Rudy Wurlitzer: Infinite West

Two-Lane Blacktop (Directed by Monte Hellman)

A descendant of the Wurlitzer family of jukebox/organ fame, Rudy Wurlitzer came to prominence with the publication of two short novels Nog (1969) and Flats (1970). Praised by Thomas Pynchon and a key text of the countercultural movement, Nog follows a lone narrator on an endless journey through an American West filled with ‘obsessive monologues, disintegrating memories, hoped-for horizons, buried myths, paranoid plans.’ 

Wurlitzer became a screenwriter around the same time, first collaborating with Jim McBride on the post-apocalyptic Glen and Randa (1971), before being approached by director Monte Hellman, an admirer of Nog, to rewrite a script called Two-Lane Blacktop – an existential road movie that is a logical outcome of the elliptical and filmic aspects of Wurlitzer’s fiction.

Two-Lane Blacktop stars singer-songwriter James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson alongside frequent Sam Peckinpah collaborator Warren Oates. Heavily publicised prior to its release (Esquire dubbed it ‘the Movie of the Year’ and published the screenplay in its entirety) but then ignored and dumped by distributors, Two-Lane’s reputation has grown over the years to become a canonical ’70s film. Wurlitzer went on to write Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) for Sam Peckinpah; Walker (1987) for Alex Cox; also working on Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978), Volker Schlöndorff’s Voyager (1991) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha (1993). 

Wurlitzer was working on a screenplay with Michelangelo Antonioni at the time of the director’s death. He wrote the libretto for the Philip Glass’ opera In The Penal Colony, and has also written scripts for the television courthouse drama 100 Centre Street, directed by Sidney Lumet.

The following is an edited extract of an interview with Rudy Wulitzer for the A.V. Club in 2011 in which he discusses his early screenwriting career:

Two-Lane Blacktop (Directed by Monte Hellman)

AVC: How did Monte Hellman approach you about writing ‘Two-Lane Blacktop?’ You were best known then for your experimental novel ‘Nog’, which doesn’t exactly seem like Hollywood material.

RW: I know! That was like, ‘Wow!’ [Laughs.]

AVC: Had you given any thought to writing for film before that?

RW: I was writing these books one after the other – Nog, Flats, and Quake – and I didn’t see it at that time, but it was sort of a trilogy. So, I was broke, because those books weren’t exactly going to be on Oprah. I didn’t want to teach. I was a bartender for a while and I didn’t want to do that. So it was great. It was a real adventure, and I really liked L.A. in those days. I’m totally alienated from it now, but it was sort of a dreamy place. And I didn’t know that many people there, which was a great benefit. I was left alone, you know? I had written some of Nog there, and that was great, because there was a certain kind of freedom involved.

AVC: How did you go from writing ‘Nog’ to writing screenplays?

RW: Well, I have a visual imagination, so it was not an awkward jump into the form. In fact, I liked the form a lot. Especially when I was left alone. In those days, I didn’t feel sublimated to the director as much – at least, at first. With Monte, he just shot what I wrote. And I can remember an old, grizzled producer saying, ‘Well, son, enjoy it, because that ain’t gonna ever happen again.’ [Laughs.] And yeah, he was right. I mean, sort of. Although Sam pretty much shot what I wrote. And Hal [Ashby]would’ve. I worked a little bit on Coming Home for him. I did the last draft, and he was wonderful. I would’ve gone on to work with him anytime.

Two-Lane Blacktop (Directed by Monte Hellman)

 AVC: Was the raft scene in ‘Pat Garrett’ in your script? It’s a purely visual moment, and seems to be much of a piece with Peckinpah’s oeuvre.

RW: Yes, I wrote that and MGM hated it. And Sam, when his final cut reemerged some time later, he put it back in. It was an important scene for me, because it worked as a metaphor for the whole Western myths of origins. It just worked on a poetic level.

AVC: Which is not the kind of thing you can say to a studio executive.

RW: No! [Laughs.] Are you crazy? ‘There’s the door!’ But in terms of the whole myth of the West and the frontier – which also mirrored my own sense of internal frontiers, the myth of freedom and all that – in this last book I wrote, a lot of those scripts and research and filmic ideas I was left with found their way into that book, called The Drop Edge Of Yonder. It seemed to complete something for me, because I used the best of that.

AVC: The visual quality of the writing in Nog is so important. It’s almost the only thing that allows you to keep your bearings. You can see how Monte Hellman would latch onto that.

RW: Monte is unlike any director I’ve ever known. He’s very innocent, in his way. What he liked – and, I think, he had in his earlier films that he did with Jack Nicholson – what really turns him on is to be surprised. I think he thought, ‘This guy will give me something new.’ It’s the way he casts, too, for better or for worse. They’re mostly people who’ve never acted before. So, there’s a mixture. With Two-Lane, what’s so interesting about it now, in retrospect, is the non-actors, like James Taylor, and the girl, Laurie [Bird], mixing in with the real old pros, like Warren Oates and Harry Dean [Stanton]. It gives it a strange energy, which, at the time, people were sort of freaked by. But now, I find it all quite lovable, don’t you? [Laughs.]

Two-Lane Blacktop (Directed by Monte Hellman)

AVC: Absolutely. I love James Taylor’s performance.

RW: Yeah, and he was totally out of his mind. [Laughs.]

AVC: I think it’s, by far, the best thing he’s done in any medium.

RW: Yeah, that’s because he didn’t know what he was doing. And none of us did. It was a process that – more than any other film that I’ve been involved with, except maybe when I worked with Robert Frank – existed in the present. Films are such a linear medium, and they depend so much on the overloaded cost of things, and how it’s set up before, and where it’s gonna go after, so you’re locked into this linear process. But Monte, with his extraordinary openness and innocence, didn’t play by those rules. He didn’t know that he wasn’t playing by them. It never occurred to him.

AVC: You mentioned the juxtaposition of the road movie and the internal journey, as well, which is something that very much plays into the books and the films. It seems to be pretty consistent.

RW: To go back to what you were saying about why Monte chose me, for all the strangeness of Nog, it does represent a very eccentric road movie. So, I think that’s what appealed to him, one of the things.

Two-Lane Blacktop (Directed by Monte Hellman)

AVC: There’s something truly subversive about ‘Two-Lane Blacktop’, which is a movie about a road race that never ends and no one wins.

RW: It didn’t start that way. When I came into the situation, the only thing I kept from the original script was the idea of these race people, the Driver, the Mechanic, and the Girl, and this cross-country race. But nothing else. So I was very free. I hung out with car freaks in the San Fernando Valley and read all the magazines. I didn’t know a car from a cow before that. It was like a great new language. And the way Monte cast it, with these non-actors like James Taylor and Laurie and Dennis Wilson, and then with these old, great character actors; the balance was really interesting in terms of language and energy, this sort of innocence compared to this high-powered professionalism of Warren Oates. As far as the ending goes, we didn’t know how to end it, and it seemed wrong to end it with them winning or losing; that wasn’t where it was at. The whole thing was about the process of being on the move, the road to nowhere. Of course, when the film opened, people really thought it was nuts. They were expecting a classic story of winners and losers and races, all that stuff. And it didn’t happen.

AVC: Was there a model for the character of GTO, played by Warren Oates?

RW: Not really. A lot of it was just Warren. I just went for it, because I was working against the one-dimensional innocence of the non-actors. They didn’t have that range. They had one note. I wanted to write something that involved a lot of notes that would help balance it. So that’s what I was trying to do. Make it over the top and with humor. The non-actors’ parts didn’t have any humor.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

AVC: There’s also, in both ‘Two-Lane’ and ‘Pat Garrett’, a sense of men wrestling with the roles available to them. Pat Garrett and the Driver want to be tough guys, but in a sense, pushing toward that archetype destroys them.

