James L. Brooks: The Hollywood Interview

Filmmaker James L. Brooks.



JAMES L. BROOKS:
LAUGHTER THAT STINGS IN YOUR THROAT
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the December 1997/January 1998 issue of Venice Magazine.

Along with Norman Lear, James L. Brooks is arguably the single-most influential creator/producer of American television during the 1970's. A list of the hit TV shows he created and/or produced during the decade include Room 222, the seminal Mary Tyler Moore Show and all its spin-offs (Lou Grant, Rhoda, Phyllis), Taxi, The Associates, The Tracey Ullman Show, The Critic, Phenom, and The Simpsons. Brooks brought realism to the previously overstated world of television comedy. His characters were not cartoony buffoons created for the sole purpose of generating laughs. They had warts, were neurotic, lovable and maddeningly truthful, all the while delivering laughs out of real-life (and often heartbreaking) situations. These were not "sit-coms," but something entirely new. Brooks' fingerprints can now be seen in shows such as Seinfeld, Friends, Ally McBeal and numerous other shows from the 1980's and 90's.

James L. Brooks was born May 9, 1940 in North Bergen, New Jersey. He started out as a copyboy with CBS News in New York, eventually becoming a TV news writer. In 1965 he moved to Los Angeles to work for David L. Wolper's documentary company. Showing a growing interest in the entertainment aspect of television, he conceived the idea for the series Room 222 (1969-74). Forming a partnership with fellow writer Allan Burns (Rocky & Bullwinkle), he embarked on the big time by creating The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the string of other hits that followed.

Having conquered television, Brooks then set his sights on motion pictures, first writing the screenplay for the romantic comedy Starting Over (1979), then making an auspicious directorial debut with Terms of Endearment, which he adapted from Larry McMurtry's best-selling novel. The film won five Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor. He was again nominated for Best Picture and Best Screenplay Oscars for Broadcast News in 1987, a film he based on real-life experiences in the CBS newsroom. It was named Best Film and Brooks was honored as Best Director by the New York Film Critics. Brooks produced The War of the Roses in 1988, co-produced Big and served as executive producer on Bottle Rocket. He also executive produced Cameron Crowe's directorial debut Say Anything in 1989 and, most recently, produced Crowe's hit Jerry Maguire.

In 1990 Brooks produced and directed his first play, Brooklyn Laundry, a Los Angeles production starring Woody Harrelson, Glenn Close and Laura Dern and wrote and directed the feature I'll Do Anything in 1994 starring Nick Nolte, Albert Brooks and Julie Kavner.

Brooks' latest is sure to win a place in his "all-time best" category, As Good As It Gets, a biting comedy starring Jack Nicholson as the most un-P.C. of New Yorkers and as the people in his orbit whom he verbally abuses, Greg Kinnear, Helen Hunt and Cuba Gooding, Jr. As Good As It Gets, is full of the trademark Brooks humor: belly laughs that sting in your throat. It is funny, poignant and very truthful and contains some classic "Jack" moments that are sure to have a place in the actor's retrospective. TriStar Pictures releases the film December 25.

In person, James L. Brooks displays the same warmth, thoughtfulness and sense of humor that he imbues in his characters. Some words of wisdom from a man who helped to shape the perceptions and senses of humor of several generations...

Were you always a storyteller growing up?
James L. Brooks: I don't think I was a storyteller. I was a clown and clowned around, then I think I went through periods of isolation where I was very quiet. I was an early latchkey kid. My father was sort of in-and-out and my mother worked long hours, so there was no choice but for me to be alone in the apartment a lot.

Do you have any siblings?
I have an older sister who helped raise me.

So you were essentially an only child.
Yes, in a way. She was eight years older than I was.

Do you think that sense of isolation you mentioned helped you develop your creativity early on?
(laughs) Yes. It's the only good thing about being beaten up and being left alone: you get a chance to (be alone in your own head).

When did you really start writing a lot?
I think I started writing for fun when I was really young. Then I was on the high school newspaper. And for a while even in high school I'd send out short stories that wouldn't get published, but every once in a while I'd get a letter back from someone that was encouraging. It never occurred to me to make a living as a writer. It never entered my mind.

Were your stories mostly humorous?
Yeah. I always loved comedy and comedy writers.

Who were some of your favorite comedians growing up?
Oh gosh...As a kid I guess it was Sid Caesar. Jack Benny. I remember when we used to listen to Lenny Bruce. And (Mike) Nichols & (Elaine) May killed me beyond belief. I just couldn't believe they existed in the world.

I can see a lot of Nichols & May in your humor.
Really? I mean it's been a lifelong admiration, because I know them each now. I just always feel weird when I'm around either one of them...and don't ever burden them with the fact that I idolized them...And (if you listen to their material) it absolutely holds up today...Bob Newhart used to do albums like that. The first Bill Cosby album also had a big affect on me.

Initially you wanted to pursue a career in journalism, right?
Well, I wanted to pay my rent and then through my sister I got a job that you usually had to be a college graduate for, which was an usher and pageboy at CBS. They pulled on us to be occasional replacements if a copyboy was gone. I filled in for two weeks. And for that you had to be a college graduate from a good college. And the guy I filled in for never came back. So it was really just a great break for me. I mean, I was there for three years, thinking that I was going to be the oldest usher in the history of the world. Then once my foot was in the door, I became a union news writer. Then I left there, strangely, because I still haven't quite figured out how I got the guts to do it, to come out here and try writing documentaries for David L. Wolper. Then I got laid off there after about six months, newly married and now really out of work. I kept trying for any news job I could get, really fearing that I was going to wind up selling women's shoes, or something...Then I met Allan Burns at a party and he had a lot of shows that he'd created. And he was and is, a really warm, funny guy. Then Allan got me an in for a series called My Mother the Car, and I sold a story outline to them and once I did that, they called me in to re-write a script. And that's how I got into television writing.

