Werner Herzog: The Hollywood Interview

WERNER HERZOG BRINGS THE MUSIC BACK
By
Alex Simon


Academy Award-nominated German film director, screenwriter, actor and opera director Werner Herzog was born Werner H. Stipetić on 5 September 1942 in Munich. His family moved to the remote Bavarian village of Sachrang in the Chiemgau Alps after the house next to theirs was destroyed during bombing towards the close of World War II. When he was twelve, he and his family moved back to Munich. The same year, Herzog was told to sing in front of his class at school and adamantly refused. He was almost expelled for this and until the age of eighteen listened to no music, sang no songs and studied no instruments. He would later say that he would easily give ten years from his life to be able to play an instrument. At fourteen, he was inspired by an encyclopedia entry about film-making which he says provided him with "everything I needed to get myself started" as a film-maker. He studied at the University of Munich, despite earning a scholarship to Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

In the early 1960s, Herzog worked nightshifts as a welder in a steel factory to help fund his first films. He hasn’t put down the camera since. He is often associated with the German New Wave movement along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and Wim Wenders His films often feature heroes with impossible dreams, people with unique talents in obscure fields, or individuals who find themselves in conflict with nature.

Herzog’s films have won and been nominated for many awards. His first important award was the Silver Bear for his first feature, Signs of Life. Nosferatu the Vampyre was also nominated for Golden Bear in 1979. Most notably, Herzog won the best director award for Fitzcarraldo at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival where, in 1975 his The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser won The Special Jury Prize (also known as the 'Silver Palm'). Other Herzog films nominated for Golden Palm are: Woyzeck and Where The Green Ants Dream. His films have also been nominated at many other important festivals around the world: César Awards (Aguirre, The Wrath of God), Emmy Awards (Little Dieter Needs to Fly), European Film Awards (My Best Fiend, a documentary about his legendarily tumultuous relationship with actor Klaus Kinski) and Venice Film Festival (Scream of Stone and The Wild Blue Yonder).
In 1987 he and his half-brother Lucki Stipetic won the Bavarian Film Awards for Best Producing, for Cobra Verde and in 2002 he won the Dragon of Dragons Honorary Award at the Kraków Film Festival.

Herzog was honored at the 49th San Francisco International Film Festival, receiving the 2006 Film Society Directing Award. Grizzly Man, his documentary of the life and death of Timothy Treadwell, won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. Encounters at the End of the World won the award for Best Documentary at the 2008 Edinburgh International Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Documentary Feature.

Herzog’s latest might seem to be a departure from his usual fare, but if you look closer, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans bears many of the master’s signatures. Nicolas Cage stars as a drug-addicted New Orleans cop whose life is slowly coming apart in the changing world of the post-Katrina Big Easy. Although it shares half a title with Abel Ferrara’s 1992 cult classic Bad Lieutenant, the similarity begins and ends there, with Port of Call being every bit as much of a Werner Herzog original as Bad Lieutenant was all Ferrara. The First Look Features release, which co-stars Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer and Alvin "Xzibit" Joiner hits U.S. screens November 20.

Werner Herzog sat down with The Hollywood Interview in Los Angeles, where he has lived since 1995. Here’s what transpired:

When I first heard you were doing this film, I thought ‘What an unlikely marriage of subject and filmmaker.’

Werner Herzog: (laughs) What’s your thought now?

I loved it. I think it’s your funniest film.

It is, yes. There’s such an instant rapport with the audience in terms of the sort of wild, hilarious side of it. It’s humor that you cannot easily name, however, like when you look at slapstick, you know immediately what it is that’s so funny. You know where the jokes are. But here it’s very hard to figure that out, yet audiences have responded very strongly to it.

So there was no hesitation on your part in doing a sequel, or remake of sorts?

It does not bespeak great wisdom to call the film The Bad Lieutenant, and I only agreed to make the film after William Finkelstein, the screenwriter, who had seen a film of the same name from the early nineties, had given me a solemn oath that this was not a remake at all. But the film industry has its own rationale, which in this case was the speculation of starting some sort of a franchise. I have no problem with this. What the producers accepted was my suggestion to make the title more specific—Port of Call: New Orleans, and now the film’s title combines both elements. Originally, the screenplay was written with New York as a backdrop, and again the rationale of the producers set in by moving it to New Orleans, since shooting there would mean a substantial tax benefit. It was a move I immediately welcomed. In New Orleans it was not only the levees that breeched, but it was civility itself: there was a highly visible breakdown of good citizenship and order. Looting was rampant, and quite a number of policemen did not report for duty; some of them took brand new Cadillacs from their abandoned dealerships and vanished onto dry ground in neighboring states. Less fancy cars disappeared only a few days later. This collapse of morality was matched by the neglect of the government in Washington, and it is hard to figure out whether this was just a form of stupidity or outright cynicism. So we tried to incorporate those elements into the story.

Herzog with Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes.

I thought it was a satire.

A satire, I think, is something else. I can’t explain it…there’s something more mysterious to it, something much darker and more subversive. A satire would be, it would try to imitate something and try to ridicule something, and here it doesn’t do it, so I don’t feel comfortable labeling it as a satire. Let’s be content with saying it’s hilarious. (laughs)

Okay, but tonally, it reminded me a great deal of David Lynch’s work.

It’s hard to imagine where you’d see that context. I think in David Lynch’s films you do not have that kind of humor. They’re much bleaker, and much stranger in a way…

I don’t know, a lot of this is pretty strange…

(both laugh) Yes, okay. We’ve got the demented iguanas…

And the dead guy’s spirit break-dancing in the middle of the floor…

(laughs) Yes, yes…

A lot of that, to me, is very Lynchian and while I’ve always found a lot of humor in the subtext of your films, you certainly aren’t known as a filmmaker who specializes in, or even utilizes, a lot of humor. Quite the opposite.

Well, over the decades people have laughed during films of mine, but the difference is, they weren’t sure whether they should be laughing or not. Grizzly Man, for example, has these very hilarious moments.

Well…uncomfortably funny, at least for me.

Yes, you feel uncomfortable, but for example when Timothy Treadwell is in the tent and he’s cursing all sorts of gods because of the rain, and then an hour later he’s flooded with rain, and his tent is crushed, and he continues recording from his crushed tent. He knew this was a hilarious moment, and he plays it dead-pan as a star in his own movie. So of course, there are very hilarious moments.

I understand, and I don’t disagree. I guess what I was referring to was the community of the so-called “film intelligentsia” that tend to label your work as very dark, very brooding…

It’s not the film intelligentsia that I object to. It’s more the kind of post-structuralist, post-modernists, vapid, academic babble that you hear quite often.

Most of the film professors in the world.

Yes, they’re all losers.

Herzog in the police station set, with Nicolas Cage in background.

Yeah, they tend to be people who never made it in the business and then take their anger out on working filmmakers.

I do not postulate that they have to make a living in the film industry, but it’s an unhealthy attitude with which to watch films, because I think films should be viewed with an element of wonder, of surprise, of marveling at something, and they take all the notion of wonder away from you. They stifle it. That’s why I don’t like it.

I won’t use the word “satire,” but I saw your Bad Lieutenant as a commentary on American consumerism.

I became aware of how broken the American system of finance was when I realized you got punished for not owing money. What finally woke me up was a banality: when attempting to lease a car I was confronted by the dealership with the unpleasant news that my credit score was abysmal, and hence I had to pay a much higher monthly rate. Why is that, I asked — I had always paid my bills, I had never owed money to anyone. That was exactly my problem: I had never borrowed money, had hardly ever used a credit card, and my bank account was not in the red. But the system punished you for not owing money, and rewarded those who did. I realized that the entire system was sick, that this could not go well, and I instantly withdrew money I had invested in stock of Lehman Brothers while a bank manager, ecstatic, with shuddering urgency, was trying to persuade me to buy even more of it. So it’s not so much consumerism, as a system that couldn’t sustain itself in the long run. I see this as a noir film, really. We’re living through a great time of insecurity right now. Film noir always is a consequence of the Climate of Time; it needs a growing sense of insecurity, of depression. The literature of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett is a child of the Great Depression, with film noir as its sibling. I sensed something coming in the months leading up to the making of the film: a breakdown which was so obvious in New Orleans, and half a year before finances and the economy collapsed, the signs were written on the wall.

Is that feeling of depression that you sense what attracted you to this material?

I think so, yes. In a way, I was totally astonished by The Dark Knight because, on the one hand, it’s a huge, mainstream movie. But it also astonished me at how dark it was, as though it was a premonition of something coming at us. I went to see the film, and ran into Christian Bale, which was the only reason I saw the film: I wanted to see how Christian was doing, because I so love that man, as an actor. I ran into Christian and (director) Christopher Nolan, and said to Nolan ‘Congratulations, this is the most significant film of the whole year.’ He thought I was kind of making it up, or joking. And I said ‘No, no, no! This is a film of real substance. It doesn’t matter if it’s mainstream or not.’ And it’s wonderful that he made the film the way he did.

And you were seeking to bring that same flavor to Bad Lieutenant?

Yeah, but in a different way. I mean, The Dark Knight isn’t funny at all…

I have to disagree with you there: I thought Heath Ledger was hilarious—the same way Malcolm McDowell was in A Clockwork Orange.

Yeah, but scarier, really deeply scary, as was Malcolm McDowell. Whereas Nicolas Cage is more joyful. You see the bliss of evil with Nicolas in this film. As vile and as debased as he gets, you have to enjoy it because it’s these qualities that connect him and the film deeply to the audience.