RW: Some of it probably had to do with my own relationship to the film world. One of the things I saw looking at these early films once again was how sublimated the screenwriter is to the powers that be: director and stars. It’s something that I can’t do any more. Although, that said, with those scripts I was freer and looser and more connected to my own instincts than afterwards. So that’s the irony of it. But it was certainly a subject even before the film business, that one has as a writer, and also where I came from – in other words, a complicated relationship with authority.

AVC: You’re dealing with this foundational American myth of the frontier and the road movie, the idea that you find yourself by leaving home. Other countries don’t have that in the same way.

RW: You could say that represents our myths of origins. I’ve always been attracted to that in a lot of different ways, because I’ve always been a kind of nomadic character.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

AVC: Did you move around a lot as a kid? When did the wanderlust kick in for you?

RW: The wanderlust kicked in when I was about 16 or 17. I got a job on an oil tanker as a wiper in the engine room. We went from Philadelphia to Spanish Morocco to Kuwait. And then after that, I spent a lot of time in Europe. Paris.

AVC: And that was in the ’50s or the ’60s?

RW: The ’60s. I was influenced a lot by an old poet that I knew, Robert Graves. So I hung out with him. New York in the ’60s was a very exciting place for me, because the first little film I did was with Claes Oldenburg, and it was kind of a happening film. So, I was influenced by Claes and [Robert] Rauschenberg, and the whole art scene, [Jackson] Pollock. And the freedom. The whole jazz scene in New York was great, Ornette Coleman and those kind of people. And the poets: [William S.] Burroughs, I knew, and [Allen] Ginsberg, and Phil Glass was a very good friend of mine. He was working as a plumber then. I had a job at the Five Spot. It was just a kind of extraordinary time of complete permission. The cliché about the ’60s really seemed to be true in the Lower East Side in those days.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

AVC: The movies don’t celebrate that kind of freedom, though. They’re about the dangers of freedom, more than its possibility. It seems significant that the race in ‘Two-Lane’ goes from west to east, which is the opposite of the great westward expansion.

RW: Yes. There’s the myth of that. And also, in a literary sense, as I look back on it, what I was questioning was the whole naturalism of the narrative throughline. That was, in a literary sense, what I was trying to do in the books, but also in Two-Lane. Two-Lane related to those three early books more than any other film or book, except perhaps for Drop Edge. That’s an interesting way to think about it.

AVC: There are little bits of Western mythology that thread through them as well, but in ‘Pat Garrett’ you deal with it directly. As with a lot of Peckinpah’s movies, it’s about the seduction of those myths, and also the incredibly destructive power of them.

RW: I was talking about this the other day to this friend of mine, the director Alex Cox, who’s a big fan of that film. And we were saying what’s really interesting, a few people have pointed out about that film, is the politics of it. The Santa Fe ring, and how they were controlling things. That sort of mirrored in Peckinpah’s mind the whole thing he was going through with MGM – being controlled by these other forces where you aren’t quite sure what they’re thinking, you’re at the mercy of. So independence is a loaded thing, and you pay a big price for it at times. But it’s worth it.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

AVC: There’s an idea of being in love with self-destruction or nothingness.

RW: That’s an interesting point, because as I look back on that time, I was always sort of skating on the edge of nihilism, but always hoping or trying to find a way to transcend it. To not let it just be nihilism, but to go for a bigger metaphor, and bigger view. Not always successfully, but that was in the room as well, for me, anyway…

AVC: ‘Pat Garrett’ never made it out in its proper form.

RW: I know, I know. There was all that stuff with MGM and – oh man, it was a nightmare. Peckinpah was on the warpath. But those days, now I realize, ‘My God, that was an amazing time.’ When you could just proceed with a certain degree of autonomy and adventure. It was amazing. I would write one of these crazy books and then go out and make a film, and I didn’t know what all the complaints were about. I thought, ‘Wow, this is great.’ [Laughs.] And then of course, the big, steel doors shut down and it was bad from then on. But the people I worked with, like Monte [Hellman] and Peckinpah, Hal Ashby I worked with awhile, they were all great. And individuals. The whole corporate envelope hadn’t gathered. There were storm clouds on the horizon, but I was so stuck in my own fun, I never saw it coming.

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

AVC: ‘Pat Garrett’ and ‘Two-Lane Blacktop’, even more so ‘Glen And Randa’, it’s a little hard to believe they got made in the first place.

RW: They couldn’t get made now, that’s for sure. [Laughs.] It’s amazing they were made. Then in the ’80s, of course, it all shifted and changed and became more corporate. The people you were dealing with more were salespeople. Back then, you’d write a script and Monte would say, ‘Yeah, gee, I read this crazy book by you. I’d like to see what you could do.’ So I completely threw everything out and did my own thing, and no one questioned anything. [Laughs.] There were no salespeople in the room. You didn’t have to pitch; you just did your thing. So you were free to go on your own journey, and it was more of a collaboration in that way.

AVC: How did ‘Esquire’ get the idea that ‘Two-Lane Blacktop’ was the ‘movie of the year’ and end up publishing the script?

RW: I don’t know. Somebody must’ve sent them the script, and the script had a certain kind of, I guess, cachet they liked. It was the only script they’d ever published. I think they felt, after the first returns were in, ‘My God, what an insane thing. We’ll never do that one again.’

Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (Directed by Sam Peckinpah)

AVC: Do you feel like ‘Two-Lane’ and ‘Pat Garrett’ reflect what you had in mind? Or improved on it?

RW: In retrospect, I’m stunned by how they turned out better than I thought they would. At the time, once you’re involved in the whole drama of production and this and that and the personalities, you just don’t know. You’re more aware of the problems and the various cuts. And then when it’s released, and the reviews are mixed at best, you think, ‘Ugh.’ But now, I’m amazed at how good those films are. And it’s not just – well, it is, in a way – that they couldn’t be made now, but the degree of freedom and exploration and spontaneity involved just doesn’t happen now. First of all, films are a hundred times more expensive now, and they’re hooked into a global audience, and it’s all a kind of corporate sell. There’s a sort of magic sense when you’re making a film that you’re just in your own world and trying to work for its own sake. These directors, like Peckinpah, he was amazing. He was crazy and confrontational and inspired and generous, and all these things that now get sublimated. That whole photo-artistic temperament was given full range. So now, I’m fond of those films…

– Interview: Rudy Wurlitzer. By Sam Adams. The A.V. Club, August 26, 2011. Full article here

Joel and Ethan Coen: In Regard to Barton Fink

Barton Fink (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

Writers come and go. We always need Indians. 

– Producer Ben Geisler in Barton Fink

The Coen brothers’ Barton Fink (1991) is the story of a New York writer who aspires to create a new, living theater about the ‘common man’ and who sees it as his job ‘to make a difference.’ The year is 1941, and on the back of the success of his first play, Fink (John Turturro) is lured into a Faustian bargain to go to Hollywood and write for the movies. On arriving in Los Angeles, he forms a friendship with his next-door neighbor and common man Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), and another writer, W. P. Mayhew (John Mahoney), whom Fink considers to be the ‘finest novelist’ of their generation. Fink, however, finds himself unable to make progress on the wrestling picture he’s supposed to be writing. Events turn from bad to bizarre: Mayhew’s secretary and lover, Audrey Taylor (Judy Davis), is revealed to have authored the great writer’s books; in attempting to help Fink, Audrey seduces him only to be later discovered dead in his hotel room; Charlie helps Barton dispose of Audrey’s body; amiable common man Charlie turns out to be a homicidal maniac who possibly murdered Audrey; and Charlie entrusts Barton with a box that may well contain Audrey’s head. In the end, Fink overcomes his writer’s block and is able to finish his wrestling picture, which turns out to echo his New York play. As Fink’s descent into hell is complete, the hotel where he is staying catches fire, and Charlie shoots the detectives who are investigating Audrey’s murder. Barton escapes the blaze as Charlie disappears back into his burning room. In the closing scenes, Barton enters another form of purgatory as the head of the studio refuses to release him from his contract thus retaining the rights to Barton’s writing. Finally, Barton finds himself on a sunny beach and becomes a part of the painting that throughout the movie has hung on the wall of his hotel room. 

