egotist, so when we're in rehearsal and the actor says 'Sidney, this line doesn't feel right,' or two actors may say 'Sidney, this scene isn't going anywhere,' we'll talk it out and I'll go home and re-write it and sometimes it's a hell of a lot easier than trying to do it through a writer! (laughs)

I read in your book that a lot of the dialogue in Dog Day Afternoon was improvised. Do you encourage improvisation from your actors?
No I don't. I'm not a believer in improvisation, although I like it as a rehearsal process, but not for shooting. I find most improvisations wind up being rather self-indulgent, and what takes seven minutes to say in an improv could actually be said in a minute or thirty seconds. And time is precious on the screen. But Dog Day presented a unique problem: in its style...the first obligation of that picture was to let the audience know that it really happened. And as a result, the style of that picture isn't even realistic, it's naturalistic. I wanted it to feel like a documentary, and as part of that, I told the actors 'Look, as long as you don't change the meaning of anything, or shift the scene to another direction, use your own words. ' And by the way I did this with the complete approval of the writer, Frank Pierson, who was there and wrote a wonderful screenplay. And we never changed the structure of anything...much of what we used were Frank's words. But he saw the advantage of that. And what we would then do, we wouldn't just leave it as an improvisation. I brought my sound man in and the boom operator, and we recorded the improvisations and that night a bunch of secretaries would sit down and type them up, then Frank and I would sit down...and by the time we began shooting, we had the shooting script with dialogue composed of the improvisations. Only two of the scenes in the film are actually improvised on camera: Pacino's scenes with Charlie Durning and Pacino's yelling 'Attica' at the cops outside the bank.

You seem to experiment with a great deal of styles in your films. How do you respond to critics who accuse you of not having a distinctive personal style?
They're not wrong in the sense that I think that my job is to serve the material. When I'm doing Murder On the Orient Express, I don't want that to look like or feel like Dog Day Afternoon. I shift styles by picture and by subject matter, and by subject matter I mean not only the genre the picture's in, but what the picture's about emotionally. And the only thing is, I do it with great subtlety. To me, a bad shot is a shot that you notice.

Who are some present day filmmakers whose work you admire?
Gee, there's a lot...I love Zemeckis' work. I think Spielberg has become a great director. And I'm not using the word 'great' like Variety uses the word 'great,' I mean of all-time. I think two of the greatest American movies every made are E.T. and Schindler's List. Those are two great movies in the classic sense of the word. E.T., even though it's very different kind of movie in that it's not 'serious,' is one of the most beautiful, perfectly-made movies I've ever seen. An extraordinary piece of work. Nobody knows who hasn't tried it, how hard it is to make a fantasy work. Film is a very literal medium...and when that group of bicycles took off, my heart just leapt, as did the whole audience the night I saw it. The whole place just screamed and cheered and applauded...the sense of emotional release that you had from that, the sense that they were going to win--that's great moviemaking!

Any other names that come to mind?
Well the bad thing about a question like this is that I run the risk of offending those that I leave out, either intentionally or not. There's so many...I love Jonathan Demme. I love Ron Howard's work. He's a wonderful director.

What do you think about the independent film movement?
Well...I'm not sure there is an independent film movement. I hope there is, but Miramax belongs to Disney and Harvey Weinstein is getting himself up to 30 and 40 million dollar budgets, a far cry from where he began. New Line belongs to Turner, so their Fine Line budgets are going up, up, up...The history of independents, by which we really mean in this country, is independent financing of movies--we don't mean 'independent movies.' John Sayles, for example, still makes independent movies. And he's another director I love. There have always been the John Sayles', the individuals who get it done. But the history of independent movies in this country seems to indicate that the independents eventually all get swallowed up by the majors: Dino di Laurentiis, Lorimar...and I think that'll happen more and more as the problems with distribution, I guess I should say the stranglehold on distribution, gets more complete.