Cage and Herzog confer on the set.

Yes, because in a way, he was the purest character in the film.

Yes, it’s a wonderful part and the way Nicolas crafted it, it’s like he put his whole existence into it, somehow. You don’t see something like that often.

Did the screenplay have that same spirit when you initially read it, and did it change much during the course of the shoot?

Yes, it did. It is still (writer) William Finkelstein’s text, but as usual during my work as a director it kept shifting, demanding its own life, and I invented new scenes such as a new beginning and a new end, the iguanas, the “dancing” soul—and actually this is Finkelstein’s, who plays a very convincing gangster in the film—the childhood story of pirate’s treasure, and a spoon of sterling silver. I also deleted quite a number of scenes where the protagonist takes drugs, simply because I personally dislike the culture of drugs. Sometimes changes entered to everyone’s surprise. To give one example: Nicolas knew that sometimes after a scene was shot I would not shut down the camera if I sensed there was more to it, a gesture, an odd laughter, or an “afterthought” from a man left alone with all the weight of a rolling camera, the lights, the sound recording, the expectant eyes of a crew upon him. I simply would not call “cut” and leave him exposed and suspended under the pressure of the moment. He, the Bad Lieutenant, after restless deeds of evil, takes refuge in a cheap hotel room, and has an unexpected encounter with the former prisoner whom he had rescued from drowning in a flooded prison tract at the beginning of the film. The young man, now a waiter delivering room service, notices there is something wrong with the Lieutenant, and offers to get him out of there. I kept the camera rolling, but nothing more came from Nicolas. “What, for Heaven’s sake, could I have added,” he asked. And without thinking for a second I said, “Do fish have dreams?” We shot the scene once more with this line, and it looked good and strange and dark. But it required being anchored in yet an additional scene at the very end of the film, with both men, distant in dreams leaning against the glass of a huge aquarium where sharks and rays and large fish move slowly as if they indeed were caught in the dreams of a distant and incomprehensible world. I love cinema for moments like this.

Tell us about your impressions of post-Katrina New Orleans.

Well, I hadn’t seen New Orleans ever before, so I don’t know the pre-Katrina New Orleans, although I had a basic idea what it was about. I think it was the right location for the film. This was fertile ground to stage a film noir, or rather a new form of film noir where evil was not just the most natural occurrence. It was the bliss of evil which pervades everything in this film. Also, the people of the city understand that bringing people and life back into the city would come through music and culture, and would attract movie-making that would, in its wake, bring people back. I think it’s a wonderful concept. You wouldn’t find that if, let’s say, Omaha, Nebraska had been hit by a terrifying tornado, they would probably do something else to bring people back. In New Orleans, it’s about music. Bring the music back. Even the police department really supported the film, and I really admire the police in New Orleans for their sense of poetry.
How do you mean?

They knew it was movies. It was a beautiful figment of movie fantasy, the whole film. They had the nerve to go ahead with it after they had read the screenplay. They came back to me and said “You know what? We’re going to support you. We’re going to block streets for you. We want this filmed in our city.” And I bowed my head and said ‘This is unexpected and marvelous.’ You see, the city needs a police department of that caliber.

I was in New Orleans last exactly a month, to the day, before Katrina hit, and had been there several times prior as an adult. I always had the feeling that bad things were around you, but were being held back, both literally and metaphorically.

That’s a very good observation, yes.

Many people have compared post-Katrina New Orleans to Europe after WW II, which you grew up in. Did you see any parallels?

No, that was a different sort of thing. Germany was not hit by a natural disaster. Its wound was self-inflicted and a consequence of systematic barbarism during the Nazi regime.

Sure, but one could argue that Katrina’s causing the levees to fail was a consequence on institutional incompetence and indifference to those from a lower socio-economic status.

Yes, but it was not a criminal plot and industrialization of mass murder, of genocide, which you found in Germany during the Nazi time, so I have hesitation to compare it. The comeback for Germany was different than that of New Orleans. It was mostly the women. You see 1945-46 was the year of women in Germany. Most of the men were either dead, or in captivity. The women rolled up their sleeves, cleared the rubble and started the rebuilding. It was the women who instantly acted. So in that respect it is a different destruction and a different recovery. However for children, it was marvelous to grow up in the ruins! Those were our kingdoms and forts. We had whole cleared-out blocks to play in, that still had guns and live ammunition buried in the rubble. I found a sub-machine gun once and tried to shoot a bird with it. The recoil knocked me to the ground. My mother, to my surprise, was not angry. She knew how to shoot a gun and taught my brothers and I how to secure, unload and shoot the gun. She took us into the forest and shot a single round through this big, thick log. The bullet went straight through and all these splinters flew out the other side. She said “This is what you must expect from a gun, so you must never point even a wooden or plastic gun at anybody.” I was cured from that moment on with any preoccupation of guns or weapons, and I’ve never so much as pointed my finger at someone since that day.

It’s interesting you mention that because your attitude toward presenting violence in your films has been almost reverent, in a way. In this film, for example, the violence is certainly there, but you never linger on it.

Yes, and we never really show it happening, just its aftermath. There’s only one real shoot-out, and it’s completely stylized. I do not like violence, graphic violence on the screen, in particular when it is violence against the defenseless. So I do not want to see in graphic detail the murder of a child. I do not want to see in graphic detail the rape of a woman. That’s what I do not want to see, and in our film you don’t see the murder of the Senegalese family.

Tell us about working with Nicolas Cage.

A great joy. This relentless, high level of professionalism he has is really joyous. The work itself was actually very quiet, very focused, almost like open-heart surgery. You don’t rush it, but you focus on the essentials. This is how I like to work, and Nicolas Cage followed me in this regard with blind faith. We had met only once at Francis Ford Coppola’s, his uncle’s, winery in Napa Valley almost three decades ago when Nicolas was an adolescent, and I was about to set out for the Peruvian jungle in order to move a ship over a mountain, for Fitzcarraldo. Now, we wondered why and how we had eluded each other ever since, why we had never worked together, and it became instantly clear that we would do this film together, or neither one of us would do it. There was an urge in both of us to join forces.

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Nicolas Cage: The Hollywood Interview

NICOLAS CAGE: BAD TO THE BONE
By
Alex Simon


It’s an inevitable event in every accomplished artist’s life: if you go back on the timeline of their existence and stop in adolescence, almost all of our greatest actors, writers, filmmakers, musicians and painters went through tumultuous, tortured teenage years, often scorned, almost universally ridiculed by their peers and elders alike for the cardinal sin of being “weird.” Most people run from their inner nerd as they grow into adulthood, masking it behind toned muscle, fine clothing and the right haircut, struggling to be that cool guy or gal whom we knew had all the answers and the clearest skin back when such things started to be de rigeur in our lives (and if you live in Southern California, continue to be).

Nicolas Cage is that rare movie star who not only never seemed to care if he was cool, but was one of the few that seemed to run from it, embracing his inner nerd and quirky weirdness wholeheartedly. Yes, he cut quite the impressive figure in the series of box office smash action films he was in: buff bod, cool wardrobe, good with a gun, and almost inevitably got the hot chick in the end, Bond style. However, unlike 007, who is always seen in the final fade out with a dry martini in one hand and a supermodel with a PhD in astrophysics in the other, Nic Cage would turn around wearing horn-rimmed glasses and reading a mint condition issue of Spiderman #2, with a grin that seemed to say “Fuck you Johnny Cool, I’m still a geek!” And herein lies the brilliance of one of our greatest actors.

Cage was born Nicholas Kim Coppola on January 7, 1964 in Long Beach, the youngest of three sons born to August Coppola (who passed from a heart attack in October), a professor of comparative literature, and Joy Vogelsang, a classically trained dancer and choreographer. Born into one of America’s premiere artistic families, Nic’s father is the eldest sibling of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola and actress Talia Shire. Their father, Carmine Coppola, was an accomplished musician, composer and conductor, and composed much of the music for son Francis’ films, until his death in 1991.

Life was not easy for young Nic, who sought refuge first in his imagination, and then on the stage and in front of the camera. After graduating high school early (he is not a dropout as has been reported in the past), Nic landed his first feature film role (as Nicolas Coppola) in the classic Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) in a part that was mostly left on the cutting room floor. The following year, Nic starred (as the newly-christened Nicolas Cage) in the sleeper hit Valley Girl, which made him one of his generation’s most prolific and acclaimed actors. The momentum hasn’t stopped since, with Nic having starred in over 50 features, producing nine, and directing one (2002’s Sonny). Nic won the 1995 Best Actor Academy Award (as well as a Golden Globe, and the LA and NY Film Critics Award) for his searing performance in Mike Figgis’ Leaving Las Vegas. Nic was nominated in the same category for his brilliant turn as identical twin screenwriters in Adaptation (2003). Whether he’s playing an inbred trailer park denizen who longs to give his wife a child (Raising Arizona, 1987), an Elvis-obsessed hipster on the lam with his true love (Wild at Heart, 1990), or an ambulance driver teetering on the brink of madness (Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead, 1999), Nic Cage is one of the cinema’s great chameleons: although he often changes colors with the diverse parts he plays, his quirky intensity and unpredictability make him completely riveting to watch. Even in some of his lesser films, Cage has never given a lesser performance.