Described by critic Richard Schickel as ‘gnomic, claustrophobic, hallucinatory, just plain weird’, Barton Fink was the first film to accomplish the hat-trick at the Cannes festival (best picture, best director and best actor). The following interview with the Coen Brothers took place in Cannes during May 1991:

‘Barton Fink’ takes as its theme the writer’s block suffered by a screenwriter. How did you come to write this kind of film?

JOEL COEN: It did not begin to take shape until we were halfway through the writing of Miller’s Crossing. It’s not really the case that we were suffering from writer’s block, but our working speed had slowed, and we were eager to get a certain distance from Miller’s Crossing. In order to escape from the problems that we were experiencing with that project, we began to think about a project with a different theme. That was Barton Fink, which had two origins. In the first place, we were thinking about putting John Turturro to work – we had known him well for a long time – and so we wanted to invent a character he could play And then there was the idea of a huge abandoned hotel. This idea came even before our decision to set the story in Hollywood.

ETHAN COEN: We wrote the screenplay very quickly, in three weeks, before returning to the script of Miller’s Crossing in order to finish it. This is one of the reasons why these two films were released rather close to one another. When we had finished shooting Miller’s Crossing, we had a script all ready to film.

Why did you set the action in 1941, which was a key era for Hollywood writers? Fitzgerald and Nathanael West had just died, Preston Sturges and John Huston, who had been screenwriters, had just begun careers in directing.

JC: We didn’t know that. In retrospect, we were enthusiastic about the idea that the world outside the hotel was finding itself on the eve of the apocalypse since, for America, 1941 was the beginning of the Second World War. That seemed to us to suit the story. The other reason – which was never truly realized in the film – was that we were thinking of a hotel where the lodgers were old people, the insane, the physically handicapped, because all the others had left for the war. The further the script was developed, the more this theme got left behind, but it had led us, in the beginning, to settle on that period.

EC: Another reason was the main character: a serious dramatist, honest, politically engaged, and rather naive. It seemed natural that he comes from Group Theater and the decade of the thirties.

JC: The character had somewhat the same background, in terms of being a writer, as Clifford Odets; only the resemblance ends there. Both writers wrote the same kind of plays with proletarian heroes, but their personalities were quite different. Odets was much more of an extrovert; in fact he was quite sociable even in Hollywood, and this is not the case with Barton Fink! Odets the man was moreover quite different from Odets the writer. There was a great deal of passion and innocence in him.

Barton Fink (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

Have you read the journal Odets wrote during the year 1940?

EC: John Turturro was the one who really read it. But you have to take account of the difference between the character and the man.

JC: Turturro was also interested by the style of the Group Theater plays. At the opening of the film, the voice that you hear off camera is that of Turturro, and, at the end, when he taps out a scene from his screenplay on the typewriter, it is meant to be in the Odets style.

The character of W. P. Mayhew is, in turn, directly inspired by Faulkner.

EC: Yes, the southern writer, an alcoholic. Certainly we chose John Mahoney for this role because of his resemblance to Faulkner, but also because we are very eager to work with him. And yet, that was only somewhere to start, and the parallel between the two is pretty superficial. As far as the details of the character are concerned, Mayhew is very different from Faulkner, whose experiences in Hollywood were not the same at all.

JC: Certainly Faulkner showed the same disdain for Hollywood that Mayhew does, but his alcoholism did not incapacitate him, and he continued to be a productive writer.

Barton Fink (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

Did you get the inspiration for Jack Lipnick, the producer, from Louis B. Mayer?

JC: Michael Lerner looks a little like Mayer, but Lipnick is really an amalgamation of several figures. The incident with the uniform, for example, comes from the life of Jack Warner, who arranged that an army commission be given him and demanded that the studio costume department make him a uniform. Lipnick also has his vulgar side, rather like Harry Cohn.

EC: What’s ironic about it is that this colonel’s uniform, one of the most surrealist elements in the film, is at the same time one of the few that’s drawn from Hollywood history.

One of the most characteristic qualities of your films and of ‘Barton Fink’ in particular is the fact that their structures are completely unpredictable. Do you put together your screenplays with this in mind?

JC: In this case, we had the shape of the narrative in mind from the very beginning. The structure was freer than usual and we were aware that, toward the middle, the story would take a radical turn. We wanted the beginning of the film to have a certain rhythm and to involve the viewer in a kind of journey. When Fink wakes up and discovers the corpse beside him, we wanted this to be a surprise, and yet not clash with everything that comes before.

EC: We were aware that we would be walking a very thin line here. We needed to surprise the viewer without disconnecting him from the story. In the way we presented the hotel, we hint that Fink’s arrival in Hollywood was not completely ‘normal’. But it is certain that the film is less tied to the conventions of some film genre, as, for example, Miller’s Crossing is, belonging as it does completely to the tradition of the gangster film.

Barton Fink (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

At what stage did you start thinking of the picture of the woman on the beach that figures in the last sequence?

JC: That came to us pretty soon after we began to ask ourselves what there would be in Barton Fink’s room. Our intention was that the room would have very little decoration, that the walls would be bare and that the windows would offer no view of any particular interest. In fact, we wanted the only opening on the exterior world to be this picture. It seemed important to us to create a feeling of isolation. Our strategy was to establish from the very beginning that the main character was experiencing a sense of dislocation.

EC: The picture of the beach was to give a vision of the feeling of consolation. I do not know exactly why we became fixed on this detail, but it was no doubt a punctuation mark that, in effect, did further the sense of oppression in the room. With the sequence where Fink crushes the mosquito, the film moves from social comedy into the realm of the fantastic.

JC: Some people have suggested that the whole second part of the film is nothing but a nightmare. But it was never our intention to, in any literal sense, depict some bad dream, and yet it is true that we were aiming for a logic of the irrational. We wanted the film’s atmosphere to reflect the psychological state of the protagonist.

EC: It is correct to say that we wanted the spectator to share the interior life of Barton Fink as well as his point of view. But there was no need to go too far. For example, it would have been incongruous for Barton Fink to wake up at the end of the film and for us to suggest thereby that he actually inhabited a reality greater than what is depicted in the film. In any case, it is always artificial to talk about ‘reality’ in regard to a fictional character. It was not our intention to give the impression that he was more ‘real’ than the story itself.

JC: There is another element that comes into play with this scene. No one knows what has killed Audrey Taylor. We did not want to exclude the possibility that it was Barton himself, even though he proclaims his innocence several times. It is one of the conventions of the classic crime film to lay out false trails as long as possible for the viewer. That said, our intention was to keep the ambiguity right to the end of the film. What is suggested, however, is that the crime was committed by Charlie, his next-door neighbor.

Barton Fink (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

From this point of view, the choice of John Goodman to play Charlie Meadows was inspired because he has usually been given more appealing roles and because the viewer sympathizes with him during the first scenes of the film.

