Michael Powell: Obsession and Creativity

Peeping Tom (Directed by Michael Powell)

Michael Powell graduated from ‘quota quickies’ of the 1930s to a distinguished career in partnership with Emeric Pressburger, directing such classics as A Matter of Life and Death, Tales of Hoffman, Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes. The Powell and Pressburger team came to be associated with superbly crafted, emotionally and visually intense works that show British cinema at its most creative and accomplished. After their partnership ended Michael Powell went onto direct the cult classic Peeping Tom - a disturbing study of obsession and voyeurism. This is an excerpt from an interview with Michael Powell in the 1980s, while living in America, in which he discusses the making of Peeping Tom and its hostile reaction at the time of its release.

Obsessiveness and creativity link many of your characters - Anton Walbrook in The Red Shoes and Hoffmann, and Mark Lewis of Peeping Tom.

All artists are more or less obsessed. They’re more interesting when they are - and obsessive.

What led you to make Peeping Tom?
 
I got in touch with Leo Marks because I’d heard that he’d done a very clever scene involving a cryptogram for Carve Her Name with Pride. It was just after I’d parted from Emeric Pressburger. He first suggested a story of a double agent who betrays both sides but I said I didn’t want to do a spy story. We talked for two or three weeks. Finally, he came to me with this idea, ‘Would you like to make a film about a young man who murders people with his camera?’ I said [clicking his fingers], ‘Yes! You’re on! Just tell me the idea.’ He gave me some ideas and I commissioned him. After that he came round twice a week with more sequences and I would criticise them and he would re-write them. Gradually the script was done that way but he wrote the whole script. It was his idea. Leo Marks.
 
Was the idea of audience identification with the killer there from the start?
 
Yes. It’s the way you shoot it. You can look on at a thing or you can preach about it or you can absolutely identify yourself with the young cameraman. Since any good director turns himself into a camera – I Am a Camera is the story of every director - I decided to do it that way. I did the horrifying sequence with the young boy with my son Columba, who was about seven at the time, because I knew he wouldn’t be frightened if he did it with me. Then, as he played my son, I played his father in the film within the film. It gradually grew like that so it became a family affair and the family practically turned into a lens.
 
Did you anticipate the storm which arose when the film was released?
 
No. I was very surprised because they weren’t just bad reviews but vicious attacks. They more or less said that I was morbid and diseased in my mind and was trying to influence other people to be the same. I don’t think any director had a worse attack. I was completely taken aback, very surprised, and it did me a lot of harm professionally. It meant that any subject I wanted to do which was unusual - and I have a whole shelf of them - I wasn’t allowed to. I could not raise the money. What I should have done when I realised this was I should have come straight here [to America]. They have not got the prejudices here. I knew my films were known there. I didn’t know they were so admired although I’ve kept friendships here for the forty or fifty years since I started with an American company. But I clung to England because I’m English and naturally wanted to make English films. But I should have seen the writing on the wall and cut and run.
 
Was Peeping Tom’s voyeurism influenced by Hitchcock?
 
No, not at all. In Psycho, which I think is his best picture, there’s so much humour inside which saves it. I think he got criticised but they didn’t take it so seriously as they took me.

 
Don’t you think England has a particularly negative attitude towards creativity, and people doing things in new directions, which is harmful in the end?
 
I don’t know whether it is a general thing. If they do attack an artist, they’re worse than anybody because a certain amount of hypocrisy comes into it as well. Look at Francis Bacon. He really got severely mauled. But I don’t think the English public and cognoscenti are worse than any others. Perhaps there is a source of hypocrisy which I added to it. Also, being islanders, they really are insular. They’re a bit isolated from continental thought and I never have been. I’ve always been very closely identified with everything that’s happening there. I know a lot about it, a lot about art, and they may be a little bit jealous.
 
I’ve read that you originally wanted Pamela Brown to play Anna Massey’s other instead of Maxine Audley.
 
Yes, because she and Anna Massey could easily be mother and daughter. They look a bit like each other and have almost the same colour hair. Pamela’s was a deep red. Anna’s was more chestnut. They would have made a wonderful mother and daughter.
 
Mark’s stepmother is blonde. So are the prostitutes he kills. Was he taking something against his stepmother out of them?
 
Well, I didn’t go that deeply into it except instinctively.

I have read somewhere that you have stated your admiration for Walt Disney.
 
He was one of the great innovators in film. One of the things I like was - when talkies came in, a lot of the timing of silent films went out of the window and nobody made those marvellous slapstick comedies any more because there were only verbal jokes. But Disney kept on making those wonderful cartoons for at least another ten years so he kept the whole idea of film comedy and narrative through image alive. People don’t realise that they owe an enormous lot to him. His films still move. For five years they just bogged down in a welter of talk. He was a great inventor and innovator. I was very fond of him. Whenever I was in Hollywood after the war, I always spent a day with him.
 
There are surrealistic and fantasy elements in all of your films, particularly The Small Back Room. Which branch of surrealism interests you?
 