How come your stay at Wolper was so short lived?
Well, they were cutting back, so I got laid off. The funniest story about that is that I would occasionally come back and do spot jobs for them. And at that time I had a tremendous phobia of insects. And the only job they had open was and write a National Geographic special about insects! (laughs) And I really needed the paycheck. So you had a movieola just stuck to your face and the most hideous close-ups of wasps and ants, eight hours a day for weeks, and it cured the phobia! It turned out to be aversion therapy.

What happened next?
Well, I wrote an episode of That Girl, then very shortly after that got to create Room 222.

Tell us about that.
Well, they said "Black schoolteacher" to me and that was very landmark at the time. It was the second series ever to have black leads. It's amazing, just amazing because I'm not crotchety, yet I'm the guy who did the second series ever with black leads, and I only missed the first by a few months. This was about 1969. Then I worked with a great guy named Gene Reynolds, who insisted that I do research. So I kept going back to Los Angeles High School and I found everything: The basis of some of the characters, the pilot story. And he kept sending me back, again and again and it was great because that became my pattern.

Was he a mentor for you in a way?
I wouldn't say that. I'd say he had ferocious integrity. He wasn't interested in pleasing networks or pleasing studios. He wanted it done right, like the way he did M*A*S*H. He set a great precedent, like a great editor would, which I also had the pleasure of working for at CBS news, a guy named John Merriman, who died in a plane crash. He was the first person of influence to work with me and sort of take an interest in me...I left Room 222 after a year, then Alan and I did The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Tell us about the genesis of that.
Grant Tinker, who was the head of programming at the time, secretly was working for a CBS on-air commitment for his wife (Mary Tyler Moore) and said to Allan and I that we should become a team and do the show. And we loved her, of course. Everyone loved her from The Dick Van Dyke Show. I don't think there's been another woman who's had so many people have a crush on her at once.

And you set it in a newsroom because of your background?
Yeah, my life had been research for that, although we didn't do that right away. We had some bad ideas for it initially.

What were some of those?
She was going to be an assistant to a gossip columnist for a while...I forget. There was another one that was probably worse, as if that wasn't bad enough. But at that time, it was very strange...her last series she and her husband had had twin beds and the serendipity...there were programming people at CBS who really hated the show, and we were in danger. Grant had been asked by CBS to fire us and he refused, which we were unaware of for years. And then there was a guy named Bob Wood, who was president of the network, who took a bunch of top 20 shows and canceled them, like The Beverly Hillbillies, and then put on shows like All In the Family, saw our pilot and responded to us. Took us out of a death time period and gave us a good one to nurture us...and so this business guy really revolutionized television. He'd never been that involved in programming before, but he did it. And we were the beneficiaries of this man passing through at the same time we were. And that's the luck of the draw, because later on, Taxi got canceled because the wrong guy in the chair came along at the wrong time...and also the woman's movement was just starting at this time, which matched our agenda for the show and the wave just carried us.

The thing I remember about Mary Tyler Moore that I'd never seen in any show up to that time, was that the characters were neurotic and realistic, which I'd never seen in a TV comedy before. Even Dick Van Dyke was essentially made up of characitures.
Yes, I guess that's true. That's true...This guy John Merriman I mentioned, who was the basis for the Lou Grant character, very hard-boiled...This is a true John Merriman story and a perfect Lou Grant story. It was a freezing cold night. I was living in New Jersey, working odd hours. For me it was a subway ride, a walk, and a bus through the tunnel to get home. I was a copyboy. John was an editor. We were working at 52nd and Madison Avenue. John lived in the 70's. The bus terminal was in the 40's. I didn't make enough at the time to afford a cab. So the snow is coming down in the wee hours of the morning. And he says "Can I give you a lift in the cab?" And I said, "Well isn't it out of your way?" He thought for a moment and said "Yeah, I guess it is," and closes the door to the cab and takes off! (laughs) And I was just crushed because it meant I had to walk all the way to the subway in the middle of this snow storm!...But the thing that was not revolutionary, but evolutionary about the show was the idea of work as family, colleagues as family, which was my life because that's where my family always came from, because I didn't have much of a family. And also the two arenas of home and work were new, especially for a woman. Here's the funny thing: there was no company. We were two young writers and we hired the accountants, we hired the business apparatus...we didn't know anybody and we were given the keys to the asylum and just took it for granted. It was amazing! We hired everybody! It never happened to me again and it never will. It still flabbergasts me. So typically at the end, we were going off voluntarily after seven years and there was a lot of heat around our last show, and everybody had these speeches and moments except for Mary. And she came to us and said she'd like to have a final speech too, and the speech we wrote for her was about work as family, and that's how we went off. I think that was true of Taxi also in a blue collar way. Now I think that's no longer true anymore. It's a lot harder with people moving and people working over computers. Something else is happening.