EC: This role too was written for the comedian, and we were quite obviously aware of the warm and friendly image that he projects for the viewer and with which he feels at ease. We played on this expectation by reversing it. Even so, from the moment he appears, there is something menacing, disquieting about this character.

The fact that ‘Barton Fink’ uses working-class characters in his plays obliges him to be friendly to Meadows because if not he would show himself full of prejudice.

JC: That’s true enough in part, but Charlie also wins him over completely by his friendly greeting in the beginning.

EC: Charlie is, of course, equally aware of the role that Barton Fink intends for him to play, if in a somewhat perverse way.

While shooting this film, you weren’t sure if you would go to Cannes, and even less sure that Roman Polanski would be the head of the jury. It is ironic that it was up to him to pass judgment on a film where ‘The Tenant’ and ‘Cul-de-Sac’ meet ‘Repulsion’.

JC: Obviously, we have been influenced by his films, but at this time we were very hesitant to speak to him about it because we did not want to give the impression we were sucking up. The three films you mention are ones we’ve been quite taken by. Barton Fink does not belong to any genre, but it does belong to a series, certainly one that Roman Polanski originated.

Barton Fink (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

One thinks also of ‘The Shining’ and of the imaginative world of Kafka, of the black humor and Jewish culture of Central Europe.

JC: All this is true enough, except that The Shining belongs in a more global sense to the horror film genre. Several other critics have mentioned Kafka, and that surprises me since to tell the truth I have not read him since college when I devoured works like The Metamorphosis. Others
have mentioned The Castle and The Penal Colony, but I’ve never read them.

EC: After the insistence of journalists who wanted us to be inspired by The Castle, I find myself very interested in looking into it.

How did you divide up work on the screenplay?

EC: We handle this in a very informal and simple way We discuss each scene together in detail without ever dividing up the writing on any. I’m the one who then does the typing. As we have said, Barton Fink progressed very quickly as far as the writing was concerned, while Miller’s Crossing was slower and took more time, nearly nine months.

JC: Ordinarily, we spend four months on the first draft, and then show it to our friends, and afterward we devote two further months to the finishing touches.

Barton Fink (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

What is your explanation for the rapid writing of ‘Barton Fink’?

EC: Perhaps it was because of the feeling of relief that we got from it in the midst of the difficulties posed by Miller’s Crossing. In any case, it was very easy.

JC: It’s a strange thing but certain films appear almost entirely completed in your head. You know how they will be, visually speaking, and, without knowing exactly how they will end, you have some intuition about the kind of emotion that will be evident at the conclusion. Other scenarios, in contrast, are a little like journeys that develop in stages without your ever truly knowing where they are heading. With this film, we knew as a practical matter where Barton Fink would be at the end.

Moreover, right at the beginning we wrote Charlie’s final speech, the one where he explains himself and says that Barton Fink is only a tourist in that city. It makes things much easier when you know in advance where you’re taking your characters.

EC: We have to say we felt we knew these characters pretty well, maybe because we are very close to the two comedians, which made writing their roles very easy.

Now ‘Miller’s Crossing’ is a film where there are many characters and locations and where several plot lines intersect.

JC: It is true that Barton Fink has a much narrower scope. The narrative of Miller’s Crossing is so complicated because while writing it we had the tendency ourselves to lose our way in the story.

EC: Barton Fink is more the development of a concept than an intertwined story like Miller’s Crossing.

Barton Fink (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

How did the title come to mind?

JC: We knew we came up with it at the very beginning of our work on the screenplay, but we found we couldn’t remember the source. It seems it wound up being what it was by complete chance.

There is a great deal of humor in the film, from the moment when the wallpaper starts peeling off the wall until the pair of policemen arrive on the scene. In fact the combination of drama with comedy is perhaps more evident in ‘Barton Fink’ than in the films that preceded it.

JC: That’s fair enough. The film is really neither a comedy nor a drama. Miller’s Crossing is much more of a drama, and Raising Arizona is much more of a comedy.

EC: It seems that we are pretty much incapable of writing a film that, in one way or another, is not contaminated by comic elements.

JC: That’s funny because at the start I was imagining Miller’s Crossing, while Barton Fink seems to me to be more of a dark comedy.

EC: As opposed to what takes place in regard to Miller’s Crossing, here we tormented the main character in order to create some comic effects.

Jon Polito plays a role similar to the one he plays in ‘Miller’s Crossing’. In both films, he winds up humiliated.

EC: Except that in Barton Fink the character is mistreated for twenty years. In the end, he gets used to it.

Barton Fink (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

The first image of Hollywood that appears is unconventional for this kind of film: a rock on the beach.

EC: It’s funny that you should mention that because we actually filmed other shots that would have made for a more conventional transition, but we decided in the end not to use them. All we needed was a rock on the beach that anticipated the film’s end.

This is the second production on which you have worked with your art director, Dennis Gassner.

JC: We shot for at least three weeks in the hotel where half the action of the film takes place. We wanted an art deco stylization and a place that was falling in ruin after having seen better days. It was also necessary that the hotel be organically linked to the film. Our intention, moreover, was that the hotel function as an exteriorization of the character played by John Goodman. The sweat drips off his forehead like the paper peels off the walls. At the end, when Goodman says that he is a prisoner of his own mental state, that this is like some kind of hell, it was necessary for the hotel to have already suggested something infernal.

EC: We used a lot of greens and yellows to suggest an aura of putrefaction.

JC: Ethan always talked about the hotel as a ghost ship floating adrift, where you notice signs of the presence of other passengers, without ever laying eyes on any. The only indication of them is the shoes in the corridor. You can imagine it peopled by failed commercial travelers, with pathetic sex lives, who cry alone in their rooms.

Barton Fink (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

You take a look at the Hollywood of fifty years ago, but in a different way you find yourselves confronted by the same problems. Do artists always meet up with Philistines like Lipnick?

JC: We would have to say yes, probably. But in fact Barton Fink is quite far from our own experience. Our professional life in Hollywood has been especially easy, and this is no doubt extraordinary and unfair. It is in no way a comment about us. We financed Blood Simple, our first film, ourselves, and Circle Films in Washington produced the three next ones. Each time, we made them the offer of a screenplay that they liked and then they agreed on the budget. We have no rejected screenplays in our desk drawers. There are plenty of projects that we started but then didn’t finish writing for one reason or another, either because there were artistic problems we couldn’t resolve or because the cost of producing them would have been prohibitive.

Were any of these aborted projects particularly dear to you?

JC: No, because right away you get drawn into another film, and it becomes your sole preoccupation. We would have liked to produce one or two short subjects that we wrote, but it is very difficult to get them made in America because there’s no market.

Why did you use Roger Deakins on this project?

JC: Our usual director of photography, Barry Sonnenfeld, wasn’t available, and since we had seen Deakins’s work and liked it, we asked him to work with us. He seemed right for the film.

EC: We especially like the night scenes and interior sequences in Stormy Monday. We also screened Sid and Nancy and Pascali’s Island.

Did you make storyboards, as you had for your other films?

EC: Yes, we did detailed ones, but of course there were a lot of changes once we got on the set. However, we went there with a detailed plan for each shot. This was a film much easier to shoot than Miller’s Crossing, and the budget ran about a third less, just like the shooting schedule: eight weeks instead of twelve.

Miller’s Crossing (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

Did you shoot any sequences you didn’t use in the final cut?

JC: In the case of Miller’s Crossing, there were whole sequences we shot that did not find a place in the film. This was not the case with Barton Fink; we used just about everything. I do remember, however, that we did some shots about life in Hollywood studios, but didn’t decide to keep them; they were too conventional.