Since so many independent-minded films did well at the Oscars this year, do you see those types of films coming back into vogue, like in the late 60's and 70's?
I don't think so. I think you're going to see a big backlash next year! (laughs) I think you're going to see the most expensive movie from every studio nominated next year. I'm probably wrong, but what can I say? I'm a cynical old man! (laughs)

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Roger Deakins: The Hollywood Interview

Cinematographer Roger Deakins.


ROGER DEAKINS: IMAGEMAKER
By
Alex Simon


Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the February 2002 issue of Venice Magazine.

One of the cinema’s world-class directors of photography, Roger Deakins was born in the seaside community of Torquay, Devon, England on May 24, 1949. Originally drawn to art, Deakins attended art college, where he fell in love with photography and soon found that he had an even greater affinity for shooting pictures that move. After attending the National Film School in London, Deakins enjoyed a brief stint as a documentary cameraman, then quickly rose to the forefront of his generation’s cinematographers, with a list of credits that reads like a compendium of the 80’s and 90’s greatest films. Here’s just a few titles lensed by this soft-spoken cinematic wizard: Nineteen Eight-Four, Sid & Nancy, White Mischief, Stormy Monday, Mountains of the Moon, Homicide, Thunderheart, Barton Fink (and all the Coen brothers’ films since then), Passion Fish, The Shawshank Redemption, Dead Man Walking, Courage Under Fire, Kundun, The Hurricane, and two of the most acclaimed films of 2001: the Coen’s The Man Who Wasn’t There and Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind. Deakins is currently in Montreal, shooting Levity for first time director Ed Solomon, starring Morgan Freeman and Billy Bob Thornton.
Roger Deakins spoke with us recently about his life as one of film’s great image-makers.

It’s been a big year for you. Let’s start with The Man Who Wasn’t There and what it’s like working with the Coens. I understand you shot it in color, then had it processed into black & white.
Roger Deakins: We (changed it) to black & white on the print stock and all through the intermediaries for the bulk of the release. Working with Joel and Ethan is really wonderful, really productive. They’re fine filmmakers and fine people, as well, so it’s like working in a family, really, since I’ve worked with them so many times. It’s very comfortable. You can take chances and push things a bit further when you know your collaborators well, you know?

There are a lot of great D.P.s out there who always seem to shoot the same film, no matter what the subject is. Whereas, the look of your films always changes dependent upon the subject matter.
That’s one reason I love working with Joel and Ethan: every one of their scripts is actually very different. There’s nothing worse than reading a script and going to an interview with (a filmmaker) and having them go “Well, we want it to look like Shawshank Redemption.” That’s not really what it’s about, is it? Every story is different and photographically you want to bring that difference to it.

It sounds like you take a very painterly approach. Is that a fair comparison: a D.P. to a painter?
I guess so, yeah. (laughs) A lot of filmmaking, quite honestly, is more about planning and logistics than managing to shoot a schedule. The art side, if it’s there at all, is often something you don’t have time to think about.

When you light for color, as opposed to lighting for black & white, it’s a very different process, right?
Yes, in many ways it’s different. The thing about black & white is you’re so much more aware about the composition of the frame, the depth of the frame, and the way the light is falling in the frame. Quite often, it’s easier to make an attractive picture if you’re shooting in color. I think that black & white focuses you, the viewer, on the subject of the frame.

Even though you shot The Man Who Wasn’t There in color, did you light it for black & white, since that was the final process?
Yeah, very much. We wanted it to have the feel of a period movie, although it wasn’t lit like an old film. It was great to have a chance to do that, to play with that.

One of the things I loved about A Beautiful Mind was the way you captured that 1950’s Technicolor look, and really put the viewer back in that period.
We shot that on Fuji stock, whereas I usually shoot on Kodak. I also flashed it, prexposed it, with an orange light, a warm light, which gives it a flatness, that slightly warm cast that it had. Most color stocks are so saturated, so intense and full of contrast, and tend to make most films look almost zany, actually. (laughs) That old Technicolor look from the 50’s that you mention is really some of the most beautiful color footage that’s been shot, so I’m glad you liked it.