Technology has made us a much more isolated society, hasn't it?
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

Let's talk about Terms of Endearment. I understand that took years to get made.
About four years, yeah. It was after about two years of trying to get it made and every studio saying they didn't think it would work, then Michael Eisner said he'd give me $7.5 million to make it, which wasn't a bad budget then. When we budgeted it out, we realized it wouldn't work, not to shoot on location. Because I couldn't see doing it without doing it as a location picture. I was brand new to everything. It was intimidating enough that I, who had never been to Texas, was adapting the great Texas writer (Larry McMurtry). I knew I had to go hang and spend time there and shoot there, as well as in Nebraska and New York. I just knew the last place to shoot it was Los Angeles. And I just kept on trying. Then MTM invested a million dollars. Then NBC agreed to buy it before it was made for television airing. It was four years of asking people for money, which was tough because from my background asking people for money rings bells anyway...It was a tough shoot because of the personalities involved. Then I went two days over after three weeks and things got really ugly...Eisner came down to the location and I showed him a chunk of what we'd shot and he said "Watch what you spend, but keep going." So it was tough. I was learning on the job and it was pretty scary...I haven't had too many electric moments in my life, and they don't mean anything except that you experience them. They don't create a changed universe, or anything. But the last shot of Terms of Endearment, because we'd been through some very rough times in the weeks before, I was strapped to the front of a car as we got the shot of Emma arriving in New York. And we were in Brooklyn when we went over the bridge and got the shot, then we rode back. And it was on that ride back that I knew I'd finished the movie and I felt like my head was gonna come off! And then it was amazing because we were looking at the statue of Liberty and...I had finished. I had finished. I'll never forget that.

How much of Broadcast News was autobiographical?
None, really. What happened was I had finished Terms and had been very lucky with the way it turned out and I was casting about and a friend of mine invited me to go to the political conventions in '84, and it was like I was doing research for something that didn't yet exist. I was hanging out with and meeting people...and I remember the lunch where I got the basic story of the nature of a romantic triangle between these journalists that I had met there. And I started to meet a new kind of woman. I felt so much that we as a society and everybody I knew and me were going through fundamental changes and I wondered whether our way we looked at romance was changing and that the girl was changing. I thought there was a new kind of heroine out there and that was the story. Even though you're doing fiction, there's always a story to cover if you can find it. So the character of Jane came out of four women that I met, all different ages...I just really think for me if you can be somewhat dumb about part of what you're doing it's a good thing because it gives you an innocence because it gives you humility to a certain degree. And the thing that always happens with romantic triangles is that you always know she's gonna go with guy a). I mean, Ralph Bellamy built a career on being guy b). So I thought, what if I was open to her winding up with either guy? So I was. I told all the actors that. I shot it in continuity so I could change the ending and I was really looking for the picture to inform me which way to go.

So you really didn't know who she was going to wind up with until the end of the shoot?
Right. And at the end of the road I couldn't put her with either guy.

Tell us about I'll Do Anything, which I hear was originally shot as a musical.
I wanted to do a Hollywood story. At the time it seemed to me, and it turned out to be a real miscalculation, to get the truth about Hollywood, the form had to be larger than life, a musical. I did a lot of strange things on that. Because of my background I went for actors on it and not singers. I'm in love with actors. I had great musical people, the best. I had Twyla Tharp as my choreographer. Prince as my songwriter. Sinead O'Connor did one song, a beautiful song. And I went to work...and it was the first time I fell in love with my leading lady, who was this six year-old, magical child. And her mother was great...part of the movie was based on my experience with my own two daughters...and I sort of became a surrogate dad...I had all these other people around me that I loved, and it was great. And then we went to our first preview. And it was a disaster. We had walkouts...it was awful. Then the worst thing of all happened someone who saw it told somebody who told somebody who told the Los Angeles Times about what had happened, and then they came after the story. So now here I was trying to fix the film, now I actually have the major home town newspaper publish what had happened, and kill us dead in the water. And they made a story of my odyssey, came to my next preview and it was just horrendous. So eventually I pared down the music, took almost all of it out. And you can speculate on a lot of things about why the picture didn't work. I'm a guy who started out in one form and changed it to another, but the movie played and people laughed, because I saw it with an audience. But it utterly failed commercially and I felt like I had let down a lot of people. I don't want to say too much more about this because I might make a documentary on the experience and I don't want to steal my own thunder.

Is it hard not to take it personally when something like that happens?
I think it's my job to take it personally. When I ask people to join me and come work with me, who else is responsible? But I haven't seen the movie in a long time and I still think it's a good movie.

Tell us about the genesis of As Good As It Gets.
There was a script I thought was terrific called Old Friends, written by Mark Andrus and I was going to produce it. And whenever I'm producing I support the voice of the writer. But to my way of thinking when I decided to direct it, it had such wonderful people in it, it needed you to suspend disbelief. And Andrus' writing is so earnest and lovely that you do. And my style when directing is that I really don't know how to get people to suspend disbelief. I need people to believe it. So I said I'd do a three week polish on it. Well a year later I'm pouring my heart and soul into this thing. Mark had spent at least a year pouring his heart and soul into it, had been through all the studio wars with it...so what you see in the final product is a collaboration between two writers who didn't necessarily work on it at the same time, but years apart. And that was the genesis of the picture. There were changes made and the emphasis was changed but it's the product, really, of a very unusual writing team. And again there was trouble getting the money and getting it on track...

