gus Van Sant — filmmaker, music video producer, photographer, musician, clothes designer and, now, novelist — seems a little uncomfortable as he slouches over the podium to read from his first book, “Pink.” The book, with its experimental typefaces and thinly veiled references to real-life characters (the main character is an industrial filmmaker named “Spunky” who’s in love with a handsome young River Phoenix-like actor named “Felix”), is occasionally profound but difficult in places, and Van Sant seems to be having a hard time reading it aloud. Peering over his Elvis Costello-style glasses, he scans the faces in the crowd at this San Francisco bookstore and interrupts himself: “I think I’ll answer some questions now — I can get back to this later.”
It’s a generous gesture that reveals the respect Van Sant holds for his audiences — and proves that in person, as with his films, he’s much more interested in engaging people than he is in indulging them.
One of the first questions he’s asked is about the last scene of the film “My Own Private Idaho,” when Mike, a street hustler (played by Phoenix), is lying passed out on the highway and is picked up by someone who happens to be driving by.
“Who was it that picked up River Phoenix at the end of the film?” a woman wants to know.
Van Sant says that he intentionally left it ambiguous: “I was hoping that the viewer would project themselves into the film and decide for themselves who it was.”
Not satisfied with this response, the woman persists. “OK, then. Who picked him up in your version?”
“In my version?” he says, obviously amused. “In my version, I pick him up.”
After the book signing, Van Sant took a few minutes to talk with Salon about how Phoenix’s death inspired his investigation into other dimensions (i.e., “the pink”), his fear of selling out and why he wants art to be more like food.
Was writing a novel very different from the process of writing a screenplay?
Yes, writing the book was much more fun. Screenwriting is like a road map — you read it as you’re going, you’re looking at the finished thing as you’re working on it. One thing you don’t ever do when working on a film is go to a place unless you’re shooting, and even then you’re not really experiencing the place. When you’re writing a book, you can go to this place — even if it’s Paris, France — while you’re still sitting at your desk. I talked to other writers about this, and they were like, “Yeah, of course.” But I thought it was an amazing thing.
Someone asked if you were going to make a documentary of River Phoenix’s life, and you responded that this, “Pink,” was it. Is that true?
Well, yes, it is. This book is very much influenced by River. It’s a documentary of my life and existence through him. The reason I don’t like to say that is that a lot of the stuff, you could say, is a reaction to his death. The impetus of me writing is him dying. But the book is not about that, so I don’t like to bring that up.
The book seems like it is about much more than that, until the part where the Phoenix-like character, “Felix,” dies in a very similar way. At that point you start taking very specific scenes from Phoenix’s life and inserting them in less than subtle ways — he dies in front of a nightclub, his brother was there, and so on. If you were concerned about the comparison, why didn’t you make an effort to mask it?
I don’t feel like masking that sort of inspiration for the book. The book could be about anyone dying. It’s really about a character that’s grieving. It’s not necessarily even grieving, it’s just that you can’t figure out what happens, you know, where you go when you die. So everything is centered around that investigation. It’s hard to talk about the book in terms of real people, because then it becomes this other thing, like, “Who are the real people?” and “What happened to the real people?” And that’s not really the intention of the book. It’s more about what happens to people as opposed to what happens to those people.
You did a similar thing with “My Own Private Idaho,” inserting certain scenes almost verbatim from “Henry IV.” Was Shakespeare also a big influence on you?
No, not at all. Falstaff is, and I really came to know that
character through the Orson Welles film “Chimes at Midnight,” which had those
characters and the story of Prince Hal. On the whole, though, Shakespeare — as a writer and as a poet — is just amazingly fascinating. But I’m not very far into Shakespeare. I’d like to be. Even with the few plays that I do know, like “Henry IV” Parts I and II, I can keep reading those. There’s a lot there. There’s always new information to reveal itself.
There’s a theme from “Private Idaho” that recurs in “Pink” as well, one of men who “love, but they’re not in love.”
In that scene from “Idaho,” Mike’s telling Scott that he loves him. And Scott says that two men can’t love each other, they can only be friends. That’s actually a quote from
Walt Curtis, which is in his new book, a compilation of stories called “Mala Noche and Other Illegal Adventures.” One of the stories is about Raoul, this Mexican kid, and he and Raoul, they’re on a dirt road, and they’re waiting for a bus or something like that. They’re all by themselves, and he picks up a rock and says, “Do you love me this much?” And he says, “No.” And he says, “OK, do you love me …” and he picks a smaller rock, “Do you love me this much?” And
then he picks a little tiny pebble, and finally Raoul says, “Two men can’t love each
other, they can only be friends.”
