Paul Schrader on ‘Performance’

Performance (Directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg)

‘The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness’. 

– Performance (1970)

Performance was a collaboration by two filmmakers – writer and painter Donald Cammell (who worked with the actors from his original script and supervised the film’s editing) and cinematographer Nicolas Roeg (responsible for the camerawork and film’s hallucinatory imagery). Described at the time as ‘the worlds most expensive home movie,’ Performance has become over the years one of the most influential and revered ‘cult’ films ever made. 

Performance is a complex film to absorb initially, rooted as is it in the specific milieu of late 1960’s London. The criminal sub-culture of East End gangsterism, represented by the violence of the Kray Twins, comes into contact, and morphs into, the decadent bohemianism of The Rolling Stones and Mick Jagger, who plays the role of ‘Turner’ with an affected narcissism based substantially on fellow Stone, Brian Jones.

In Performance, London gangster Chas (James Fox) specialises in extortion, a ‘performer’ whose ‘role’ is to use threats and violence to enforce payment. Self-consciously masculine, the unemotional and brutal Chas falls out of favour with his boss after he kills another gangster in defiance of orders and is then compelled to go on the run. He chooses to hide out in an unfamiliar environment, the Notting Hill residence of reclusive rock star Turner and his two girlfriends Pherber and Lucy (Anita Pallenberg and Michele Breton). Although Chas’s pretence to be an unemployed juggler convinces no-one, Turner is sufficiently intrigued and broke enough to allow him to stay.

Jagger’s musician Turner has run out of inspiration and retreated into the self-contained world of his house to lead a drug-fuelled existence that initially fills Chas with contempt. Soon Turner and Pherber start to play a series of mind games on Chas, taking advantage of his dependent status and using drugs to gradually undermine his aggressive persona.

Explicitly intellectual, underscored with violence and a hallucinogenic intensity, Performance’s ambitious esthetic manages to reference Kenneth Anger, Antonin Artaud and Jorge Luis Borges, while Cammell, a former artist, also relies on a Francis Bacon painting for inspiration in connecting the two worlds of the film.

When the gangsters finally arrive to take the disorientated Chas away to his death, Chas, now wearing a long wig, makes his way to Turner and murders him. There is an implied complicity between the two men in this act, as if Turner had been preparing for Chas to kill him all along. Although it is evidently Chas that the gangsters bundle into a car immediately afterwards, it is Jagger/Turner’s face that is visible at the car window as it drives away. The two men have become united: the ‘masculine’ Chas and ‘feminine’ Turner now combined into one through the ritual of death.

Donald Cammell stated that his intention in making Performance was to make a ‘transcendent’ film in which death becomes not the end of life but the beginning of an alternative existence – a notion that owes much to Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poète (Blood of a Poet, 1930), a film that Cammell was fascinated by, and in which the poet-martyr ultimately achieves immortality, paradoxically, through death. 

After completion, it took nearly two years for Warner Bros to distribute Performance in the United States, where, after its release, it gradually assumed cult status. A critical re-appraisal also took place over the decades in contrast to the film’s initially hostile reception. 

When Performance was eventually released on DVD in the United States, screenwriter and director Paul Schrader wrote the following piece in which he expresses his appreciation of Cammell and Roeg’s film and positions their achievement as cinema’s version of Coleridge’s opium-fuelled Kubla Khan:

Ever since the inception of movies, critics and journalists have tried to overlay its creators with the Romantic myth of creativity. If motion pictures were to be ‘art’ in the 19th-century sense, its creators must be ‘artists’ in the Romantic mode: pawns of their muse-inspired, individualistic, unconventional, and irresponsible. But, of course, then as now, this is all so much propaganda. Second only to architecture, movies are the most practical of the arts. Films are made in a disciplined manner by practical people whose creativity is more the product of sober calculation than capricious inspiration, be the film in question a classic or a programmer.

A number of films have been made in the Romantic context – personal visions responsive to instant inspiration – but, for the most part, they were unfinished, unreleased, or unwatched. The very nature of filmmaking – its financing, distribution, the physical nature of production, the conventions of storytelling, preset audience expectations, media packaging – mitigates against the success of such films. There’s no cinematic equivalent of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan.

The closest thing we have to the Great Exception is Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance, now finally, after much delay, available on DVD. This was a film made in an unusual time under unusual circumstances, and, looking back at it now, it’s as inspired, unconventional, individualistic, and irresponsible as it was 35 years ago. It’s as if a wormhole opened in the common-sense history of film – and Performance came through.

Performance is a great film, a masterpiece, which adheres to few of the rules that define greatness. It doesn’t come out of a film tradition, it’s not the work of a great filmmaker, it doesn’t define a film style. If anything, it seems sui generis, a genuine film serendipity, the product of conflicting creative forces momentarily (perhaps magically) aligned and in sync: writer/director Donald Cammell, director/cinematographer Nicolas Roeg, producer Sandy Lieberson, technical advisor David Litvinoff, actors Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, and James Fox, editor Frank Mazzola, composer Jack Nitzsche.

The insecurity of the studio system, the aura of swinging London, the social upheaval of the moment (the film was greenlit in the spring of 1968), London’s distance from Los Angeles, and Jagger’s star power combined to give Cammell and Roeg unprecedented financial and creative freedom. During shooting, the film veered ‘off book.’ Cammell and Roeg would confer at the end of each day, discuss what had happened from their separate perspectives (Cammell story and dialogue, Roeg images), and plot what should happen the next day. Everything was up for grabs: every idea, every image, no matter how outré or unexpected. Furniture was moved about between the master and the coverage, 16mm camerawork replaced 35mm in certain shots, actors were encouraged to ‘play out’ their actual relationships. Critics have been arguing for 30 years whether Performance is a Cammell film or a Roeg film or a Cammell/Roeg film – or whether, in fact, it’s a Frank Mazzola film since so much of the structure was created in the editing. Even the film’s creators were uncertain about who did what.

However it came about, the result is unique in film history: a masterpiece made from madness. Antonin Artaud was a crucial figure in Cammell’s thinking and informs Performance’s famous line: ‘The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.’ The madness that infected Cammell and Roeg, their belief in magic, their notions of visual images as language, their Blakean conviction that the road to excess – in sex, violence, drugs, you name it – leads to the palace of wisdom, cohered in a way that defies explanation.