How long did it take to get it off the ground?
Over a year to get it all together. Again, at first I didn't know how to do it. I didn't understand the tone of it. I was open on that and it was an exploration. There were a lot of late ideas in it. It was a late idea to make Jack's character chemically ill. It was a late idea to put the emphasis on he and the girl. It's very hard to explore what to do with a picture at a certain budget. There is another type of budget where you can just say "We know what we want to do and it's this (snaps fingers)!" And for me, because I'm a responsible person, you start to feel very weird if you're out there playing with someone else's money without a clear idea of what you're doing with it. But, like most things, it worked out in the end. It just took that little extra time of exploration.

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Vittorio Storaro: THe Hollywood Interview

Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro.

VITTORIO STORARO:
WRITING WITH LIGHT
By
Alex Simon

Editor's Note: This aritcle originally appeared in the February 1999 issue of Venice Magazine.


Vittorio Storaro is widely regarded as one of the top cinematographers in the world. Born in Rome in 1940, Storaro went to film school in Italy at Duca D'Aoasta Technical Photographic Institute, the Italian Cinemagraphic Training Center, and the Centro Sperimental di Cinematografia. After meeting another young student of film named Bernardo Bertolucci, a lifelong friendship and partnership was born, with Bertolucci as director and Storaro as cinematographer. Their collaborations include The Spider's Stratagem (1970), The Conformist (1971), Last Tango in Paris (1972), 1900 (1977), and The Last Emperor (1987) for which he won an Academy Award. Storaro's other work behind the camera lens includes the classics Apocalypse Now (1979) for which he won his first Oscar, Reds (1981) his second Oscar, Tucker (1988), Dick Tracy (1990) and Flamenco, his first film for director Carlos Saura in 1995. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently honored Storaro with a retrospective of his work, starting with his early films for Bertolucci to the present day.
Storaro's most recent work, Carlos Saura's Tango tells the story of Mario, a former tango star turned director, who is making the ultimate film about the dance Tango. The gangster who finances Mario's film asks him to cast his mistress, which Mario does, and the two begin a passionate and dangerous affair. Tango artfully blends Felliniesque images of Mario's past, present and future, along with some of the most stunning Tango ever captured on film, all highlighted by maestro Storaro's gorgeously saturated colors and brilliantly composed shots. Tango is a feast for the senses, not to be missed.
Signor Storaro sat down recently at the legendary Chateau Marmont in Hollywood to discuss his life as one of the world's greatest cinema artists.

Tango is a fascinating film, as it blends so many different art forms.
Vittorio Storaro: I think that Tango is opening a new eye, a new dimension for myself. After all my interest in adjusting light, from the first part of my life to the study of colors in the second part, in the third part I'm trying to search for balance between opposite elements. Since meeting Carlos Saura there is a new way of seeing for me. It's almost an abstract way of seeing. If it were painting, it would be like going from the Renaissance and arriving to the abstract world of painting. That's the same kind of journey in the visual world that we made in our collaboration. In Tango, he uses the dance as a metaphor to tell the story of one country, of Argentina. The Argentinean community is a mixture of Spanish and Italian. And this film is made by a Spanish director and an Italian cinematographer. We worked from the roots in order to tell the story of Tango. We tried to visualize the journey the main character was making as a journey into the color spectrum. As we liked to say, we were writing with light to tell the story. That is what cinematography is all about. We are continuing this journey with a new project we just finished called Goya Goya.

Tell us how Tango came about.
Originally we thought of doing it like Flamenco, without a story. To let the dancers tell the possibilities of the story. We went to Buenos Aries for a few weeks with (composer) Lalo Schifrin lived in this new world for us. In the end we decided to make it a more personal story, about all of us. Cinema is not only about story, you know. It can be a language of images, of sound, of music and sometimes story is just there to help you go inside one area, and I think Tango is something like that.

Tell us about your friendship and collaboration with Bernardo Bertolucci.
The three sections of my own life can also be classified according to three directors that I worked with during each one. And no doubt, Bernardo Bertolucci belonged to the first part of my life. It was my more innocent part, the discovery, the growing up, the time you are forming yourself, which is my Italian part. Then the second part began with Francis Coppola and Apocalypse Now. Bernardo and I did a good section of our lives together and remain great friends. We never told our stories through the completely conscious side of our minds. Bernardo's characters never say exactly what's on their minds or what the scene is about. There is always some part that belongs to Bernardo's own unconscious, which you have to suggest and present in that way. That's why I say cinematography is again, writing with light. Using the language of light to get across an idea, or a characterization, or a theme that might not necessarily be spoken of directly.

How did you initially become interested in photography?
I became the dream of my own father, who was a projectionist with a big company called Lux Film. He always longed to be part of the process of making films, and pushed me in that direction. So in the beginning, I just followed my father's (wishes) going to different film schools and step by step I became aware of the process and fell in love with the mystery of photography. Step by step you clarify yourself and the process then becomes your own, and it clarifies your own journey.

Tell us about working on Apocalypse Now.
I realized at that point in my life that I musn't be innocent any longer, but that I must be conscious of what I was doing. It was one of the most important changes I ever had, or than anyone has in their own life. Only when things are clear, can changes occur in your life. Cinema gives you a great opportunity to learn new things about yourself. You must always continue to be a student, to continue to learn. And Apocalypse Now helped me to realize this.