I once got a fortune cookie that said, “He loves you as much as he can, but he
cannot love you very much.” That’s just a traditional theme that a gay man might experience if he has a lot of friends that are straight. He loves you as much as he can. Sometimes I think that happens between heterosexual couples, when you find somebody who’s just amazing and they
become your best friend and then the next logical thing is, you know, we
could be totally in love. Except they might say, “Oh, but no — no, I don’t
like you like that.” And it’s just like, why not? That can happen to any two people, but it often happens to two male friends.
In “To Die For,” you mock people’s obsession with image and with being on-screen. Now, in “Pink,” you make fun of filmmakers, presenting them as these pretentious and pathetic characters. In the book’s opening lines, Spunky says, “Once I was good, and now I am shamed. I have turned bad … I am looking for salvation. I am looking for the quick buck. I’ve sold out. I am spoiled by the system.” Is that true for you? How do you manage to work in a medium that you’re so critical of?
Yes, that is true. How do I keep working in it? I feel guilty about it. I was thinking of changing my name today, just to have some way around the kind of name brand situation that I’m in. Some people, they make use of it, it’s a power. Some people make use of it like a politician. A politician really needs to be a hands-on personality: “I’m the guy, this is what I think, and if you vote for me, I’ll do what I’m saying.” But there’s not any reason for a filmmaker to
be promoting what he does, because the film is there. If people say that the film is good, you’ll go. Maybe there’s an ad, but the filmmaker doesn’t have to go around getting free press and articles about his film.
In “Pink,” Spunky is listening to a local Christian radio station, and he says, “I think all art should be in the service of something like Jesus, and not in the service of the glory of the artists themselves.” Would that be your ideal?
Well, it just means that I want art to be like food — when you see a tomato in a
store, it’s a thing, you understand it, you know what it is. It’s part of life. And art should be like that, it should be organic, something that isn’t rarefied. It should be a group thing, it should not be removed — so that only this person understands it and that person has to explain it to you. It shouldn’t be issued as privileged information. It should be understandable by
the group. And that’s a utopian thing that I’m saying, but it’s the way
art used to be. In other times, I imagine — and maybe I’m projecting, maybe I’m
thinking that a Greek vase is understood by the Greeks in a
different way, maybe there were in fact elites who were the only ones who appreciated it –
but I imagine that art was made by people in the same way that furniture was made.
Something whose function is very certain, but that becomes art, too. It would be
nice to deconstruct all of that labeling.
You seem to both suffer from and yet make fun of the confusion that a lot of people of your generation seem to share — for example, one issue that Spunky struggles with in “Pink” is his guilt that he has stopped rebelling and has now “sold out.”
Well I’m sort of a child of the ’60s, and I still hold ’60s values close, you know.
There was something that happened then, but I have my own vision of it, and I’ve never applied it to anything. I have my own interpretation. When I was growing up in the
’60s, there was this amazing dichotomy between the practice
and the concept. The concept is paradise, and the practice is not paradise. But the concept is right. And the follow-through tries to get at it, but the problem is just human.
Who do you think are the most relevant young filmmakers today?
The young filmmakers not yet making big budget movies, they’re the ones most in touch with their culture. Harmony Korine’s “Gummo” got slammed in the L.A. press, but I thought it was pretty amazing. It seemed really open to me, really free.
Whatever happened with the Harvey Milk film you were reportedly working on?
Oliver Stone had developed about four or five screenplays, and I was working on it with Becky Johnston, the writer. But it wasn’t really working. One thing was, the character didn’t have a sense of humor. That was a very big problem, because I thought that was such a big part of who he was.
The first time I worked on it, I got fired. Then I made “To Die For,” and Warner Bros. called back and said, “Let’s try it again,” and I fell for it. Right now, they’ve got it at HBO. I asked if I could make a 10-hour version, not just about Harvey, but about the whole Castro. There’s a much bigger story there that you just can’t do in three hours. So I wanted to get a little closer. But it’s Hollywood — they get a little scared.
You’re next film, “Good Will Hunting,” is opening in a few months. What’s that about?
It’s about this janitor at MIT who secretly answers the problems left on the board by the professors. When he’s confronted, he doesn’t want anything to do with it. Robin Williams, Ben Affleck and Matt Dillon star in it.
In the book, “Pink” refers to this other dimension that exists outside of the ones we inhabit, not heaven exactly, but a place of potential salvation. How did you conceive of this other place, this other reality?
The one thing that you can be really, really sure of is that there is more. There’s more in the sense that there’s a future, you know, an hour from now, something else that’s a weird disconnected part of now, but its not here, right now. But you can be sure that in an hour from now there will be some more of what we have right now.
There is just definitely more. And that’s the kind of wild, unbelievable thing about reality. It doesn’t occur to you when you’re part of it, because reality is all about what’s real
and what’s in this reality, and it’s not anything about what’s outside of this reality. But if you just think about the other realities, it becomes unbelievably dumbfounding.
