Sidney Lumet 1924-2011

Director Sidney Lumet.

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

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

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

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

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

SIDNEY LUMET: THE MASTER SPEAKS
By
Alex Simon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Nick Nolte: The Hollywood Interview

Actor Nick Nolte.


NICK NOLTE: REBEL, REBEL
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the December 1998/January 1999 issue of Venice Magazine.

Growing up in Arizona is sort of like being a forgotten third cousin of the Rockefellers with a different last name: no one talks about you, no one thinks about you, and no one notices you. You're the red-headed, pasty-faced stepchild that vanished into the wallpaper of the east wing. You know that you're very close to something important that people do notice (like California) where books, plays and movies are set, where many famous and accomplished people are from, where people seem to want to be, want to go and very often seem to be on their way to. So for those of us stuck in the limbo land of identity-free Arizona, we had very little to really call our own. We had one Trump card: Steven Spielberg. Aside from the most successful filmmaker of all time, we could claim Alice Cooper, Steve Allen, Wayne Newton, and Lynda Carter (Wonder Woman, remember her?), but no true-blue, bonafide, dyed-in-the-wool, cooler than cool movie stars...that is not until 1976 when a TV "mini-series event" rocked our world. Rich Man, Poor Man was a revelation for a couple reasons. First, it was a great, old fashioned story full of sex, violence and one-eyed villains who were deadly with a sharp blade. Second, it introduced a young actor named Nick Nolte to the world. And get this: Nolte, this cooler than cool, dyed in the wool star-to-be was from Phoenix! Well...okay. Maybe "from" is too strong a word, but he went to Arizona State, lived in the Phoenix metro area on and off for years and at one time or another, had an Arizona driver's license, so dag-gummit, we claimed him as our own! Nolte's immediately-recognizable star quality combined the vulnerability of James Dean, crossed with the surly world-weariness of Robert Mitchum to create a much-needed rebel without a care for the rebel-challenged times of the mid-70's. Ask anyone from Arizona and they'll tell you: "Yup, Nick's one of us."

Nick Nolte was born nowhere near Arizona, but in Omaha, Nebraska on February 8, 1940. The son of an Iowa State football player, Nolte followed his dad's footsteps initially, excelling in sports as a teen, and eventually earning a football scholarship to Arizona State, where he flunked out. Over the next few years, he played ball, but barely studied, at four other schools, including Eastern Arizona Junior College, Phoenix City College, and Pasadena City College, before finding himself out of options as a football player. After briefly holding a job as a Los Angeles iron worker, he discovered the theater, studying at the Pasadena Playhouse. For the next 14 years, Nolte roamed the country with various regional companies and worked extensively at New York's Cafe La Mama. Although he settled down considerably during his travels, marrying the first of his three wives and catching up on his education by attending classes at various universities, the still-rebellious Nolte was arrested for counterfeiting draft cards and was put on five years probation. Things improved dramatically for him upon his return to California in 1973, however. He began appearing in films and TV shows, and in 1976 hit paydirt with Rich Man, Poor Man. Movie stardom quickly followed, with Nolte gaining notoriety for many of his unconventional, non-commercial choices of projects. Many feel that the longevity of his career has been helped by the fact that he refuses to be pigeonholed into "movie star" parts.

His first high-profile feature was the big screen adaptation of Peter Benchley's The Deep (1977), where Nolte played second fiddle to Jacqueline Bisset's tangible assets; director Karel Reisz's overlooked masterpiece Who'll Stop the Rain (aka Dog Soldiers, 1978); the greatest gridiron film ever made, North Dallas Forty (1979); the biography of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy, HeartBeat (1980): the box office smash 48 Hours (1982) which introduced another fresh young face in Eddie Murphy; Under Fire (1983), director Roger Spottiswoode's masterful political thriller about the coup in Nicaragua in the late 70's; Grace Quigley (aka The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley, 1985) with screen legend Katharine Hepburn; Paul Mazursky's Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986); Sidney Lumet's Q & A (1990); he scored two hits in 1991 with Martin Scorsese's remake of Cape Fear and Barbara Streisand's Prince of Tides. He followed these with George Miller's acclaimed Lorezo's Oil in 1992, James L. Brooks' I'll Do Anything and William Friedkin's Blue Chips in 1994, Merchant-Ivory's Jefferson in Paris in 1995, and Keith Gordon's adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night (1996). Nolte ends 1998 with two major releases: reclusive auteur Terrence Malick's long-awaited World War II drama The Thin Red Line, in which he plays a Lt. Colonel who may or may not be totally insane, and Paul Schrader's searing drama Affliction, a compelling and bleak depiction of a small town sheriff's investigation of a shooting and his impending mental collapse, framed with a backstory of childhood abuse at the hands of a tyrannical father (James Coburn). Both films are slated for Christmas releases in L.A. and New York for Oscar consideration and feature some of Nolte's most compelling, complex work to date.

In person, Nolte is not the imposing giant he appears to be on screen, but a trim and dapper fellow of about 6'1 who loves nothing more than to sit at home with a good book on a Friday night. Nolte sat down recently to discuss his work, his memories and of course, his (sort of) hometown, Phoenix.

Your character in Affliction, Wade Whitehouse, really stayed with me for a long time. Did you have trouble shaking him as well?
Nick Nolte: Yeah, he hung around for quite a while, just because of the place I had to get to find him. I stalled doing this film for about three or four years. We finally got it set up about a year and a half after Paul and I had first met, and when Paul called, telling me he wanted to start shooting, I had a couple other projects I'd already committed to. Plus, I didn't really feel quite ready to do it. So Paul was quite upset that it fell apart...finally the head of Largo, Bart Potter, asked me if I had any projects I wanted to do, and I told him about Affliction. So it took about five years altogether. And I needed those five years, not that I didn't understand the rage and the violence in the character, because I did. But it was all about whether I wanted to go there or not...but this primal rage, this capacity for violence that we address in the film, it's in us all.

I thought one of the most compelling things about Wade's losing his mind was that you weren't sure until the very end whether the murder was real or in Wade's head, because Wade believed so strongly that he was right. He didn't think he was insane, so neither did we, as the audience.
The insanity is Wade's denial of the situation. The other brother (played by Willem Dafoe) is truly insane. He's locked himself away in this little world where he doesn't have to deal with human beings at all. Wade is a classic hero in the sense that he faced his deficit, his affliction, and deals with it...but the whole nature of mental illness is denial. Hitler didn't believe he was crazy. He thought he was right. He thought he was rational, and correct. It's not the crazy person who's dangerous, it's the rational person who's in denial.

The Thin Red Line deals with many of the same issues, doesn't it?
It does, and it doesn't. I think one of the themes is, based on what James Jones, who wrote the book the film is based on, said. He said that in the moment of the biggest horror that one can face--war--where you absolutely know you're going to die and that the fellow next to you is going to die, in that moment there's a falling away of all pretense, and in that moment, you experience the most profound love for the fellow next to you that you will ever experience. And it's a hypocrisy that that's the case. Jones was on the front lines, so he knew first-hand. It's also a story about courage. Who's able to arise to the occasion and shoot that gun? In WW II and up to Vietnam, only 20% of the troops actually fired their weapons. 80% did not fire. A Colonel did this whole study, and he discovered that there's an instinct in all humans not to kill, and that instinct has to be overcome somehow during times of war. They found that a lot of the men were shooting over the enemy's head and that those who couldn't shoot at all, would load the guns for those who could...But Jones said that he never felt that kind of profound love again in his life and the only kind of love that comes close to it, is love for a child. That's about the only kind of love you'll sacrifice yourself for.