Film is really the only art form where all the other art forms can come together, isn't it?
You said something very important, particularly today. Museums today cannot just present to the public drawing, painting or sculpture. Visual art has moved beyond that. There is a dominant art form in every century and in this one, it has been film, there is no question.

Let's talk about Last Tango. At the time you were making it, were you aware how controversial, and how influential, it would be?
No. Usually when you're working on something, those things don't occur to you. You're just doing the work because you feel that's the right way to do it. Even with Tango, at the time we were doing it, we didn't think about (other's reactions). We just thought we were doing it the right way and did it. Looking at it now, I think it's a film that will open up a whole new area in the world of visual art.

I'm anxious to see your new film about Goya. Who are some of the painters that have influenced you the most?
Going backwards, I'd say Caravaggio. Being Italian he was the obvious first choice, also the way he used light and dark. He gave me the confirmation that he was the only one that really visualized the journey of light. William Faulkner wrote in one of his stories, I don't know the title in English, about a beam of sun traveling into a room in a similar way that Caravaggio used to paint. Those two elements stayed in my mind and influenced me the most.

When you shoot a film, especially a film with a huge scope like 1900 or Apocalypse, do you storyboard before you shoot?
I'm not able to storyboard, no. Carlos Saura is very good at storyboarding, however. But I use any other elements to visualize the scenes in my script. My scripts are always full of paintings, not always from the same painter, but any image that helps me to connect me to a script. You always need to have one very strong idea to tell. What is the main idea of the picture? What is the idea that will lead the project in the right direction? Once you have that, you go to the script and you have to make that script yours in understanding what is the main concept of the project visually. How I can tell the story through light and color. I really do believe that the human being does not see only with the eyes, but with the entire body. Your body reacts emotionally to different colors without your even knowing it, you know? You feel love, hate, right, wrong, without even knowing it. When a film is in balance with all its elements: visuals, music, editing, performance, then it is successful.

The first film I remember seeing where I was aware of the emotional effects of color was in Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966).
Yes. He was one of the few directors who studied the meaning of color. Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potempkin (1925)) also wrote a famous book about color, although he only did one color film, Ivan the Terrible, Part 2 (1946). Throughout his script he made specific notes about the color journey. Color can be used as a language. Unfortunately, today newer filmmakers seem to prefer to tell the audience exactly what's going on and what everything is about instead of using color, production design, music, actors' body language, and camera angles to communicate. Plus with television, we are now used to seeing images on a very small screen, and the original way of making a movie on a wide screen doesn't work very well on a small one. So most directors today do movies with television in mind, which is a major mistake. Soon, those movies will be blown-up as television screens get bigger and have better resolution, and the results will (not look good). So we'll turn to films from other periods, I think. We need a new generation of filmmakers who will try to re-educate the audience and make pictures in a more balanced way. Cinema is a balance between three elements: images, music and words. If you're using balance, you can have a perfect way today of using cinema in a modern way.

Tell us a bit more about the experience of Apocalypse Now.
It's difficult after so much time. Without a doubt, the film changed us all more than any other project we've worked on before or since. Not just because of the physical hardships and the length of time it took, but also because of the meaning of the film, which was a journey where Willard, the main character, is learning many things about the nature of man and of life. Like Heart of Darkness, it was also about how one culture can affect another culture, when they try to take it over. Throughout history, one civilization always thought it was doing good by trying to destroy another civilization, by putting their world on top. Like what the Spaniards did in South America, for example. Apocalypse Now is really a metaphor in this respect. It was difficult to find another project after Apocalypse to fall in love with, that had the right principles. I had to rejuvenate for one year afterwards before I could work again.

I know the relationship between the director and the cinematographer is a very close one. Tell us about your relationship with Francis Coppola, whom you've worked with several times.
We must always remember that cinema is a communal work, not a single work. But we still need a leader to take us on the journey. And that spiritual leader is no doubt the director. We need that person to help us go off together in the same direction, and Francis is a master at that. He also has given me more freedom to stretch myself than anyone else. Also, there is no difference between his private life and his public life. His life is all about family. On the set, his family is always there and the people working on the film are his family, as well. The same is true when you are in his home. He welcomes you as one of the family.

Tell us about working with Warren Beatty on Reds and Dick Tracy.
At first, Warren was my nightmare (laughs). It was very difficult to understand his way of filmmaking in the beginning. Then I began to realize that as an actor, he was seeing the story from the character's point of view, from the inside. With Coppola, Bertolucci and the others, they saw it from the outside. When I understood his point of view, I found it much easier to collaborate with him, and I learned a lot about the relationship between story and character.

Was Dick Tracy difficult to shoot because of its limited color scheme?
Yes and no. German Expressionism influenced more art forms than any other art movement of its time: painting, film, music, and comic books. I said to Warren, "Dick Tracy must be like German Expressionism: about the conflict between opposite colors." They were using so many opposite colors next to each other, to create conflict visually. It was a type of painting that was very strong politically, and worked brilliantly, so that's what we had in mind.

What should a director look for when hiring a cinematographer, and vice-versa, what should a cinematographer look for before working with a director?
I can't answer the first question, but I can the second one. From the first moment I meet a director, I try to express myself. You say 'yes' or 'no,' based on your feeling that this story and this director are going in the same direction that you are going. If you feel that, that you are attracted to the story and the director's vision, then you should do it. You have to have some common ground. If you feel comfortable with all these elements, then they're the right person. Sometimes you meet wonderful, gifted people, but for some reason you don't feel comfortable and you pass, you say 'no thank you,' because they were not going in the same direction you were going at that time. There is always something inside you that will push you in the right direction that you will discover through writing, or music, or performance, that will help you discover who you are and what your life is about. This will help you grow up, and help you learn about yourself. In turn you can give this gift to somebody else: your children, your students, your audience. You share this spirit. And in doing that you feel that you are part of the human journey.

