Salon | David Mamet

THE SALON INTERVIEW_DAVID MAMET_PAGE 3 OF 3
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What about "Four Queens?"
Al Pacino asked me if I wanted to write a poker movie. I said yeah.
Do you still play poker?
I haven't played poker for a number of years, but I've been writing a little bit about poker.
Why do you say in your book "On Directing Film" that nobody in the studios knows how to read a script?
Because it's true. The people who read scripts, the people who go into studios, have exactly the opposite life of people who actually work in the movies. One wonderful, wonderful thing about show business is that almost everybody in it got into it when they were young and frightened. We were out on the street because we couldn't keep a job or we didn't want a job and we didn't have a skill and we had to learn how to work in a world where we didn't have any support. We had to learn how to trust each other and how to trust ourselves. The people who come into the studio system come in from a very, very different life. These are people who have stayed in school, done very well, gone to graduate school and have gone into an institution which is going to reward them for being true to the institutional ideals, and only reward them for being true to the institutional ideals. It's like Jews and Christians, two completely different societies and two completely different traditions.
You mean between privileged and unprivileged groups?
Not necessarily privilege. It's the difference between a nomadic people and an indigenous people. The studio people are going to be there every year. They have a way things are done, and as long as they subscribe to the way things are traditionally done and please their superiors, they have a reasonable certainty of a secure life. On the other hand, a nomadic people -- you could say Jews, you could say Gypsies, you could say artists -- are going to come into a new situation where they aren't particularly welcome, assess the situation as quickly as they can and make something new out of it, make a new solution that hasn't occurred to the indigenous people because the indigenous people have been there too long.
Has this conflict between the artist and members of the institutional side of filmmaking gotten worse?
I don't think so. If you go back and read memoirs of the cinema, every filmmaker wrote about the same situation.
At one point, you mentioned that it's an accident that movies were connected with drama. Why do you say that?
I think it's so. Films started out as a carnival entertainment. I was just reading [French director Jean] Renoir talking about them and he says they came from the baraque foraine, the fair booth. They seem to be wanting to get back there. That's what some movies are.
Like action films?
Especially summer movies.
Does that drive out other films, yours for example?
Not at all. Look at the success of "Fargo," or "Prime Suspect" and "Absolutely Fabulous" on TV.
You wrote some scripts for "Hill Street Blues." Are you tempted to write more scripts for television?
I'm always tempted, but they've been teasing me for many years. I've written stacks and stacks of material for television and the only thing I've gotten made was two episodes of "Hill Street Blues" -- which I loved making, by the way.
Why was nothing else produced?
People say, give me something new, and I give them something new. Then they say, but I don't get it.
It's sort of a booby-trapped offer?
They say, woe be to you when all men praise you, so the story of my life in flailing my way through the movie business has always been people saying I love your work, I love everything you've ever done. I hand them something and they say: except this. It's like Brandon Tartikoff complaining to Robert Penn Warren at Yale that D.H. Lawrence could write a good story, but needed to get to the point faster. Warren told him he should go into television and the rest is history. Someone in Hollywood said tragedy always comes in threes. There was Princess Diana, Mother Teresa and Brandon Tartikoff. So there you are. Rest in peace.
In "On Directing Film," you talk about what a mistake it is for actors to search for a "character" to play. What did you mean?
Actors don't need to put on some extraneous character. Their character exists in the action and the words. The best actors, people like Jimmy Stewart and Anna Magnani, are not pretending to be a character; they're saying the words and letting the story tell itself.
On the other hand, that's why Laurence Olivier is terrible in films. He eats up the scenery. The audience ends up paying more attention to the actor's technique than to the story. Looking for a "character" to imitate may be fun for the actor, but it's less fun for the audience. When you listen to Glenn Gould playing Bach, you don't say what great technique he has. You say how great Bach's music sounds. It's the same thing with film acting.
Do films require more and more spectacle?
Perhaps so. I like to think old movies were better, but if you go back to B movies of the 1940s and 1950s, a lot of them are absolutely atrocious and unwatchable. They're just atrocious and unwatchable in the way which was specific to that time.
How do you mean?
If you look at the films of Terence Davis, which I think are great films of genius, they're specific to this postmodern time, or whatever the hell people are calling this time. You look at the films of William Wyler. Those are not films that are going to be made today.
What are the films that are going to be remembered from this period?
If you go back to the '60s, there were great films by Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick. Since then, the films of Sidney Lumet are great. Sally Potter's film of "Orlando" was magnificent.
I wanted to ask about your essay "A Jew for Export" in "Make Believe Town." How do we counteract unconscious anti-Semitism, the kind that, as you point out, offends Jews by placing a Christmas tree on the courthouse lawn, for instance?
It's important for any minority to speak up. American Jews have a lot to learn from other minorities that have spoken up, for example, the gay people, the African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans. I think it's important for one to regain one's spiritual heritage.
To counteract unconscious anti-Semitism?
Sure. I think it's important to counteract it in one's self. That's what my movie "Homicide" is about. It's about self-loathing.
What does it say about society that film audiences are asking for more and more spectacle and less and less drama?
The problem is that back in the misty reaches of time, it was all one. Spectacle, drama and religious observance were all one. In various places in various histories of various civilizations, they all bifurcated, or trifurcated. Now they're coming together in many ways in some marvelously interesting pagan attempts at reunification.
What are some examples?
Summer movies. I'm fascinated by summer movies. I think they're the equivalent of the state fair. At the state fair, we go to see the latest in technology, the special effects. We also go to see the prize heifers, the movie stars. We go to get a touch of the sordid or louche in the hoochie-koochie shows. And the state fair goes back to the Grecian and pre-Grecian summer festivals, much as you went to the Eleusinian mysteries to get laid in a way that pleases God.
So the era we're living in now is not any different in the kind of entertainments it offers?
The difference is that it's been split off from religious awe. People need to put their religious awe somewhere else, for example on the imperial presidency, or on Princess Diana. They need someplace to put their need to be in awe of a demigod.
What do you think of the reevaluation of Nixon? Will this lead to a reevaluation of Vietnam as a good war?
I think it's loathsome. But that's what history is. It's always revisionist. Historians have got to have something to write about. I remember that when I was a kid looking at movies in the late '50s, all the Germans were good. Every American war movie had good Germans in it. Kurt Jurgens played a million good Germans. They were people who were misunderstood and wanted to kill Hitler. It was rewriting history. Filmmakers had to have something new to say. I think it always happens. A few years from now, people are going to rediscover that Nixon was a vile brigand. But historians have a tough gig. They've got to write something new about the past.
What did you mean by saying in "Make Believe Town" that all crimes are possible in the all-possible future?
The future doesn't exist. If you keep saying we have to do something because of the future, if you boil it down, it means we have to do this now because I'd like you to. The future is a mythical construct in which there's no strife. So what the politicians say is that if you do X, Y and Z now, you can have that beautiful future in which there is no strife. It's the same thing as saying if you get rid of the Jews, or the blacks, or the gays, all the strife will be gone. As somebody said, all great crimes are committed in the name of public tranquillity. To ensure peace, I have to annex the Sudetenland. To ensure peace with honor, I have to stay in Vietnam. To ensure the tranquillity of this town, we have to get rid of all the black Americans. It's a confidence trick for taking power.
SALON | Oct. 24, 1997
Richard Covington is a regular contributor to Salon.