Nicolas Cage gives a no-holds-barred turn in legendary auteur Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, portraying a drug-addicted cop teetering on the brink of insanity, in the post-Katrina Big Easy. A wild, stinging satire rife with Herzog’s trademark haunting, yet beautiful imagery, the First Look Studios release, which co-stars Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer and Alvin "Xzibit" Joiner hits U.S. theaters with a vengeance November 20.

Nic Cage sat down with The Hollywood Interview recently to discuss film, philosophy, and the liberation of embracing your inner nerd. Here’s what transpired:

What was it about Bad Lieutenant which initially attracted you?

Nicolas Cage: I was up for the challenge of it, the risk of it. I’m at a point now where I need to look for work that keeps me interested, keeps me excited about acting. I know Harvey [Keitel], and thought he was excellent in the first Bad Lieutenant, and felt that Abel Ferrara directed a great movie. With Werner and this script, I thought we could take the original Bad Lieutenant and make it a much more abstract film. And New Orleans itself - I have a very close connection with this city. In many ways, I was reborn here; became a philosopher here. It‘s the city that woke me up to the possibility of other ancient energies… and that is both a blessing and a curse. I’ve made four pictures here and this is my fifth. I was afraid to come back and do another movie, but when I’m afraid to do something, I know I have to do it. I have to face the fear, get over it and work through it. These are the main reasons.

Cage and Eva Mendes in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

You chose the setting for this film. Can you talk about this?

I chose New Orleans for the reasons I previously expressed, and it’s a city like nowhere else in the world. We have a Bad Lieutenant in New York, and because this is a new movie entirely, Bad Lieutenant Port of Call: New Orleans, let’s give it a cultural twist that we haven’t seen before.

What was it like to make a film with Werner Herzog?

Werner had come to me in 1995 to do Cortez, and I had just come off of Leaving Las Vegas. I was being very selective about what I was going to do and not do, and when Cortez came across my desk, I didn’t feel it was wise to play this dictator who was pretty horrific. A lot of actors who play Manson or Hitler, you don’t see them again, and I didn’t want that to happen to me. I was also much younger then. I would have a different way of looking at it now. But to get back to Werner – I grew up watching his movies, and my father and Werner are friends. My father was a huge admirer of Herzog’s work, as are some of my colleagues, and they all recommended that I do it. I really like Nosferatu, Aguirre: Wrath of God and Stroszek. Those are pictures that stand out. I thought it would be good to work with him.

I’m always looking for a new way to express myself. I just did a picture in Bangkok with two Chinese brothers and an all-Thai crew, because I thought they would bring a ‘new me’ out. When you’ve acted for 30 years, you have to find new ways of reinventing yourself, and if you can’t find it on your own, you have to go to strange places and see if they can find it for you. Now, I’m working with a German, a great artist, to see what his sensibilities are. What can he see in me, what can he bring out?

Bad Lieutenant is a self-generated motor. Werner knows this and we’ve worked well together because of this. He lets me do what I need to do, and I let him do what he needs to do. Each of us knows who we are, which always makes it easier.

Cage confers with director Werner Herzog.

The search for who we are inside is an ongoing quest, isn’t it? It should always keep going, ideally.
Yeah, and it will, until we become…what’s the right way of saying this? Until we’ve overcome it to the point where we can become masters of our own destiny, if such a thing is possible.

We become the directors, not the actors?

(laughs) Yeah, we’re no longer at the mercy of the elements, but more in control of them.

Ever met anybody like that?

No. Have you?

Never. (both laugh) I’ve always wanted to meet The Dhali Lama. I would imagine he’s pretty close to that.

Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard, too. When he walks into a room, you feel a different level of vibration, that he’s that guy we’re talking about.

Cage in Bad Lieutenant.

Your background is the stuff of Hollywood lore now: you’re the offspring of what has become one of the most prolific artistic families in Hollywood history: the Coppolas. Your father August Coppola was a professor of Fine Arts, right?

Yeah, comparative literature. He initially taught at Long Beach State and then became Dean of Creative Arts at San Francisco State. Here’s the interesting thing about my father in relation to education: he was pretty frustrated with the educational system, so when I went to him in high school and said ‘Dad, I’m not a good match for this. This isn’t me. I want to go to work. I want to act. High school isn’t working for me.’ He actually said “Go ahead and take the (GED) exam, and get out.” So what one would expect, that he would insist I go to college, wasn’t the case. He encouraged me to follow my dream and go on.

But he was also the son of an artist.

Yeah, so he understood that and related to that. Thank you for pointing that out. It has been somewhat confusing to me over the years why he would say that’s okay. It was somewhat important to him that I pass the equivalency, which I did do. I passed the GED, but I didn’t finish the school year. To set the record straight, I am not a high school dropout, as has been said. I have a diploma. I just wanted to get to work.

Your mother is also an artist, right?

Yeah, she was a dancer, a modern dance instructor. She studied at UCLA. I was surrounded by that kind of frequency, of artistic energy, that was always around my family. When I’d visit my uncle Francis, it was everywhere. It’s the kind of thing where, it’s madness. There’s a level of it that’s so eccentric and zany, that if you’re not careful, it can catch like wildfire and burn you down. But at the same time, that’s the very stuff that makes people fascinating to watch and charismatic. The trick is, how do you keep a balance with it and not blow yourself out.

Well, the history of art, and particularly cinema, is littered with the corpses of people who were the architects of their own destruction.

In some capacity whether it’s drugs, high speed driving, or just bad behavior, yeah. This is the very thing that I’m thinking about daily, what we’re talking about now, and I’m trying to think how to express it without sounding like I’ve got my head in the clouds. It occurs to me that we’re on this material plane here and we’re born into it, into matter, and so because we’re on this level, it seems like the people who are the most messed up, and have the largest appetites for the material are the ones we find the most charismatic, and the ones we relate to the most and they sort of take the experience of our lives on Earth and tell the stories. So we go to the theater and we see it, and we say “Yeah, I know what that’s like. I’ve been there. I know what it feels like to drink myself into oblivion. I know what it’s like to want to rob a bank,” and so on. But no one wants to go watch a movie about a guy like The Dhalai Lama. Who’s going to want to go watch that for two hours? As beautiful as it is, people seem to be gravitated toward those who are on this plane and who are succumbing to the plane.

It’s called “drama” for a reason. You know the one word definition of drama, don’t you?

No. What?

“Conflict.”

Yeah, yeah. It’s something that I’m really contemplating right now. If I became perfect, which I am not (laughs), would anybody want to see my work?

But would you want to be perfect?

That depends. It’s almost like if you want to get to another level, assuming there is another level in the afterlife, I’d rather be an eagle than a monkey. But I don’t think anybody wants to watch the eagle. I think they want to watch the monkey.

It’s also comforting, to a certain degree, to watch people who appear to be far more fucked-up than we are, even though that might be the case. Most likely, unconsciously, we’re relating to that pain and that dysfunction far more than we realize. Is that what you’re saying?

Yeah, yeah, that is what I’m saying. The most charismatic stars and performances: Al Pacino in Scarface (1983), Jack Nicholson in a number of movies, Robert de Niro in Raging Bull (1980), these are people who are really beleaguered with issues, but you can’t take your eyes off of them. I’m not saying the actors themselves are beleaguered, but the characters they play are. If you did become perfect, you would almost have to resacrifice yourself into matter to be able to be someone who would be accessible to people.

You would have to become Keir Dullea 2001: you would just become light spheres.

Yeah, exactly! So the artist to me is really the one who, in a sense, is a character who is giving themselves up for the people.

From what I’ve read, you’ve always known that you were an artist, and have marched to the beat of your own drummer from the time you were a small child.

Yeah, that’s right.

Did you know you were an actor at that point, or did you just know you were different?

I knew I was different. I knew in very abstract ways that I wanted to be an actor. I liked what was happening in a box—which was the television set—more than what was happening in my own family living room. I wanted to figure out how to get inside the box. It was mystifying to me, and thought it was amazing that there were people inside this little box. I vowed in my mind that I’d learn how to get inside it.

You were also the victim of bullying growing up because you were perceived as being so different.

Yeah, those were rough years.

But don’t you also think that when you don’t fit into the norm, it forces you to develop the part of your brain that forces you to create, in order to maintain some kind of stability?

Yeah, it’s a training ground of sorts. Look around, this whole place is a training ground. There’s a million opportunities to not give in, and not have it break your spirit. Instead, you can have it be a stepping stone, depending on how you navigate those waters. Our minds are so sensitive at that age. But I had that moment on the football field where everyone in the school starting backing away, and just slamming me with every other name you could think of, and I didn’t know why it was happening. Although it turned out it was because I was wearing a t-shirt that had The Incredible Hulk on it. (laughs) And that was it, from then on.

You were “it.”

Yeah, I was “it.” I was the guy with the cooties. But I remember taking a deep breath, and just kind of gliding out of it, and going home and sort of breathing and calming down, and just sort of making a mental note of it, but not letting it become the wildfire that we’re talking about.

Which is what happened at Columbine.

Yeah, which is what happened at Columbine. You have to have a place which can funnel the negative energy and turn it into a positive. A lot of these kids don’t have that. They have no identity, or that becomes their identity, being an avenging angel, of sorts. If I could have been there, and had been some kind of teacher or something, I would have said ‘What kind of music do you like? Okay, you like goth music. You like it to be really dark and scary. Well, let’s see if we can learn to make it together, to put it all there.’ People get mad at kids when they draw scary pictures, they think it’s the sign of some sort of disturbance. Well, actually it’s art. He or she is taking a scary image, getting it out of their head, putting it onto a piece of paper, and alleviating the pressure. They’re doing something good with it. To take that away, or not facilitate or educate that is why, I think, we have these problems.