Let’s talk about your background.
I was born and raised in a town called Torquay, a coastal town in southwest England. I spent most of my childhood fishing and on boats. My grandfather was a fisherman. My dad was a builder.

How did you fall in love with movies?
I fell in love with movies as a kid, really. It was sort of a gradual progression. I joined the film society in Torquay and watched current movies as well as films, like Peter Watkins’ The War Game (1967, Best Documentary Academy Award winner). That had a big impact on me. It never occurred to me at the time that being in the film industry is something I could do professionally because I had no connection to it at all. I loved painting and didn’t have an interest in going to work in the local bank or anything (laughs). So I went to art college and took up painting, discovered photography and realized from there that I could get into filmmaking and got involved with shooting documentaries. It was just a whole series of events that led to it, really.

Was there one film you saw as a kid or a student that solidified it for you?
No, I wouldn’t say that. It was much more a progression of watching movies, all kinds of movies, be it documentaries, Italian neo-realism. I remember in the screening of The War Game, this little old lady fainted! (laughs) And I thought ‘God, this is amazing!’ (laughs) Poor old lady! Pretty harrowing stuff, at the time. There was so much that was exciting going on in English television and cinema at the time.

That was the era of “The Wednesday Play” series that launched people like Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, right?
Right! “The Wednesday Play.” That was brilliant. Somehow, our generation has dropped the ball on that whole tradition of British cinema, haven’t we? I mean, Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, God bless them, are still working away, but they’re sort of the last torch bearers of the kitchen sink drama, aren’t they?

So after art college, you got into making documentaries?
Yeah, after art college I started working as a still photographer recording country life in North Devon for a year, and started an archive down there that was eventually taken over by another cameraman for about 15 years until he died. Then I found out about the National Film School in London was opening. A friend of mine told me about it, so we both applied. Luckily, I got in.

Did any of your classmates go on to have successful careers?
Well, Michael Radford (Nineteen Eighty-Four, White Mischief, Il Postino), whom I worked with for a long time. We started doing documentaries together, and then the first few features I did were with him. That’s what started my career, really. Once I did Nineteen Eighty-Four I had a track record and never looked back, really. I was lucky.

Nineteen Eighty-Four was Richard Burton’s last film. Did you get to know him, at all?
Yeah, he was wonderful. He was a very approachable guy. On the first day of shooting with him, we were all terribly nervous. I was maybe 30, 31 at the time. We were a very young crew and were all nervous. Then the call came from the first assistant director that we were all to gather outside Richard’s trailer. So of course we all thought that we were out on the carpet, right? (laughs) And Richard came out and said “I just want to thank you. When I showed up this morning and saw all these young faces, I was absolutely terrified! But I just want to thank you for one of the nicest days filming I’ve ever had.” So it was really nice. I had such a good time with him. I used to hang out with him at lunch and he’d regale us all with stories about his life and career.

Let’s talk about Sid & Nancy next, another terrific film.
Alex Cox is a wonderful filmmaker and hasn’t been able to get a lot of projects off the ground, of late. He’s had a lot of things almost come to fruition and then they don’t happen at the last moment, it seems. He did one film fairly recently called Highway Patrolman, which I thought was just terrific. He’s very uncompromising, which is a problem in Hollywood, and Sid & Nancy was a very uncompromising film, and a really crazy shoot. But because of that, I think it really added something to the picture.

You guys really captured that time and place beautifully. The concert scenes seemed really authentic. Was it just a matter of doing a lot of hand-held, guerilla-style filmmaking?
It was, really. I was thinking of the scene where Gary and the band were playing in Ealing, or somewhere in some dingy little club. We got this audience in, dressed like punks. I was shooting the audience and the band, and had to wear a mask, finally, because all the audience were spitting! (laughs) It was just a matter as kind of hanging on, really, and recording it all.