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OSCAR-WINNER Louie Psihoyos: The Hollywood Interview

Oscar-winning filmmaker Louie Psihoyos.


LOUIE PSIHOYOS KEEPS WATCH ON THE COVE
By
Alex Simon

When Louie Psihoyos’ documentary The Cove was released last July by Roadside Attractions, it had already gained major buzz after nabbing the Best Documentary award at Sundance, and went on to score the Best Doc prize in some of Hollywood’s most coveted arenas: The DGA Award, The PGA Producer of the Year Award, The National Board of Review, The L.A. Film Critics, and the BFCA’s Critics Choice Award. It also won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature—not too shabby for a first-time filmmaker. The Cove was released on DVD by Lionsgate in December.



Psihoyos (rhymes with Sequoias) has been one of the world’s top nature photographers for years, cutting his teeth immediately out of college by shooting for National Geographic, where he landed an 18 year tenure. His passion for diving and underwater photography led him to create, along with Jim Clark, The Oceanic Preservation Society (OPS) in 2005. It also led to his acquaintance with another legendary name in the world of the aquatic, Ric O’Barry, a once-legendary animal trainer who captured, and then trained, the five dolphins who, in the 1960s, starred in the hit TV show “Flipper” as the eponymous dolphin. It was the worldwide popularity of “Flipper” that gave rise to aquatic theme parks, such as Sea World, private “swim with the dolphins” organizations, and the popularity of dolphins as pets which people kept in their backyard pools. All of these factors produced one common denominator in the minds of fishermen: dolphins were suddenly a very lucrative business. When O’Barry realized what he’d unintentionally created, and after the death of the primary “Flipper” dolphin, who literally expired in O’Barry’s arms, Ric O’Barry became a committed conservationalist, and animal rights activist, realizing that dolphins (and their first cousins, the whale), are highly-intelligent mammals and not simple fish as many still believe, and are not meant to be put in captivity, or even worse, hunted and killed. It is the latter which brought O’Barry, and Louie Psihoyos, to the small fishing village of Taiji, Japan.

Seemingly built around its love of the creatures of the sea, the dolphin in particular, Taiji also hides a horrific secret: a remote, natural cove which is ominously surrounded by barbed wire and “keep out” signs, where the fishermen of Taiji, driven by the multi-billion dollar dolphin entertainment industry and an even more scabrous market for mercury-tainted dolphin meat, engage in an unseen (and highly-taboo) hunt for creatures that are not only among the most advanced on Earth, but also among the most toxic, with their mercury levels topping five thousand times the safety level allotted for legally-sold seafood.

Working with model-makers at George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic, Psihoyos and his team of filmmakers and activists made a series of cameras and microphones, disguised to look like the rocks of the cove, hid the equipment under cover of night, and captured some truly horrific footage, and equally chilling conversations from the fishermen, damning not only the fishermen and the community of Taiji, but the highest levels of the Japanese government, as well. One of the most provocative and incendiary documentary films in many years, The Cove combines covert op suspense with ecological and scientific fact. It is a unique work.

Louie Psihoyos sat down with The Interview during a recent L.A. stopover. Here’s what transpired:

Let’s start with how your journey from photographer to filmmaker to activist happened.

Louie Psihoyos: I was a still photographer for many years, then got into filmmaking because I wanted to create awareness of ocean issues. I was trying to really be objective when I went into this film, to tell both sides of the story, because I thought that’s where the magic was. When I realized that the other side didn’t really want their side told, probably because as Ric O’Barry said in the film, if the world found out what was actually happening there, they would be shut down. So I think the dolphin hunters realized that they were in an indefensible position on a couple levels, not just in terms of the humanity and the extinction of these creatures, but the inhumanity to man. These animals are toxic and their mercury levels far exceed the minimum toxicity levels allowed for seafood in Japan, five thousand times more toxic, in fact. I asked some of the scientists about why (the fishermen) continue to do it and they said “The money.”

Former dolphin trainer-turned animal rights activist Ric O'Barry.

Economics, plain and simple. And also sociology, it sounds like, because a big part of Japanese culture involves fishing, whaling, and fish in general. So it sounds like there’s also a certain nationalistic pride involved.

Sure, you could argue that, I suppose, but the types of boats they’re using and style of hunting they’re engaging in has only been in practice since 1933. My mother is older than their tradition. So it’s disingenuous to call it a tradition, plus if your tradition is poisoning people, you have to rethink your tradition. We had a tradition back in Colorado, just down the street in Rocky Flats, where they made triggers for plutonium bombs. The argument that the workers had there for continuing to do what they did was “Well, what are we going to do for a living if we don’t make bombs?” Well, they found other ways to make a living. The sons of the dolphin hunters told us that they don’t like doing it, either, that they’d rather be hunting lobster or crabs.

Let me play devil’s advocate for a few questions, if you don’t mind.
No, not at all.