But ironically these explorations don’t make Spunky feel any less claustrophobic — they make him feel perpetually stuck in the present.
That’s the weird part of our dimension. There is only now. There is no such thing as
past and future, except in the way that we’ve been able to have a clock
go around and we can time it, and that means we can go, “Oh, I remember
you from five years ago, that was so long ago.” But it was the same time
then as it now, because it’s always “now.” Through the moon and the
sun going around, we have this passage of time and regenerating of
cells, but its all just a matter of transferring.
Is that why Spunky is panicked about recording everything, to have everything captured on film?
As a filmmaker, the first thing you find out is that you can lose film. The chapter when Spunky is talking about that, that is basically a story that happened to me. I made this first film — it’s actually the whole flip-book thing, that’s a re-creation of it — I made it, and I showed it to my friend. The next day it was missing, just gone. Later my friend said, “Actually, I took the film because I wanted to show my friends here how cool it was.” And I said, “Where is it? And he said, “I don’t know, I lost it.” That was my first film, and within two weeks, it was just gone.
What do you think about the Internet, where, theoretically, things could exist forever?
Well, I don’t know that much about it, except that it does seem like the Wild West. But
I had a really vivid and very strange and very scary thought, which
isn’t very original, but it was the first time that I really saw the
future of intelligence. It was machine, it wasn’t human, and it was
just hugely dominant. And I thought, wow, machines will take over and
humans are going to be like animals. We’ll just be organic fungus. And
the computers, the machine, the thing, once it gets its own
independence, will proliferate and become this huge intelligent
organism. It was the first time that I ever really understood that.
I’m sure it’s the subject of all kinds of science fiction, and I’m sure
that there are hundreds of people that have seen this and so forth, but I thought, it’s a logical step. When it finally gets to the point where it’s them calling the shots, and it can take care of itself, then it will be its own organism. And it’ll be fast enough that it can take over, and we’ll just
be like toads, basically, because it might just say, “We don’t need this
organism anymore, the organism’s a bummer. The organism is
bothering us.” And it’ll just blow us away. We’ll be back in caves, hiding
from these things that we’ve built.
music videos historically have been off the path of the serious filmmaker. But with the growing black market niche in both television and movies, that isn’t true any more. Case in point: Director F. Gary Gray, whose stylish hip-hop videos gave him the opportunity to move to the bigger screen, making compelling, well-crafted feature films on urban themes.
A native of South Central Los Angeles, the 27-year-old Gray began his career seven years ago, gigging as a photographer on the young Fox network’s rap video show “Pump it Up!” It was there that he met members of the seminal Los Angeles hip-hop group WC and the Maad Circle, who hired him to direct one of their videos. This work led to a prodigious video career, including his helming Coolio’s “Fantastic Voyage” and Ice Cube’s “Today was a Good Day,” which was rated by Rolling Stone as one of the top 100 videos of all time.
It was Ice Cube who helped Gray get his first big-screen job, directing Cube’s screenplay “Friday,” a funny, low-budget ($3 million) meditation on marijuana and downtime in the hood. “Friday,” which made an impressive $30 million at the box office, is likely to remain a cult hit as long as renting videos and smoking pot go hand in hand. One of a handful of hip-hop influenced cinematic classics, along with “Boyz in the Hood,” “Menace II Society,” and “Juice,” the 1995 film explored a day in the life of an out-of-work young black man. As special as this film was, however, its small budget kept Gray from larger visions ones realized in his new film “Set It Off.”
“Set it Off” is not the kind of escapist fare that leaves the mind once the harsh light of the multiplex lobby hits the the eye. It’s a stylish tale about a quartet of poor black women (played with uncompromising commitment by Jada Pinkett, Queen Latifah, Kimberly Elise and Vivica Fox) who take to robbing banks when clean living can’t pay the rent. Their ill-fated mission, paradoxically, puts them on the path to self-actualization. Though some viewers will be unsettled by its message, others will recognize “Set it Off” as this year’s zeitgeist film, a more powerful “Waiting to Exhale.”
In street parlance, “set it off” means to set something powerful into motion, an expression that describes Gray as accurately as it does his new film. Gray recently spoke with Salon about his burgeoning film career, hip-hop and making it in Hollywood.
I’m curious to know if fulfilling your long-time goal of becoming a filmmaker is what you thought it was going to be.
I’m more satisfied than I am disappointed. “Friday” is an edgy movie, “Set it Off” is an edgy movie neither one of them falls along the safe, Hollywood formula film story lines, and they’re both close to my heart. So I’m satisfied with the fact that I can make what I want to make and, fortunately, be in the position to turn down films or major budgets, and look at the material that I wouldn’t have especially at this age been exposed to. On the other hand, it’s disappointing that there isn’t a lot of good material out there.