Warner Brothers, offended by the X-rated result (Warner Bros. President Ted Ashley was described as ‘appalled’), dumped the film, releasing it in a handful of theaters with minimal publicity. I saw it opening night in Westwood Village where I lived; I walked home in a daze, so astonished by what I’d seen that I went back the next afternoon to see it again. I put it on the cover of Cinema, the film magazine I edited, and have watched it every year or so ever since, never failing to be astonished anew. When others ask me why I admire the film so, I find myself uncharacteristically at a loss for words. My best answer is the greatest compliment one can give a film: I say, simply, ‘It’s the real thing.’

– ‘Paul Schrader on Performance’. Film Comment – March/April 2007.

Elia Kazan: From Theatre to Film

A Streetcar Named Desire (Directed by Elia Kazan)

With his films and stage works in the 1940s and 1950s, Elia Kazan established himself as a leading proponent of psychological realism. His works are both a reflection of societal struggle and personal anguish. 

Kazan was born in 1909 in Istanbul into an Anatolian Greek family. Kazan's family emigrated to the United States when he was four years old, and he grew up in New York City's slums and suburbs. He was a solitary youngster who read incessantly. Determined not to follow in his father's business, the young Kazan studied English literature at Williams College from 1926 to 1930. This is where he first gained an interest in theatre. 

Kazan condidered a career in cinema and determined that more theatrical training would assist him in accomplishing that aim. He was admitted to Yale's School of Drama despite his lack of practical experience. Between 1930 and 1932, Kazan engaged himself in all facets of theatre creation. He discovered that he shared an interest in social drama and the formation of a left-wing alternative to Broadway theatre. Kazan left graduate school before finishing his degree to work as an apprentice with the Group Theatre, a subsidiary of the Theatre Guild. 

Cheryl Crawford, Lee Strasberg, and Harold Clurman developed the Group Theatre, modelled after Stanislavski's renowned Moscow Art Theatre. The company's works sought to balance social awareness with aesthetic brilliance. Kazan served in a number of  capacitirs for the ensemble, including press agent, stage manager, and performer, earning himself the nickname “Gadge”, short for gadget. In 1934, he helped recruit new writers, including Clifford Odets, whose play Waiting for Lefty, was a great success and in which Kazan also appeared. 

Kazan remained a member of the company until 1941, performing in Odets' Golden Boy and other productions. Kazan started focusing exclusively on directing and throughout the decade's first few years, he directed a number of plays, most notably Thorton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, starring Tallulah Bankhead, for which Kazan received the 1942 New York Drama Critics' Award for Best Director. By 1945, Kazan had been approached to direct both on Broadway and in Hollywood. He proceeded to have success in both areas, with the film A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and the play All My Sons, which was written by an unknown young writer called Arthur Miller.

His first full-length feature was a film adaptation of Betty Smith's best-selling novel "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." Though it did not fare well at the box office, the film received positive reviews for its realism and performances. 

Two years later, Kazan's passion for social concerns led him to create a landmark picture on the plague of anti-Semitism, "Gentleman's Agreement," about a journalist assigned to pose as a Jew in order to see prejudice firsthand. The film earned eight Academy Award nominations and took home three, including Best Picture and Best Director for Kazan. 

Kazan was now in demand and flourishing on both the stage and screen: from 1947 to 1951 he directed the original productions of two enormously influential plays: Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire" and Arthur Miller's "Death Of A Salesman," as well as directing the film adaptation of "Streetcar," as well as "Pinky" (1949), another taboo-busting film about racism, as well as "Panic In The Streets" (1950). 

Kazan formed the Actors' Studio in 1947 with Cheryl Crawford and Robert Lewis as a kind of resurrection of the Group Theatre, with an emphasis on actor instruction rather than production. Kazan returned to theatre with Miller's Death of a Salesman, starring Lee J. Cobb. The play was a spectacular success, running for more than 700 performances and winning several prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize. 

Then, in 1952, shortly after filming "Viva Zapata" with actor Marlon Brando (whom Kazan had propelled to popularity in the stage and screen adaptations of "Streetcar"), McCarthyism finally caught up with him, and Kazan made a fateful decision. After first refusing to identify names with HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee), he eventually agreed to fully participate. Kazan became a pariah overnight in the eyes of many of his friends and acquaintances. Kazan never expressed regret publically  for his conduct, thinking Communism to be a danger to American values. This only served to intensify anger against him. 

Ironically, it was at this point in his life that he became most inspired as an artist. He often reflected on how the films he created after the HUAC experience were his most powerful — and personal — works. His creativity was motivated by a deep-seated sense of self-justification. 

His undisputed masterwork is 1954's "On The Waterfront," which was scripted by Budd Schulberg and starred Brando in his third and last cinematic collaboration with Kazan. Terry Malloy is played by Brando, a retired prizefighter who works for his brother Charlie (Rod Steiger). Charlie is second-in-command to mobster Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), who commands the waterfront via intimidation and brutality. Terry's journey from cynical, indifferent punk to heroic crusader, who ends up reporting on - and finally dismantling - the Friendly machine is chronicled in the film. 

"Waterfront" was Kazan's response to those who criticised his HUAC performance: the unmistakable message is that speaking up against evil is a worthy endeavour. The storyline and performance are stunning, while Boris Kaufman's austere photography and Leonard Bernstein's evocative soundtrack complement the action. The film received 12 Academy Award nominations and won eight, including Best Picture, Actor (Brando), Actress (Eva Marie Saint), Writing, Cinematography, and Editing, as well as another Best Director award for Kazan. 

Kazan next took a risk on an unknown young actor called James Dean to adapt John Steinbeck's book "East of Eden" for the big screen. Kazan would film in widescreen and in vibrant, rich colour this time. The narrative, set in California in 1917, is a modern retelling of the Cain and Abel legend. This success earned both Kazan and Dean Academy Award nominations. 

Kazan next founded his own film company and produced Baby Doll (1956), A Face in the Crowd (1957), and several additional films, all of which failed to find a mainstream audience. In 1957, Kazan returned to the stage, directing William Inge's Dark at the Top of the Stairs, Archibald MacLeish's J. B., and Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth. 