You’re dealing with this very specific subculture of fishermen in this small region of Japan. If you ask an educated, upper-middle class person what they think of dolphin hunting, odds are they’ll agree with your position, because they realize dolphins aren’t so-called “lower creatures,” but actually very sophisticated mammals. But these fishermen are tough, blue-collar guys, most of whom I'm guessing aren’t terribly educated, have been fishermen for generations, probably hundreds of generations, would they really be able to make a living doing something else? Your example of Colorado is bit different. The town of Taiji struck me almost as the Asian equivalent of Appalachia, where people also have a tough time “getting out,” so to speak, and breaking with tradition, even though that tradition might be harmful to themselves, and to others. Is this a fair question?

Yeah, I see what you’re saying. They actually speak a dialect that few Japanese people understand. When we had the covert footage of them talking around the campfire, we had to find a translator who specifically knew this very obscure dialect. So yes, that’s one argument, and a variety of countries, including the U.S., are culpable in terms of the endangerment of whales and dolphins. The bottom line is that all those countries got the word pretty early that the hunting of these creatures continued to go on way after it was sustainable.

And it became illegal to hunt whales in 1986?

As a law it was 1982, and then it was actually implemented in 1986. But the Japanese are still doing it under the aegis of the scientific permit they issued to themselves when, of course, it’s not science. It’s just an excuse to do commercial whale hunting, which is very profitable.



Let’s get back to the original question, which was if you took whaling away from the country in general, and dolphin hunting away from this community in Taiji, would they have a source of income that they could survive on?

Take income away from a couple dozen people? I have to be honest that I don’t really care.

I had the impression that it was more than a couple dozen people, that most of the town depended on the income earned from the fruits of the sea. Taiji struck me as a “company town,” so to speak, just like a lot of the Appalachian communities were literally owned by mining corporations back in the day, and their people exploited.

Well, there’s 26 people in the boats, then the other people work in the slaughterhouse, some are the middlemen, but most of the fishing there is done from other sources. Tuna fishing, for example, is huge there. It has one of the biggest tuna fishing markets in the world. There is a dwindling supply of fish in the ocean, and I know that the top level people I’ve interviewed are keenly aware of it. The Deputy Minister of Fisheries, Akiranakmai, I sat on a plane next to him for ten hours, on a flight from Dallas to Japan. We had had this footage for a couple years that I didn’t want to sit on, because I knew that more of these animals were going to be slaughtered and more children and adults poisoned. So I cut together a P.S.A. from what we’d shot, along with the scientific facts, with the idea of showing it to the Japanese delegate of the I.W.C. So I hop on this plane, one of the last people on board, and there’s this empty seat next to me, and who should sit down next to me, but this man, Akiranakamai! (laughs) I thought, if there is a God, then he has a really good sense of humor. I waited till the plane took off so it would be uncomfortable for him to try and get up to change places with someone on the plane. So I turned to him and asked ‘Do you have any idea who I am?’ He said “No.” I said “Well I know who you are, and I’d like to show you some movies.” And I did. He was furious at the fact that we’d gotten this footage. I said ‘Listen, you’re responsible for five thousand tons of toxic dolphin meat being put on the market every year, a lot of it being sold as fake whale meat. How do you feel about that? You could stop it.’ His response was “Well, I’m in charge of food security, not food safety.”

Louie Psihoyos confers with the model-makers at ILM.

You touch on a very important cultural point: Japanese culture is all based on hierarchy. One of the most telling moments that illustrates this point in your film is when you showed the footage to Akiranakamai’s subordinate, his only response was “On whose authority did you film this?” He couldn’t respond any other way, with a real opinion, and neither, obviously, could his boss. So how do you battle something so firmly rooted in a culture that’s completely different from ours?

Well, hopefully this film will cut through, to some level, to the hierarchy, where it will be shut down. There’s two ways to kill a rabbit: you destroy all the grass that it’s eating or you shoot it through the head. With this film, I think we can do both. The Minister of Health, she could shut this down. The minimum amount of mercury allowed in fish to consumed in Japan is .04 parts per million. Dolphin meat has anywhere from 5-5,000 parts per million.

You raise another alarming point in the film, that there are many other very popular types of fish that also have high amounts of toxicity in them: swordfish, tuna, and grouper. What are some of the others you mentioned?
Marlin. Shark. There are advisories for mercury in all 50 states of this country, so it’s available. On the DVD extras for The Cove, we have a 24-minute short that’s on this subject, as well.

Ric O'Barry and friend.

Another devil’s advocate question: the ultra-left wing environmentalists who, peacefully, are trying to stop the slaughter of dolphins in this film, it could be argued, are the opposite side of the coin from the extreme right wing who, sometimes violently, in this country picket and in the extreme, bomb abortion clinics or assassinate OBGYNs. In both cases, you have a small group of people trying to keep another group of people from engaging in a way of life that makes their living. I happen to think the extreme right-wingers are naïve if they think that their actions will ever help repeal Roe vs. Wade. Are the left-wingers equally naïve to think that their actions and that of a very talented filmmaker will make a difference here, or are their ideals, and strategy, progressive?