Is that a surprise to you?
Yeah, it is surprising. Out of 40 scripts, one may be good. There are a lot of people in the industry who really just write a lot of the same stuff, and it doesn’t appeal to me. And I live by the Hangman Theory: Every time you make a bad decision, you get the stick, and eventually if you make enough bad choices, you hang yourself in this industry. Although I want to continue to shoot, and shooting is my life right now, I don’t want to do it for the sake of doing it.
Is it important to you to move beyond the “‘hood movie” label?
I would say hip-hop has definitely one of the forces that fueled my career and I have a lot of respect for hip-hop. But I also have respect for the art of filmmaking. With all respect to hip-hop, I really don’t want to restrict myself, labeling my films hip-hop films, just like I wouldn’t want to restrict them as just black films. My plans from this point on will always be to make good stories. If it takes place in the ‘hood, if it takes place in outer space, if it takes place in Canada [laughs] or in the Grand Canyon, that’s where I’m going to shoot it.
You’ve featured many rappers in your films, such as Ice Cube in “Friday” and Queen Latifah in “Set it Off.” It seems the leap from music videos to film works for your actors as well.
I don’t set out to say I want a rapper in this part, a singer in this part. It’s individualized to each project. But one thing I can say is that rappers like Ice Cube have a narrative style of rapping, and it’s almost like a performance from an actor, because you have to believe that they come from this neighborhood or you have to believe they’re going through certain scenarios that they create in their songs. They have to actually act on microphone, and I think that’s good practice.
How does making music videos fit into your film work?
Directors don’t get an opportunity to play. Actors have workshops. Musicians have bands. Directors, who are in the same kind of creative medium, don’t have an opportunity to play or to test certain things. And video is a playground for me. I say “play,” but when I play, I’m serious. As a director of motion pictures, you can go two years without making a movie. You don’t want to get rusty. It doesn’t work for everyone, but for me, it works.
Oliver Stone is a legendarily vehement media scrapper who knows how to defend himself in the arena of public opinion. He went into the ring to defend “JFK” when people accused it of distorting history; again on behalf of “Natural Born Killers” when some charged it with exploiting violence; again in defense of “Nixon” when critics called its version of events into question.
Now John Grisham, the lawyer-novelist whose legal yarns have become a Hollywood staple, is accusing Stone of making movies that are like “defective products.” After a callous murder in Mississippi near Grisham’s home town was linked to a pair of young joyriders who’d apparently watched “Natural Born Killers” before the crime, Grisham went after Stone in an article in The Oxford American, a literary quarterly, and the feud got amplified in the pages of Vanity Fair.
If “Killers” was meant to be a satire but nobody took it that way, Grisham argued, treat it like a faulty product — and hold Stone and other filmmakers legally accountable, under the principles of product liability law, when their works can be directly linked to crimes (whatever that precisely means and however you’d go about proving it).
Stone isn’t about to recall any of his “products.” In fact, he has just issued a video “Director’s Cut” of “Natural Born Killers” that restores dozens of small cuts made in the film to get it past the ratings board. And as a producer he is about to release two more films that explore violence, American-style, from other angles.
“Freeway,” a debut by writer-director Matthew Bright, is a darkly funny modern retelling of the “Little Red Riding Hood” fairy tale, with a serial killer villain and the heroine recast as a teenage victim of child abuse who is left on her own when her mom and stepfather are put away. “Killer: Diary of a Murder,” based on a true story, is the character study of a pathologically violent inmate (James Woods) in the 1930s who resists liberal-style efforts to reform his character.
We talked to Stone in a room at San Francisco’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, where he’d entered the rhetorical fray once more on behalf of his work.
“Freeway,” “Killer,” the “Natural Born Killers” restoration: is there a theme here?
No, they were never connected, actually. “Killer” was a small film that we did almost a year before “Natural Born,” I think, and it was sitting on the shelf. “Freeway” is coming out because it showed on HBO, and apparently a lot of people saw it and there was enthusiasm to release it here, more as an art-house film than as a commercial release.
It’s been butchered a lot. It’s been through the grill with the MPAA board. The Matthew Bright script which I read was brilliant. It was funny, dark and violent, and true, I thought, about social conditions for young kids. I’d never seen child abuse treated that way. It had a hint of parody in it, a hint of excess, it was madness, her madness, everything’s slightly exaggerated and grotesque. The board was tough on it, I think not because of visuals as much as the idea of the film. “Natural Born Killers” pissed them off too — it’s about chaos. Whereas “Desperadoes,” or “Bad Boys,” they just flag that OK. “Mortal Kombat” is violent all the way through — without any blood, it’s violent.