Let’s get back to some of your films.

(laughs) Yeah, okay.

Trailer for Valley Girl.

The first movie I saw you in was Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982).

I had auditioned for Judge (Reinhold)’s part, and did about ten or twelve auditions for it, and didn’t get it, but got a supporting part as Brad’s Bud #1 or #2, I forget which. A lot of your scenes are on the TV version, that they air on TNT.

Are they really? That’s bizarre. I remember my father driving me to work on that. I was 16. I guess that makes me a child actor, of sorts. It’s been over 25 years now. It’s very interesting growing up publicly. I was there and most of the actors were five or six years older than me, so I was the nerd again. Another mental note was checked off there. (laughs) Like American Graffiti (1973), Fast Times turned out to have this incredible cultural and artistic synchronicity in terms of all the actors who went onto greatness.

Yeah, there was a buzz in the air that there was something excellent being created. It was another difficult time, though. I was Nicolas Coppola, and there was a lot of “Oh, he thinks he can be an actor because he’s Francis Coppola’s nephew.” So again, I had to sort of figure out how to deal with that, and achieve my goals if this is being put on me. Now again, with a very young, very sensitive mind. So it occurred to me that one, I’d have to work twice as hard as the other actors in order to be taken seriously, and two, that I’d have to change my name. Cage and Deborah Foreman in Valley Girl. So it was between Fast Times and Valley Girl (1983) that Nicolas Cage was born.

Right. You got “Cage” from the musician John Cage?

John Cage and also the comic book character Luke Cage. I liked reading comics as boy—I was a nerd—and it was how I learned to read, really. Then I when I went to Horace Mann Elementary School, in music class they talked about John Cage, and I always thought that it was such a cool name. Then I started getting interested in that kind of music, which is what my father listened to. So that was the genesis of the name. After Valley Girl, everything changed for you.

Yeah, that was the first time I felt like I could breathe on a movie. I walked in on that with a new name. Nobody knew who my uncle was. The other actors weren’t teasing me about it, so I suddenly felt like I could really relax and do what I think I can do. All I wanted was to be on the same playing field as everyone else. Not that I have a problem with my name, but don’t have prejudice towards me because of my name. Just put me on the same playing field because I think I can do this, whether you think so or not. So that’s what Valley Girl did for me. You did three movies with your uncle. Since there was a familial bond in place already, did they two of you have a sort of shorthand in terms of how you communicated?

What happened was, Francis saw Valley Girl and got very excited about the possibility of me, and that’s when The Cotton Club (1984) happened, and then Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), and all that stuff occurred. And I liked working with him. I found him to be very open to some far-out ideas. Peggy Sue I didn’t want to do. I actually turned it down originally. He really went through the paces with me on that. TriStar wanted to fire me and he talked them out of it. I was going for something different with that character, and he didn’t know 100% what he was getting into when he cast me. I told him I didn’t quite know why he wanted to make the movie, and he said “Well, it’s like Our Town.” So I kept turning him down, and finally I gave in on the condition that I could go pretty far out with the character. During rehearsal, I came up with this idea to into Pokey from the Gumby show, and create this cartoon character. Those were some very tense days on the set. Every day I was going to be fired. Kathleen (Turner) was not happy with the performance. She thought she was going to get the boy from Birdy (1984) and instead she got Jerry Lewis on acid! (laughs) Cage in Francis Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married. But that interpretation was so appropriate, because that guy, in every high school in America, is a cartoon!

Exactly! Not only that, but the dreamscape that we were playing in was very exciting to me. So I thought since this is about the visions a woman has when she’s fainted, maybe I could make Charlie a little more abstract. Every time that movie’s brought up today, it’s your performance that people talk about.

That’s what’s so ironic because at the time, it was really lambasted critically. “The wart on an otherwise beautiful movie,” is what one critic said, I think.

Cage and Laura Dern in David Lynch's Wild at Heart. Wild at Heart (1990) is one of those movies that keeps getting better every time I see it. Although I have to admit when I first saw it, I hated it.

You know what’s interesting about what you’re saying now, is I’ve notice this happen with all kinds of art forms. Apparently 2001 got slammed when it came out. Rock Hudson walked out of the theater. The very things that really kind of rub us the wrong way at first, become the things we connect with so deeply later. That’s why I think I get as happy with the bad reviews as I do with the good ones. I don’t want to make people too comfortable right off the bat. If I can really do my job well and get to the truth of something, inevitably that might be a little bit painful. (laughs) And that’s why I try to be careful with the movies I choose. I don’t want to have one identity. I want to keep looking for different points of expression. Anytime you elicit a strong emotional response from someone, you know you’re doing your job.

You know you’re doing something right, absolutely. Owen Glieberman from Entertainment Weekly gave Lord of War a D-, which is basically failing the movie. So I thought ‘Okay, I know it’s not a D-, otherwise we wouldn’t have David Denby from Newsweek saying it’s one of the most enjoyable movies of the year.' He’s a very important critic. So to me, those are very interesting polarities and it says I know I’ve gotten you, Owen. I know I’ve affected you in a way that you’re going to think about this down the road. So it’s actually a good review, if you think about it that way. I actually told them to put (Glieberman’s grade of D-) on the poster, but Lions Gate wouldn’t do it. (laughs)

Cage in his Oscar-winning turn in Leaving Las Vegas, with Elizabeth Shue. Tell us about the experience of making Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and working with Mike Figgis. It was just a great time, all the way around. I had a great connection with Mike and Elisabeth Shue. Mike is music. He’s free form and rhythm and melody and it comes out in his direction. He’s even got music on the set that he was composing. So we had a connection and I hope to work with him again some day. We did the film very quickly, in about four weeks and it just was painless, I don’t know why. It just seemed like everything was linking up. It was channeled with the real guy, John O’Brien, almost. (Editor’s note: John O’Brien, who wrote the novel on which the film was based, committed suicide shortly before principal photography started) I felt like I was making moves that I later on found out he had made, like the way he’d light his matches. The car he drove, Mike wanted him to drive an old Jaguar and I said ‘No, he should drive a BMW, like every other agent in town.’ And he had a BMW, and I didn’t know that. His parents came to the set and would comment on how much I reminded them of their son. I don’t want to get too spooky about it, but it was a very special time. We were in John’s mind somehow. John Woo is one of my favorite directors, and I’m a big fan of Face/Off (1995).Tell us about that. Face/Off for me is a personal milestone because I felt like I was able to realize some of my independent filmmaking dreams in a major studio film. I was taking a lot of the laboratory of Vampire’s Kiss (1989) and points of expression that I was working on with films like Nosferatu (1922) or The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919): early German expressionistic film acting, and with Face/Off, I got do it in a huge genre picture. John had shown me his film Bullet in the Head (1990) and I knew when I saw that where he would let me go. I knew his barometer and that I could put it up against a wall of expressionistic acting, as opposed to naturalistic acting. I’d not done that to that level before in a big studio movie, so it was a real personal best for me. I got to get way outside the box. Cage and John Travolta in a publicity still from John Woo's Face/Off. I forgot that you executive produced Shadow of the Vampire (2000), which was a fictional re-telling of the production of Nosferatu. F.W. Murnau, who directed the latter film, is one of my heroes. Yeah, he was amazing. Sunrise (1927) is one of the greatest films ever made. Nosferatu actually changed my life when I saw it as a kid. It’s one of the movies that made me fall in love with movies and scared me to the depths of my soul. It’s kismet that we’re talking because that’s exactly the same experience I had. My father used to bring the movies home from Cal State and he’d project them for us, and there I was, looking at this terrifying imagery. It was so uncomfortable and really made me miserable but again, like we talked about, I began to fall in love with it. Murnau shot it like a documentary, which is what made it so interesting. Wasn’t it one of the first films to go on location? I think it might have been, yeah. What we did in Shadow of the Vampire was pretty thought-out and accurate in terms of the actual events, except of course that (actor) Max Schreck wasn’t really a vampire! (laughs) All actors by some definition are vampires, I suppose. I have a theory that all great actors and filmmakers have one overlooked masterpiece, and I think 8mm (1999) is yours. I think it’s such a brave, audacious, deeply disturbing movie. Thank you. I’m sure Joel (Schumacher) will be happy to hear that. In a lot of ways that movie is kind of a milestone for me, because it’s my first foray into horror. To me, it’s a horror film, and I hadn’t really done that before. It does have weight in my library, but it was, as you said, overlooked and wasn’t something people could respond to at the time because it was so dark and disturbing. It’s not how people want to spend eight bucks to get their minds off their problems. (laughs) Cage in Joel Schumacher's 8mm. If it had been made in 1971, it would have been a hit.

But you see, those are my favorite movies, from the 70s. I’m still kind of living that fantasy, trying to do it in 2005. But that was the time, and those were the movies that propelled me into wanting to go for this. The 50s and 70s movies for me are the ones that got me on the track of wanting to be an actor. I was watching Klute the other day, which was made in 1971. A movie from 1985 is more dated now than that film is.

Yeah, right. I believe that. If you look at A Clockwork Orange (1971), it’s like virtual reality now. Even if you take a single frame of that film, the amount of time Kubrick must have put into lighting that, it just pops! The shot of the droogies as they’re walking out of the milk bar, it’s lit in a way that’s nearly digitally perfect, and he did it in ’71. It’s fascinating. Tell us what directing was like, with Sonny (2002). That was a great experience, too. It was a real highlight for me. I was surrounded by some of my favorite actors. I’ve never seen James Franco hit a false note. He’s a great actor, and he’s just fantastic in the movie. It’s a great kitchen sink drama. Did you study the films of Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson before you did it? No, I didn’t. It just kind of came out of me, the way I sort of felt it. I didn’t want to take too much away from the actors. I wanted the film to look beautiful, but I really just wanted to focus on performance, and I got that. I was very happy with the results.