Let's talk about your background. Were you drawn toward theater as a kid?
No, not until I came out here. In the early 60's I had a friend who was going to the Pasadena Playhouse--I was going to Pasadena City College--and he invited me to see a play he was in. So I went, became fascinated with it, and left L.A. and went to Arizona, where I started doing theater. I did some work at Phoenix City College with John Paul, all the community theaters, started a couple rep companies out there. Then I worked all over the country, finally ended up with a company that went to Broadway and then folded. Then a guy I knew in Phoenix named Keith Anderson called me up, and told me he mounting a production of this William Inge play called The Last Pad. So we did it, Inge came over and saw it, and insisted that it come to L.A. with our cast. So we put it on in what's now the Geffen Playhouse. This was about 1974 and I went from there to doing TV guest spots, and then Rich Man.

You were really one of the first actors who was courted by the big studios to take a more independent route, weren't you?
You have to remember, I was 35 years old when I got Rich Man and I had 14 years of theater experience and during that 14 years, I chased nothing but the authors (of the plays). If there was an Arthur Miller play, I'd find out where the production was being done and go audition. If they were doing Luther somewhere, I'd go audition. I tried to do that play every 2-3 years, because it's such a scope of his life and I'd get a different insight into the character every time. So after Rich Man I had a lot of offers for three picture deals and I'd say "What are the pictures?" And they were always crap. There were three pictures I tried to get into that year: Apocalypse Now, George Roy Hill's Slap Shot, and Billy Friedkin's Sorcerer. I came close on Apocalypse, but they gave it to Harvey Keitel, then to Martin Sheen. And during all that time, they had The Deep just sitting there, with my agents going "Do The Deep! Do The Deep!" Since I wasn't cast in these other pictures, I went to work and did The Deep.

Tell us about working with Robert Shaw in that film.
(laughs) He'd corral me in a corner and say (imitating Shaw)"It's a treasure picture! A treasure picture! Let's drink some rum!" (laughs) We'd be in the tank filming with Jackie Bisset and take these giant phallic shells and chase her around. Jackie would start laughing. With Jackie in the scene, you were always swimming upside down, with her wearing that t-shirt. (laughs) Bob and I got real close during the shoot. Here's one day: we were sitting on the boat, docked, and were shooting this scene where we had to get off the boat, onto the dock. And it starts raining, all day. And we're just sitting in this boat. So Bob turns to me and says "See that bottle of whiskey over there?" I said "Yeah." "Let's have it." So we take the bottle, have a drink. It keeps raining and we keep drinking...finally at five o'clock a little ray of light breaks through and hits the dock. And (director) Peter Yates goes "Let's get the shot!" I immediately, being a young actor, try to get up. And I'm drunker than a skunk! We'd gone through that bottle and started another one! (laughs) So I'm all ready, trying to pretend I wasn't drunk and Bob goes, "No, no, let me handle this." So Bob gets up, walks up the stairs to the top of the boat, started walking along the plank, gets to the front of the boat and BOOM! He falls flat on his face! Peter Yates starts yelling "Oh my God, he's drunk!" Bob rolls off the boat, falls into the water, climbs into a little dinghy, starts it up, and heads across the bay! So everybody was terribly frightened to go get Shaw, so I got elected since we were friends. So I go across the bay, to this house where he is. I look through the window and I see him sitting in a chair with another bottle. So I crack open the door and say "Bob...?" He turns to me and says "What took you so long?" (laughs) That was Shaw. That was Shaw.

Let's talk about North Dallas Forty, which I think is the greatest football picture ever made.
I'm sitting in Mexico doing Who'll Stop the Rain, reading Peter Gent's book North Dallas Forty, just going "This is an amazing book." Anthony Zerbe walked by and said "That's your next picture." I said, "You mean I can just do what I want?" He said "Absolutely. That's going to be your next picture." So I got a writer friend of mine and we just started writing it. We didn't have the rights to it, didn't know what its status was. I called my agent and manager at the time and said I wanted to do this film, could they please check on the rights. But they didn't want me to do this project, so they didn't really pursue it. In the meantime every job that was offered to me I turned down. So this went on for a year. At the end of that year, I got a call from Michael Eisner, who had just come on as one of the three presidents of Paramount, along with Barry Diller and Robert Evans. He was also a vice-president at ABC when I did Rich Man, so I had a relationship there. He read the script and said "Okay, this is going to be one of my first films. But you've got to use a Paramount producer and a Paramount-appointed director. I said "Fine." Diller and Evans didn't want to do it, there was a lot of competition between them, but we went ahead anyway. During the development process we had gone through lots of different writers, comedic writers who wanted to have one of the players go on the field with a wooden leg, things like that...so I called Pete Gent and had him come back to have him on the set.(producer) Frank Yablans didn't want him there. He screamed at Pete: "Get this guy the hell off the set!" I said "Frank, this is the man who wrote North Dallas Forty, this is Phil Elliot, my character. I need him here to help me with my character." Frank grumbled "Alright, but he'd better not get in the way." So then (director) Ted Kotcheff comes up to me and says "Get Gent to start writing." So Pete started re-writing the script. And we shot one of his scenes, and Frank wasn't there that day. We were in dailies later, and this scene came up, and it was just brilliant, and Frank said "This is great! Who wrote this?" Pete raised his hand. Frank barked back: "Keep writing!" (laughs) So that's how North Dallas Forty was done. It was forced into being by my simply saying "I am going to do this."

I think Under Fire is an overlooked masterpiece. Tell us about the genesis of that film.
I'm going through the commissary at Paramount and I see Roger Spottiswoode and Ron Shelton. I knew Roger because he was Karel Reisz's editor. I asked them what they were up to. They were about to pitch Under Fire. I asked to read it and said "Look, you guys stay here, I'll go over to the office and read it." So I read it and it was just brilliant. So I committed to it, and because they had the actor already attached when they pitched it, it got set up! So we go down to Mexico to shoot it. We didn't have that big a budget, maybe 10 or 12 million. Right when we hit Mexico, the peso devalued by half, so we doubled our money! Now we had $24 million, in Mexican money, to shoot this. So we were able to give it an epic scope.

Tell us about Katharine Hepburn and Grace Quigley.
What Kate did, when I went to Kate's house in New York, she said "Pick a chair you want to sit in." So I sat down in this chair and she said "Ah yes, just as I thought, you picked Spence's chair." (laughs) She was great, just wonderful. The producer would say to her, "Kate, how are you going to play this?" She'd say "What do you mean 'how am I going to play this?' Do you know how you're going to do something before you do it? That's a stupid question!" (laughs) Here's a woman that was fired on eight films, bought her way out of a Broadway play, she said "I was very young and just terrible. I didn't know any technique and I went to the producer and said 'Get someone in here who can act.' And the producer said "No, we didn't hire you for your talent, we hired you for your name." She's very aware, very tuned in. And she knew that wasn't the right place for her to be, so she raised some money and bought her way out of the play. She came along in my life at just about the right time. I was pretty on the edge. And that film had a real ambiance as a holdover from Vietnam, the counterculture. It's an interesting film. Rex Reed called it a "Nazi film," that it promoted killing the elderly, which was absurd.