Americans always seem confused about whether it’s better for movie violence to have horrifying physical and emotional consequences — or for it to be a comic book where people just sort of die without it mattering, the way whole cities are incinerated in “Independence Day.”
I’ve done it both ways. I did realism with “Born on the Fourth of July” — you feel a bullet going in a spine, you feel very directly a life has changed. And “Platoon” was realistic. And “JFK,” you blow off somebody’s head at high noon. But the concept in “Freeway” was to go the other way and to make fun of it, to treat it lightly. Like “Natural Born Killers,” it’s in the same tonality — a sitcom. I think both ways work, they’re both powerful.
Satire or parody is meant to make people think. But it’s supposed to make you smile or laugh as you go, too, so you’re not sitting there feeling this is real. It’s so outrageous, in a sense, the culture, such a mockery of what life should be, that you can only laugh at it — it’s too much to take. That’s why I had Rodney Dangerfield do the sitcom [in "Natural Born Killers"] — Mallory’s home life was so bad that she could only imagine it as a sitcom. And that works great. But it gets misunderstood by people who go to movies for literal purposes — the Bob Doles of the world, let’s say, who believe what they see. I think a movie is an illusion — and people know that. But there is always a group that’s literal-minded. They believe that that’s real up there. You can’t get past that.
John Grisham argues that people don’t get that it’s a satire, and feel that the killers, Mickey and Mallory, are heroes.
And so kids will go out and blow other people away? Well, you know the consequences of his idea, it’s clear: it’s a disaster for our ability to speak. All ideas would be treated as if they were defective products, like a lawnmower or a car. If an idea is conceded to be a product in a courtroom, they will be hauling in people like me for years, and there’ll be no freedom of speech — there’ll be fear, and a lawyers’ paradise for Mr. Grisham.
But the problem is — I am perhaps too dark — but I do believe that one more Supreme Court justice . . . and I think the Grishams of the world could slip it into a case and run it through Washington. That’s what I’m beginning to think may happen. We’re just one justice away. That’s pretty scary. Picasso is gonna be arrested for affecting somebody’s attitude toward their mother, and the music of Beethoven drove someone to hammer his father to death; Jean-Paul Sartre is gonna be hauled in because he influenced Pol Pot, and Pol Pot killed two million people in Cambodia. It’s gonna be a crazy time. The world would be nuts. It would be the end of artistic expression as we know it.
So Grisham is really a redneck — he’s not thinking this through. Particularly in view of his own most recent film ["A Time to Kill"], which I thought was extremely rabid and stupid, a vengeance-is-mine kind of film. I just don’t like the way that’s sold — that’s much more dangerous, in a sense, to the American public, than any film I’ve ever made. And because it’s unconscious material, it seems to get by people.
When Grisham talks about movies as “products,” that sounds oddly like the big studios themselves, who talk about movies as “product,” not art or entertainment.
Corporate culture will always cave to fear. That’s what’s scary to me. Unfortunately, the culture has become more corporate in my lifetime. They rule — they own the government. Which is fascism — it’s American fascism. Money rules this fucking country. It’s everywhere, everywhere, everywhere, more now than when I was growing up. I was perhaps more naive.
I feel that these three films, they’re all little contributions in their way to consciousness. That’s all you can do. I don’t have the balls to go into the corporate arena. I just cannot take that. But we’re the victims as a result, you see, because we have to make films, and we’re dependent — we’re like gladiators in the arena. You go in for a few times, you get killed eventually, you’re bound to, you can’t not, unless you play it really safe and smart. But I don’t know anybody who really can. So you get killed, and then they do with you what they will.
I thought Grisham had a point about people not getting the satire, the irony, in “Natural Born Killers,” no matter how heavily you underlined it. You did romanticize Mickey and Mallory, in many ways. If someone comes to you and says, “I love ‘Natural Born Killers’ — Mickey and Mallory are my heroes!” what do you say?
But, you see, they are heroes, in their relativistic world, because they have integrity and honesty amongst themselves. They are this weird Romeo and Juliet, and younger kids do identify with them. Some of them do, not all. Because they’re outside society. Mickey and Mallory stay cool with each other — their feelings grow and they stay devoted. I think that’s the right thing. That’s what people would be relating to. I don’t think anybody would relate to the idea of blowing away people.
A lot of people do feel like blowing away their parents, because they are really repressed and tortured by their parents. And much more so — that child abuse thing goes into “Freeway.” There’s a lot of that shit going on. And in America, the dysfunctional family seems to be more accepted, it’s just more normal. Because we don’t have a culture, I think, that’s in good sync with nature. Television is intruding in our lives in a loud way — it’s a loud medium. That’s part of the reason I made “Natural Born Killers” that style, that surfing style.