Kazan temporarily reconciled with Arthur Miller in 1963, directing the latter's play After the Fall. While the play was a triumph, Kazan's second production of The Changeling was a failure, prompting his resignation. Kazan then chose to film America, America, a fictitious account of his family's relocation to the United States. His subsequent picture, The Arrangement, was semi-autobiographical and a commercial flop. 

Kazan subsequently switched to writing novels and directed one more picture, 1976's The Last Tycoon. Elia Kazan: a Life, his 1988 autobiography, was a colourful and frank account of the people and works that shaped a remarkable life.

In the following extract from an interview with Cahiers du Cinema in 1966, the great Greek-American director Elia Kazan discusses his transition from theatre to film, and how this influenced his conception of character and artistic realism.

CAHIERS: Shall we begin with the actors? It seems that, little by little, you have guided them from exteriorization toward a certain interiorization.

ELIA KAZAN: I believe that that is true. In the films that I was making twenty years ago, I had, I chose, more flamboyant actors. They were the engines of the film, and the film was the vehicle of their expression; it was always a question of expressing, of exteriorizing what there was ‘in’ them, and the free course that I left to this flamboyance made me tend sometimes almost toward opera. But, little by little, I lost interest in this expression as such, and in fact I almost turned against it. I began, too, to restrain my actors, in proportion as I saw things in a truer, calmer fashion.

At the same time, I became more and more interested in what happened to them, to the actors, human beings, characters—in the way in which they reflected or reinforced something, be it unconsciously, in the way in which they let something grow in them, come out from them. Now, ten or fifteen years afterward, I see the gap that separates me from the first manner, when my actors were moved by the most violent feeling of life, which they rendered directly and unconsciously. Now I no longer ‘feel’ people through an acting technique. Life is not like that. People ordinarily do not know or realize the why and the how of their beings, whence they originate and whither they lead them. In any case, very few people know exactly what they want, and there are fewer still who can go straight to what they want. That is why I direct my youngsters in a more supple, more complex way. I abandon myself more to imprecision, to the nebulous, and I accept more readily the ways of contradiction. I believe that that is the only way to approach the truth.

A Streetcar Named Desire (Directed by Elia Kazan)

CAHIERS: Your films themselves are made more and more on the complexity and contradictions of life.

ELIA KAZAN: At the start, my films were always written by scenarists, sometimes theatre men [Tennessee Williams, William Inge]. Even then I worked on them myself, but little by little I collaborated more and finally I began to write my stories myself. I was present at the birth of the film, instead of being, as before, the conductor of cadences and solos. In A Streetcar Named Desire, there are entire scenes that I would do differently today. I would have them happen much more calmly, unconsciously, and that would take much more time as well. I still think that dramaturgy is essential in theatre, but one must rethink the thing completely when one approaches the screen. That too is why, as I grew older, I felt more and more acutely the difference between theatre and film. and, little by little, I lost interest in the theatre.

CAHIERS: But the fact is that you originally acquired much from the theatre. Perhaps something of it still remains today in your films?

ELIA KAZAN: I agree absolutely. I took something from the theatre and that something is still there. But, regarding that, let me be more specific about some points. The essence of the Stanislavsky method, and the fundamental interest that it had for us, in the way in which we learned it as students and used it later, dwelt in the action. That is to say, when someone felt, experienced something, our feeling—and our theory—was that this emotion would never become ‘of’ the theatre, unless it were expressed as a need, a hunger. And it is of this need, of this hunger, that such-and-such a precise action sprang incarnated as expression of this hunger. The play became a series of progressions, each of which consisted of the fact that a person did a certain thing that responded to a certain want. We stressed the word ‘want’. and we did our best to emerge on the word ‘do’. In short: To do. To want. To do.

Wild River (Directed by Elia Kazan)

We sought to attain the infinitive: To conquer, to love ... infinitives emerging on ‘To want’ and ‘To do.’ The result was that our performances in the theatre, especially in the form in which I expressed myself at the start, were extremely violent, violent and amusing. But today, when I observe life, I see it takes much less direct paths, circuitous paths, subtle and subterranean. Moreover, when the actor is aware of his aim—because the director has pointed it out to him or he has analyzed it himself—he cannot but distance himself from life to the extent to which, in life, people are uncertain ultimately as to what they want. They oscillate, wander, drift, in relation to their aim—or they change their aim. In short, they want this, then that, but... but that is life, and it is there that the poetry of life dwells, in these contradictions, these sudden deflections, these aspirations that spring up and disconcert. In short, while I once had a unilinear approach to life, I now interest myself more and more in the complexity of things.

– Interview with Elia Kazan. By Michel Delahaye 1966. From Cahiers du Cinema in English. March 1967.

Paul Schrader on ‘Light Sleeper’

Light Sleeper (Directed by Paul Schrader)

Following ‘Taxi Driver’ and ‘American Gigolo’ in what writer/director Paul Schrader calls his ‘man in a room’ series, ‘Light Sleeper’ is the story of drug delivery boy John LeTour’s mid-life crisis, a moody urban parable awash in waves of nostalgia and low-key despair. ‘Light Sleeper’ shows us the gradual disintegration of one man’s identity, an unraveling that begins when friends die, romance sours, a career ends, and, more importantly, when the Reagan-era highlife which fueled upscale drug use inexplicably vanishes, taking with it its accompanying aura of cool... Willem Dafoe anchors the film with an excellent performance. Travis Bickle’s hair-trigger charm, his desperation to please, ages here into the quiet pain, the persistent feeling of melancholy which lies just beneath LeTour’s affable exterior. (Scott Macauley)

John LeTour, the light sleeper, is a drug dealer who makes nightly deliveries. Like Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver he floats around on the outskirts of society, completely cut off from his fellow citizens. Now in his forties he is caught up in the throes of a mid-life crisis.  Le Tour is concerned about the future since the 1970s drug culture has waned. He is a man out of time.

Paul Schrader’s Light Sleeper owes much to his main cinematic mentor, Robert Bresson, notably his film Pickpocket (1959), while functioning in accordance with his Bressonian instincts and transposing the spiritual search to a modern-day American city environment and infusing it with the crime genre.