Let's talk about Prince of Tides, another character with a lot of backstory. Did you have a similar experience with your character Tom Wingo in that as you did with Wade Whitehouse?
Absolutely. I was living in North Carolina at the time, in a beach house, just above Myrtle Beach. I told Barbara Streisand that I was going to go to that beach house for the summer, and I was going to live that life, out on the beach, hang out in some classes with some school teachers in small schools near that area, go down to Beaufort and try to trace Pat Conroy's writing of the novel, which became sort of a massive detective job. Because Conroy talks not only about Beaufort, but all of the south. For a while Robert Redford had the piece, and had a different kind of script than Barbara had. I thought she really found the heart of that material. So I really lived that life, went shrimping...I always felt the character of the sister was Anne Sexton. Barbara felt she was Sylvia Plath. Then someone told me that Pat has a sister who's a poet, so it might just be his sister! (laughs) But Barbara took the heart of the story and focused it on the women and the men. She was a wonderful director, wonderful with the actors and so steeped in the material.

How do you like to be directed, if at all?
However that director wants to direct. With Sidney Lumet, for example, he has a style where we do four weeks of rehearsals where we answer every question from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. We rehearse it a lot like a play. And that's a wonderful approach, because by the time you film, you don't really have any questions about the characters. Sidney and I had a ball. He was wonderful. But every director's different, and you learn something new with each approach.

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Matthew Broderick: The Hollywood Interview

Matthew Broderick in Wonderful World.

THE EDUCATION OF MATTHEW BRODERICK
How the most (arguably) iconic juvenile lead of the 1980s has not only matured into one of our finest character actors, but just keeps getting better

By Alex Simon

If we are all a combination of nature and nurture, actor Matthew Broderick is both. The son of acclaimed character actor James Broderick (best-known as the father on the 1970s hit series “Family”) and playwright/author/painter Patricia Broderick, Matthew’s upbringing in an artistic environment led him to take the stage at age 17, opposite his father in a production of On Valentine’s Day.

Two Tony awards and many decades later finds Matthew Broderick’s resume filled with some of the most iconic films of the 1980s: WarGames, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Glory to name a few, where Matthew established himself not only as one of the finest, and most versatile, young film actors of his generation, but distinguished himself on Broadway as well, in now-legendary plays such as Torch Song Trilogy and Neil Simon’s autobiographical Brighton Beach Memoirs and Biloxi Blues (a role he repeated in the film version, directed by Mike Nichols).

The ‘90s saw Broderick step into more mature roles such as the voice of adult Simba in the Disney hit The Lion King, and that of the hapless, but well-meaning, high school teacher in Alexander Payne’s scathing satire Election, a part which has become somewhat archetypical of Broderick’s later work. He also made his directing debut with Infinity in 1996, penned by his mother. The new century found Broderick again a star of the Broadway stage, originating the role of nebbishy accountant Leo Bloom in the musical of Mel Brooks’ The Producers, opposite Nathan Lane, for which he received a Tony nomination.

Matthew Broderick’s latest big screen outing is writer/director Josh Goldin’s Wonderful World. Broderick stars as Ben Singer, a failed children’s music composer struggling to find meaning in his life. When his Senegalese roommate (Michael K. Williams) has a health scare, Ben finds himself drawn to the roommate’s beautiful and kind-hearted sister (Sanaa Lathan), whose gentle, loving nature forces Ben to reevaluate his cynical view of life. Also starring Ally Walker, Philip Baker Hall and Jodelle Ferland, the Magnolia Pictures release opens in New York and L.A. January 8.

Matthew Broderick sat down with The Hollywood Interview during a recent visit from his native New York to discuss his latest role and other adventures in the screen trade. Here’s what followed:

Tell us about your character of Ben Singer and how you found the heart of this very cynical, “glass half-empty” man.

Matthew Broderick: Well, I have my cynical side so it was fun to explore that. The film is written and directed by Josh Goldin, who’s been a very dear friend of mine for about 20 years, and Ben is very much like Josh in many ways, although Josh is much more cheerful. It was nice that our friendship was able to turn into a professional relationship, and thank God it didn’t go too disastrously, so we were able to remain friends. (laughs) But I liked the part a lot.

Does it make a difference working with a director with whom you have a personal relationship? Is there more of a shorthand present in terms of communication?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I haven’t done it that often, but I have a little bit and, knock wood, it’s always been a pleasure. I can see how it would not be. I mean, if you’re friends, you might be too careful with each other or it might be strange to be bossed around or directed by somebody with whom you’re close. But that’s never happened with me, particularly with Josh. He didn’t change personalities when he became a director. We still had the same relationship. He was not afraid to be honest with me, and vice-versa, and we always ended up having a drink after we’d shoot, so we never went to bed angry, as they say. (laughs)

L to R: Matthew Broderick, Michael K. Williams and Sanaa Lathan in Wonderful World.

How do you think people will relate to Ben’s character and what he's going through, particularly in terms of what the country has gone through in the past year?

It’s interesting because the story seems to be sort of a litmus test for people in terms of whether you see things as positive or negative, and whether your life is the way it is because of your actual circumstances, or because of how you’re looking at things. Ben sees everything in a kind of negative light when the movie begins, and he’s done it to such a degree that he’s almost bringing it on himself. He’s making things worse than they are, and his daughter, which is an interesting part of the film, his relationship with his daughter, he begins to see that he’s actually hurting her, and that’s when he says ‘Wait a minute.’ Then he has a roommate who gently nudges him along in terms of how he’s thinking about things, and then he gets involved with a romance, which wakes him up and gets him out of just thinking about his ex-wife. So he suddenly has a little luck, and also an internal change in his attitudes that makes him end up in a slightly better place than he was in the beginning of the movie.

I’ve been a huge fan of Michael K. Williams since The Wire and it was great to see him do such great work here. Tell us about working with Michael.

Josh wanted him so badly, from seeing The Wire, and the two characters couldn’t be more different, but Michael just has such great energy and is such a bright and interesting actor. I loved working with him. He’s always surprising, and very present, and has a great attitude. He’s always very happy, as is Josh, and thank God, because we shot the thing in 21 days. When you’re on that tight of a schedule, people can get cranky, but by and large, everyone stayed cool and wanted it to come out well and there was no craziness, and a lot of that was due to Michael and the attitude he brought.

Broderick and Ally Sheedy in WarGames.

We should talk about some of your other films. Why don’t we start near the beginning, with WarGames. You did that right after your triumph on Broadway with Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs and you didn’t see a lot of that in the early ‘80s, with actors going back and forth between the stage and screen, as you do now.

Yeah, that happened purely by luck. I was auditioning for WarGames the same time I was auditioning for Brighton Beach and they both worked out and there was time to shoot before the play began. I was cast in the play before I was cast in WarGames, I think, and then luckily the film shot in time for me to be able to do the play, as well. So it was just luck. I didn’t have some master plan to do both. It just worked out that way.

