Watching movies at home, on a screen however large and a sound system however noisy, is simply not the same thing as seeing them in a theater. My dad used to say that watching movies on TV was like getting kissed over the telephone. What’s missing in seeing a film on television is a central component of what it means to be human—the assembly. Whether it’s at a church, at a play, or at the movies, the idea of losing your identity at a gathering of others—known or unknown to you—while sharing a common experience, a journey, an event, is uniquely human, and in my opinion we abandon such practices at our peril. Gatherings are important, and certainly better than going through life with ear buds. Never mind the theology or medium in question, concentrate on the part where you rub shoulders with strangers. Cities are places you walk or ride the subway, places where you look at people, they look at you; you don’t pass them on the freeway at seventy miles an hour. At the end of a performance of Beethoven’s Third, you and the audience have shared an adventure, at once individual and collective. The experience makes you a better person. Don’t ask me how or why, but it does. There isn’t any movie shown on televsion that wouldn’t be better in a movie theater. Art is fragile—it can be interrupted by crying kids, the telephone, the neighbors, what have you. Gatherings, whether for music, church, plays, films, or ballets, are experiences to which you must make a commitment and in making that commitment, in leaving your home to devote yourself to that communal experience, you reaffirm your humanity.
Speaking for myself, the career artery in which I work has narrowed. I am still absorbed by stories, which I thought would never go out of fashion, dating as they do back to Homer. But lately narrative has been replaced by rides. Endless action sequences, unrelated to character or plot, are just a different kind of pornography, one in which standalone episodes of violence are substituted for standalone episodes of sex. The stories that nominally link these episodes are of little interest because—at least to me—they are unconnected or unrelated to life, which is what appeals to me. I am interested in heroes, not superheroes. Caped crusaders and movies that end with the word “Man” strike me as rather pathetic attempts to dial out an encroaching reality that most Americans appear unwilling to confront. The movies I am interested in making—and watching—are all attempts to confront reality, however quirky, peculiar, hilarious, or unpleasant. Even in (my) Star Treks, as Kirk remarks, everyone is human. Tell me a story.
Of course franchise films have endured, and that includes Star Trek. After VI came VII, VIII, IX, X, none of which I saw on their release, partially because I was afraid I would like them better than my own, and I was petty enough to be frightened by this possibility. Eventually I did find myself watching them—for a segment on Star Trek villains for yet another DVD repackaging in which I had agreed to participate—and at first my worst fears were confirmed. I thought the other films looked better, in many cases were better acted, with superior effects, etc. Later, I gained some perspective and decided mine were just as good and my actors had a certain esprit de corps that struck me as pretty much inimitable.
DEATH
I have said that this is not a travel book; nonetheless it is the account of a journey and every life journey throws you IEDs.
Shortly after we returned from India in 1987, Pierce Brosnan’s wife, Cassie, was diagnosed with cancer, from which she later died.
In January of 1992 my own wife was also diagnosed with breast cancer and died a year and a half later, aged thirty-six, leaving me the widowed father of two daughters, aged three and six. Directing a film during that period was out of the question; I wasn’t sure I could even frame a sentence. Some have marveled at my bad luck at losing my mother and then wife to cancer, but this isn’t how I found myself feeling about it. However sorry I felt for myself, I felt worse for Lauren and our children, so prematurely and horribly separated.
There followed several years of which I have only the haziest recollection, and during which I am sure I made little sense. Brushing my hair or teeth seemed weirdly unimportant, and writing was a financial necessity, nothing more. At the beginning I thought about killing myself but quickly realized that even if I’d had the nerve, I couldn’t really entertain the idea: I had two children for whom I was responsible. I was annoyed with them at the time, failing to recognize their gallantry and the example they set until later. I can never repay my debt to them for teaching me how to endure. But here I can at least acknowledge it.
The only project that resonated with me was the first one I was offered following Lauren’s death: HBO commissioned me to write and direct an adaptation of The Odyssey, a tale that had been my favorite since the age of five when an uncle of mine had told it to me as an ongoing bedtime story. I knew this material inside out, and it wrote itself. In the process I realized I was also writing my autobiography, the story of a man trying to get back to his wife; more, it was the tale of a man punished for his inability to distinguish between cleverness and wisdom. Yes, it wrote itself.
Brosnan and I would lunch in Westwood on a regular basis and compare widowers’ notes. Occasionally we’d include other guys whose wives had died, but mainly it was just the two of us, taking each other’s pulse. At one of these lunches he started to talk about Cassie and soon tears were rolling down his cheeks. I brought up Lauren and shortly I was weeping, too. At this point, while sobbing into our gazpachos, a lovely girl with a great bosom walked by and we both instinctively turned to admire her. Then we looked at each other, caught in the act, and began to laugh while still crying.