A small-time crook, such as Michel in Bresson's picture, is shown as someone who seeks grace and atonement. The “search” in this instance is not shown, since it is instead linked to a plethora of superstitions, coincidences, and chance. Ann, his erstwhile business partner, appears to be an astrologer, and John visits a psychic himself who informs him of possible problems ahead. The plot turns when he's introduced to an ex-lover named Marianne, also a recovering drug addict, setting in train a lethal series of events. 

In contrast to Bresson's picture in which just the action is lethal, here the effects are deadly. Conceptually, the tale is a well-traveled one: a guy wishes to quit his criminal lifestyle, rekindles a previous lover, and the conflict and resolution are readily evident. Schrader's objective is a mood piece; his work is an exploration of how to live a full life.

Scott Macaulay spoke with Paul Schrader for Filmmaker magazine just before the film’s New York opening:

FILMMAKER: ‘Light Sleeper’ is your third ‘man in a room’ film? How has the central character changed over time and how has the audience changed in relation to him?

PAUL SCHRADER: The character has gotten older as I’ve gotten older. When he was in his twenties he was angry. When he was in his thirties he was narcissistic. And now he’s forty and he’s anxious. I think that the times have changed similarly. Part of what I’ve tried to do with this character is mix a personal evolution with a social one. I think we are in very anxious times and this character is appropriate.

FM: How about in terms of ‘Light Sleeper’s position within the marketplace? Now that his character is forty, is he as resonant a character to audiences?

PS: We will see. The character is… I don’t know. I can’t answer that. I don’t see [Light Sleeper] as a mass-audience movie but then I didn’t see Taxi Driver and American Gigolo as mass-audience movies.

FM: Nostalgia is an important theme in the film. The characters seem to be nostalgic for an earlier part of their lives and American today also seems drenched in nostalgia. There’s a sense in this campaign year that the best days are behind us.

PS: The American century is coming to a close. The days when we could drive the world economic machine are over and therefore a lot of other things are over. America is having to come back to earth in a number of areas and there’s a very anxious zeitgeist in this country.

FM: Even the supposedly glamorous scenes in the film, like the nightclub scene, seem to be an expression of this winding down.

PS: Well, the main characters are too old to be doing what they’re doing. Like so many people of their age, they got into the drug business because it was fun. All the hip people were doing it. And then times changed and those people died or went straight. Here are these dealers in some kind of time warp. I based this on some people that I know and that’s how they feel about their lives. They wonder, ‘How did we end up these old fogeys in a young people’s business?’ I felt that was a wonderful metaphor for a kind of morbid nostalgia for my generation.

FM: There’s a sense today that the European art film might also be a thing of the past. As someone influenced by the earlier films of Bertolucci and Bresson, does the sense of nostalgia you express in the film apply to film culture as well?

PS: That’s a problem of finances. National cinemas in general are in bad shape. Financing for German-language or French-language films is much harder to come by. But I wouldn’t get too sad about this. It’s all cyclical. We may be going through a trough of some sort but on the other hand there are a lot of exciting things happening right now too.

FM: What do you think of Wim Wenders’s recent attack on violence in American film and his call for some sort of European response to America’s exporting of violent material?

PS: Well, I think he’s right… It’s very hard to dictate popular art by fiat. There is some sort of pact that goes between the audience and the financiers and the filmmakers. One can’t simply say, ‘We want something else.’ There has to be an interaction. I would hope that the market for violence is on the wane. There will always be a certain niche for it. I think [violence] has gotten a little too prevalent but audiences are making that correction.

FM: Do you think Wenders could have been referring to some of your films?

PS: I don’t know. Part of the problem is that we’re making [violent movies] but that they’re buying them. We make a lot of films that Americans don’t even care to see but we export them because the foreign market wants them. Chuck Norris and those kickboxing films aren’t that successful in America so we’re making them for the foreign market, not for ourselves.

FM: In your essay ’Notes on Film Noir,’ you point out some key elements of that genre, specifically romantic narration and a fear of the future. Both of these elements are present in ‘Light Sleeper’ but you seem to have made a decision to play down issues of genre and de-emphasize plot elements in favor of character study.

PS: Each of those films has the same structure. A person goes from day to day, place to place, and has a job which takes him into other worlds. He’s sort of a voyeur who looks into other people’s lives and doesn’t have one of his own. And events happen and sometimes they seem of consequence and sometimes they don’t. At some point the events coalesce and form a plot and he’s under enormous pressure. There’s an explosion and an epilogue. I like that structure. I like that idea of the plot slowly insinuating itself into the drama.

FM: What was the production history of ‘Light Sleeper’?

PS: It happened quite quickly. I had the idea in September and finished the script by Christmas and I started shooting in March. [The script] had been turned down by everybody, even with Willem attached, and then I got Susan (Sarandon] and still it was turned down with Susan attached. I was able to put together some money. I started with a video deal and then I brought in some French money and then I upped the video deal. The video company was owned by Carolco. My agent pointed out to Mario Kassar, who had not read the script, what a sweet deal this was for the French and that his company was on the video end of it. He read the script and looked at the deal and said, ‘You’re right, why don’t we make the whole thing?’ And that’s how it came about. But it had been passed on by Carolco until I put together this enticing financing arrangement.

FM: Didn’t you at one point try to make this film with your own money?

PS: What happened was, the financing was dawdling. And I had given Susan and Willem a date of March 28 to start. Francis Coppola once said to me, ‘Just start making a movie and eventually people will believe you’re going to make it and they’ll finance it.’ So one day I came into the office and said, ‘We’re going to go into pre-production.’ And then I financed the first three weeks of pre-production until we got the money. I think that that’s what really made it happen, when people realized it was going forward.

FM: Were you affected by the union turmoil that spring?

PS: I shot during the lock-out which meant that I was able to get the best crews at a low price because studios weren’t working in New York at that time. I had all the top guys who were basically doing a low budget film in lieu of nothing at all. The union salaries aren’t that exorbitant, it’s all the stuff built on top of them. If you work at scale you can make a film inexpensively. It’s also important to know that when you’re trying to make a low-budget film that looks like a big-budget film, the sacrifice has to begin at the top. It has to begin with me, Willem and Susan. Once the sacrifice begins there, then you can run it right through the whole production. It’s almost impossible to get the crew to sacrifice when people at the top aren’t sacrificing.