Compared to your preceding films, which feature bravura sequences like the night-time shoot-out in ‘Miller’s Crossing’, ‘Barton Fink’ has a much more restrained style.

JC: We weren’t conscious of that. Probably Miller’s Crossing had so many dialogue scenes that at a certain stage we intended to give the spectator some interesting visual effects. The genre also encourages large-scale action scenes. But in the case of Barton Fink this kind of thing did not seem appropriate to us. Stylistic tours-de-force would have ruptured the film’s equilibrium.

The writer victimized by Hollywood is a part of the legend of the cinema.

EC: Right, it’s almost a cliche. Furthermore, we gave the two writers in the film the dignity that victims are accorded, something they maybe didn’t deserve because Barton Fink is probably not a great artist and Mayhew is no longer able to write.

Do you feel close to any of your contemporaries in the American film industry?

JC: There’s no lack of films that we like, but we don’t see connections between them and our work. The American film industry is doing quite well these days; a number of directors are succeeding in using the screen to express their ideas. In effect, two kinds of films are being produced these days in the United States: the products churned out by the large production companies, which are most often repetitive although there are exceptions, and the films that certain independent directors manage to make.

Miller’s Crossing (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

Your films contrast sharply with the greater part of the Hollywood films of today. For example, you begin all your films in the middle of a scene without any kind of establishing shot, as in ‘Miller’s Crossing’.

JC: At the beginning of Miller’s Crossing, we had two setups: the first was of a drinking glass with ice cubes, then a closeup of Polito. We did not intend to show right away who was holding the glass. You see someone walk off with the glass, you hear the tinkling of the ice cubes, but the character is not visible in the shot. Then you see Polito, you listen to his monologue, and the ice cubes are always part of the scene, but they escape view. Then you see Albert Finney, but you still do not know who is holding the glass, and finally, you get to Gabriel Byrne in the background. All that was set up and laid out in the storyboards.

EC: We intended to create an aura of mystery around the character who was going to become the hero in the film.

JC: Polito is important in this scene because he’s the one who provides the background information as he begins to tell the story.

EC: We held back Gabriel’s entrance into the conversation. He is the last one to talk, five minutes after the beginning of the film.

How do you explain the relative commercial failure of ‘Miller’s Crossing’ despite the good reception it got from critics worldwide?

EC: It is always difficult to speculate about this kind of problem. Perhaps the story is too difficult to follow.

JC: After all the whole plot of The Big Sleep was very difficult to understand! It’s very difficult to analyze failure at the box office, but in any event we were certainly surprised by it.

– ‘Interview with Joel and Ethan Coen’. (From Positif, September 1991). By Michel Ciment and  Hubert Niogret. Translation by R. Barton Palmer.

    

Focus On: Elaine May’s ‘Mikey and Nicky’

Mikey and Nicky (Directed by Elaine May)

Elaine May is a writer and filmmaker and actor and improviser, but beyond that, she is an artist whose career-long quest for truth has driven her to create work that has taken many forms but always sought to cast aside the easy crutches of cliché and convention to express something profound and real about the human condition.

She first exploded into the public consciousness in the late 1950s, as one half of Nichols and May. She and Mike Nichols were the smartest of the smart set, selling albums hand over fist and changing comedy with their sophisticated long-form improvisation. They were less interested in setups and punch lines than in exploring the complexity, wonder, and absurdity of the world we live in.

After the duo broke up, May wrote plays and dabbled in movies, first as an actor and later as a filmmaker. After costarring in Luv (opposite Jack Lemmon and future Mikey and Nicky star Peter Falk) and Carl Reiner’s Enter Laughing (both 1967), May not only adapted the short story on which the brilliant 1971 dark comedy A New Leaf is based and directed the film but was also heartbreaking and hilarious as its female lead, Henrietta Lowell, a daffy botanist and heiress who is on a more cerebral and sublime frequency than the rest of us. She’s so irresistible that Henry Graham, a W. C. Fields–like misanthrope played by Walter Matthau, abandons his plan to murder her for her money. That, in May’s world, is a happy ending: a man maturing beyond his desire to kill a woman oblivious enough to want to spend the rest of her life with him.

A New Leaf could have been a star-making film for May as an actor. She was deservedly nominated for a Golden Globe for best actress in a comedy or musical. Yet (though she occasionally acts to this day) she chose a different path, continuing her directorial career with another discomfiting study of human nature. Lenny Cantrow (Charles Grodin), the protagonist of May’s The Heartbreak Kid (1972), isn’t out to kill anybody, but he’s murderously callous about breaking the heart of his vulnerable new wife, Lila (Jeannie Berlin, May’s daughter)—on their honeymoon, no less—in order to pursue the shiksa goddess Kelly Corcoran (Cybill Shepherd). This painfully hilarious cult classic doubles as a potent allegory for Jewish assimilation. Lenny gets the girl, but this outcome registers more as tragedy than triumph. It’s a “happy ending” that’s actually achingly sad: getting what he wants most in the world is probably the worst thing that could happen to Lenny.

As a director, May specializes in deeply nuanced portrayals of intense, complicated relationships, just as she did in her groundbreaking stage work with Nichols and May. Where other filmmakers might cut away to give audiences room to breathe, May remains close to her dramatis personae in ways that are sometimes uncomfortable for audiences and characters alike. She is adept at getting viewers to empathize with the prickly, complex antiheroes she creates with such care and craft. In The Heartbreak Kid, for example, she pits the Waspy mortification of Eddie Albert’s patriarch against Grodin’s sweaty Jewish desperation and then ratchets up the tension and unblinking awkwardness to levels both hilarious and borderline unbearable.

May is keenly attuned to the often fraught relationships between men and women as well, but her sharpest focus is on the grubby desperation of male schemers controlled by greed, by lust, by a need to realize their seedy, selfish goals at any cost. Presented from the perspective of these profoundly flawed men, her films are all, on some level, explorations of the world of masculinity, with all its foibles and messy contradictions.

Her genius for finding the squirmy humanity within toxic characters finds its purest and most heartbreaking expression in Mikey and Nicky, on which filming began in 1973 but which wasn’t released till 1976, following all manner of ill will and out-and-out warfare between May and Paramount, the studio that financed the film. At one point, May even hid reels of her own footage so that Paramount could not wrest it from her and release the movie in a bastardized form.

Mikey and Nicky is in many ways May’s first drama, but it can just as easily be described as her darkest and most penetrating comedy. Then again, May seems profoundly uninterested in glib dichotomies like comedy and drama, hero and villain, good and bad, friend and foe. Her obsession is with people and relationships, which rarely fit into such tidy categories.

In search of a new kind of emotional realism, May shot for far longer than planned, and often left the camera running long after a scripted scene had ended, pushing her collaborators and herself in obsessive pursuit of a tricky and delicate cinematic vision. You can practically feel the prolonged shooting schedule in the overwhelming air of exhaustion that hangs heavy over Mikey and Nicky, the sense that we’re entering a long, sad story at its weary end.

We begin, appropriately enough, in total darkness, accompanied by the reassuring white noise of city street sounds—Mikey and Nicky is as bracingly dark visually as it is thematically. May’s film is Godfather-like in its comfort with shadows and darkness. In it, nighttime isn’t just a time of day, it’s a world unto itself, one that its title characters have been haunting long before the events of the film.

Nicky (John Cassavetes), a low-level Philadelphia bookie who is hiding out after stealing from a crime boss, is deeply, deeply tired but also sick—with fear that his luck and his time on earth are both running out, and also with an ulcer born of too much stress and too little self-care. He is marinating in his own sweat, paranoid, holed up in a dingy hotel room in desperate need of help and human kindness. He seems to have burned every other bridge, so he calls on Mikey (Peter Falk), one of his oldest and most dependable friends, to help save him from the hit man he is convinced is after him.