How does your early work hold up for you now?

I don’t know. It’s hard to…my younger things, there are always moments I think are not very good, and I would do better now but at the same time, there’s a lot that I probably wouldn’t do as well. There’s something very nice when you start out and you don’t know too much and you’re more trusting and there’s an ease about the work that’s good. You can’t lose because you’re just thrilled to be there, basically. Then also the nice thing when you’re starting out is the audience is just happy, or hopefully happy, to see this new guy. After a while, that goes away and they’re saying “Hm, is this different from the other thing you did?” And they start to have opinions about you, preconceived things, so you never get that fresh feeling again. So that was an exciting time, because nobody knew what to expect from me, nor did I.

Broderick in an iconic pose from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Speaking of that, we have to talk about Ferris Bueller, which is your most iconic role. I remember reading an interview with you a few years back where you said, after the film’s huge success, you were afraid of getting typecast as that guy for the rest of your career.

It’s not that I didn’t want to be typecast, I just wanted to make sure my career could withstand being identified with such an, as you say, iconic character. It’s like when, back in the old days, if you were cast as Superman, it was hard for audiences to see you as anything else. So, as silly as it sounds now, that part almost had people thinking of me as that guy. So I was just trying to make sure I had a career, and I did, so no complaints.

What was the experience like of making the film itself? It looked like everyone was having a ball.

We were. It was really fun to shoot. It was all about John Hughes. He was so bright and funny, and had such an original mind. It kind of seemed like a new type of film at the time, something that hadn’t really been seen before. It was a big shift, and John’s work was very much on everybody’s mind at the time. I had seen The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles, and then to be asked to do his next one was really thrilling. We shot it in Chicago, which is where John was from, and knew every inch of. He showed us around and we just formed this great camaraderie: me, Alan Ruck, Jennifer Grey, Mia Sara. It was a very special time.

L to R: Alan Ruck, Mia Sara and Broderick in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

What film after that would you say helped redefine your career in terms of moving into another genre comfortably?

I don’t know that there’s any one that redefined me. I just think that, after a while, if you keep working you start to feel as though you’re not so defined by one thing. I mean, I liked Election a lot. That was a different way to go. Glory, I think, was different. Then a lot of the plays I’ve done, like The Producers those are different, too. So I’ve had a lot of variety, and a lot of things that didn’t work, too.

Broderick in Ed Zwick's Glory.

Glory is one of those movies with a blessed cast: you, Morgan Freeman, Denzel Washington, Andre Braugher, Cary Elwes, and others. You all either launched your careers with that film, or sent your careers into a new arc.

It was amazing, wasn’t it? I don’t really run into Denzel that much anymore, but his career has really been magnificent from then on. Some of my favorite actors are in that film, so I was very happy to have been in it with them. Morgan Freeman was one of those people. I mean, I grew up watching him on “The Electric Company,” playing Easy Reader. (laughs) Of course Morgan has had a tremendous career, as well. The director, Ed Zwick, too. So yeah, it’s fun to look back and say ‘I knew them when,’ although we were all pretty established at that point, but no one was really a “star,” per se.

You’ve gotten to work with some amazing directors during your career: Mike Nichols, Sidney Lumet, John Hughes, to name a few. When you directed your first feature, what lessons did you take from them?

Well, you take different lessons from different people. There are so many ways to be a director, and those are three very different directors with different styles. Sidney’s technical skill is just incredible, and I wish I had that, which I knew I didn’t have. Sidney Lumet has directed ten thousand movies and four thousand live television shows, so he just knows everything. Mike is so great with actors and you just want to be around him. He’s a very fatherly director and everyone just wants to hang around near the monitor and talk to Mike. So I couldn’t do that, either. (laughs) John Hughes was a little more shy, a quiet director, but knew exactly what he wanted, but was a little more reticent, I think. But very, very funny when he wanted to be, and very smart. Plus, John wrote all of his films, and when the writers are directing they tend to have a more exact notion of what they want, whereas if the director didn’t write it, he or she is more likely to say “Well, what do you think we should do?” They’re a little looser sometimes. They’re all different, and those three are three of the best.

Broderick and Marlon Brando in The Freshman.

You’ve also worked with some of the greatest actors in the world. We’ve got to talk about Marlon Brando. Any stories about The Freshman?

Oh God, I’ve got a million. (laughs) I mean, he was just so thrilling to watch. He was very friendly to us, to all the actors. He really liked actors. Me and Bruno Kirby would hang out in his trailer, trying to get information. Marlon was very entertaining, liked to talk a lot, and I just hung on everything he said, and I loved watching him work. I can’t remember any stories, really. Sorry. (laughs)

Did he tape his lines on you?

(laughs) No, by that point he used an ear piece and an assistant would feed him his lines if he couldn’t remember. You didn’t notice it, and he rehearsed a lot, too. So it wasn’t that he didn’t care about it. He just didn’t like to know his lines too well. He said if he knew his lines too well, then it wouldn’t be spontaneous, because a part of you is always thinking “What’s the next line?” He didn’t want that part of his mind going. That’s what he said. But if he could read them or hear them, it took his consciousness away from “What am I saying next?” He was a very unique person, and a great actor.

What about all the great actresses you’ve worked with? Any who stand out in particular?

Well, the danger of these questions is that I’m going to leave people out that I don’t mean to. But I’ll tell you one who comes to mind, and that’s Sanaa Lathan, from this movie. She had to work very hard, and very late sometimes, and always cheerfully. She had to learn dances and accents and really make you believe she was from Senegal. She did all of it. What other actresses…Marsha Mason was terrific in my first film (Max Dugan Returns), Ally Sheedy was great. I’m just going chronologically. I don’t know…I’ve worked with great women. I don’t know where to begin. (laughs)

Reese Witherspoon and Broderick in Election.

In terms of the diversity of the roles you’ve played, where would you say Ben Singer falls?

Gosh, I don’t know. I mean, I hope he’s different. It’s nice because he’s not soft. He has an edge to him, which is nice, because I often get parts which are softer. At the same time I don’t like to play something that’s too foreign to me, because I want to serve the script. I don’t want to be doing some exercise for someone else’s enjoyment. I want to play parts that suit me. It’s tricky to know what those are sometimes, but I don’t necessarily think I should break too far away from how I am, or how I’m thought of. You can go a little bit out there, but not too far. That’s my opinion.

You’ve also managed to continue your balance of stage and screen work, again one of the few actors who has managed to do that now. Is it a different process acting on the stage versus acting on film, or are they first cousins?

They’re first cousins, I think. Technically the process is very different. You never have enough rehearsal on a film. Everything you’re seeing in a film is the first day of rehearsal. So I like plays, because it gives me time. On the other hand, there’s immediacy with film that’s very nice. The fact that you haven’t done the thing 200 times is kind of good. It’s fresh. But scenes either play well, and you either work in it, or you don’t. I either suit a role and bring something good to it, or I don’t. I’m never sure which way it will go, and it doesn’t matter if it’s the stage, film or TV. That part of it is always the same.

Broderick and Nathan Lane in The Producers.

But when you play a part like Leo Bloom in The Producers hundreds of times, I’d imagine that you are able to go deeper into the character just because you get to spend so much more time with him.