So if somebody said, “Time to stop making movies about violence — now you’re president, Oliver Stone — go and do something about the problem,” what would you do?
If I were president, I’d study Fredric March in “Seven Days in May.” I guess I would roll up my sleeves and go to work for a hundred days. I’d study every fucking department upside down. That’s what takes time. Nixon knew that shit, because he’d been around accounting a long time. They used to say Nixon was very good at the budget meetings, he loved to crunch numbers. Then you have to establish an image, you have to establish strength and authority, and only then would you be able to start to move. You have to get that first sweep, and move fast, like Reagan did, because everything will sour. And you’ve gotta pray for good luck and some wind. That’s the only way to do the job. It’s impossible. But don’t cop out — stand for what you mean, and go in and do it. People would vote for somebody who had conviction.
That’s certainly what a lot of people seemed to think about Reagan.
Reagan was brilliant in his convictions. He was always a good-looking actor, a good-looking kid. He pulled it off, man, you gotta give him credit. He was stupid about a lot of things, in my opinion, but he was great. It’s a shame he wasn’t a liberal.
In an interview in The New Yorker about “Natural Born Killers,” you said, “No one is innocent. The line between thinking murder and doing murder isn’t that major.” I’ve always wanted to ask you about that, because to me that seems like a very major line: everyone harbors some violence in their thoughts, but what distinguishes a civilized person from a criminal is that the former doesn’t act out those violent thoughts.
I don’t disagree with you. Perhaps I meant, it’s a critical line. It’s a thin line, a very thin line. That’s a Buddhist principle. That thought itself is a malice in your heart. And I meant it’s a thin line that I’m very conscious of, because there are times I’ve wanted to murder people. And I killed people in Vietnam. I know that it’s a reality.
I understand a lot about death and violence. I’ve been practicing Buddhism for three years, and non-violence is one of the supreme virtues. The way I see it, they realize violence is more endemic. I made “Natural Born Killers” after I had converted. I’d come from Thailand, where it’s a non-violent culture, and I came back to America with all these sensational TV shows.. By the way, I consider violence not just killing your parents, but also money, the way it’s used, media — I consider the aggression of our culture, the competitiveness for the dollar, violent.
With all that’s happened, all the controversy, is there anything about “Natural Born Killers” you would do differently now? Aside from restoring those scenes in the director’s cut.
The director’s cut was important for me. Rhythmically, it was really hard to cut 100 things in a movie that’s finished. I always wanted to go back and clean it up. I made a better-edited movie than that. Some people that really hated the movie, I wish they could see it again, rethink their attitude.
Sure, you always want to change things, but it was of its moment, it was a reflection of that period, an insane period. Now we’re into something else. I’m picking up the zeitgeist in my own way. It has to do with media, too — the bigness of it. The corporatization of our culture. I think if I could hit on that theme I could do some service. Try and get some big company to finance it!
Give Rupert Murdoch a try?
Oh no, he would never do it. I would have to struggle. It’s not so easy, you see. They don’t give you censorship, but they say no for economic reasons, and that’s a form of censorship. A chilling effect.
Nixon strikes back
Triumph of the bill
“The Kennedys were not admirable people. They simply were not nice. The legend is that Jack was always gracious, charming, dashing… Bull. He spit on waiters and ignored or screamed at the help. I remember attending a dinner once and watching Bobby — who was the smartest and also the meanest — throw his meal on the floor and right at a waiter because he didn’t like it…”
–The late Richard Nixon, to his aide Monica Crowley, from the book “Nixon Off the Record” (as reported in today’s San Francisco Chronicle).
David O. Russell, the unpredictable writer and director behind hot-movie-of-the-moment “Flirting with Disaster,” seems an unlikely candidate to have become the latest toast of Tinseltown. After a less than auspicious beginning as a political activist and maker of documentary videos, Russell decided to make film his sole focus, writing and directing his first short in 1987, “Bingo Inferno.” That film marked his induction into the Sundance Film Festival, a badge that enabled him to garner grant money from the New York Arts Council and the NEA to finance a short comedy, “Hairway to the Stars,” before making “Spanking the Monkey” (1993), his darkly humorous take on mother-son incest.
These days, Russell doesn’t have to look any further than his own life for inspiration. Scrambling between
two ringing phones, a fax, and his screaming two-year-old who refused to put his pants on, he put to rest any doubts that Mel, the somewhat scattered and non-commital hero of the wildly funny “Flirting,” was indeed based on his own life.
Speaking from his home in New York City, Russell took a few moments to talk with SALON about his new film.
“Flirting with Disaster” is such a departure from “Spanking the Monkey.” It’s been called your “great leap” into the Hollywood big time.
I don’t even know what “great leap” means, really. It’s a more commercial film, if that’s what they mean.
After making a movie about incest, I think it would be hard not to become more commercial.