To be a man in Mikey and Nicky is less a condition than an affliction, but before Mikey lashes out with incoherent violence, there is tremendous sweetness in the way he treats his friend, in the way he holds him in his arms while Nicky weeps over the seemingly intractable jam he finds himself in. The warmth and kindness Mikey shows his friend at a low ebb in what appears to be a lifetime full of them makes the inevitable betrayal to come even more devastating.

As a film actor, Cassavetes’s impact and influence rank with those of Marlon Brando. Like Brando, he specialized in raw, violent tenderness—see his turn as the grieving, carousing family man Gus in his own Husbands (1970), for example. He was a macho bruiser of a performer, but beneath Nicky’s anger and incoherent, drunken rage lies a powerful hunger for connection, for salvation. Cassavetes begins the film in a place of weary, scared, wired, vibrating intensity that he maintains to the bitter end. He’s burning with desperation even in his most hushed moments.

In other words, he gave his costar plenty to play off. Falk’s idiosyncratic delivery, dry humor, and quiet intelligence as a performer are most famous from his television role as the rumpled detective Columbo, which he took on right around the same time he met Cassavetes, in 1967, and kept for nearly four decades. It was Falk who passed May’s Mikey and Nicky script to Cassavetes, though they would end up shooting Cassavetes’s Husbands and A Woman Under the Influence (1974) together first. In all three films, Falk plays some version of a family man in whom tenderness and violence perpetually struggle for the upper hand. In Mikey, he has the less showy but arguably more challenging role, as a nurturer who cannot show his true face to his old friend without exposing the simultaneously deadly and banal betrayal at the film’s core.

Part of Mikey and Nicky’s dark night of the soul involves a feverish, self-defeating pursuit of sex. Nicky’s wife has kicked him out, and in his desperation and horniness, he has fallen into a poignantly pathetic sexual relationship with the fragile Nell (Carol Grace, devastatingly vulnerable and sad in one of her only film performances). The scene involving her plays like a warped burlesque of heterosexual courtship, with all of the niceties and formalities stripped away, leaving only a lonely woman’s desperate need for affection, no matter how disingenuously offered, and a man’s beastlike need to satisfy his urges. It’d be a moment of visceral awkwardness even if Mikey did not afterward try to have sex with Nell himself, and erupt into violent rage when his seduction attempt is rejected. If you’re a woman in this milieu, you are hated and abused for putting out too easily but punished for not putting out at all. Mikey’s reaction is all the more shocking coming from a character who has up to this point served as Nicky’s conscience, and from an actor as inveterately warm and innately likable as Falk.

The artfulness of May’s direction, meanwhile, lies in its relative invisibility. Like Cassavetes, she is more invested in capturing the underlying emotional reality of a scene than in flashy camera movement or ostentatious visual style. It is all about serving the actors and the moment. And it is a testament not only to the spontaneity and rawness Cassavetes and Falk bring to their roles and to their lived-in chemistry but also to that patient direction—as well as to May’s tough, naturalistic script—that Mikey and Nicky’s dialogue often feels as immediate as if it were improvised in the moment, though virtually none of it was.

For the film’s titular duo, this is a night unlike any other: an endgame, a bleak reckoning. For everyone else, however, it’s just another night. That’s true even of Kinney (Ned Beatty), the man hired to kill Nicky. The same year Mikey and Nicky was barely released, Beatty devoured the screen as a verbose evangelist for big business in Network. Cinema is full of colorful hit men, but Beatty and May upend expectations by crafting a portrayal that bears no trace of the pyrotechnics of his Network performance, making his gunman as unremarkable as possible. He’s just an ordinary guy with an unusual occupation, who goes about his deadly business with a grudging sense of obligation no different, really, from that of an insurance salesman eager to make his quota.

In one of the film’s most quietly incisive moments, Kinney grouses that, after expenses, he’ll barely make any money killing Nicky. Forget morality or legalities: in the sad, sorry world of Mikey and Nicky, where everyone has a price, killing barely even makes sense from an economic perspective.

For Kinney, killing a man he knows only from a photograph is strictly business. For Mikey and Nicky, however, everything is intensely, painfully personal. The same was obviously true of May when she stubbornly birthed this masterful, darkly comic exploration of toxic masculinity through a combination of prickly genius and indefatigable force of will. This was her first wholly original script, based on a play she’d started writing decades before and inspired by real people she’d encountered during her youth. Not to mention the fact that A New Leaf had been taken from her and recut by Paramount, and she had no intention of letting that happen again.

It’s not too much of a stretch to say that the short-fingered vulgarians at Paramount took a hit out on Mikey and Nicky, creatively speaking. They did not understand the movie, nor could they control its strong-willed auteur, so they tried to kill it by taking it out of her hands.

In October 1975, the studio filed a lawsuit against May, claiming ownership of the film, kicking off a series of suits and countersuits between the director and Paramount for control. At one point, the studio sued her and her husband at the time, David Rubinfine, for criminal contempt after he allegedly smuggled some of the film to a colleague to keep it out of Paramount’s hands.

May was finally able to finish an edit of Mikey and Nicky in time for a Christmas 1976 opening, but the release was token at best. The film’s saga was far from over, however. In 1978, May, along with Falk and former Paramount executive Julian Schlossberg, bought the movie back from the studio, and they rereleased it to a more appreciative audience several years later.

Despite her success as a screenwriter and sought-after script doctor on films like Heaven Can Wait (1978), May ended up paying a huge price personally and professionally in an industry where men who fight to realize their vision are considered inspirational while women who do the same are considered “difficult” and cited as grim cautionary tales. She was given the opportunity to direct only one more feature, 1987’s Ishtar, and even that only through the intercession of the film’s producer and star, Warren Beatty.

In many ways, Mikey and Nicky fits perfectly into the uncompromising milieu of the New Hollywood of the late sixties and seventies, with its unrelenting darkness, moral ambiguity, and focus on troubled, unlikable dwellers on the grubby fringes of American society. It is unique, however, in being a major New Hollywood film written and directed by a woman (unbelievably, May was only the third woman to direct a Hollywood film in the sound era). It’s even more unusual in that it’s the furthest thing from what Hollywood would consider a women’s movie, then or now. It’s as insightful about masculinity as Cassavetes’s own dramas about the often ugly world of men.

Perhaps that’s why it has taken the movie so long to be appreciated and seen. A woman ventured boldly into cinematic territory long considered the exclusive domain of men. To the folks in the executive suite, it did not seem to matter that May had made a masterpiece, only that she had made a movie that would be hard to package for a mass audience, even in the heady days of the midseventies.

May set out to use her genius and the overlapping brilliance of Cassavetes and Falk to articulate brutal, profound truths about the joy, horror, and complexities of human experience, as illuminated by the strange codes of a certain subset of insecure, violently overcompensating, crime-prone American men, and a tortured conception of friendship as a messy combination of hatred, love, and everything in between. She succeeded spectacularly, and Mikey and Nicky is an essential reminder that great, deeply personal art endures long after commercial considerations have been rightfully consigned to history.

– Nathan Rabin: Mikey and Nicky: Difficult Men. 