For me, personally, I think it’s progressive, as are most animal rights issues. I personally stopped eating things that walk 25 years ago, however I’m not militant about it. My wife still eats meat, as do my kids. I try to wear vegan shoes. (laughs) But if I was eating fish that was toxic with mercury, I would hope someone would tell me! Some of these fish should have poison labels on them when they reach stores. I’ll give you even more of a left wing point-of-view. At the core of this, we’re not making demons out of the dolphin hunters as much as we are the rest of society for toxifying these animals. It’s such a big issue, but the way we’re getting our energy through the burning of fossil fuels is destroying the planet through acidification. We’re going to lose all the corral reefs by the end of this century. Now do I use energy every day? Sure. When I charged all my electric devices in my hotel room, am I engaging in hypocritical behavior? You bet.

We all do, even the best-intentioned of us, just to survive.

Right, just to survive. Halfway through the making of this film, I realized that we were taking another left turn in the story, in that the film wasn’t just about dolphins and the bad guys who hunt and kill them, but that the real bad guys of the story are us. I did a carbon assessment of what it would take to make the film at that point, and came up with a figure of 646 tons of carbon that would be put into the environment to make the film. Because we were producing the film in Colorado, most of our power there is coal-derived, and coal has a lot of mercury in it. So I realized that one of the dirtiest things you can do to the environment is to make a film about it. (laughs)

A still from the covertly-filmed dolphin hunt inside the cove.

So what do you do in your daily life to combat this?

Well, that realization changed the way we used energy from then on. I’m the Executive Director of the Oceanic Preservation Society, and we installed 120 solar panels on our roof, which generates 140% of our electric needs. The electric company gives us a check every month, as opposed to the other way around. We have two electric cars, not the hybrids, but completely electric, that can go 80 miles an hour and 120 miles per charge. The license plate reads “VUS”—Vehicle Using Sun, the opposite of an SUV. Now all our neighbors are installing solar panels on their roofs. We’re trying to do the same thing with this film, to show people what’s possible if you’re committed.

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A Talk with Alex Gibney: Director of Taxi to the Dark Side

Alex Gibney's Academy Award-nominated documentary Taxi to the Dark Side

Note: This article on documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney appeared last month in Venice Magazine. Today, he received a well-deserved Oscar nod in the Best Documentary Feature Category for Taxi to the Dark Side, his disturbing investigation into torture in American prisons during wartime, that being now. His previous directorial doc, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, is also a masterwork of investigative journalism.

Taxi Driver
Alex Gibney’s new documentary on torture is a harrowing new ride you won’t want to take. But you have to.
By Terry Keefe

About six weeks before he passed away, Alex Gibney’s father, once a Naval interrogator during World War II, and later a journalist himself, unhooked his oxygen tank and asked his filmmaker son to get his video camera. Frank Gibney wished to speak about the subject of torture and how outraged he was at the revelations about the use of torture on prisoners in Iraq, Guantanamo, and Afghanistan. Specifically, the elder Gibney directed his indignation at the leaders (you know them, but for the record, they include George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Alberto Gonzalez), who he believed the buck stopped with. Frank Gibney had interrogated Japanese prisoners during the battle of Okinawa, one of the bloodiest, and although they were dealing with that era’s version of suicide bombers in the form of kamikaze pilots, Gibney and his fellow soldiers chose not to cross the line into brutality. When asked why not by his son, Frank Gibney replied that to do so would be to sacrifice the very values they were fighting for. Alex Gibney elaborates, “It’s not to say that there weren’t suspensions of human rights during World War II. The Japanese Internment Camps in particular come to mine. But it was so far from my father’s frame of reference that FDR would have condoned torture. One of the things that he was fighting for, particularly against the Japanese, who did torture prisoners, was for a better possibility.” Alex Gibney’s interview with his father closes his new documentary on the use of torture during the War on Terror, entitled Taxi to the Dark Side, a film which should be required viewing for every American, from the highest towers of political power to the youngest soldiers in the field. Gibney’s latest continues his examination of the force of corruption, explored via the business world previously in his documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and how it virals itself into every part of an organization, whether that be a company or a country, when immorality is left unchecked, or condoned, by the people at the top of the power structure.

The taxi cab referenced in the title was driven by an Afghan named Dilawar, who was taken prisoner as a suspected terrorist by the military and brought to the air base at Bagram, where he was tortured and eventually died. It turned out that Dilawar was innocent, a fact that was known by his interrogators towards the end of his life. But they continued to abuse him anyway, largely because Dilawar had been stuck inside an organizational culture of torture that knew few boundaries and was sanctioned at the highest levels. Says Gibney, “Structurally, the story of Dilawar allowed me to show the breath of the policy, a relentless torture mechanism that corrupts everything in its path.“ Indeed, although Dilawar himself never left Afghanistan, the passengers in his cab, also suspected terrorists, were brought to Guantanamo and tortured. And that same system of torture, when used in Guantanamo on the suspected “20th Hijacker” of 9/11, Mohamed al-Qahtani, eventually extracted statements about links between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda, which Colin Powell later used in his now-infamous U.N. speech in the lead-up to the current Iraq War. And who knows whether the information al-Qahtani provided was true? A man who is getting waterboarded might say anything. “The one thing we know about torture is that the interrogator gets what he wants to hear,“ explains Gibney. “And I think that became appealing for the Bush administration over time. It became a mechanism, conscious or unconscious for them, which got them back the info they wanted to hear. That’s a terrifying idea. That’s the Soviet Union. That’s the gulag. You’re intentionally seeking false confessions to confirm your beliefs.” He goes on to say, “People were stating for years that this was just a few bad apples at Abu Ghraib. But it was a much more pervasive policy. It gets into the corruption of the American character.”

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