Yes. We did that for a year, not including Chicago. Then we did the movie, and then we jumped back into it on stage for maybe another four months, me and Nathan (Lane). I think for like six months you get better, and then after that, maybe you don’t, looking back on it. Some things get better, but some things don’t. Sometimes things can get too much better, too strange. I don’t know if that happened with The Producers, but luckily I had Nathan, and that kept me sane. That made it possible to do it 500 times. We kept each other awake.

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Golden Globe Winner SALLY HAWKINS: The Hollywood Interview

Actress Sally Hawkins.


SALLY HAWKINS ON THE VIRTUES OF BEING HAPPY-GO-LUCKY
BY
Alex Simon

Editor's Note: This article appeared in the November issue of Venice Magazine.

English actress Sally Hawkins got her first break in cinema from iconic director Mike Leigh in his film All or Nothing in 2002, and soon followed with work in Leigh’s acclaimed Vera Drake two years later. It was heady stuff for the young actress, who’d just graduated England’s revered drama school, The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, a few years before. Born in London April 27, 1976, Sally made her screen debut on the British television hit Casualty in 1999, with work on the comedy smash Little Britain, as well as fine supporting work in Layer Cake (2004) with Daniel Craig, and The Painted Veil (2007) with Edward Norton and Naomi Watts. She also appeared in Woody Allen’s final UK production, Cassandra’s Dream, opposite Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell.

Sally headlines social realist Mike Leigh’s latest kitchen sink slice of English life, Happy-Go-Lucky, playing Poppy, a free-spirited young Londoner who always manages to keep her chin up and smile, even during life’s most discouraging moments. Shot with Leigh’s signature fly-on-the-wall style, Happy-Go-Lucky marks another impressive entry into this unique filmmaker’s cinematic canon, and boasts a star-making turn from the charming and radiant Miss Hawkins, who took time to speak with us during a recent stopover on this side of the Pond. Here’s what was said…

Mike Leigh really gave you your first break.
Sally Hawkins: Yeah, without him, I don’t know where I’d be. I really mean that. He’s phenomenal. He doesn’t suffer fools, and he’s completely honest, and just a really lovely man. He has no fear, and just says what he feels. You so often in life have people who are afraid of hurting your feelings or sort of approach you from around the side. Mike is just straight-on. In this business especially, it’s so refreshing.

I think we need more blunt instruments like him in the film world, and in general.
Yes, he’s honest and his films reflect that, and there are fewer and fewer of those kinds of films, aren’t there?


Sally and Eddie Marsan take the most neurotic driving lesson in cinema history in Happy-Go-Lucky.

His process that creates that honesty is very interesting, combining rehearsal with improvisation. Tell us a bit about that.
We start out with nothing, no script, nothing. He gets a collection of actors together and they flesh out the story. With something like Topsy-Turvy or Vera Drake I think they were more set ideas, but with Happy Go Lucky and All or Nothing, we start with one-on-one work with Mike, where you’re sort of building up the character and—I don’t know how else to put this—but he’s sort of plugging into your brain and sucking out everything that he needs: very detailed notes. He sorts out what he wants and what he needs. Whether you’re aware of it or not as an actor, he knows vaguely where he wants you to go. I was aware very early on that he was looking for someone who was open and high energy and full of life, love and positivity, who had a sense of humor and naughtiness about them (laughs). And that was quite apparent from early on.

So there wasn’t even a seed of your character to begin with in his head.
No, I think he just knew he wanted to follow someone who had a certain kind of energy and put it up on the screen. And the character that he wanted me to explore, he wanted to have those traits.

Just being around you this briefly, you really radiate positive energy and happiness. Was there a lot of you in this character?
I think there is, yeah. Definitely when life is going well, and I’m sitting in the Los Angeles sun (laughs), I have that same kind of positivity! But early on, he establishes a strong line with you that there’s you, and then there’s your character, and there’s a danger that if you allow yourself to believe that they’re you, it can get into some shaky territory. So he always refers to the characters in the third person, for example, when he’s working with you, just to make sure that line is there. You’ll take with Mike alone, and he’ll ask what was going on with your character in that particular scene, and you’ll also refer to them in the third person. So that line is maintained throughout. Before and after (the scene) he’ll ask you to warm up into your character.

How do you do that?
It gets easier as you progress through rehearsal. Initially, it might take half an hour or an hour before you realize that they’re there and you get a handle on the character, but towards the end of rehearsal, you find that you get better at finding the character, perhaps it’s just down to finding a particular gesture. Then by the time you’re filming, the whole process takes thirty seconds, and you’re there.

How long do you actually rehearse before you shoot?
It’s a six month rehearsal period before Mike shoots. He creates these incredibly real, rich, complex characters. They’re as close to real people as possible. You create them from birth, really. Then Mike takes the time to refine them, build them, and write them basically.

Sally and director Mike Leigh relax on the set.

It sounds like a very complex process.
It is complex, but it makes sense when you’re doing it, and it’s a lot of work, but it’s the most exhilarating thing for an actor, and it’s the most secure feeling I’ve had as an actor, because every single thing, every beat has a root, it has a reason for being there. It’s just so tight by the time it gets to filming, because it comes from this organic process. It’s like a piece of tapestry where you know every single stitch and every beat. I’m just full of metaphors today! (laughs)

How long was the actual shoot?
Four months, we overran slightly. So the whole process is the better part of a year, really.

What’s so fascinating is that you’re describing an epic filmmaking process that Mike Leigh has, for what seem to be “kitchen sink” films that most people would guess are shot and rehearsed in about 3-4 weeks.
Yes exactly, it feels like an epic, even though the tiniest moment might be happening on the screen, there’s this really thick, meaty thing behind each beat of the story.

Leigh and Ken Loach are sort of the two leading social realist filmmakers who have documented Britain since the ‘60s, where you feel like a fly on the wall watching them. In the U.S. we had Robert Altman, John Cassavetes and we still have Sidney Lumet, but most filmmakers aren’t doing things like this anymore.
Mike’s a huge fan of Robert Altman and Cassavetes, It’s fascinating to hear Mike speak about that: his influences, and what he’s hung on to from them, and then how he’s taken their methods and sort of put them through his own filter, so to speak.

Let’s talk about your background. Your parents are children’s book authors and illustrators.
Yes, and it was wonderful growing up and watching them collaborate: my Mom might do the rough drawings, and then my Mom might do the final drawings, or vice-versa. Then they both work on the text together. My Dad wrote a lot of the books, because my Mom was always trying to run around and do everything else, like manage my older brother and me when we were growing up (laughs).

Is your brother artistically-inclined, as well?
Yes, he a phenomenal designer and illustrator, and designs web pages.

You studied at RADA. What was that like?
I knew I wanted to go there early on, and enrolled at quite a young age, so I took every course I could. I was like a sponge. It was a good decision, I think, to go there so early, because if I had gone to university first, I might not had been quite so keen and wide-eyed, and putting the tutors up on pedestals, which is where they should be. It was a fabulous introduction to all these different techniques: Stanislavski, and the Method, and all these phenomenal and unusual texts…it was a really tremendous experience.