In the event there was no way I could leave my kids to direct The Odyssey or anything else. Eventually the film was taken over by Andrei Konchalovsky (HBO left it when I did). He hired his own screenwriter and over at NBC threw out my script; together they concocted The Odyssey According to Danielle Steele. The trashing of Homer seemed of a piece with everything else that had happened.
Then one day I met a beautiful woman named Stephanie, and everything changed. It takes a large heart for someone to come into a family in place of a beloved wife and mother. Stephanie made it look easy and saved the lot of us. I am not a profound person and I’ve never been able to sort out the metaphysics here, but I certainly know love when I feel it. I know other people in similar circumstances who have not been so lucky as to get a second chance at life.
Many years ago I read an article in the Science section of The New York Times that has stayed with me. It had to do with the genetic component of happiness. What side of the bed did you wake up on the morning you were born? The article pointed out that people seem born with an innate level of happiness that appears to exist independently of outward circumstances. You get a raise, win the Oscar, fall in love—and your level of happiness rises in response to good news. But eventually it resettles at its standard level. Similarly, you can get fired, have your house burn down, and so forth. Your happiness declines appropriately—but by and by it tends to slide upward to where it was before. This idea seems very relevant my own experience of life. I’ve gone through some horrendous stuff. I haven’t recovered from Lauren’s death; a part of me doesn’t want to recover from it. But I have learned to ingest it, to coexist with the fact of it, to incorporate it into a life that includes my love for Stephanie, a love that measures no less. My glass always goes back to looking more than half full.
VENDETTA
And as long as you’re alive, life doesn’t stop. More things happen. In 1997 HBO offered me the chance to direct a film called Vendetta. By now I was happily married to Stephanie (with a third daughter to show for it), and finally in a position where things were stable enough for me to spend time behind the camera again, and so I was delighted to accept. The script by Timothy Prager was based on a nonfiction account by Professor Richard Gambino of events surrounding the biggest lynching in American history. The victims were not—as I had anticipated—African Americans, but rather Sicilians in New Orleans in 1891. They had been accused and acquitted of having murdered the city’s very popular—and v
ery corrupt—chief of police, David Hennessy, who had been gunned down in a heavy fog on his way home from work the previous October by persons unknown. The city’s white oligarchy saw in Hennessy’s murder an opportunity to throw a monkey wrench into the power of the growing Sicilian population. It was a compelling tale, the more shocking as it was so little known. When the Sicilians were acquitted, the judge nonetheless refused to release them, holding them overnight on a bizarre technicality, “lying in wait” (for a murder of which they’d just been found not guilty!), long enough for a mob of twenty thousand to be rallied by an advertisement in the next morning’s newspaper: COME PREPARED FOR ACTION TO ADDRESS THE DEFECTS OF JUSTICE IN THE HENNESSY CASE! The mob stormed the parish prison and shot, stabbed, and used for target practice, while hanging, these unfortunate wretches, before going home, satisfied that they had, in one newspaper’s editorial, done the jury’s work for them.
The script was an ensemble piece, a cutaway view of New Orleans as an anthill with several different strata, including—just above the blacks—the Sicilians, most of whom spoke no English. It seemed crucial to me that their scenes be filmed in Sicilian. John Matoian, then head of HBO Films, agreed, though he did feel that the film needed a star—HBO traditionally hooked their films to stars—even though there wasn’t a starring role in the script. In the end Christopher Walken undertook to play the chief white oligarch, who might or might not have been the real culprit behind the chief’s murder. (The theory being that it was pinned on the Sicilians to allow the whites to take over their businesses when they were executed—which they did.)
I visited New Orleans (which then existed), only to find that the French Quarter had become a sort of Disneyland and bore little resemblance to the New Orleans of 1891. HBO wanted me to film in Canada, which I thought ridiculous until I visited Kingston, midway between Montreal and Toronto. The city was situated on Lake Ontario, and with its period architecture parts of it could—with a little help—pass for Louisiana and the Mississippi and/ or Lake Pontchartrain. With the help of my ingenious production designer, David Chapman, Kingston soon became the very vanished New Orleans of our story.
I had labored under the common delusion that Sicilian was merely a variant of Italian, only to learn that it had about as much relationship to that tongue as Yiddish does to German. All my Italian actors had to learn their lines in an alien tongue. I might as well have cast Americans; the linguistic chore would have been essentially the same.
Like The Day After, Vendetta depended on the goodwill of an entire town to provide size and scope to the story. What Lawrence had done for nuclear war, Kingston did for lynching. Folks came out by the thousand to go through makeup and wear period clothes (and mustaches for the men) in order to get paid a pittance and a sandwich for their infinite pains. They were wonderful.
In my admittedly subjective opinion, I think Vendetta is my best work. I had mysteriously improved as the result of my hiatus from the camera. My coverage was more efficient and more imaginative than before, my work with actors, shaping performances, increasingly subtle.