Another film you shot that I’m a big fan of is White Mischief. You shot Africa like it was reimagined by Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain.
Yeah, and that’s what it was, really. It was a true story, and also this wonderful sort of film noir murder mystery, drenched in decadence. It’s still never been solved. It was such a surreal environment. I mean, the war was going on back in England and these people were living by Lake Navasha in Africa and having these weird sexual parties. A very strange really world they were in. It was completely surreal. The Gin Palace where we shot is an actual place. We visited so many of these colonial houses where these elderly, wealthy people were living out their last days. There were all these wild animals, flamingos and hippos, living around these Scottish mansions, built of Scottish granite, surrounded by these huge hedges, little croquet lawns…and these people never went out of these houses! Africa didn’t exist for them. Their servants would just go out and get them supplies.

I’m a huge Mike Figgis fan, and think Stormy Monday is one of his best films.
Yeah, that was a fun movie. It was lucky, actually. When we did that there was an actor’s strike in America and got Tommy Lee Jones and Melanie Griffith, which was great because it gave the film a profile it probably would have never had. We wanted to give the whole thing a sort of Edward Hopper look, unlike the Newcastle of Get Carter, which was a great film, but had a very gritty, grimy quality. We wanted more of a sort of American, glitzy, colorful look. Mike Figgis is a really nice guy, wonderful guy. He’s got a very eclectic background in theater, and music and has an overall understanding of what he’s doing. He shoots a lot of his own stuff now. I don’t blame him! (laughs)

I’ve always felt that Bob Rafelson’s Mountains of the Moon is an overlooked great movie, and Rafelson is an unheralded American master.
That’s nice to hear you say that because I’ve got a real soft spot for that movie. We had such a wonderful time making that film. I totally agree with you about Bob. I think if you look at his body of work…Five Easy Pieces alone should have given him icon status. But, he’s a crusty old bugger, you know? (laughs) He upsets a lot of people, but I got on with him great and love him dearly. I think he’s an amazing filmmaker.

His work is such a study in contrasts, isn’t it? On the one hand, you have Five Easy Pieces, which is such a study in minimalism, and on the other there’s Mountains of the Moon, a sweeping epic worthy of David Lean.
It’s interesting. Robert always dreamed about doing Mountains of the Moon, and he’d been contracted by Carolco to do Air America (eventually directed by Roger Spottiswoode, 1990). But there was a writer’s strike and the script for Air America wasn’t ready. So Carolco said, “Do you have anything else you want to do?” Robert said “Yes! I’ve got this script, Mountains of the Moon.” They asked what it was about and, according to Bob, they never even read it, just asked how much he needed. He said “I can do it for about 12 (million).” They said “Okay.” (laughs)

Amazing! That movie looks like it cost $80 million!
No, we had six weeks in England, six weeks in Africa with a very small crew. Then we stayed for another six weeks in Africa doing second unit stuff. Hard to believe in the final product, but it actually was fairly low budget.

On Homicide, you worked with David Mamet. Tell us about working with the director as writer.
Well, all directors are different. Mike Figgis is very all-around knowledgeable. Someone like Rafelson is very into the feel of a scene somehow, not the written word and not the images, but how the scene hits you, an untenable thing that he’s searching for. Mamet is really very into the dialogue and script-oriented, obviously. My job in that was much more about creating the visuals for it, really. It was a hard shoot, but a very interesting one to work on.

Tell us about John Sayles and Passion Fish. He’s another unique American artist.
Boy, have I been lucky over the years working with some of these guys, or what? John’s just a lovely man and is such a warm guy and it comes out in his movies. He’s so in love with people, just the way they are. That was a wonderful piece just because it was so simple, just these two characters in this old house on the bayou. He’s very organized, John. He had that whole film storyboarded as thumbnail sketches in his script that we’d go over each day. It was all planned out in his head, really.