It sounds like you knew you were an actor from an early age.
Yeah, although it sounds like a bit of a cliché, I was introduced to acting in primary school. It was either art or acting for me, and when I found I was really most interested in making my friends laugh, once I got to senior school, I was aware of RADA and realized I wanted to pursue that line, instead of university, which is what they were pushing, because it was a very rigorous academic school.

L to R: Sally, Ewan McGregor, Haley Atwell, and Colin Farrell in Woody Allen's Cassandra's Dream.

You got to work with another icon of cinema recently: Woody Allen, in Cassandra’s Dream.
He was absolutely amazing, and in a completely different way from Mike. He’s a huge hero of mine, and was charming, disarming, and lovely, droll, bright and I’d do anything for him. The only way I can describe his process is working from the outside in, whereas with Mike it’s just the opposite. When Woody sees it, he knows when it’s right. It’s more about it happening and Woody capturing it, whereas with Mike, every moment is accounted for. Both do very few takes, interestingly enough.

I think the part of Happy Go Lucky that’s stuck with me the most is in the opening scene when your character’s bike is stolen, and instead of getting angry, she says “I didn’t even get a chance to say good-bye.” It was such a great, non-exposition way to establish who she was.
I’m so glad you liked that. That was actually born out of a five minute improvisation before we shot that scene. That’s one of the lovely things about working with Mike: these bits of magic just pop out of nowhere because of all the work you’ve done beforehand.

Trailer for Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky.

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Armand Assante: The Hollywood Interview

Actor Armand Assante.



ARMAND ASSANTE:
RENAISSANCE GANGSTER
By
Alex Simon


A veteran of over 80 film and television productions, Armand Assante first made a splash in the pop cultural lexicon with Sylvester Stallone’s post-Rocky directing debut Paradise Alley, in 1978. After making the ladies’ hearts beat a bit faster with turns in films like Little Darlings and the now-classic Private Benjamin (both 1980), it was his turn in the latter, as the suave French gynecologist who wins Goldie Hawn’s heart with what became every Jewish man’s fantasy deal-closing line that had Hollywood buzzing with statements like: “Who is this amazing, sexy French guy?” and “ He’s heir apparent to the throne of Alain Delon!” The answer was simple: the “French guy” was born and raised in Manhattan’s Upper West Side neighborhood of Washington Heights, and bowed on the world stage October 4, 1949, to an Italian father and Irish mother, the second of three children.

Growing up in an artistic household, young Armand Assante, Jr. was exposed to the theater early by his parents, and initially fell in love with music. At 17, Armand entered the American Academy of Dramatic Arts where he was the recipient of the Jehlinger Award for Best Actor in 1969, making his professional theatre debut the same year opposite Imogene Coca in “Why I Went Crazy,” under the direction of Joshua Logan. He spent years in the theatre before his film debut in 1974’s The Lords of Flatbush, remaining a devoted student of Mira Rostova in New York for more than 20 years.

Armand won an Emmy as Best Actor for his mesmerizing turn as mob boss John Gotti in the 1996 HBO production, Gotti. 2007 has been a significant year for Armand’s career, as well: California Dreamin’, a Romanian film in which he stars, won the coveted Un Certain Regard category at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Armand also does a riveting turn as gangster Dominic Cattano in Ridley Scott’s crime epic American Gangster, going toe-to-toe with Denzel Washington’s Frank Lucas, the most notorious drug dealer of the 1970s.

Armand, who lives far from the limelight on a farm in upstate New York, sat down with us recently in the booth of a busy Beverly Hills eatery to reflect, ponder and digest a buffet of topics. Here’s a taste of that meal:

American Gangster marks the second time you’ve worked with Ridley Scott. Tell us about his process.
Armand Assante: Ridley, even when you watch his earliest films he did as a kid, is one of the greatest shooters of all time, but he is also one of the best filmmakers of all time. He hires an actor based on what that actor can bring to that specific role. He puts a tremendous amount of faith in the talent he surrounds himself with. What I love about what Ridley did on American Gangster is that he was tough on himself, as a director.

How so?
It’s all story, no indulgence. It cuts to the bone. What I really appreciated is that Ridley didn’t indulge anyone or anything in that movie. It’s just a masterful piece of direction.

I think it’s his best film.
(laughs) I’m glad you said that, because I was afraid to, but I agree. I think it’s his best film. It’s his most powerful, hard-hitting film and what I appreciate about it the most is that it didn’t soft-sell or romanticize the tragedy of heroin or the gargantuan effect it had on our society, from the top to the bottom.

What I really appreciated was how invisible he was as a director. I didn’t notice one bit of his direction the first time I saw it. That’s the mark of a great director to me.
Totally. It was all story.

Yeah, and I think someone like Sidney Lumet is the master of that. You never notice how well-directed his pictures are until the second or third time you see them.
Lumet said something interesting to me, which has since become my golden rule, and that is that 80% of a film is pre-production. And Ridley really drove this home the same way.

I also appreciated that this film, which is set in the ‘70s is very much a ‘70s film: it’s completely morally ambiguous on every level. There’s no black and white, except for maybe Josh Brolin’s crooked cop, who’s a flat-out villain. Your character and Denzel’s are far more honorable men than his character is.
That’s right. In many ways, it’s about the dangers of corporate enterprise.

I love the speech your character has about how if you’re successful, you’re going to have enemies. If you want friends, you have to be mediocre.
(laughs) Yeah, wasn’t that amazing, and true? Great screenplay by Steve Zallian. He’s sort of a throwback to the Steve Shagan generation of writers. It’s a very provocative screenplay. I remember being a kid, and actually hearing about the Vietnam-heroin connection. My father was in the Marine Corps, and he talked me out of going to Vietnam. I remember reading about how the Vietnam war was a continuation of the opium wars in China.

And who knows what’s being smuggled back in the coffins from Iraq and especially Afghanistan, which I think has more poppy fields per capita than anywhere else in the world.
I’m sure they’ll turn a blind eye to that, too. I was working in Bulgaria last year, and all the truck drivers on my floor had just come back from Iraq, and they said it was hell on Earth. They were terrified, every minute.

What was it like sharing the screen with Denzel?
He’s as big a star as you can get, and he’s that big a person, as well. He’s a tremendous actor, and I always thought the world of him, but I didn’t quite know what to expect. It turns out he’s an incredibly generous, giving person, and a generous, giving acting. That’s the soul, the magnamity of his work. It’s interesting, I heard that recently he was at a veteran’s hospital in Maryland or Washington and he said to one of the foreman, they told him a number and Denzel just wrote them a check. I could expect that from him. Very generous man, and I think his performance in this is worthy of an Oscar. It’s a very compelling performance. And Russell, as well. Beautiful work. When you see work like that, you know what goes into. They’re not only walking the line, but they’re carrying it on their shoulders.

You’re a native New Yorker, right?
Yeah, born and raised in Washington Heights.

Both your parents are artists, as well?
My father’s a painter and he supported us with advertising. My mother was a concert pianist, piano teacher, and she’s a writer. I have an elder and a younger sister, as well.

Did either of them go into the arts?
My older sister was an actress and signer for years, primarily a singer. She never recorded, but she still sings in cabarets and things.