I didn’t get into film until I was 28, and I’m 37 now. By the time I wrote “Spanking the Monkey” I had done a lot of living, and had had a lot of relationships, and been through a lot of jobs, and had
a lot of failures. I had had a whole other life, a whole other career in political work.
So after I made “Spanking,”I thought, “What do I want? What would feel fun?” With “Spanking the Monkey, ” it was lugubrious on the set every day, because people were being asked to work with this horrible energy. There’s black humor in the movie, but, you know, it’s a really gross place to go — where a mother sleeps with her 18-year-old son. Everybody was kind of in a cranky mood because you’re asking them to live with this every day. So I thought I’d like to do something that would just be more fun. But it doesn’t mean I won’t do twisted dark things again.
Would you consider making someone else’s film?
I’ve seen a lot of scripts, but none that have interested me that much. One, called “Girl, Interrupted” (based on Susanna Kaysen’s memoir of her breakdown and recovery) interested me a lot, actually. I’d be happy to do that. But I haven’t seen that many books or scripts that I thought were incredible.
You were a student of novelist Mary Gordon in the late ’70s at Amherst. Were you ever interested in writing fiction?
Yeah, that’s what I thought I was going to do. I always had this thing that I was going to do political work and write fiction, but it wasn’t working out. I burned out on the political work. I was making trouble around low-income housing and toxic waste dumps in New England, and trying to get those things treated. I burned out on that and I said I think I’m going to go into movies. I think the basis of good movies is writing, anyway.
What writers do you like?
I like Robert Stone, I like Thomas Pynchon. But mostly now I read nonfiction.
What did you make of Andrew Sarris’ comparison of you to Preston Sturges in the New York Observer?
I’m suing him (laughs). I think the comparison is apt, but I didn’t study him or anything like that. I was never a Preston Sturgis fan. Thank God, because if I was I think “Flirting” would never have been as original. I think I would have been too preoccupied with the screwball comedy genre.
Where did you come up with some of your more idiosyncratic characters, like the gay ATF agents and the son of the acid freaks?
With those two ATF agents, I thought it would be fun to have federal agents who were gay. But, like a lot of my friends who are gay, they defy every gay stereotype. They weren’t obviously gay in any sense.
With Lonni Schlichting, I knew I wanted his father and mother (played by Alan Alda and Lily Tomlin) to seem like these wonderful dream parents who then had something very narcissistic and criminal going on. And the son is sort of a red flag, who’s saying look, he was raised by them, and look how miserable he is. So he’s kind of the squeaky wheel. It’s a fun character, because he gets to be way out there.
I like the Schlictings, because I love seeing the contradiction between their psycho-speak, that whole new age, Buddhism-speak, and their complete self-absorption. You see it all the time.
For the entire soundtrack of “Spanking the Monkey,” you used only songs from Morphine’s “Cure for Pain.” Did you have as much to do with the soundtrack for “Flirting”?
Yeah, I was very particular about it. The films don’t carry a lot of music, so you have to be very particular about what’s going to fit. They don’t need a lot of music.
I don’t know how much I enjoy it. You make this soundtrack deal, which is like a deal with the devil. At first you say, “Oh how exciting, Geffen is incredibly discriminating, they never do this, and they really love the movie, and they have a great list of artists.” But then they’re like, “You have to use this single, and not that one, and this band doesn’t want to be in the movie,” and it’s just a big pain in the ass. I think everybody’s sick of it — even the bands. Sick of MTV and the whole thing.
We heard the Grateful Dead would never license music because they didn’t want Jerry Garcia’s name to be associated with anything that had drugs in it. But I said, “You gotta see the movie.” So they all saw the movie, and they all laughed and said, “Sure, go ahead.”
But, through all that, I think we put something good together. It’s not your standard mountain of music. It’s a nice eclectic, weird mix of music — like Southern Culture on the Skids, they have the closing song.
Martin Scorsese has taken an awful lot of abuse, given his level of accomplishment. His films have been denounced as bloodthirsty, blasphemous, or (God forbid) merely slick, and the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences shows no sign of abandoning its favorite sport — that is,
bypassing Scorsese’s work in favor of some flyweight entertainment.
By now, however, even Scorsese’s detractors concede that he’s one of the
most opulent filmmakers in the history of the medium, squeezing the maximum
pictorial beauty out of every shot. This sort of gift has sunk lesser
careers; it tends to elevate shallow image-mongering above narrative
coherence. Yet Scorsese’s films, whatever their individual merits, have
always worked as stories. Their emotional impact eliminates any hint
of directorial finger-painting. Why?
Some of the answers are obvious: gritty scripts, superlative
actors. But I’d like to suggest another key additive, which is the
director’s
relationship — or more accurately, romance — with popular music. As Scorsese
made clear in a 1992 interview, this infatuation began early.