My only explanation for my improvement has to do with watching my oldest daughter learn to ride a bicycle, a process that took five days. On the first day, wearing helmet and knee and shoulder pads in an empty parking lot before a closed restaurant in Provincetown, she lasted about ten minutes before crying that she’d had enough. On the second day she went about fifteen minutes before giving up—but there had been some improvement. By day three, fifteen minutes had become twenty, and Rachel was actually pedaling. Something had happened in the night. Simply put, she hadn’t woken up where she’d left off the day before. Her brain and then her muscles had processed something she had experienced or learned. By day four she was almost there, and by day five, she was riding a bike—but the major part of the work had somehow occurred when she wasn’t on the parking lot. So it was with my other two daughters, and so it was with me when I resumed directing after the time following Lauren’s death.
It was harder, after so much time had passed, to return to features. I tried the independent route, spending a couple of years attempting to put together a film Ronnie and I had cowritten entitled Spoils, a film noirish piece, set during the waning days of World War II and involving two officers of the German occupation—male and female—who discover the German crown jewels in the basement of the castle where they’ve been billeted and decide to steal them. Bruce Greenwood and Linda Fiorentino were to have been our leads. A wild, true story, our script came heartbreakingly close to filming (we were ten days out) when the money disappeared, and I was obliged to fly home from Germany on air miles. The world of independent cinema is rough. Ismail may have been tardy with his checks but enough of them went through to make his movies.
THE HUMAN STAIN
When I was in Belgium, trying to hold together my production of Spoils, I got a phone call from Gary Lucchesi, asking if I’d read Philip Roth’s novel The Human Stain. Gary, having done the executive shuffle from Tri-Star to Paramount, was now heading production at a company called Lakeshore Entertainment. I had not read Roth’s novel but determining by this point that I would shortly be home (and unemployed), I agreed to have a look at the book and meet with Gary and his boss, Tom Rosenberg.
Tom, who hailed from Chicago, had attended Berkeley and gone on to work as a civil rights lawyer in Kentucky before becoming an Illinois real estate mogul. He ran Lakeshore as a mini-major studio, making the films that pleased him. Like a salmon swimming upstream, Tom was still interested in movies about people. By 1999 this was already becoming a rarity, but under Tom and Gary’s stewardship, plucky Lakeshore was doing okay.
I devoured Roth’s novel and was deeply affected by what I read. Roth’s in-your-face hyperarticulateness sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, but it matters not to Philip Roth. He just keeps writing. To use a baseball analogy, some of Roth’s books are singles, others strikeouts, still others home runs, while some are out and out grand slams. What you learn about art (and possibly life) from Philip Roth (and maybe also from Woody Allen) is that the name of the game is showing up and swinging for the fences.
In the case of The Human Stain, there was no question that Roth had written a grand slam. The story of a black man passing as white and succeeding wildly in his deception, only to lose tenure at the college he has created for an allegedly racist remark, was provoking and disturbing, let alone ironic. Coleman Silk’s subsequent love affair with an illiterate custodial worker, leading to their tragic destruction, was, I felt, the work of a genius operating at the height of his powers. Roth’s snapshot of America during the Clinton impeachment proceedings was dead on, as savagely accurate as it was heartbreaking.
I had no idea how to make a movie out of the novel, but I had six weeks in which to figure it out. Six weeks became five and before I knew it, three. I was back in Los Angeles, recuperating from the Spoils debacle but no closer to cracking The Human Stain. Finally, with three days to go, Stephanie advised me to give it up. I was just making myself—and everyone else—crazy. Tell them the truth, she urged. No point bullshitting.
Her advice came as a great relief to me, and I was instantly reconciled to it. Unknowingly this served to do what was really needed, namely to take my conscious mind off the problem. As I have indicated earlier, my best creative work takes place when I am able to let go. In the present instance I remember I was sitting in the bath, staring at my toes and wondering—not for the first time—why long immersion in water causes the skin to wrinkle like prunes.
Suddenly, unbidden, like safe tumblers falling into place—click, click, click—came acts one, two, and three of The Human Stain.
I sat completely motionless, letting the water get cold around me, afraid that if I moved, my elegant solution to the film would vanish like a dream following a morning cup of coffee.
But it remained, and I became convinced it was the right way to adapt Roth’s novel. Adapting novels or short stories or plays is a tricky process, an
d one that varies with the piece being adapted. Let’s confine ourselves for the moment to novels. The better a work of art, i.e., the more successful it is in the medium for which it was originally created, the more difficult its successful translation into another form is likely to prove. Something—much?—will likely be lost in translation to another venue. Novels are a flexible form—they can be long, they can be short, they can be written in the third person, the first person, etc. But films—or plays, or operas for that matter—must obey certain dramatic conventions. They must, for instance, be digestible at a sitting, two hours, three if you must and five if you’re Wagner, but that’s pushing it. Descriptions, interior monologues (think Molly Bloom’s forty-page soliloquy), multiple narrators or points of view—these present problems for the filmmaker that the novelist need not think twice about.
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