Article here

John Cassavetes: Under the Influence

A Woman Under the Influence (Directed by John Cassavetes)

John Cassavetes wrote A Woman Under the Influence (1974) primarily to provide his wife Gena Rowlands with a significant role. Initially envisioned as a trilogy of interconnected plays, the theatrical possibilities seemed intimidating considering Rowland's Mabel character's emotional and physical demands; one single film would suffice. After convincing the American Film Institute to name him filmmaker-in-residence, providing him with access to equipment and facilities, and providing students with on-the-job training— all of which was provided for free — production on one of Cassavetes' most successful films began shortly thereafter. 

Nick's (Falk) and, particularly, Mabel Longhetti's chaotic lives is instantly apparent as she scrambles to prepare for a night alone with her husband. For the first of many times, one wonders whether there is a true reason for the mayhem, whether Mabel reacts with self-induced terror, or whether the fear stems from an underlying medical problem. Mabel is the first Cassavetes character to exhibit clinical insanity. Her childish spontaneity and unpredictability contribute to the unease in her relationship with Nick. Meanwhile, as sincere as Nick may be in his own way, he lacks the emotional capacity for genuine care and understanding. Mabel is challenged about her condition and committed, but Nick becomes increasingly deranged, irresponsible, and deadly in the days that follow. When Mabel is not present, a clear co-dependency emerges. 

A Woman Under the Influence contains several passages of extraordinary tenderness, complete with genuine companionship, fumbling, and sensitivity. Simultaneously, Nick's incapacity to comprehend Mabel's condition results in explosive aggression and threats of violence. He dominates Mabel by being gruff, impatient, and even brutally honest, while she is brimming with vitality and excitement. Mabel is thus a prototypical Cassavetes character, one who reflects the director's own style of filmmaking. As with Cassavetes' movies, she creates unsettling scenarios, yet as though abandoning the urge for analysis that Cassavetes frequently employed with his films, one of Nick's most egregious errors with Mabel is to rationalise her behaviour. While Cassavetes claims that Mabel's unease is unsurprising, adding, "I don't cast 'totally competent' women in my films because I don't know any 'completely competent' people,"15 Carney also draws connections to his own autobiography. If Moskowitz embodies Cassavetes' swagger, Mabel embodies his self-doubts, uncertainties, and sorrows, he writes. 

A Woman Under the Influence concludes with a shaky acclimation process for both the spectator and the protagonists. However, as with Faces and Husbands' unresolved conclusions, the question of whether anything has been accomplished remains. Have Mabel and Nick confronted the underlying nature of their marital and psychological conflicts? Though there is no straightforward resolution, the film's conclusion is satisfying, if only because it establishes a state of respite in which, despite the mayhem, love persists. Cassavetes' work, as Carney puts it, is "stunningly hopeful....[he] never abandoned the promise of possibility." A Woman Under the Influence strikes the ideal balance between Cassavetes' continually erratic style and a more linear causal progression. As an obvious showcase for Rowlands, the picture has a solitary star focus, and it got two Academy Award nominations, for her and for Cassavetes as director, in large part due to her exceptional performance.

“If there’s one quality that separates John Cassavetes’s movies from almost everybody else’s, it’s the density of detail in the storytelling. His films need to be read closely, from beginning to end. There are no lulls with Cassavetes, no lapses in rhythm; the films aren’t broken down the way most are. You have to apprehend them from gesture to gesture, breath to breath. Very few filmmakers in the sound era have chosen to work this way, at least in the realm of fiction. Only Carl Theodor Dreyer, of whom Cassavetes was a great admirer, comes to mind. This is not to slight filmmakers with a different approach to their art, who either break up their scenes in clearly articulated units (Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Bresson), build tableau effects that take the action into an eerie timelessness (Stanley Kubrick), isolate a certain visual or behavioral event as the focal point of a given shot (Jean Renoir), or dig into the marrow of time to make an event out of duration itself (Andy Warhol, Andrei Tarkovsky). Every approach is equally valid, none more elevated than the rest. Die-hard Cassavetes devotees do him no favors when they buy into his own pronouncements and claim that his methods allowed him a greater purchase on the truth (whatever that is) than other filmmakers. “My films are the truth,” he once said during a personal appearance with a filmmaker of my acquaintance; needless to say, my acquaintance was more than a little put off. Yet such pretentiousness is easily forgiven in a man like Cassavetes, just as it’s easy to make allowances for the pomposity contained within Bresson’s book of maxims. When you consider how far against the grain they both went, it’s understandable that they would each accord their own idiosyncratic working methods the status of scientific breakthroughs or archaeological finds.”

– Kent Jones.

In the following extracts John Cassavetes discusses the personal and creative process that led to the writing of his masterpiece A Woman Under the Influence.

I absolutely wrote A Woman Under the Influence to try to write a terrific part for my wife. Gena wanted to do a play. She was always complaining we’re living in California, she loves the theater and everything. Gena really wanted to do a play on Broadway. And I had always fancied that I could write a play. She wanted something big. She said, ‘Now look, deal with it from a woman’s point of view. I mean deal with it so that I have a part in this thing!’ And I said, ‘OK,’ and I went off and had been thinking about it for a year anyway. And I had taken seven or eight tries at bad plays and came up with this play, which was not the play that the movie was, but it was based on the same characters.

And Gena read it and said, no, she wouldn’t do it. And I’m very stubborn so I didn’t realize that she liked the part but that on the stage, to play that every night, would kill her. I had no concept of that because we’re all obsessed, everyone’s obsessed, that is, in this stupid thing. And so I wrote another play on the same subject with the same characters, deepening the characters and making it even more difficult to play. And I gave it to Gena and she said, ‘I like that tremendously. I like the first one too, but I don’t think I could do that on Broadway.’ So I wrote another play, and so now there were three plays! And I took them to New York and I got a producer to produce the plays on Broadway and I thought it was a terrific idea to do these three plays on consecutive nights with matinees, see? [Laughs.] And Gena’s not a particularly ambitious woman in the trade, as it goes. Although, if she sees a good part, she’ll kill herself for it, but I mean kill herself performing it, but not getting it. I mean, it’s either given to her, or she’ll play with the kids or do something else or go out. When Gena read the plays she said, ‘No one could do this every night!’ She feared they would take her to a sanitarium if she became that keyed up over a long period of time! So then I said, well, all right, let’s try to make it a movie.

I can’t just go out and make what I want. I have to go through a whole big process of crap, talking to people and talking to people, proving to them that whatever we are going to do is going to make money. If I can prove it to them that my intentions are to make money, then they will let me make any film I want. But it becomes increasingly more difficult to tell them that since I’m not concerned with making money. You con people and you lie to them. You try to keep a little part of yourself when somebody says to you, ‘You figure it’s the greatest picture ever made?’ You try to keep a little part of yourself alive. So I went through all the processes of calling people in Wisconsin and Idaho and, you know, big industrialists, and trying to find out how to raise the money. And we couldn’t raise anything, not anything!

We had some readings of the play and started to work on the script and got involved in it. I have a definite person in mind when I write, which is why I like to work with people who are very close to me. I know the way they think, so I try – presume, if you will – to put down some of those thoughts, not in their own terms but in the character’s terms. I often get extremely close to someone’s real personal problems, but that’s our hope – no fictitious emotion. Knowing who the two central actors would be, I revised the screenplay. I wrote it for Peter Falk, as he would expect me to. I study his speech patterns and study the way he works, and how he really feels about it, and then start to write off that.

Gena tells everyone that it’s hard to live with me because there is nothing she can say that I don’t write down. I see Gena around the house and with the kids and I tape record what I see. I do tape record things and exaggerate them and blow them up and the incidents are not the same. I mean, I’m not a writer at all! I just record what I hear. As prattle. What people are concerned with in a day’s living. I have a good ear for prattle. Every line in your life is eaten up by the movies you do.