“When I was growing up,” he said, “in my neighborhood, there was
music everywhere. In the summer especially you could hear the record
players and juke boxes. They were always outside on the street. One was
playing swing and another had ballads. Then somewhere else, say on the
second floor, there was opera. It was like a series of mini-concerts.”
Scorsese’s movies, too, have been like a series of
mini-concerts, into which he has mixed pop music of every stripe. “Mean
Streets,” which represented his break into the big time in 1973, placed the
Rolling Stones cheek-by-jowl with Ray Baretto, not to mention Johnny Ace,
Jimmy Roselli, and “Please Mr. Postman.” The next year, Scorsese combined
Mott the Hoople and Gershwin for “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.” Of
course, the director has occasionally gone for a less catholic approach,
commissioning Bernard Herrmann’s superb score for “Taxi Driver” or the
neo-Brahmsian upholstery of “The Age of Innocence.” But several of his recent
films have sent Scorsese back to his mix-and-matching, and the resulting
soundtracks give a good idea of how he uses popular music to enhance and
complicate the story onscreen.
Take the goodies contained in “Goodfellas” (Atlantic CD). On a
basic level, they give a sense of period, whether it’s the Moonglows crooning
“Sincerely” or Cream’s rendition of “Sunshine of Your Love.” Still, these
aren’t your run-of-the-mill signposts, which another director might allow to
drift out of a transistor radio for five seconds. They’re often mixed up front,
alongside or on top of the dialogue, and just as often they extend through two
or more scenes. Scorsese’s affection for this stuff is transparent. So is
his awareness that even the shlockiest pop music can pack an emotional
punch; that’s what keeps his playlist from sounding nostalgic.
At the same time, he’s too shrewd to overlook the complications.
“As far as I could remember,” Ray Liotta recalls at the very beginning of
“Goodfellas,” “I always wanted to be a gangster.” At once Scorsese cues up
Tony Bennett’s “Rags to Riches,” in all its thrilling, goofy glory, and we
see a succession of wiseguys disembarking from their Cadillacs. Forget
that “Rags to Riches” is actually a love song. What we now have is an
anthem to upward mobility, which anticipates Liotta’s own ascent. The fact
that he owes his riches to murder, extortion, and grand theft only adds to
the irony; so does the film’s conclusion, which finds a penniless Liotta in
the clutches of the witness protection program.
A similar mixture of affection and irony envelopes the “Casino”
soundtrack (MCA CD), which is crammed with nearly two hours of music.
Again, Scorsese has picked certain items to give a sense of the Las Vegas milieu. We
get Dean Martin (“You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You”), Tony Bennett (“Who
Can I Turn To”), and a double dose of Louis Prima. Some tunes, like Harry
Nilsson’s “Without You,” identify the mid-1970s time frame. Others, it’s
clear, were selected primarily because Scorsese and his musical
co-conspirator Robbie Robertson liked them. And indeed, who’s going
to quibble with Clarence “Frogman” Henry singing “Ain’t Got No Home” while
De Niro’s hopeless marriage to Sharon Stone falls to pieces?
Here, too, the musical ironies are thick on the ground. When Stone
conspires with Joe Pesci to steal her husband’s nest egg, B.B. King sings “The
Thrill Is Gone”; when she runs off with her sleazeball lover, Fleetwood Mac’s
“Go Your Own Way” plays on the car radio. Both tunes are appropriate to the
onscreen action, but the fit is just imperfect enough to make us laugh.
Scorsese — and the audience — manage to have it both ways.
Not always, though. “Casino” itself is a flawed piece of work,
too long by a third and padded with recycled bits from “Goodfellas”
(including Joe Pesci’s turn as a second-banana psychopath). This doesn’t
prevent it from standing head and shoulders above most of the current
Hollywood crop. But it does mean that Scorsese’s iron control of his
effects gets blurred from time to time, and that applies to the music, too.
After all, the last song we hear as the credits roll is “Stardust” — not
the emotive Billy Ward performance that appeared in “Goodfellas,” but a
bleaker solo version by Hoagy Carmichael. Surely Scorsese means this
expression of lost love to evoke De Niro’s romance with Stone. But since
even Rupert Pupkin would have been able to recognize the relationship as a
predestined mess, Carmichael’s tune sounds less poignant than obtuse. It’s
not clear who the joke is on, and I’m not sure that Scorsese knows, either.
In any case, the music itself doesn’t suffer a scratch. You can
slap the soundtrack on your home stereo, and what you get is another
variation on Martin Scorsese’s desert island list — what he’d listen to if
he were shipwrecked with nothing but a polyester suit and a bank of slot
machines. And that, in my book, is a worthwhile purchase.