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John Woo: The Hollywood Interview

Director John Woo.



JOHN WOO: NUMBER ONE WITH A BULLET
By
Alex Simon

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

Picture if you will: Several years ago, I'm sitting at home. It's late at night. I'm bored. I decide to surf my local cable system, sifting among the usual offerings of long-forgotten re-runs, grade Z exploitation flicks and programs offering some inbred yokel in overalls giving a blow-by-blow on how to re-build an engine manifold for a 1961 Chrysler. Then I come upon a movie with two Asian gentlemen who are having a heated argument in not-so-badly dubbed English. "Cool," I think to myself, "a cheesy chop-socky flick from Hong Kong with horribly dubbed lines like 'You think you know kung-fu, you son of a pig's cousin?!'" I settle back, resigned to settling on eighty minutes of unintentional laughter.

But wait...that was a really cool shot and...hold on, that lead actor with the baby face is really exciting to watch and...Wait! Let me get my breath back after that, the most incredible shoot-out I've ever seen since the finale of The Wild Bunch! This is no chop-socky flick! This is...well, genius!
What is this movie?
More important, who made this movie?
Answer #1: The Killer.
Answer #2: John Woo.
From that moment on, I was a devoted convert to the cult of John Woo-ism. I sought out his films feverishly, whether they were being screened in sometimes laughably malaprop-filled subtitled prints at Laemmle's Monica theater, or were pulled off the shelves of the late, great Video Archives (better known as the Quentin Tarantino School of Film) in Manhattan Beach, John Woo movies, with their operatic blend of Sam Peckinpah violence and Douglas Sirk romanticism, became a staple of my filmgoing diet.

John Woo was born in 1946 in Guangzhou, Canton Province, China. His family emigrated to Hong Kong in 1950, fleeing the Communist rule of their native land. After college there, he began his film career in 1969, apprenticing at the Cathay and Shaw Brothers studios. At Shaw Brothers, he directed his first feature in 1973, The Young Dragons, a martial arts film. That same year, he secured a long-term contract with the Golden Harvest Studio, where he worked for two decades.

While he worked consistently through the 70's, making action films and comedies, he made his mark with the elemental gangster film A Better Tomorrow (1986). This film provided the model for his subsequent features: anguished and sometimes brutal central characters (often portrayed by actor Chow Yun-Fat); a serious-minded story about loyalty and betrayal; and graphic, cathartic violence--in which Woo invented the now widely-imitated "two gun" technique, where the hero (and sometimes villain) battles multitudes of enemies with a blazing gun in each hand. No filmmaker since Sam Peckinpah has had such a profound influence on the way action films are shot and directed and, as a result, Woo's films quickly gathered an American cult of critics and fans; The Killer (1989), became the highest-grossing Hong Kong film in America since Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon in 1973. His pictures after A Better Tomorrow fed Woo's reputation for technical proficiency and visual imagination. They included a sequel (A Better Tomorrow II, 1987); an epic film set during the Vietnam war (A Bullet in the Head, 1990); a heist comedy (Once A Thief, 1991); and Woo's final Hong Kong film (which many consider his finest) Hard-Boiled (1991). In 1992, he relocated to the U.S.; his first American feature was Hard Target in 1993, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. In 1994, Woo formed WCG Entertainment with partners Terrence Chang and Christopher Godsick and, under their banner, directed Broken Arrow in 1995, followed by directing and executive producing Fox Television's Once A Thief The Series, based on his feature film. Woo's third American feature Face/Off opened nationally on June 27.

With Face/Off, John Woo returns to his roots of Hong Kong filmmaking, with its complex, bigger-than-life characters, operatic shoot-outs and no-holds-barred camerawork and stunts. Starring John Travolta and Nicholas Cage as a vengeful federal agent and his nemesis who, for reasons that have to be seen to be believed, are forced to switch identities, the film is, by far, the best film of the summer, and Woo's best American film to date.

As is usually the case when you meet one of your idols, there is a mixture of nervous excitement, along with the apprehension that you might be disappointed in what you find. Happily, John Woo puts both fears to rest almost as soon as you meet him. During both occasions when we met to talk, Woo was a gracious host, ushering me into his Westside office and offering me a beverage, which he himself pours and serves. A humble man who carries himself with the quiet, yet self-assured strength of a Zen Master, John Woo reflected on his long journey from the slums of Hong Kong to international fame and success, along with a variety of other subjects...

How did you become interested in film growing up in Hong Kong?
JOHN WOO: When I was a kid, since my family was so poor, we were even homeless for quite a while, my mother was a big fan of the American movies. She would always save some money to take me to the movies. And as a kid, I always felt like I lived in hell, the slums of Hong Kong were horrible. I always had this dream of living in a better place, a place with no crime and violence, a place where people only care about each other and appreciate each other...and I could only find that dream in the movies. And that made me have a very early love of the movies, especially musicals. I remember the first musical I ever saw was The Wizard of Oz and it was so wonderful...my mother took me to all the classic films. Then when I was 11 yeas old, I knew I wanted to be a part of the movies...I would take a piece of glass and I would brush some images on the glass, like cowboys or a Chinese hero like a Monkey King, and then I took a torch, would shine it through the glass, and project the image on a wall. I would move the torch up and down, and the image on the wall seemed to be moving! I think at that moment, I found my interest and love of making films. When I was in high school, I joined a (acting troupe) where we put on plays...we did about eight plays...then when I was about 19, my family couldn't afford for me to go to college anymore. At that time, there were no film schools in Hong Kong, so all I could do is learn from movies. We were lucky, because we could see all the film masterpieces from all over the world--that's one of the great things about Hong Kong...so by the time I was quite young, I knew all about filmmakers like Fellini, Antonioni, the French New Wave, Jean-Pierre Melville, Stanley Kubrick, Hitchcock and Sam Peckinpah...so when I was 19, I started working with a group of young people who were also fascinated with movies and we started making experimental films. That was a very interesting time. It was also during this time I started working at a studio as a script supervisor.

This was at Shaw Brothers?
Yes, Shaw Brothers. I worked my way up to 1st A.D.(Assistant Director) and I worked with a great master named Chant Chit. He was the king at the time. He was equal to (the great Japanese director) Akira Kurosawa...he made a lot of period films, always about friendship, honor, loyalty. He also created a lot of big stars...and I was so lucky. I worked with him for about two and a half years, then I got my first chance to direct a movie in 1973.

Hong Kong cinema in the 80's had a real renaissance. What was it like working in that atmosphere?
Well, at that time, Hong Kong had sort of a "new wave" going on in terms of its filmmakers, so it was exciting. I was going through a transition myself then. Before that, I used to be a comedy director, and I just hated it! I wanted to change, because the kinds of movies I really wanted to do were dramas--something from the heart like Jean-Pierre Melville or Humphrey Bogart used to make. But the studio wouldn't let me do it. So I changed over to another studio called Cinema City to make A Better Tomorrow in 1986, with the help of my friend Tsui Hark. And that movie really changed my life. It broke all the records, made a lot of money and helped me establish myself as a director all over the world.

The thing I noticed with Face/Off was that you really returned to the style of your Hong Kong films. It seemed with your previous American films, Hard Target and Broken Arrow, like you were restraining yourself a bit. But with Face/Off, you really come out with, no pun intended, both guns blazing. Do you feel that way as well?
Yeah, yeah. I'm really grateful to Paramount because they gave me so much freedom on this film...they let me do whatever I wanted to do because they like my style. Also because of the nature of the script, the script was exactly what I like to do with two very different characters, who also have something in common. There's no real good guy or bad guy in my films. The film's also about friendship and dignity and honor and family.

Those are themes that seem to run throughout a lot of your films. Do you think that comes from the fact that you did have a poor childhood and you had to depend on your family and friends quite a bit?
Yeah, there's so many things...I love to use things that I experienced in real life--but that doesn't mean I was a gangster! (laughs) But I like to put as many real experiences into my films as I can. Like when I was a kid, my family was so poor, they couldn't afford to let me go to school until I was 9 years-old. And it was very rough on the street. Almost every day, I had to fear the gangs, or I'd get beaten up by a gang, and I had to struggle very hard to survive. I was so lucky that I had great parents, and a church. My parents were very tough on me so I'd live straight, and made sure that I lived with dignity. That's also why I'm so grateful to the church. My church was the only place where I could hide, where I could cry, where I could talk to God, and where I could feel not lonely. I was also sponsored by an American family through the church and that is how my education was paid for. Me and my brother and sister for six years. I'll always be grateful to those people that helped me and my family and my church. So my movies are about being grateful and trying to be good to each other. Chivalry. If you do something good to me, I will give something back. That's how I learned. From church. From the Bible. From our culture. Like when I first started making films, I was a big success. I made several hit movies and then I help others, I helped other people with their careers like Tsui Hark, Michael Hoy, Jackie Chan...I was so happy to do that because I feel that in this world, people only succeed by helping each other. You can never work alone...then, for a long time after that I was down. My career was down. Some people even said to me "John, you're finished." And then, I was helped by Tsui Hark, he helped me back and helped me produce A Better Tomorrow. I try to put all those qualities back into my characters. And of course, some people after I helped them, stabbed me in the back. I put that in my films, too. So most of my films are based somehow on my real-life experience.