Most directors I’ve spoken with have all said that the D.P. is their most essential partner during a shoot. Is the same true for a D.P. with a director?
Oh yeah. Really, a cinematographer’s work is only as good as the director, really. That’s why I love working with the Coens and with Norman Jewison. They really push you to do something and you feel like you can work from a position of strength and take chances and risks. It’s hard when you’re on a film if a director doesn’t have the experience to understand the visual language involved, and there is a whole language involved. And if the director doesn’t understand that or isn’t confident enough with himself to let you, the cameraman, to take what the script requires and create the visuals it can be frustrating.

What advice would you have for an aspiring cinematographer?
I usually say to students that they should find their own way of doing it and not try to copy anybody. They should watch old movies and love movies, but it’s not something you can do by copying somebody else. You have to find your own style and your own way of seeing things.

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David Strathairn: The Hollywood Interview

David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow in Good Night and Good Luck.

DAVID STRATHAIRN WISHES YOU GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s note: This article originally ran in the October 2005 issue of Venice Magazine.

David Strathairn has become one of America’s most recognizable character actors since making his debut in John Sayles’ debut film Return of the Secaucus Seven, in 1980. Born in San Francisco January 29, 1949, Straithairn was educated at Williams College (where he first met classmate Sayles). 71 films later, just a few of his credits include Silkwood (1983), At Close Range (1986), A League of Their Own (1992), Bob Roberts (1992), Sneakers (1992), The Firm (1993), The River Wild (1994), Dolores Claiborne (1995), and L.A. Confidential (1997). In addition, Strathairn has appeared in seven of director John Sayles’ fifteen films, more than any other actor.

David Strathairn gives his best performance to date in what is the best film of 2005 to date: George Clooney’s Good Night and Good Luck. Co-written (with Grant Heslov) and directed by Clooney (who also plays television broadcasting pioneer Fred Friendly), Good Night tells the story of television news icon Edward R. Murrow (Strathairn) and his stand against tyrannical United States Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose “witch hunts” against suspected Communists in the early 1950s are still regarded as one of America’s darkest hours. Backed by a dream cast that includes Patricia Clarkson, Robert Downey, Jr., Ray Wise, Frank Langella, Jeff Daniels, Tate Donovan and, in a heartbreaking turn, the vastly underrated Ray Wise, Good Night, and Good Luck will surely be remembered at Oscar time and should be seen by every American, both as an invaluable history lesson, and as an unsettling portrait of how that history repeats itself. It also establishes George Clooney as a major artist. The Warner Independent Pictures release hits screens on October 7 in limited release, and goes wide the following week.

David Strathairn sat down with Venice poolside at a Beverly Hills hotel, to talk about his latest work.


I think this is a very important film.
David Strathairn: It’s really beautiful, isn’t it? It’s also very resonant, I think. The politics of that particular moment were very alive at that moment, as they are again.

Growing up, my parents spoke to me often about what it was like during McCarthy’s witch hunts in the 50s. I never thought I would see its like again in my lifetime, just as I never thought we’d have another Vietnam in my lifetime.
It seems like every generation or two has to learn a lesson. We can be told, but only hands-on experience seems to be the way we learn. Each step in our awareness of what the world is and where we are in the world, it seems that we’re teaching ourselves the same lessons over and over again.

Yeah, isn’t it ironic that it’s your generation, who fought the Vietnam war, who now find their kids being sent to fight in Iraq.
Yeah, in fact in our short time as a nation and as a species, there always seem to be these landmark events and people who try to pass on some insights. Maybe this isn’t conscious, but just by the dint of their own experience, how they encapsulate their time.

Like Edward R. Murrow.
Exactly, and Fred Friendly and William Paley and Joseph McCarthy. Those people become our teachers, and it seems like we have to apply their lessons over and over again in order to learn them.