FM: You’ve scored ‘Light Sleeper’ with rock ballads that have an almost literal relationship to what’s on screen. The approach makes the film warmer but it also makes the emotional drama kind of obvious.

PS: Yeah, I don’t mind that. Some people have said that it’s a little too obvious, but I like it. That gets to be a personal call. When I wrote the script I had Bob Dylan’s lyrics and I asked Bob for five songs and he offered five other songs. I didn’t want the songs he wanted to give me and he didn’t want to give me the songs I wanted. But the idea even from the script stage was to have a third voice for the character. He has his dialogue voice and his diary voice and his song voice, which is his most romantic voice. Having it come out of the mouth of another person allowed it to be more romantic. [The music] sounds sort of like film scoring but in fact it’s another way the character can talk to you.

FM: I liked the epilogue but somehow it didn’t seem to me to be as upbeat as I thought it was intended. The character’s main problem in the film seems to have been making a decision and, at the end, prison just solves that problem for him.

PS: The most important thing is that at the ending he says, ‘I’ve been looking forward’ when he’s spent the last hour and 45 minutes looking backward. It’s about getting to a point in your life when you can look forward and about finding freedom behind bars, which is a very Bressonian idea. In each of those films I’ve had people say to me that the epilogue must have been added later. Each time it was written in the first draft. It’s what the film is about. Each film is about the epilogue and if I could have just filmed the epilogue I would have been fine – but of course I had to make the film in order to have the epilogue.

– Excerpt from ‘Movie High – Scott Macauley Interviews Paul Schrader about Light Sleeper’ – Filmmaker magazine, Fall 1992. [Original article here]

See also: Paul Schrader: Notes On Taxi driver and Paul Schrader: Steps to Writing a Script

Ingmar Bergman: Dialogue on Film

Cries and Whispers (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

The great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman held a seminar with the Fellows of the Center for Advanced Film Studies on October 31, 1975 in which he openly discussed his approach to writing, his preparations for shooting and his relations with his company of actors while filming. 

He had recently completed the masterly ‘Cries and Whispers’ – set in a manor house at the turn of the century where a spinster (Harriet Andersson) is dying, attended by her two sisters and devoted servant. 

Superbly photographed by Sven Nykvist in an elemental style with scarlet backgrounds which give a tremendous force to the anguish of the characters. Bergman was later to comment that ‘all my films can be thought in black and white, except for Cries and Whispers. In the screenplay, I say that I have thought of the colour red as the interior of the soul. When I was a child, I saw the soul as a shadowy dragon, blue as smoke, hovering like an enormous winged creature, half-bird, half-fish. But inside the dragon everything was red.’ 

The film is lustrous and hypnotic with the power of a dream. Light breaks in occasionally from beyond illuminating the characters and their dark lives until the final breakthrough into the exhilarating openness of the world outside.

The following interview is one of Bergman’s most revealing on the manner and process of his artistic work.

Please tell us how you work with actors.

BERGMAN: It can be a very complicated question, and it can be a very simple question. If you want to know exactly how I work together with my actors I can tell you in one minute: I just use my intuition. My only instrument in my profession is my intuition. When I work at the theatre or in the studio with my actors I just feel; I don’t know how to handle the situation, how to collaborate with the artists, with the actors. One thing is very important to me: that an actor is always a creative human being, and what your intuition has to find out is how to make free – do you understand what I mean? – to make free the power, the creative power in the actor or the actress.

I can’t explain how it works. It has nothing to do with magic; it has a lot to do with experience. But I think when I work together with the actors I try to be like a radar – I try to be wide open – because we have to create something together. I give them some stimulations and suggestions and they give me a lot of stimulations and suggestions, and if this fantastic wave of giving and taking is cut off for any reason I have to feel it and I have to look for the reason – good heavens, what has happened? – and I know if we try to work with those waves cut off it is terrifying; it is the hardest, toughest job that exists, both for me and the actors. Some directors work under aggression: the director is aggressive and the actors are aggressive, and they get marvelous results. But to me it is impossible. I have to be in contact, in touch with my actors the whole time. Because what we first of all create when we start a work together is an atmosphere of security around us. And it’s not only me who creates that atmosphere; we are together to create it.

But you know, all those situations, all those decisions, all those very difficult decisions, you have to make hundreds of them every day – I never think. It’s never an intellectual process, it’s just intuition. Afterward you can think it over – What was this? What was that? You can think over every step you have made.

Do you write in the same way?

BERGMAN: Yes, yes, yes. The best time in the writing, I think, is the time when I have no ideas about how to do it. I can lie down on the sofa and I can look into the fire and I can go to the seaside and I can just sit down and do nothing. I just play the game, you know, and it’s wonderful and I make some notes and I can go on for a year. Then, when I have made the plan, the difficult job starts: I have to sit down on my ass every morning at ten o’clock and write the screenplay. And then something very, very strange happens: often the personalities in my scripts don’t want the same thing I want. If I try to force them to do what I want them to do, it will always be an artistic catastrophe. But if I let them free to do what they want and what they tell me, it’s OK.

So I think that is the only way to handle it, because all intellectual decisions must come afterward. You have seen Cries and Whispers, yes? For half a year, I went around and I just had a picture inside about three women walking around in a red room in white clothes and I didn’t know why. I couldn’t understand these damned women – I tried to throw it away, I tried to write it down, I tried to find out what they said to each other, because they whispered. And suddenly it came out that they were watching another woman who was dying in the next room, and then it started. But it took about a year. It always starts with a picture with some kind of tension in it, and then slowly it comes up.

In your films you often confuse reality and dreams, and I wonder if you feel that they are of equal importance.

BERGMAN: You know, you can’t find in any other art, and you can’t create a situation that is so close to dreaming as cinematography when it is at its best. Think only of the time gap: you can make things as long as you want, exactly as in a dream; you can make things as short as you want, exactly as in a dream. As a director, a creator of the picture, you are like a dreamer: you can make what you want, you can construct everything. I think that is one of the most fascinating things that exists.