People have said that you and Chow Yun-Fat are Asia's answer to Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese. Any plans on working with him again in this country?
Yes, my next project. I hope we have no problem of scheduling because he is getting busy right now. The project is a light comedy, sort of like To Catch a Thief, The Thomas Crown Affair, Topkapi, Butch Cassidy, films like that.

Why a light comedy?
Some people see me only as an action director. I just want to let people see the other side of me, because I can be very funny. The other thing is, I have learned a lot from the U.S. The culture, the people, the way of thinking, and the sense of humor. There's a lot of humor in Face/Off and when I found I could do that well, it gave me a lot of confidence to try comedy again.

How did you and Chow Yun-Fat start working together? Was A Better Tomorrow your first film together?
Yeah, at that time Chow was already a huge TV star in Hong Kong. But he'd never made a successful film. Some people even called him "box office poison," even though people recognized him as a great actor. I had never met him before casting A Better Tomorrow. It was at that moment that I said to myself I wanted a person who looked like a modern knight. This person had to have a great heart. I wanted to create a new kind of hero, a hero who can stand for me, can speak for me, and also can speak for the audience, someone close to the audience, not like a superhero. I had always heard that Chow liked helping other people, children, his friends and a man with a heart like that, well, he's my hero! (laughs) So I chose him based on that. Then when we met, we had a long talk and found that we had a lot of things in common. I found that we were both old-fashioned. We both believe that in the old times, people were nicer. They cared more about people, more about family and more about each other. But then the world changed and the people are getting more selfish. So I think we both feel that we want to bring those values to our films and remind people about them, so maybe we can get some of them back. I also find Chow, my idol, resembles a lot of the classic idols of movies: Clint Eastwood, Gary Cooper, Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, Cary Grant, all the great images, all are Chow Yun-Fat.

Any favorite stories about working with Chow?
During A Better Tomorrow, most of the scenes we shot weren't in the script, you know why? We were both so down. We were both in the same boat because we'd both been failing for quite a few years. For one scene we were having trouble with, I asked Chow if he'd ever had a similar experience in real life. Chow remembered once several years earlier when he'd been insulted by a gang boss. And he said he felt dishonored and he cried and felt so angry...So I said 'Okay, let's forget about the script. Let's put that experience into the scene' and I let him make up the dialogue. And we did that a couple more times during the film, and I think that's one of the reasons why so many people were touched by that film and by his performance and by his character, because he brought so much truth to it. So that's why I like working with Chow, because we have so much in common. The same thing with John (Travolta) and Nick (Cage), we are all very old-fashioned.

Who are some of the other filmmakers who've influenced you?
Hitchcock and Fellini come to mind. Fellini was such an incredible visual storyteller. Everything he did was with images. Just beautiful. And his films are so much like him. When you're watching them, you can really feel Fellini. Very personal work. Hitchcock, of course, I learned everything about suspense there is to know from his films. The other person who comes to mind is Arthur Penn.

Another one of my heroes, as well.
Arthur Penn's films take such a strong point of view. They're so powerful that way.

Ever see The Left-Handed Gun, his first film?
Oh, I love The Left-Handed Gun! Great film! And The Miracle Worker. And, of course, Bonnie & Clyde is a classic. I really think that he and Sam Peckinpah made everything change. I think both have a lot of romance in their films--very romantic films. The other person who influenced me the most is Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai). He is a true master. I also like Francis Ford Coppola very much. I love his first film The Rain People. I like William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist) also very much. He did so many amazing experimental things in what were supposed to be mainstream studio films.

I love Friedkin's work. One of my favorite movies is Sorcerer, his remake of the French film Wages of Fear.
I love that film! That was such a good film, and so underrated when it was released. Again, he took that film and really made it his own, with his own characters. I still watch that film and feel so sad for the characters. It's such a tragic film. Then of course there's Stanley Kubrick and David Lean, another one of my idols.

You're known for your incredible action sequences. How long does it take you to shoot an action sequence? I'm thinking especially of the opening scene in Hard Boiled with all the bird cages.
That took nine nights.

That's it?!
Every action scene I make, the whole scene is all in my head. I know exactly what I'm doing and what I want. It's choreographed all in my head already before we start shooting. Some scenes take longer though, like one gun battle scene in Face/Off we did took two weeks. The speedboat chase, including second unit, took four weeks.

What do you think the affect will be on the Hong Kong film industry when China takes control of Hong Kong on July 1?
It's unfortunate because I've been out of Hong Kong for five years, but from what I've heard, it's going to be a little tough for Hong Kong film in the sense of topics that they can deal with. It won't be that bad as long as the movie never involves any politics. I think action and comedy will be unaffected. In the beginning, everybody will be a little insecure, because they won't know what to expect, then the Chinese government will let them know what they like and what they don't like. So the Hong Kong film business might slow down a little initially. After the first year when everything's settled down, I think it'll be fine, because I don't think China will want to hurt the business, because they need it. I can also see it might be a good thing because change is always good for new movements. What I mean is, now that there's a little chaos happening, many film people have left and this makes room for many young, new people to take over, who will create an entirely new kind of Hong Kong film. It will create more opportunity for a newer, younger generation. I also believe that China is changing. They're getting a little more open, I think. They also realize that they need friends in the whole world (laughs). When the people of Hong Kong really see the change as being good, I think their confidence will come back. Also, Hong Kong's people are very smart, very tough. So once they figure out what the new policies are, they'll do their best to work within them. They're survivors. I also hope that China keeps their promise to keep everything in Hong Kong the same.

What do you think the likelihood of that is?
I don't know...I have heard that they are going to be very tough on the media, on TV, on the newspapers...it's just going to take time. I only hope that the new government will respect the people and what they want. I think that China will become much more open. Even now in China's major cities, particularly Shanghai, are going through major changes. They work very hard, want to catch up with Hong Kong. Maybe even do better than Hong Kong. China has a great potential for everything: business, culture, art, everything. The country is so beautiful. But for me, of course, I only wish our country to become more strong, more beautiful.

Do you think you'll ever make another film in Hong Kong?
I don't think so. I think I've done enough there--for over twenty-five years I made films there. Here in America I feel I have many more opportunities, especially now that I have all this wonderful support and so many projects. Another thing, after I left Hong Kong, I decided to concentrate on projects that were more international. I'm trying to combine the new things I've learned here in America with my own culture. If I went back to Hong Kong right now, I'd have to start all over again and un-learn everything from the past five years. I don't even understand the new language in Hong Kong now! Or how the people think...In America you can say anything that you want, create anything you want. In Hong Kong, unfortunately, you have to be careful of everything you do and say. And this I don't like.

Even before the Chinese take over, you mean?
Yes. Yes. You can never make anything about politics or mainland China without it being sensitive. There was always the fear of making them angry. Of course for an artist, you want to go to the movies and see something expressed how the filmmaker feels about the people, about the country, about the government and the answer in Hong Kong was always "No!" If I had to go on making just action and comedy for the rest of my life, I'd rather die! I want to do something more.

Do you see yourself making a politically-themed film in the future?
Not really. I'm not that interested in political films. Sometimes in my movies, I'd have some political feel, like in Bullet in the Head, how I felt about our country, about Hong Kong...but here I can make any kind of film I want. Although I would like to make a film in China...it's so beautiful. So much history...

So you'd like to maybe make an American-backed movie in China?
Yeah. I have a project in development in Paramount. An epic about 19th century China and American soldiers and missionaries that try to help the Chinese government fight some rebels. It's a true story. It also has a very strong love story. Not a political film. Tom Cruise is very interested in it.

We've talked before about some of the filmmakers who've influenced your work. How does it feel now when you look at the work of the new generation of filmmakers, and they've all been influenced by you?
I feel flattered. I'm still learning from people myself. I think we're all in a big family in the film business. I have learned so much from the west and your filmmakers here. Now that I can see people getting something from me, it's like coming full-circle. Actually, we are learning from each other. I know now I'll never feel lonely ever again, like when I was a kid, because I have all these friends all over the world!

What was the genesis of the "two gun" technique that you made famous?
While we were shooting A Better Tomorrow, I decided to stage a very classic gun battle scene and I wanted it to be unique, unlike any in a Hong Kong film ever. I'm very strongly affected by the music in films. I wanted the gunshots to have a very strong rhythm, like a drum beat. I especially liked the look of the Colt .45 because the gun is so pretty, but it doesn't hold that many bullets...when they showed me the Beretta (handgun), which looks similar to the Colt .45, I asked how many shots it held and they told me "seventeen." I thought 'Oh, that's great.' Because the scene was about the hero entering a restaurant with fifteen guys inside that he had to fight. Now one gun with seven or eight bullets against fifteen guys isn't going to work, so I suggested using two, which held seventeen shots each. And also two guns continuously firing is just like a very strong drum beat. And also a little bit of that came from the western--the cowboy with two holsters strapped on. Then we said, two guns are still not going to be enough, so I had the hero hide guns in flower pots inside the restaurant that he could grab when his first two ran out of bullets! (laughs) So we had two handguns basically acting like a machine gun, with continuous firing and a strong rhythm.

Tell me some more about how making films in Hong Kong is different from making films here--in addition to having more freedom.
There's good things and bad things about working here. The good is that everything is so much more well prepared. Here you have to have a complete script, with everyone knowing what they're doing...you have to stick to the schedule here. The bad here is that it's too complicated to make movies here. It's not about the studio--it's about the people. The people make everything so complicated. Whoever's got any power, they will use it. So many games...

