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James Stewart loves watching the defectives in Hitchcock's restored peeping-tom thriller.
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Movie Interview
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By Austin Bunn
[01/27/00]

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"I'm so glad you brought this up," he said, "because I wanted to get that into my speech and I just couldn't fit it in. There's one name: Krzysztof Kieslowski [the late Polish director of "Dekalog" and "Three Colors: Blue, Red and White"]. What Kieslowski does is so easy and so difficult. He's doing the cheapest movies to make -- he's got people in a housing project, he's got small casts and nothing glamorous in the locations. But these movies are about life, and they're about politics and how it interacts with people's individual lives.

"Kieslowski is a genius. And you can't ask people to be geniuses. But I remember something that Pauline Kael said about Godard years ago: Only Godard can be Godard, and it's useless for filmmakers to try to imitate Godard, because they'll only end up with lousy Godard; but there are other filmmakers who can be useful influences. Just trying to make a Kieslowski movie, you'll make something so much more interesting than what you'd be trying to do if you had a different influence.

Also Today Astonishing ourselves Why most American independent films don't have a future -- and why that's a good thing. By Jack Lechner Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

[Robert] Altman, too, is a great influence on filmmakers. If people go back and watch "Thieves Like Us" and "California Split" and "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" -- go ahead and imitate those movies all you want. You'll never get them, but you'll get something interesting. Because the nature of what Altman and Kieslowski are about is not gimmickry or surface. And even if they have distinctive styles, they're not about what you do with the camera or how you light for it. They're about finding ways to illuminate corners of people's lives that movies can do uniquely. And that's what anyone can do."

When I was trying to get into an "indie" frame of mind before I interviewed you, I read John Pierson's "Spike, Mike, Slackers, & Dykes: A Guided Tour Across a Decade of American Independent Cinema" [Hyperion, 1995]. At the end of the book he gets gloomy and says there's a big difference between a filmmaker setting out to make a great movie and what happens more often these days -- a filmmaker looking around at what's being made and thinking he could do better than that.

I think he's right. And that's something you see a lot, not just in the American independent scene, but in French movies. Something that distinguishes "The Dreamlife of Angels," for instance, is the sense that the filmmaker is trying to make a great movie. "The Dreamlife of Angels," which may be my favorite movie of the last five years, is a movie where this guy gave it everything he had, where he drew on everything he knew. It was clearly influenced by Ken Loach -- but this guy brought something completely new and fresh to it. He made an Erick Zonca movie. Working at Miramax, there was no way I could see that movie and not want to immediately work with Erick Zonca on his next film.

What about companies like Miramax and USA? How do you define them? Boutiques? Mini-majors?

In my speech I refer to them as quasi-independent production divisions of distributors. Or they're the production divisions of quasi-independent distributors. They really occupy a new tier that we're going to have to find words for. They're certainly not studio studios yet. But they are now producing most of their movies, on larger budgets -- and some of them are star-driven movies. It's hard to think of them as independent movies.

I think of them as niche movies -- they're not movies for the broadest possible audience. Virtually every movie that the big studios make, they're trying to reach the broadest possible audience. They would be thrilled if every movie they released would be seen by every person on the planet, and they are crafting their movies to that end. But the niche distributor is trying to reach the largest number of people who would be interested in a particular movie. Having worked at Miramax for three years, I can say that [co-chairman] Harvey Weinstein would stop at nothing to get as many people as possible in the world to see "Shakespeare in Love." But he doesn't expect, even in his wildest fantasy, that even every person in America will see it.

On the interview show "Raw Footage," David O. Russell talked -- respectfully and affectionately but also critically -- about going through "a classic Harvey Weinstein-slash-Sergio Leone situation" when making a deal for "Flirting With Disaster." He described Miramax as a "pressure cooker," because the company tries to do things for less money and get stars for a price. They do it, he said, "on the back of the filmmaker," meaning they use a director's reputation to attract high-priced talent.

What can I say? I'm sure David was happy with the cast he got with "Flirting With Disaster." Certainly I was as a viewer. (I joined the company when that movie was pretty much finished.) At this point, the niche film industry is established enough so that no filmmaker should have illusions about what they're getting into. You're making a $7 million movie at Miramax -- if you believe you can do that movie with no stars, you're deluded! Just as you'd be deluded to think that if you were making a $35 million movie at Universal, you wouldn't need bigger stars! And similarly you're deluded if you think you'll get stars for your $1 million movie that you're making on your credit card. Unless you happen to know them personally or have found some bizarre connection.

I'm not the place to go if people want to hear tales out of school about Miramax, because I had a great time there and got to work on some movies that I really liked. But it is true that as the budgets rise at companies like USA or Fox Searchlight, so do the pressures. One thing that Harvey Weinstein is very diligent about is that he doesn't like to lose money. You'd be amazed how many films that were not considered to be among the biggest hits at Miramax did not only not lose money, but in fact made money. That's because he was very smart about hedging his bets. Who is in this movie that will guarantee us a video sale, a television sale, foreign sales and a minimum of theatrical sales even if the movie turns out not to work in the end? That's just smart business.

The only problem comes when you've got people trying to shoehorn the wrong actor into a part to try and trigger those things. But I think that happens more at the studio level; Harvey is really good about this. In the niche industry, you're still talking mostly about director-driven movies. They don't usually remake the movie to fit the stars -- although it happens sometimes.

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