When did you know you were an actor?
I was introduced to the theater when I was four years-old. I was smitten with the magic of theater when my parents took me to see Mary Martin in Peter Pan at The Winter Garden, in 1954. They took me to musical theater all through my childhood. I went into the theater when I was 16, and in between working in the theater and studying professionally, I’d been in the theater ten years before I made my first film. I worked almost theater on the East Coast. I did phenomenal material. I was lucky. I’ve always been a journeyman actor. Acting never came easy to me at all. Music came easily to me. As a kid, I was a professional drummer and singer. I was on the road for years as an actor, honing my craft, and even in film, I found my process was just too slow.

How so?
Just in terms of the time I felt I needed to prepare. It only comes with experience that you learn to hustle. It’s still for me an arduous task. You think a lot about what you’re trying to accomplish. It’s hard to make great material, and I’ll fight for it too, if I have to. I’ll go to bat for a producer, or director. I’ll do everything I can to help them. But it’s tough. I think the industry is tougher than it’s ever been right now. It’s hard to get independent films made, and it’s hard to get good stories made. In many ways, the digital age has changed the geography of filmmaking in that it’s made things cheaper, but it’s also made things faster. And I don’t know if that’s always fair to the creative person. It’s an interesting time, but I think that the over-informationalized and computerization of society has taken the focus away from what it is that I love, which is just stories, and storytelling. I find it a harder world to work in because of that because people are now thinking at that speed and in those terms, too.

It’s the super-processor mentality.
Yeah, and that’s not what actors, writers and artists are supposed to be about. So the pressure is greater and the expectations are greater, when in fact sometimes less may be more. Interesting time.

Also, the studios don’t seem to care if a picture is good anymore. They only care if it makes money. It takes someone like Steven Spielberg to do a Schindler’s List or a Ridley Scott to do American Gangster, which I know has been floating around Hollywood for years.
Yeah, there’s literally a handful of filmmakers left who have the juice to make the films they want to make. And the age-old phenomenon about this industry is how they chew people up and spit them out, like what they did to guys like John Frankenheimer. It’s just brutal. If you’ve ever tried to develop something yourself, you see how hard it is. You also see a lot of grift. When you see that level of corruption coming into your industry, you just want to say ‘Wait a minute, this ain’t the street!’

The first movie I saw you in was Paradise Alley. Did you meet Stallone when you made your debut in The Lords of Flatbush?
I met Sly on Lords, but didn’t get to know him. For some reason, he had me in mind when he wrote Paradise Alley. I happened to be in L.A. doing an episode of Kojack, my first job in L.A. ever, and I ran into Sly and he invited me into his office. He said “I’m doing this film, and I’d love you to play this part.” Boom! Just like that. It was a wonderful entrance for me into the business and a fabulous role. He looked out for me and was very good to me. I’ve never forgotten that. Sly’s one of the most unique men in the business. When you get to know Sly, you realize how tremendously talented he is, which most people don’t understand. He’s a very misunderstood figure, and a very hard, hard working guy.

Then the movie that really established you was Private Benjamin.
Yeah, I was very lucky to work with Goldie and Howard Zieff and Harvey Miller, Nancy Meyers and Charlie (Shyer). That was an amazing amalgam of talent that went into making that picture. It was really my first introduction to Hollywood and that first understanding of how tough it was.

Why was that?
There was a lot of skepticism about the release of Private Benjamin, and much to everyone’s surprise right out of the gate, it was an overwhelming hit, from the first screening in Westwood. I vividly remember Goldie, Charlie, Harvey, Nancy and Charlie sitting at the premiere in Westwood, and still editing in their heads, and you don’t see that kind of teamwork often. I’ve only been on a handful of projects that really made an impression, but what I continually tell people who want to make films, and somehow most of them don’t get the message, is that in truth, if you want to make a project work, stay working on it about three years after it’s released. Because if you don’t have the passion going in, it’s the passion that you have after to sustain what you held in the process true that keeps it going. Any project I did that worked, did so because the team from the inception, never let it go. I never underestimated the passion of that team for that reason. And other projects I’ve done since then that have really kicked it out of the park had that some kind of passion and commitment behind it.

What were some of those?
Stuff like Gotti, The Mambo Kings, Belizare the Cajun…it’s just about having a team that’s relentless. And I have the same feeling about American Gangster. There’s a relentlessness there, a tenacity. Sly has that. So does Goldie. So does Ridley. That tenacity continues to make an invaluable impression on me, and that’s what it takes to get anything done in this business, and you just don’t see it very often. If you’re not ready to do that, you’re in trouble, because it simply takes too much time, too much energy and too many brain cells.

You’ve always chosen to live in New York. Why?
When I tried to live here I always found L.A. to be a community of an overwhelming amount of information, 95% of which was false. It’s very easy for creative people to become addicted to that flow of information, and they stop paying attention to what their initiative is, or what their drive is. You forget what your taste is and you become addicted to the taste of others. “Well, I should really be doing this, instead of what I want to do,” that sort of thing. That’s not what you’re supposed to be about. The hardest thing about being in L.A. is being able to hold onto what you are, because it’s very easy to get swept up into what’s popular, marketable, cool, and so on.

It’s a town of conformists and if you’re an artist, by definition, you’re a non-conformist.
Yeah, and it’s very easy for actors especially to conform, because sometimes it’s just about paying bills, about getting through the week.

The same goes for writers. You might write 12 Angry Men, but your agent says that what’s selling now is comedies about 16 year-olds farting and trying to get laid.
Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And how do you keep your integrity in that situation, but also pay your bills? That’s the dichotomy.

You got to work with the great John Frankenheimer on Prophecy.
John asked me to do that film, and I thought it was impossible to make an animatronic bear work. David Selzer’s script was prescient, dealing with environmental issues, and how genetic structure of animals can be mutated. So I loved the script but in ’78, I just didn’t think the technology existed to bring it off. I turned the film down four times, but John just hammered at me to do the movie. And I’m glad I did it. He was one of the great directors. The film was not well-received at all, but John was a fascinating guy, a very complicated guy. I hammered him every day because I knew that this was an opportunity for me to learn from a master. He came out of a pool of directing giants that I knew growing up watching live television.

Since he had a stage background, how did John work with actors?
John was unforgettable with actors. He lived in the moment and wanted the moment captured on film. He was really in an actor’s face. He believed in bringing an actor right in front of the camera. He not only told me things he’d done in the past, but he’d do things to get a certain look in your eye…once, without telling me or any of the other actors, he blew off a shotgun about four feet away from us, and he got the look that he wanted. He wanted everything very pliable and spontaneous, and he got it. When I look back at some of the people I’ve gotten to work with, I’ve really been blessed. I got to work with a lot of the guys who came out of live TV when I did films in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Who were some of those?
Fielder Cook, Ralph Nelson, Buzz Kulik, Edgar Scherick and you look at those projects those guys did on television, and they stand up to anything. Story, story, story. That’s what they were about. They were a tremendous education for me. You learn by osmosis. One thing I’ll remember the rest of my life, I had the same exact experience both with Fiedler Cook and with Sidney Lumet. There was a time with each of them when I was on the set, and I said ‘I’m sorry. I’m totally lost. I don’t get where my character is. I don’t get where this scene is going or why it’s not working, so I’m asking you what should I do?’ They both said the same thing to me: “Lean forward six inches.” And the fuckin’ scenes came alive like that! That’s powerful. That’s knowledge.