In Hong Kong is there more of a familial feel to making a film? You're all in it together?
Yeah, yeah. There you're all in it together. Here, there's too many voices. (laughs) Some people want to change this and that and they spend too much time on arguing and meeting...and you can waste months doing that. And every time, it's just a repeat of the same old thing. And sometimes it's about ego. And sometimes that can hurt the movie. But in general, I think that the great thing about America is that there are so many talented people and most of the people here are really very professional. Everybody has great passion and dedication. They all are educated from film. And the government and the whole of society really seems to support and love the business. It makes things so much more convenient. They'll give you whatever you want, from the police, the fire department, the neighborhoods. The other good thing is that there are so many talented writers. And it's a free country, so you can have a choice! I feel like a real artist working here. In Hong Kong, on the other hand, everything is so simple. It's so simple to work with a studio. You only need a couple meetings to discuss the storyline, the budget, the cast, then we're on our own. Everybody just wants to make a movie, and nothing else. No games, no ego and no politics. And most Hong Kong films are shot with no scripts, just an outline.

None of your Hong Kong films had scripts?!
Well...my films usually did have completed scripts. But I'd rewrite a lot on the set. And as a result, most Hong Kong films go way over budget and over schedule. If you create on the set all the time, adding more things, the money is gone, gone, gone. You spend more and fall behind. Another bad thing in Hong Kong, you have to work very hard, fight very hard, and survive by yourself. The government doesn't really care about the film business or give any real support to the business. Do you know in Hong Kong, we don't even have a film library? We have no history. Although I've heard in the last couple years they have started to collect and store the films...but all (the government) cares about is the tax. Whenever you set a camera up on the street and you get any sort of a complaint, particularly from a foreigner or the British, the police will throw you out--no matter who you are. Only me and Jackie Chan would get a break (laughs) because they respected our work. But most filmmakers are very poor in Hong Kong. We work like beggars and get no respect from the government. That's why in my movies you'll see we shot most of the scenes in a studio, or in a warehouse, or far away from the city. But they open wide for foreign film crews, for British film...and it's not about money, we'd pay them the money. There's just favoritism there--lots of it, for foreigners. I don't think they even have any idea the impact Hong Kong films have on the rest of the world. But, that all happened before I came here. Now I hear it's getting better.

It sounds like America is your home to stay.
Yeah. I really feel like as a filmmaker, I want to keep making movies where I can say what I want to say, shoot where I want to shoot...here if I want to shoot on the street, the police will block off the whole area for you, for free! Not just here, but in New Orleans, Toronto, Vancouver...I was so happy the first time it happened I almost cried! It's so wonderful to just be able to do my own thing.

Any advice for first-time directors?
Just do it. Do whatever you want, how you want. Also try to direct your first film from your own script. I think that way the film will be much better--and more original.

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Mike Figgis: The Hollywood Interview

Director Mike Figgis.



MIKE FIGGIS:
A NOT-SO INNOCENT ABROAD
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally ran in the June 1999 issue of Venice Magazine.

Mike Figgis was born in 1949 in Carlise, England and lived in Nairobi, Kenya as an infant. The family moved back to England when Figgis was eight, settling in the tough northern town of Newcastle. Drawn to music from an early age, Figgis played trumpet and guitar in various bands including Gas Board, featuring future star Bryan Ferry (later of Roxy Music) on lead vocals. Figgis moved from music into theater upon joining England's avant-garde theater group The People Show. Figgis stayed with the group for 10 years, touring the world and developing his craft. In 1980, Figgis formed his own theater company, The Mike Figgis Group. He crafted multimedia productions that incorporated an extensive use of film. The work caught the eye of England's Channel Four, who financed Figgis' first feature, The House (1984) starring Stephen Rea. Figgis was put on the map by his next feature Stormy Monday (1988), a moody noirish thriller set in his hometown of Newcastle framed by his own moody jazz score. His American debut was with Internal Affairs (1989), starring Andy Garcia and Richard Gere, followed by the thriller Liebestraum (1990), Mr. Jones (1992), The Browning Version (1993), the sleeper hit Leaving Las Vegas (1994) which won an Oscar for Nic Cage and redefined Elizabeth Shue's career, and One Night Stand (1996), starring Wesley Snipes and Nastassia Kinski.
Figgis' latest is his finest film yet. The Loss of Sexual Innocence is the non-linear tale of a series of events in the life of a filmmaker (played as an adult by Julian Sands) and a series of events which shape his life, all of which is framed by a reinterpretation of the Adam & Eve story! While Loss is anything but commercial, it is a challenging, inventive, and often brilliant melding of images, sounds and ideas. The Sony Pictures Classics film is released on
Mike Figgis sat down recently in his hotel suite to discuss his career as an artist who always pushes the envelope.

I want to see The Loss of Sexual Innocence several more times. It was so rich, I felt like I missed a lot on just one viewing.
Mike Figgis: Yes, I suppose it is rather rich for just one viewing, if you liked it. In fact, I kept noticing little things that I had forgotten after watching it recently.

One thing I notice in a lot of your work is how understated and underplayed everything is. Does that stem from your performance art background?
I think so, yes. Definitely that, and music. I trained as a musician so I tend to compute musically, whatever I'm dealing with. The concept of orchestral writing is written in parallels. You've got your top line, your bottom line and everything in the middle. Once you've learned that system you apply it to everything, especially in filmmaking because you're writing a series of lines that holds everything together.

Tell us about the genesis of Loss.
It started out being called Short Stories. It was actually inspired by Hemingway's Nick Adams Stories. Hemingway's my favorite writer and was actually my sister's Godfather. My mother, who passed away a few weeks ago, was a very beautiful woman, and she worked in Nairobi. When Hemingway "died," (He went missing for a few weeks when his plane went down. His obituary was published, and it was assumed he was dead) he had burned his hands very badly when he had to punch his way out of the canvas fuselage. He couldn't type and had been commissioned by Look magazine to write an article about Africa. My mother was sent to do his typing for him and they had this mad...well, I don't know how far their relationship actually went, but he wrote really beautiful letters to her from Cuba after he'd left. My youngest sister had just been born, so there was always this 'Hemingway thing' in the house. And the Nick Adams stories really resonated with me. And I was thinking, why are all movies based on novels and not on short stories? I liked the idea of not having to worry about linear plot. I thought it would be interesting to do a performance art piece called Short Stories, done in a huge warehouse, where part of it would be done live, and part on film. Some of the stories would be on film and live, with the same actors. It would go on for eight or nine hours...then once I started making films, I stopped doing theater. So I had this script, or half-script for Short Stories, showed it to a few people, had a lot of false starts and finally got the financing for it. It took about 12 years. I got people really enthusiastic about it, then they'd change their minds at the last minute. I knew that if I didn't make it soon, it would cease to be a viable project in my head, the way things sometimes do.

What was your budget on Loss?
About $3 million. We shot it all on super 16mm.

Was Julian Sands' character of the filmmaker autobiographical at all?
Yeah, the childhood stories, especially, are as clinically accurate as I could get. I'm sure my memory has clouded them somewhat, but the scene in the grade school gym class, and the sequence with the teenager and his girlfriend, those were taken from my life. Also the dream that Julian Sands has is a dream that I had, that I sat down and wrote down in detail when I woke up.

I loved the Sandie Shaw music in that scene.
Yeah, so do I. I met her the other day. She told me that they're releasing an album with all her classic songs, re-mixed, which I think will be great. She has such a great voice, no vibrato. She just got stuck with a lot of bad material.

How did you throw the Adam & Eve story into the mix?
It actually started with that, when it was a performance art piece. I liked the idea of re-examining that parable, because it's the cornerstone of all our concepts about morality, in The Old Testament. It made me actually sit down and read The Bible. That story was pretty hard on women, actually. I mean, it ends by saying that childbirth is God's way of punishing women and basically says that woman is a whore and men are pure. The Bible is extremely misogynistic...It's also interesting because it's the first sexual story.

Another theme you explore in this, which you've explored in other films as well, is the seemingly perfect family on the outside, which in fact is very dysfunctional. Where does this come from?
The fascination with the internal workings of relationships, I suppose. You can never presume to understand the secrets of a marriage. Once that door closes, you don't know what really goes on. Also because I grew up in Africa, then moved back to a very working class area of England, where I promptly got the shit kicked out of me for the first two or three months until I learned how to "become one of the lads," though never really. So I always made a habit of watching people and observing them and noticing those moments that give them away. It's all about what's behind the façade.

Let's talk about your background.
I went to Kenya when I was six months old. My father was an Irish colonial who had been educated in England. He became a pilot during the war, and became an alcoholic during that point. He tried to pick up the pieces after the war, he was only 17 when he started flying, and to please his father, attempted to become a lawyer, like the rest of his family. He went back to Nairobi, where my grandparents were very prominent, and at that time Nairobi was this swinging city...there were a couple bars in Nairobi where Frank Sinatra would keep tabs on Ava Gardner...it was a 'happening' place. I grew up in this environment in this huge house, servants, a couple of cars...it was just one big party.