McCarthy’s witch hunts were really a continuation of America’s first great culture war of the 20th century which began in the 1920s and was interrupted by WW II. I always saw it as a war between blue blood WASPs who were going after Jews and other groups outside their own who were rising up in prominence and power. If you look at most of the people the HUAC went after, they were Jews, blacks, Poles, homosexuals, and people who’d recently emigrated to the U.S., say since the turn of the century. But all these groups were starting to gain footholds not only in industry and popular culture, but also in politics. And I think this really scared the bourgeois status quo at the time, hence the witch hunts.
Yeah, there’s many ways to cut it: economic, social hierarchy, territorial, and opinion. When a man’s got a different way of walking and talking, why is that perceived as a threat? When extrapolated, something can become a threat, and McCarthy thought that there was really a threat to his way of life. And Ed Murrow felt that McCarthy’s methodology, in protecting his perceived way of life, was a threat to someone else’s perceived way of life, or cultural imperative. It came down to quite a pivotal battle, as history has told us. That was a real turning point in just the individual right to face your accuser, and not give power to the kangaroo court that could ride you out on the rail, based on suspicion. The principals that Murrow stood for, and that he Fred Friendly went out on a limb for, was a very significant moment in what then was a much smaller world.

Tell us about Mr. Murrow. Did you feel you got to know him at all, after wearing his shoes for a bit?
It’s interesting the film is by no means a bio-pic, which I think would have been a very different way of looking at that world if you had dealt with just him. We really look at all the players in that particular chapter of history. For my research, I read a lot about him, and took George’s brilliant advice to keep in mind that it was not a bio-pic, but there was a great deal of information about Murrow and his life, aside from what we portrayed in the film. I did get to meet his son, Casey Murrow, who showed up on the set. He gave a few insights, but was very discreet, and I think he kind of knew the lay of the land, too, that this film wasn’t about what his father ate for breakfast. It was about what happened within the walls of the studio. What I did learn about him from reading about him and speaking his words over and over, was that he had an amazing equanimity as a person who was respectful of other opinions. It was palpable that he was a professional at such a high level as a journalist, that the standards he brought to bear were so exemplary that he really set the bar for all the journalists that came after him. He was a very principled man.

Let’s talk about George Clooney. I can’t think of another performer in recent memory, except maybe Tom Hanks, who’s had the kind of genesis that Clooney’s had. To go from a sort of pretty boy actor that nobody took seriously, to a good actor people respected, to a TV and movie star, to an all-around gifted artist who seems like he can do almost anything: act, write, direct, produce. It’s quite extraordinary.
I agree with everything you say. Not only is he an extraordinary artist, but when you look at the body of his work, he’s always done risky projects like Three Kings, Fail Safe which attempted to sort of give re-birth to a live theatrical event on television as they did in the 1950s, K Street, Unscripted, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, those are all choices, and you get judged by your choices and lauded for your choices. The fact that he chose to make a film as particular as this, as potentially removed from general public awareness, is brave but it’s also very generous to do something like this, to open a window on a moment in our history that is resonant and reflective and applicable is great. And to do it with such deftness and cleanliness…I often say that he and Grant Heslov are the Edward R. Murrow and Fred Friendly of the film, based on the choices they made and the fact that they were out on a limb. The choices they made were the right ones throughout. You just didn’t want to stop making the film during the entire process.

The film has a wonderful leanness to it.
An amazing leanness, particularly considering the amount of improvisation that was done. It was prepared improvisation, by which I mean we rehearsed with improvisation and then shot what bits George decided were best. It was startling to see what resulted from it all. I felt like I had been hit in the solar plexus, not in a painful way, but I just felt like something had really landed when I saw the film for the first time in its complete form. I’m so proud to have been part of all of it.

Tell us about some of your co-stars, who are all the best actors working today. I’ve been a fan of Patricia Clarkson since I saw her in The Untouchables.
Isn’t she beautiful in this? It’s like she’s a 40s or 50s star with this glamorous, sparkling quality she has. Langella was amazing as Paley. You could just feel that he was the boss. But he’s also likable. That’s another great thing about the film, both literally and metaphorically: it’s all gray. The whole situation was gray. That’s why I thought it was such a smart decision to film in black & white. Robert Downey is one of the best actors around. He was a real pleasure to work with, Ray Wise…it was just a dream.