I think also the reception for the audience of a picture is very, very hypnotic. You sit there in a completely dark room, anonymous, and you look at a lightened spot in front of you and you don’t move. You sit and you don’t move and your eyes are concentrated on that white spot on the wall. That is some sort of magic. I think it’s also magic that two times every frame comes and stands still for twenty-four parts of a second and then it darkens two times; a half part of the time when you see a picture you sit in complete darkness. Isn’t that fascinating? That is magic. It’s quite different when you watch the television: you sit at home, you have light around you, you have people you know around you, the telephone is ringing, you can go out and have a cup of coffee, the children are making noise, I don’t know what – but it is absolutely another situation.

We are in the position to work with the most fascinating medium that exists in the world because like music we go straight to the feeling – not over the intellect – we go straight to the feeling, as in music. Afterward we can start to work with our intellect. If the picture is good, if the suggestions from the creator of the picture are strong enough, they’ll give you thoughts afterward; you’ll start to think; they are intellectually stimulating.

After you have written a script, do you continue to develop the characters during the shooting?

BERGMAN: No. You know, I have always worked with trained actors; I have never worked with amateurs. An amateur can be himself always and you can put him in situations that give the situation a third dimension, as Vittorio De Sica did inThe Bicycle Thief [a 1947 classic of Italian “neorealism"], but if you work with trained actors you must know exactly what you are going to do with the parts. We make all the discussions before and then we work in the studio, giving each other suggestions. But the whole time we must have in mind what we meant. And it’s very dangerous to go away and suddenly start to improvise. You can improvise, of course, in the studio, but if you improvise you have to be very prepared, because to improvise on an improvisation is always shit. If you are very prepared and know how to do it, you can go back if your improvisation suddenly one day fades away, which it does. Of course it does. Inspiration, enthusiasm, everything like that is beautiful, but I don’t like it. When we are in the studio we have to be very strict.

What is your relation to the camera? Do you feel you have to overcome the technical limitations of the camera?

BERGMAN: If intuition is our mental instrument, the camera is our physical instrument. I think the camera is erotic. It is the most exciting little machine that exists. To me, just to work together with my cameraman, Sven Nykvist, to see a human face with the camera and with a zoom to come closer, to see the scene, to see the face changing, it’s the most fascinating thing that exists. The choreography of the actors in relation to the camera is very important. If the actor feels that he is in a good position, in a logical position, he can be with his back to the camera; it doesn’t matter. The camera has to be the best friend of the actors, and the actors have to be secure with our handling of the camera. They must feel that we are taking care of them.

Are there many young directors here? Very good. We who are directors must never forget that we are behind the camera and the actor is in front of the camera; he is nude, his soul is nude. If he has confidence in us, we have enormous responsibility. We have something fantastic: we have somebody in our hands and we can destroy him or we can help him in his creative job. To be behind the camera is never difficult, but to be in front of the camera is always a challenge, a difficulty, to be there with your face and your body and all the limitations you have in your soul and all the limitations you feel of your face and your movements, I don’t know what. What is strange is that we must not lie to the actors; we have to be absolutely true to them. Better actors like the truth more.

When is the moment you stage the movement or position of camera? When I read the screenplays you write, they always say only what the actors are saying, a bit like a play. When is the moment you state, “The camera will be here"?

BERGMAN: The evening before. When I come home in the evening I just sit down with the script and I read the next day’s schedule very carefully. Then I make up my mind about it and I just note the choreography of the actors and the camera. And then in the early morning when I meet Sven – you know, we have worked so many years together – we just very shortly, in five minutes, go through the scene, and I tell him about my ideas for different positions of the camera and the different positions of the actors and the atmosphere of the whole scene. Then we can go on the whole day; it is not necessary to have any discussions. He is a marvelous man. He is very silent and very shy. He is nice. And suddenly everything is there – without any complications – and I can look in the camera and everything I wanted is there.

Do you rehearse with the actors on the set before you plan your shots?

BERGMAN: No, never. That is a very good question. Because if you rehearse with trained actors they go from the mood of intuition to what they are trained to, to stage acting every evening. It’s very difficult. If you go on rehearsing with the actors too much, more than just to learn their lessons, and if you rehearse with them several days, some new process in the actors’ minds starts. An intellectual process, I think, and that process can be very good, but it’s very dangerous for filming because you have something in his eyes suddenly, some sort of “Now I do that“ and "I do that" and “I do that." He’s conscious of what he’s doing. He has to do it intuitively.

Just before you start filming, when you get to the set, you said you know as little about the film as the actors do.

BERGMAN: But remember, I have written the script. I have lived with this script perhaps for one or two years. The preparation for the next day, in details, I wait with it as long as possible. Of course, when I made The Magic Flute [his film of Mozart’s opera] we had to prepare everything before.

You use women as your main characters quite a lot, and I was wondering how you relate to them, how you identify with them? Your male characters aren’t very much in the foreground.

BERGMAN: I like more to work with women. I have many good friends who are actors and I like tremendously to work together with them, but in filmmaking it’s a job for good nerves and I think the women have much better nerves than men have. It’s so. I think the problems very often are the common problems. They are not, on the first hand, women; they are human beings. And God forgive me, but I have the feeling that the prima donnas always are male. I think it has to do with our whole social life and the male part and the female part that they have to play, and it’s very difficult to be an actor; it’s not so difficult to be an actress in our society.

Would you just talk a little more about what you say to an actor? Do you do exercises with them?

BERGMAN: No, no, no, no. Good heavens, no. I say nothing. I promise.

Do you tell them the message of the film?

BERGMAN: No, good heavens, no. No, no, no, no. I don’t know anything about messages or symbols or things like that. Sometimes when I have the message everything goes wrong. So we don’t talk about those things. We just talk professionally: “Be careful. Be slower. Don’t be in a hurry. Listen." You know, the most important of all is the ear – the ear for the director and the ear for the actors. Listen to each other. Very often when I see a scene I just close my eyes and listen, because if it sounds right it also looks right. It’s very strange.

Now we have only a minute to conclude this, to me, wonderful meeting, but I wanted just to add something. Perhaps it sounds like an old uncle, but I am, so it doesn’t matter. May I give you an advice?

Yes, please.