What was your father doing at the time?
Drinking. (laughs) If you were from the right family, you get could credit for anything. My grandfather founded the largest law practice in Nairobi, so dad got away with murder. He was sort of the black sheep of the family, occasionally worked as a jazz DJ, which is where I got my love of jazz. His record collection is amazing. I've still got it, all the old 78's. He had a very precise, amazing ear for music. He'd put on a record and say to me "Okay, just listen to what the bass player is doing. Cut everything else out." If you start at that age, you do develop an ear. Around the time I was 11, they had auditions for a band in school, and from there on I was a musician.

What made your family move back to England?
Debt. By then, dad couldn't hold them off any longer. I remember going to the airport saying "But why do we have to hide under a blanket?" (laughs) So we got in this twin engine plane, which almost crashed in Malta, and took about four days to fly to England. Then we arrived back in the north of England just before Christmas and I saw my first snow. It was quite remarkable. Newcastle was, and still is, a tough town with a warm heart, like all tough towns. But the only way you can get past the violence is to get to the heart of it.

Stormy Monday gave a very interesting portrait of Newcastle going through gentrification.
You should see it now. It looks exactly like it did in Stormy Monday, completely gentrified. When we shot the film, it wasn't like that at all, we just cleaned up the parts where we shot. Sting was so wonderful in that. He used to come see me play, you know, when he was in short pants. (laughs) Bryan Ferry was in that band, as well. I actually auditioned for Roxy Music, then decided that performance art was more interesting.

You're the only director I know of, other than John Carpenter, who also writes his own music.
I'm very lucky to be in the position to do that. When I first started doing films, it was a problem, however, except with Stormy Monday, which was so low budget, the producers were thrilled because they didn't have to pay me for it. (laughs) And everybody really liked the score, so when I went to do Internal Affairs at Paramount, I got huge resistance from the studio about doing the score. Then one night I was at this party, and Robert Towne was there. When I was introduced to him, in front of the producer, he said "I just temped the entire print of Tequila Sunrise with the Stormy Monday soundtrack!" (laughs) So they finally gave in and let me do the soundtrack on the condition that I did it along with another composer, which was fine because he was very good. From then on, with the rest of my studio films, they would always say 'yes' to my composing the score, then fire me because they just couldn't understand why I would want to do the score. It would be so much easier if I just shut up about the music, I suppose, since produces know so much more than directors do about music. (laughs) They've got all these deals going, with product placement and so on. The album is a big marketing tool.

Will you ever return to studio filmmaking?
Sure. The next one most likely will. It's a New York thriller. But I also want it to be down and dirty.

I heard that you were going to do the Chet Baker story.
Yeah, I was thinking about it. I get very nervous when I have to deal with real people, especially real people who were well-documented, filmed and videoed. People who were so much a part of the 20th century art scene, that everyone knows what they looked like, unlike Beethoven, Wagner, or even Robert Johnson because there's only something like four photographs of him. When you're talking about someone like Chet, you're always going to have a problem with a music, because no actor's ever going to be that good. Although I haven't seen Hilary and Jackie. I heard Emily Watson looked very convincing. But the best thing you can say about a musician...the best thing about Chet, or Miles Davis, or Louis Armstrong was watching them play. So I don't really know what would warrant making a film about these people once they're gone.

Internal Affairs was an unusual studio film. More European because of how understated it was.
Yeah, but it looks very American. It has the smell of the American movies that I like. L.A. photographs in a certain way. When you first get off the boat, so to speak, and look through that lens, it's a thrill! Our architecture doesn't stack up like yours does, so the light does different things. People don't look quite the same. It's fascinating.

I love the ambiguity in many of your stories, like the story of the twins in Loss.
If you don't know that you have an identical twin, you'd be fascinated by it. I had the experience on a boat once in Egypt. I was pretty sick with a stomach infection and had spent the first few days in my cabin. On the third day, I woke up, went out to the deck and bumped into myself! It was like looking into a mirror. We were just both like 'What?!' (laughs) I started to speak to him and he was Polish, didn't speak any English. It was mind-boggling: same hair, same mustache, same age, same size. He was married to a Canadian woman, who translated for us as we spoke. Then we took a photograph and ended up playing ping-pong together. Then I started thinking, 'Well, my dad was in Europe during the war. Could he be my brother?' Not my twin, but my older brother. We kept checking everything out, the eyes, the nose. He had a crooked nostril like me. (laughs) But it never crossed my mind that we really were related. But if someone had said to me, 'You've got a brother out there somewhere. We don't know what happened to him,' immediately I would've said 'Fuck! It's my brother!' Because I would've known.

I also loved the foreshadowing with the photo of the woman in the cobalt blue dress in the magazine. It reminded me a bit of Don't Look Now (1973), the Nicholas Roeg film, which used the image of the red raincoat.
What a movie! Everyone talks about the love scene in that, but I always thought that was least-interesting part of the movie. It wasn't very erotic. It was more clinical, as it should have been. There's a cross-cut at the beginning of The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) between Rip Torn having sex with a student and then to David Bowie that I think is far more erotic. I love Nic Roeg. What a cutter. And what a great eye.

How did you first become fascinated with film?
I think it was sound, to be honest. I really got off on film sound. Then I had my theater group, and I used to use a lot of tape and pre-record dialogue to make it sound like a cinema, like movie dialogue, to use it like a sort of thought process so the audience would be sitting in this sort of soundscape. I think Polanski's Repulsion (1965) was the first film that made me aware of how sound could be used in film. There's a little music in that, but not a lot. The sound of the dripping tap, the sound of the flies building up, then the way he used sound in the really frightening scenes was absolutely awesome. You'd hear the flies, but then you'd also hear the traffic outside. So it was very realistic. I hate dubbed sound. I hate manufactured sound. I like real sound. And it's so much more effective. Then Bonnie & Clyde (1967) really got me interested in making films. I just watched it the other day along with a documentary on the making of it. It's such a great film.

How did Leaving Las Vegas come about?
I was given the book and started reading it at a real low spot in my life film-wise. I just ate it up. It was a very European story, I thought. It was a contemporary existential novel, and it was perfect. What's perfect about it was that it'll so utterly marginalize how a film can be made, super 16/low budget, that no one will fucking like it, so it's great! (laughs) But I also knew that the people who would like it would like it for the right reasons, so it was the sort of film I wanted to do. I went in with a completely cavalier attitude as to how to do it. There were things I had wanted to do for five or six years in terms of technique that studios never let you do, like going to complete silence on the soundtrack. So I thought, 'Fuck it, I can do whatever I want.' Which is never really true, by the way. You're always going to have your fights using other people's money, but the fights are a bit different when you're up against a major studio as opposed to independent investors. It was a four week shoot with two really cracking actors, plus some brilliant cameos from Laurie Metcalf, Julian Sands, and others. I loved it.

You said you were going through a tough time before you made it. Were there any similarities between yourself then and the Nic Cage character?
No, no. I mean I was still in a very privileged position. I was still making movies. I certainly had empathy for the character. The story really just tied into my whole romantic literature history. I felt that it was very much like an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, and that his character was very Scott Fitzgerald: urbane, witty, alcoholic, charming. It was a very old fashioned character, which was perfect for Nic. And I'd always had a huge crush on Elizabeth Shue, ever since I auditioned her for a film that never got made. I just found her so moving. I think she gave the performance in that film. She gave Nic his Oscar. She framed everything for him. She allowed the audience to love him. She made him accessible through her vulnerability, through her dialogue with the audience, with her shrink. Just brilliant. I always found Elizabeth stunningly beautiful. And I remember when I first met her thinking 'Who does she remind me of?' Then it hit me that it was Liv Ullman. She's pure Bergman. So I photographed her like that, both on film and in stills. I've always been shocked by how she's been photographed since then: very cheesecake, very glamour girl. It kind of summed up to me why most people don't get who she is.

Were you surprised that Leaving Las Vegas was successful?
Completely! I thought it would bomb horribly and thought that One Night Stand would be a huge commercial hit! (laughs) I'm very glad Leaving Las Vegas did well, and still don't quite know what happened with One Night Stand.

As someone who has gone through frustration professionally, what advice would you give to others in the business in terms of holding on to hope?
Well, it's a tough business and the toughest thing about it is that, ultimately, it's got very little to do with anybody else. The definition of tough is that those who make it are so clinically determined to be successful, or they're incredibly talented. Sometimes they're both. But most people that I meet are not so talented, but have great heart and would love to be that. I wish it were that easy. I think it defines itself. So to anyone who is talented who is experiencing problems I would say look to the movie Celebration (1998), which has to be one of the best films ever made, was made for nothing...and proves the theory I've had all these years which is it's nothing to do with the project, it's nothing to do with the studio. It has to do with your vision and your ability to share that vision with your co-workers. That film should have won every Oscar, especially compared to some films which are so low-grade, so banal...

Any advice for first-time directors?
Make a list of obvious technical points and refer to it all the time. Because once you start directing there are too many reasons for you to be distracted. And they're to do with simple things like making shot lists. Make sure you've got all the coverage for the editor. Think like an editor, really, because you can never judge the footage while you're shooting it. You might have a beautiful take, but might find you're unable to use it because you don't have the coverage to get in and out of the take, so plan on things like cutaways. Make sure you've got enough in your shopping bag so the editor can get you out of trouble later on. That way you get to keep all the stuff that you love. Always do a wild track of some tricky dialogue if people are talking at the same time. Even if it's good to cut on overlaps, sometimes actors don't say it the same way, but if you have a clean track...just take ten minutes with the sound man. It's all real nuts and bolts stuff. Every time I seem to make the same stupid mistakes and I'm like 'Fuck! I told myself I wasn't going to do this again!' (laughs)

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