When I first start writing there’s a sense of discovery. In some way it’s not work, it’s finding some romance in the lives of people. You get fascinated with their lives. If they stay with you, then you want to do something – make it into a movie, put it on in some way. It was that which propelled us to keep on working at A Woman Under the Influence. The words kind of spell out the story in a mysterious way. I deal with the characters as any writer would deal with a character. There are certain characters that you like, that you have feeling for, and other characters stand still. So you work until you have all the people in some kind of motion.

Making a film is a mystery. If I knew anything about men and women to begin with, I wouldn’t make it, because it would bore me. I really feel that the script is written by what you can get out of it and how much it means to you. What the film is about is not deliberate in the original intention. I mean, I know that the subject is going to be a family. But I don’t know what my initial motivations are. You’re interested in where you’re going. The idea of taking a laborer and having him married to a wife whom he can’t capture is really exciting. I don’t know how you work on that. So I write – I’ll do it any way I can. I’ll hammer it out; I’ll kick it out; I’ll beat it to death – anyway you can get it. I don’t think there are any rules. The only rules are that you do the best you can. And when you’re not doing the best you can then you don’t like yourself. And that’s very individual with everyone.

The preparations for the scripts I’ve written are really long, hard, intense studies. I don’t just enter into a film and say, ‘That’s the film we’re going to do.’ I think, ‘Why make it?’ For a long time. I think, ‘Well, could the people be themselves, does this really happen to people, do they really dream this, do they think this?’ There were weeks of wrestling to get the script right. I knew hard-hat workers like Nick, and Gena knew women like Mabel, and although I wrote everything myself, we would discuss lines and situations with Peter Falk, to get his opinion, to see if he thought they were really true, really honest. The actors discussed the clothes the characters would be wearing, the influence of money on their lives, the lives of the children, why they sleep on the ground floor, etc. Everything was discussed, nothing came from me alone. We write a lot of things that aren’t in the movie, as background. So that when we got to the scene, you might rewrite on the spot, but we might have already gone in three, four, five, seven, eight, nineteen different versions of the scene.

I do a full and total screenplay and then the actors come to me and tell me what they don’t like. We get together for several weeks, in the evenings, for example, and read the script together. We get on well together, we’ve known each other and worked together for a long time. The actors come up with various suggestions and I ask them to write them down because sometimes I don’t understand what they are trying to say. Gena, for example, read the finished script and said, ‘I hate this woman. What does she do? What clothes does she wear?’ I replied that, at this stage, I didn’t care what she wore. But for her this is important; and she’s right, I had given a superficial response.

I try to get deeper into the characters and find out what the actors want to play. In what they want to play, somehow they’re adding to the film. They’re adding their own sense of reality and perceptions I wouldn’t know from my relatively limited point of view. It’s a necessary part of the process for me. If for me a line is right, I won’t let the actors change it, but will allow them latitude in interpretation.
After Minnie and Moskowitz, I thought, ‘All right, I would like to make a picture to really say something.’ The most important thing in my life, in Gena’s life and in the lives of our intimate friends was the idea of marriage. We were deeply concerned with the change in illusions that marriage engenders over a period of years and the overwhelming need to understand the problems of retaining the family. Out of that came the characters, the feelings for the characters and, in a more specific sense, the complex delineation of the woman in the film.

The film was born out of my despair and questioning of the meaning of my life. As I thought about this, and, later, during the filming, I became very conscious of certain problems that were unknown and foreign to me. I’ll use anything I can to straighten out a problem – even write a movie about it. When I finally saw the finished film, I was shocked by the reality of these problems.

Usually we put film in such simple terms while being endlessly involved in talking about our personal experience. We admit how complex it is. But it’s as though we never look into a mirror and see what we are. So the films I make really are trying to mirror that emotion so we can understand what our impulses are; why we do things that get us into trouble; when to worry about it; when to let them go. And maybe we can find something in ourselves that is worthwhile. Look at it this way: if I were writing a picture and I used a situation which none of us were involved in or interested in, then I’d feel ashamed about doing it – and so would everybody else. So I use absolutely everything I can find in our own lives, in our friends’ lives, to make what we’re doing interesting. But you’d better do it honestly, and you’d better cure all those personal problems that might be holding back something you want to say.

I don’t think audiences are satisfied any longer with just touching the surface of people’s lives; I think they really want to get into a subject.

Love within a family is a universal subject, but one that’s always treated lightly. We’ve learned to gossip about life instead of living it. A woman is either a married housewife who is happy or a married housewife who is unhappy. It’s not that simple. It is possible to be married and in love and unhappy too. And love fluctuates. Marriage, like any partnership, is a rather difficult thing. It has been taken rather lightly in the movies. Family life is so different than what has been fed into us through the tube and through radio and through the casual, inadvertent greed that surrounds us. Films today show only a dream world and have lost touch with the way people really are. For me the Longhetti family is the first real family I’ve ever seen on screen. Idealized screen families generally don’t interest me because they have nothing to say to me about my own life.

I spend months and years working out the philosophical intent of each picture. We create such problems in making a film by being so nuts as to say, ‘What’s underneath these characters? What are we really try- ing to say? Why are most movies so exploitative? Why don’t we go in and try to find out what people are really thinking? Even if we don’t know how to answer the question.’ The idea was to take all the experiences that I’ve had, all the family and love that’s been given, all the bitterness – to take all that and say, ‘OK, we’ve had all this,’ and put it all together.

In replacing narrative, you need an idea. What you do is take an idea that you have about a situation and then translate it into a dramatic situation that seems as normal as everyday life so the audience doesn’t see the idea. So it doesn’t show. Of course the idea itself has to be good – it really has to be first-rate. And the idea in A Woman Under the Influence was a concept of how much you have to pay for love. That’s kind of pretentious, but I was interested in it. And I didn’t know how to do it, and none of the other people knew how either, so we had to work extremely hard. But you have to deal with philosophic points in terms of real things. Children are real. Food is real. A roof over your head is real. Taking the children to the bus is real. Trying to entertain them is real. Trying to find some way to be a good mother, a good wife – I think all those things are real. And they are usually interfered with by the other side of one’s self – which is the personal side, not the profound, wonderful side. And that personal side says, ‘Hey, what about me? Yeah, you can’t do this to me.’ But if you’re in the audience, the audience is saying, ‘Hey, what about me?’ All the way through A Woman Under the Influence the characters are not thinking about themselves – and therefore the audience is allowed to ask that because the characters can’t. In that way, the film was a little unreal. Because in life people stop and say, ‘What about me?’ every three seconds.

I knew that love created at once great moments of beauty and that on the other hand it makes you a prisoner. It just seems to me that women are alone and they are made prisoner by their own love. If they commit to something then they have committed to it and it’s a torture. And it’s true. I mean, I see it in my relationship to Gena. Within such a system men have always been in a more favorable position – they are allowed to test themselves against the rest of the world since they are in contact with it. But I feel it too. A man feels that also. And nobody knows how to handle it. Nobody knows how to handle it.

This is complicated in turn by other characters and their lifestyles that come and go within the structure of the film. The interrelations between the characters must not be made too easy; like people in life, each presents unique problems, so that even though they come from the same class background and share similar experiences, problems still arise. To make sure it wouldn’t be sentimental, when I finished the script I crossed out all the references to love except one.

I think we’re just reporters, all of us basically. We report from a certain editorial point of view on what we feel, on what we see and on what is important to us. A story like this is not newsworthy really – it’s not Watergate, it’s not war; it’s a man and woman relationship, which is always interesting to me.

– Extract from Raymond Carney: Cassavates on Cassavetes.