BERGMAN: It is a relief to me to know that if I have an intention, if I have a passion and an obsession, if I want to tell somebody something and if I want to touch somebody, the film helps me. But if I have nothing to say and I just want to make a film, I don’t make the film. It’s so stimulating, the craftsmanship of filmmaking is so terribly stimulating, dangerous, and obsessing, so you can be very tempted...but if you have nothing to come with, try to be honest with yourself and don’t make the picture. If you have something to come with, if you have emotion and passion, a picture in your head, a tension – even if you aren’t very technical – the strange thing is that having worked on the script and having worked with the camera for days and days, suddenly when you have cut it together, the thing you wanted to tell is there.

I have a very good example, Antonioni’s L’Avventura (Italy, 1960). The picture is a mess – he had no idea where to put the camera; he had no money; the actors went away; I think he had enormous problems the whole time – but he wanted to tell us something about the loneliness of the human being, and I can see this picture time after time and I don’t know what touches me most: how he succeeds without knowing how to do it or what he wants to say. That is very important; that is the most important of all. You have to have something to come with, to give other people.

Picturemaking is some sort of responsibility, that is what I think.

– Originally published in American Film, January-February 1976

Billy Wilder: The Art of Collaboration

Sunset Boulevard (Directed by Billy Wilder)

Billy Wilder's big break came when Paramount chose to team him with the accomplished screenwriter Charles Brackett. Although they were completely unlike in almost every respect, the relationship worked well, resulting in a number of great pictures, including Ninotchka, Hold Back the Dawn, and others. Wilder had collaborated with other writers on projects in the past. Wilder created few scripts without a collaborator over his whole writing career. 

His work on Ninotchka (“Garbo laughs!”) also United director Ernst Lubitsch with writer Billy Wilder. Wilder idolised Lubitsch, and the sign on his office read: “How would Lubitsch have done it?” Soon, Billy Wilder decided he wanted to be a director, too. Because he felt filmmakers were botching his and Brackett's screenplays, he began to lose patience with them. When a journalist once asked him if he believed it was vital for a filmmaker to be able to write, his unimpressed view immediately apparent. “No, but knowing how to read is quite helpful.” 

Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland feature in Wilder's directorial debut, The Major and the Minor. It was such a hit that Wilder was able to keep directing, exceeding the studio's expectations. After filming Five Graves to Cairo (1943), he made Castle Keep (1944) with Erich von Stroheim and Franchot Tone, based on Rommel's North Africa campaign. 

Double Indemnity (1944) is unanimously regarded as one of the finest film noirs movies and was nominated for seven Academy Awards even though it was not all that succesful at the box office. Wilder worked with acclaimed crime author Raymond Chandler on the script for Double Indemnity, which was based on a novel by James M. Cain. Despite the fact that they disliked each other, their partnership resulted in a great script, as well as some of the most pithy lines to be found in any movie. A testament to Wilder's directorial skill is that he managed to get noteworthy performances out of his actors, such as Edward G. Robinson, for the film's harrowing story of desire and murder. 

Brackett and Wilder reunited for The Lost Weekend (1945), based on a novel that Wilder had read while on a train journey, and the result was a riveting, uncompromising drama about a writer struggling with his alcoholism. Ray Milland won an Oscar for his role as the alcoholic Don Birnam. Their greatest collaboration followed when they were paired once more to work on Billy Wilder’s masterly Sunset Boulevard. 

In 1996 James Linville conducted an interview for The Paris Review with screenwriter-director Billy Wilder on his extensive career. Published as Billy Wilder, The Art of Screenwriting No. 1 it remains one of the most celebrated accounts of the screenwriter's craft. In the following extract Billy Wilder discusses working with the writers Charles Brackett on Sunset Boulevard, I.A.L. Diamond on Some Like it Hot and Raymond Chandler on Double Indemnity.

WILDER
For a long time I wanted to do a comedy about Hollywood. God forgive me, I wanted to have Mae West and Marlon Brando. Look what became of that idea! Instead it became a tragedy of a silent-picture actress, still rich, but fallen down into the abyss after talkies. ‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.’ I had that line early on. Someplace else I had the idea for a writer who is down on his luck. It didn’t quite fall into place until we got Gloria Swanson.

We had gone to Pola Negri first. We called her on the phone, and there was too much Polish accent. You see why some of these people didn’t make the transition to sound. We went to Pickfair and visited Mary Pickford. Brackett began to tell her the story, because he was the more serious one. I stopped him: No, don’t do it. I waved him off. She was going to be insulted if we told her she was to play a woman who begins a love affair with a man half her age. I said to her, We’re very sorry, but it’s no use. The story gets very vulgar.

Gloria Swanson had been a big star, in command of an entire studio. She worked with DeMille. Once she was dressed, her hair done to perfection, they placed her on a sedan and two strong men would carry her onto the set so no curl would be displaced. But later she did a couple of sound pictures that were terrible. When I gave her the script, she said, I must do this, and she turned out to be an absolute angel.

I used stars wherever I could in Sunset Boulevard. I used Cecil B. DeMille to play the big important studio director. I used Erich von Stroheim to play the director who directed the first pictures with Swanson, which he in fact did. I thought, Now, if there is a bridge game at the house of a silent star, and if I am to show that our hero, the writer, has been degraded to being the butler who cleans ashtrays, who would be there? I got Harry B. Warner, who played Jesus in DeMille’s biblical pictures, Anna Q. Nilsson, and Buster Keaton, who was an excellent bridge player, a tournament player. The picture industry was only fifty or sixty years old, so some of the original people were still around. Because old Hollywood was dead, these people weren’t exactly busy. They had the time, got some money, a little recognition. They were delighted to do it...

Sunset Boulevard (Directed by Billy Wilder)

You’re never quite sure how your work will be received or the course your career will take. We knew we’d gotten a strong reaction at the first big preview of Sunset Boulevard. After the screening, Barbara Stanwyck went up and kissed the hem of Gloria Swanson’s robe, or dress, or whatever she was wearing that night. Gloria had given such an incredible performance. Then in the big Paramount screening room, Louis B. Mayer said loudly, We need to kick Wilder out of America if he’s going to bite the hand that feeds him. He was with his contingent from MGM, the king then, but in front of all his department heads, I told him just what he could do. I walked out just as the reception was starting.

Although the movie was a great success, it was about Hollywood, exaggerated and dramatized, and it really hit a nerve. So on the way down the steps I had to pass all those people from MGM, the class studio . . . all those people who thought this picture would soil the taste of Hollywood.