You did Q & A with Lumet. Tell us more about him and his process.
It was a phenomenal book which Sidney synthesized into a great screenplay that actually could have worked beautifully on the stage. It was that hammered out. Sidney’s one of those directors who believes in a tremendous amount of preparation for everyone, actors and crew. He walks everyone through everything before he does a single shot. I doubt, maybe there’s a handful of directors in the world today, who would give an actor a screenplay in May, and say we’re going to shoot in September, and have almost three weeks of rehearsal prior to it. It doesn’t happen. But Sidney is that kind of person. I thought he deserved the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Academy when we did Q & A, and he just got it what, a couple years ago? If you look at his body of work up to 1990, it’s a phenomenal body of work. He’s one of the all-time great storytellers certainly of his generation, and perhaps of the 20th century because he’s carrying on an ancient tradition which is that of the real Hebraic storyteller. His father was a star of the Yiddish theater. His uncle was Jacob Adler. It was passed onto Sidney, who took it to a whole new level. The guys who originally came to Hollywood, the Jews who built the business, were about that. The western was a metaphor for Biblical stories. They were morality plays. And men like Lumet and Arthur Miller, they were and are about morality plays. They were looking for that in their work constantly.

The Mambo Kings allowed a fusion of your two greatest loves: music and acting.
It was the passionate obsession of Arne Glimcher that really put all that together, and brought all that talent together. Arne is the one who saw Oscar Hijuelos’ book, bought it, and put his love of that music, that era, and those people into the film. To think we had people like Tito Puente, Mario Bauza, who is really the father of Latin jazz, he was in his 80s then. He came in and consulted on it. All the giants of the era were there consulting for us. Antonio Banderas and I were really blessed to be in that kind of environment. It was a year before the film started to come together, so again, Arne was relentless.

In that film, as well as so many of your other films, you’ve proven yourself to have a gift for accents. Where does that come from?
Well, I grew up in an Italian household and in that era of Washington Heights, when I was a boy, I was in a building that was literally a melting pot of the world: Russian, Italian, Irish, Scottish, Puerto Rican, Jewish, French…you heard all this stuff every day in the street and it was osmosis. You just picked it up. Growing up on the streets of Washington Heights in that time was like growing up in a city in Europe. It had everything from rabbis, to hawkers, to coal being delivered by horse-drawn wagons. By around ’57 or so, that was all gone and became more homogenized. But that’s how I developed my ear for rhythm. I credit my childhood with that. That’s how I also became obsessed with jazz, and musical styles of writing. Mamet is very much like reading jazz.

Yeah, and John Cassavetes is like watching jazz on film.
Yeah, absolutely. I loved Cassavetes growing up. Minnie & Moskowitz is one of my favorite films of all time, Seymour Cassel and Gena Rowlands. I love them. They were a breed unto themselves.

Let’s talk about Gotti. How did you get into his skin, because he was such an enigmatic figure.
I studied every transcript I could find on Gotti, and the funny thing at the time was, HBO didn’t want to get into any of the legal issues, so I went to Gotti’s lawyer, Bruce Cutler, because I think four of the guys in the story were actually on parole, so it was very dangerous to talk about. So the legal issues were a little nerve-wracking to deal with, but once Cutler saw we were serious about addressing them, he was very cooperative, to a degree, and it all came together. We cast it all out of New York, and all the guys on it went on to be regulars on The Sopranos. It was one of those roles that’s a rare opportunity. I put on 50 pounds for the role, and I listened to guys who grew up with him in Howard Beach, and guys who knew him. I could never get around Gotti himself. You start to listen to the rhythm of the way they communicate and their lingo, and I heard a recording of his voice, the rhythm of his voice, and all that put together really put me in a different zone, which was very removed. He was living an ethos of a guy from the ‘40s, of another time. That was kind of an interesting thing to work with. (Writer) Steve Shagan picked up on that in the writing. In some of the transcripts of things he’d said, I come across these amazing things, things a Mexican revolutionary would have said in the 19th century, that were almost like poetry, and we interjected them into the film. He said something about the poor to the effect of “You think I was put on this earth to make them rich and me poor,” things like that, that would have been more fitting coming from Pancho Villa or Che Guevara than a mob boss from New York. But the fact that he tried to conduct his operation like it was in another time was both what made him unique, and was also his undoing, because that time was over.

In his own way, did you see him as an honorable man?
To me, he’s honorable in the fact that he maintained his honor and held a tremendous dignity in the face of something that was almost a delusion. His ethos was something that was decades removed from what the mob was about in that time. For me, the movie isn’t even really about Gotti. It’s about how the media or the government, and sometimes even I get confused about which is which, controls our perceptions. Is this democracy, or is this the media’s version of what a democracy is? What Gotti was about, and I think why it struck a chord with people to such a degree, is that the media can inflate something to much that the entity being inflated can start to believe its own ethos and the ethos being projected upon them. And if you allow yourself to reach that high a profile, the government can pull the rug right out from under you.

Frank Lucas talked about that in American Gangster, about the importance of keeping a low profile, as did Ben Kingsley as Meyer Lansky in Bugsy. Remember when he said to Warren Beatty? “Famous for George Raft is good, Ben. Famous for you is not good.”
Yes, exactly. And that’s one of the greatest gangster films ever made, by the way. I love Bugsy. Warren Beatty just nailed that. He was phenomenal. And James Toback’s script was amazing. I did a film with Jimmy called Love and Money. He’s a fascinating character, absolutely brilliant. He understood the system at a very young age. But I think that’s why Gotti struck such a chord: we’ve come to depend on the media so much that we’ve become deluded by it. Iraq is a classic example of that.

Remember the final line of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “When legend replaces truth, print the legend.”
Exactly. And John Ford called that back in 1962.

You’ve done a lot of work in Eastern Europe recently. Tell us about some of your impressions.
It’s one of the most exciting places in the world to work for the simple reason that you’re working with unobserved talent. They’re not conforming, they’re not even noticed, so they’re very pure in their reactions. The one film I did, California Dreamin’, with a young director named Christian Nemescu, who was killed in a car accident right after the film wrapped. 27 years-old. It won Cannes in the Un Certain Regard category. Christian, to me, was like a neo-realist from Italy. Those films were like reflex reactions to what is happening in society. That was his talent. He was a very gifted young man, so it was very sad on so many levels. But Eastern Europe is now what I imagine Italy was like right after WW II, because it’s being rebuilt and there’s a feeling that anything is possible. They’re just beginning to find themselves after going through generations of repression and corruption. It’s “You know what? This is who the fuck we are in the face of these Fascist bastards!” And anything that comes from the heart like that on film, is very exciting.

We’re coming out of what I think will be recorded as the darkest period in our country’s history.. We’re just now seeing films like In the Valley of Elah that are dealing with what’s been happening. Do you think that, as in Eastern Europe, there will be a sort of artistic renaissance here?
There’d better be. One of the great things about this country is that you can speak out, but you have to make a point of it. It has to become your obligation as a writer, actor or filmmaker. You can’t hide under a rock. That’s what I’ve always respected about the people of this country and certain people in the Hollywood community: they’re harbingers of things to come.

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