Along with the internment of Japanese-Americans during WW II, I think this is the darkest chapter of modern American history, yet there have only been two feature films done on this subject prior to this one: Martin Ritt’s The Front (1976) and Irwin Winkler’s Guilty By Suspicion (1991). Both were great films, and nobody went to see them!
Well, this is sort of indicative of the fact that people don’t want bad news, or difficult news.

I would even take it further and say people don’t want the truth, especially now. In the 70s it seemed as though it was still okay to be politically and socially aware, and okay to question things.
I agree. Now it’s like if the truth hurts, then let’s not say it. We’ve been kind of anesthetized by our creature comforts. It’ll be fascinating to see how this film is received. It will stir some debate, but there’s not much to debate about it, because it’s documented. It’s history.

Let’s talk about your background. You were born and raised in the Bay Area?
Yeah, born in San Francisco and then bounced around the Bay Area. I’ve been living on the East Coast for a little more than half my life now. My dad was a general surgeon. My mom worked later in her life with handicapped kids and set up a program in the mid 60s called the L.E.P. (Life Experience Program) in California, which was devoted to teaching physically handicapped kids how to be self-reliant. These were the days before handicap access was a reality. I have an older brother who’s a junior high teacher and a younger sister who works in periodical distribution.

When did you know you were an actor?
Oh gosh…that’s a good question, because you always carry around a little guy on your shoulder who says “What do you think you’re doing?” (laughs) I’m waiting to be found out. No, you really rediscover it each time you do it: two steps forward, one step back. With this one in particular, it was quite…I knew that George wasn’t leaving me on my own, but it had that feeling. George has that kind of generosity. He imparted this trust to everyone, cast and crew, that what you were doing was okay, and even better than okay. It gave the shoot this sort of propulsion and excitement. So, I never knew I wanted to be an actor really, but making this film reminded me why I like being an actor.

You’ve been in virtually every film John Sayles has done. Tell us how you met John and what the collaborative process with him has been like.
John was in a couple plays at Williams with me. He was two years behind me in school. It wasn’t until the mid-70s up in New Hampshire at a summer theater program that where this company developed that we really got to know each other. We all cut our teeth together up there. John was on board there for several years acting and directing. Then in ’79 he did Secaucus Seven at the end of the season, using all the company members in the film. That’s how it began, and many of us have stayed with him for the duration. John is so comprehensive in his creation of his pieces, and he includes you in that tapestry. Since he was the first director I worked with, that standard has sort of stayed with me: this communal weave of character ensemble. It’s great working with John because you know from the get-go what he wants, who he sees the character as, and I’ve come to learn that the way he works through the story is, like all the great directors, all the strings are attached to his fingers. That gives you kind a kind of confidence because John knows so clearly what he wants the piece to be.

Sorry to backtrack, but I read that after Williams, you went to Ringling Bros. Clown College! What was that like and why was that something you did?
It was just one of those things you fall into, and it turned out to be something you remember as this amazing hallucination that happened in your life. (laughs) ‘What was that?!’ The circus was quite a world, really quite a world. I think it was the second year of the seven week clown college, as compared to Russian circus training which is seven years. I got on board with them and got hired as one half of a Siamese twin outfit. I remember that time as nine months of amazing moments in a world so tightly itself.

How did it help you grow as an actor?
How to fall down, get up again, fall down. I don’t know how else it helped me. It wasn’t much acting. It was mostly how fast can you change your costume and get back out there on the track. How long can you live without taking your make-up off. One thing it gave you a taste of is bare bones conditions, from a train car to sort of being able to do your so-called craft while you were sitting in mud and exhausted. To sort of put your face in it and ask yourself ‘Do you really want to do this?’ Each day it was like get up, put your boots on, get to work.

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John Sayles: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker John Sayles.


GUNS FOR SAYLES
By
Alex Simon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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