After Sunset Boulevard, Brackett and I parted friends. Twelve years together, but the split had been coming. It’s like a box of matches: you pick up the match and strike it against the box, and there’s always fire, but then one day there is just one small corner of that abrasive paper left for you to strike the match on. It was not there anymore. The match wasn’t striking. One of us said, Look, whatever I have to give and whatever you have to offer, it’s just not enough. We can end on the good note of Sunset Boulevard. A picture that was revolutionary for its day.

INTERVIEWER
How do collaborators work together?

WILDER
Brackett and I used to share two offices together with a secretary in between. When we were writing he always laid down on the couch in my office while I would walk around with a stick in my hand.

INTERVIEWER
Why the stick?

WILDER
I don’t know. I just needed something to keep my hands busy and a pencil wasn’t long enough. He always had the yellow legal tablet, and he wrote in longhand, then we’d hand it to the secretary. Brackett and I would discuss everything, the picture as a whole, the curtain situations—first act, second act and then the end of the picture—and the curtain lines. Then we would break it down and go to a specific scene and discuss the mood and so forth, then we’d figure out what bit of the story we’d tell in those ten pages of the scene.

Some Like It Hot (Directed by Billy Wilder)

INTERVIEWER
Was it the same working with I. A. L. Diamond?

WILDER
Pretty much the same as with Brackett. Discuss the story, break it down into scenes, and then I would dictate and he would type. Or he would sit there thinking, and I would write on a yellow tablet and show it to him.

How’s this? I’d say.

No. No good, he’d say. Never in an insistent way, however.

Or he might suggest something to me, and I’d shake my head. He’d just take it, tear it up, and put it in the wastebasket, and we’d never come back to it.

We had a great deal of trust in each other. But sometimes with writing you just can’t tell, especially if you’re writing under pressure. Diamond and I were writing the final scene of Some Like It Hot the week before we shot it. We’d come to the situation where Lemmon tries to convince Joe E. Brown that he cannot marry him.

‘Why?’ Brown says.

‘Because I smoke!’

‘That’s all right as far as I’m concerned.’

Finally Lemmon rips his wig off and yells at him, ‘I’m a boy! Because I’m a boy!’

Diamond and I were in our room working together, waiting for the next line—Joe B. Brown’s response, the final line, the curtain line of the film—to come to us. Then I heard Diamond say, ‘Nobody’s perfect.’ I thought about it and I said, Well, let’s put in ‘Nobody’s perfect’ for now. But only for the time being. We have a whole week to think about it. We thought about it all week. Neither of us could come up with anything better, so we shot that line, still not entirely satisfied. When we screened the movie, that line got one of the biggest laughs I’ve ever heard in the theater. But we just hadn’t trusted it when we wrote it; we just didn’t see it. ‘Nobody’s perfect.’ The line had come too easily, just popped out.

Double Indemnity (Directed by Billy Wilder)

INTERVIEWER
I understand your collaboration with Raymond Chandler was more difficult?

WILDER
Yes. Chandler had never been inside a studio. He was writing for one of the hard-boiled serial magazines, The Black Mask—the original pulp fiction—and he’d been stringing tennis rackets to make ends meet. Just before then, James M. Cain had written The Postman Always Rings Twice, and then a similar story, Double Indemnity, which was serialized in three or four installments in the late Liberty magazine.

Paramount bought Double Indemnity, and I was eager to work with Cain, but he was tied up working on a picture at Fox called Western Union. A producer-friend brought me some Chandler stories from The Black Mask. You could see the man had a wonderful eye. I remember two lines from those stories especially: ‘Nothing is emptier than an empty swimming pool.’ The other is when Marlowe goes to Pasadena in the middle of the summer and drops in on a very old man who is sitting in a greenhouse covered in three blankets. He says, ‘Out of his ears grew hair long enough to catch a moth.’ A great eye . . . but then you don’t know if that will work in pictures because the details in writing have to be photographable.

I said to Joe Sistrom, Let’s give him a try. Chandler came into the studio, and we gave him the Cain story Double Indemnity to read. He came back the next day: I read that story. It’s absolute shit! He hated Cain because of Cain’s big success with The Postman Always Rings Twice.

He said, Well, I’ll do it anyway. Give me a screenplay so I can familiarize myself with the format. This is Friday. Do you want it a week from Monday?

Holy shit, we said. We usually took five to six months on a script.

Don’t worry, he said. He had no idea that I was not only the director but was supposed to write it with him.

Double Indemnity (Directed by Billy Wilder)

He came back in ten days with eighty pages of absolute bullshit. He had some good phrases of dialogue, but they must have given him a script written by someone who wanted to be a director. He’d put in directions for fade-ins, dissolves, all kinds of camera moves to show he’d grasped the technique.

I sat him down and explained we’d have to work together. We always met at nine o’clock, and would quit at about four-thirty. I had to explain a lot to him as we went along, but he was very helpful to me. What we were doing together had real electricity. He was a very, very good writer—but not of scripts.
One morning, I’m sitting there in the office, ten o’clock and no Chandler. Eleven o’clock. At eleven-thirty, I called Joe Sistrom, the producer of Double Indemnity, and asked, What happened to Chandler?

I was going to call you. I just got a letter from him in which he resigns.

Apparently he had resigned because, while we were sitting in the office with the sun shining through, I had asked him to close the curtains and I had not said please. He accused me of having as many as three martinis at lunch. Furthermore, he wrote that he found it very disconcerting that Mr. Wilder gets two, three, sometimes even four calls from obviously young girls.

Naturally. I would take a phone call, three or four minutes, to say, Let’s meet at that restaurant there, or, Let’s go for a drink here. He was about twenty years older than I was, and his wife was older than him, elderly. And I was on the phone with girls! Sex was rampant then, but I was just looking out for myself. Later, in a biography he said all sorts of nasty things about me—that I was a Nazi, that I was uncooperative and rude, and God knows what. Maybe the antagonism even helped. He was a peculiar guy, but I was very glad to have worked with him.

- ‘Billy Wilder: The Art of Screenwriting No. 1’. Interviewed by James Linville. The Paris Review, 1996. Full interview here.