I don’t altogether agree about surrealism because, trained as I have been from the very early days, films are surrealistic. Any film. Because anybody who can start to tell a story in a street or a field just using a camera and an actor - that’s pure surrealism. Anything may happen. It’s more expressionism that you are referring to. This was a sequence where David Farrar was waiting for the girl to come back to the room. There’s a wonderful shot of him underneath, the bottle falling over on him. We made several bottles of different sizes and shot them from different angles and had great fun doing it. But the critics jumped on me immediately, ‘Oh, Michael Powell with his German tendencies and German art director must have these German expressionist ideas!’
 
There are somethings which have worked very well like those giant pencils in Mark’s pocket in Peeping Tom.
 
They were about three-and-a-half feet long. That’s the only way you could have done that. Leo wrote the sequence just like that - the pencils fall out of his pocket. I said, ‘You realise, Leo, they’re only that big. The gantry of a studio is forty feet up. I can do it all right.’ When he saw it, he said that it was one of the best shots in the picture but he never knew at the time. I asked the prop man to give me some dummy pencils and pens to drop in this sequence, three feet long! And it worked.

- Michael Powell interviewed by Tony Williams. Films and Filming: Nov 1981

Breaking Bad: Vince Gilligan On Meth And Morals

The great AMC drama series Breaking Bad stars Bryan Cranston as Walter White, a high-school chemistry teacher with financial problems. When White discovers he is suffering from terminal cancer he snaps and decides to use his chemistry background to pay for his medical expenses and to take care of his family’s future: he goes into partnership with a former student, played by Aaron Paul, and starts producing and dealing crystal meth.

Breaking Bad premiered in January 2008 and introduced the character of Walter White (Brian Cranston), an otherwise average father who covertly cooks meth to support his family after a cancer diagnosis. Season 1 was shortened due to a writer's strike, however the series resumed in March 2009 for a second season. Once Walt and his associate Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) entered the drug trade on a full-fledged basis, the stakes increased and the series found its footing.

In its first season, "Breaking Bad" seemed to be a narrative of a midlife crisis run out of control. The concept — felonious father copes with job and family stress— was unmistakably influenced by "The Sopranos," and the clash of ordinary people with colourful and vicious gangsters owes much to the films of the Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino. While the narrative and desert backdrop were a reworking of the Western into a more contemporary setting.

It quickly became evident that "Breaking Bad" was a series both rewarding and complex: a ground-breaking reimagining of the serial drama, perhaps only rivalled by The Wire and The Sopranos in its depth of characterisation and moral sweep. What distinguishes the programme from its lesser small screen counterparts is a overwhelming metaphysical dimension. As Walter White nears damnation, Gilligan and his writers raise the stakes in their consideration about good and evil, how it relates to criminality, law, even to modern terrorism. The question is: do we live in a world where criminals go unpunished for their crimes? Or do those who commit evil acts eventually pay the price for their sins? 

Gilligan has offered his own personal response to this dilemma. “Breaking Bad” is set in a world where no one gets away with anything and retribution eventually rebounds on evil doers. 

Gilligan initially had the concept for Breaking Bad while unemployed and was casually discussing script ideas with a friend. Gilligan imagined a protagonist, a good man, a teacher, gradually morphing into a villain. Walter White’s transition was depicted in the notion of "Mr. Chips becoming Scarface," but he had difficulty pitching the concept to TV networks. Gilligan eventually wrote a framework and pilot to pitch to cable networks, but his proposal was not without its difficulties. The idea was turned down by Showtime who had the similarly themed Weeds on its roster, HBO expressed reservations about a show centreing on a meth dealer, while TNT also declined. Gilligan eventually found an interested buyer in FX — only for them to drop the idea in favour of the Courtney Cox drama Dirt.

Gilligan eventually found a home for Breaking Bad at AMC which was trying to expand its original programming beyond Mad Men. Gilligan eventually won over AMC executives who were intrigued by the concept of Breaking Bad. The project began production and the rest is television history. Since then, Breaking Bad has established an enduring  critical reputation as one of the greatest TV series ever made, spawning a spinoff, Better Call Saul, and a companion film, El Camino.

In September 2011 Gilligan was interviewed on the NPR programme Fresh Air by Terry Gross who asked him where the idea for the critically acclaimed show came from, how he came to write convincingly about chemistry and the drug trade, and the direction of the final season.

‘I suspect it had something to do with the fact that when I came up with the idea for Breaking Bad, I was about to turn 40 years old, and perhaps I was thinking in terms of an impending midlife crisis,’ he says. ‘To that end, I think Walter White, in the early seasons, is a man who is suffering from perhaps the world’s worst midlife crisis.’

‘[Because] Walter White was talking to his students, I was able to dumb down certain moments of description and dialogue in the early episodes which held me until we had some help from some honest-to-god chemists,’ says Gilligan. ‘We have a [chemist] named Dr. Donna Nelson at the University of Oklahoma who is very helpful to us and vets our scripts to make sure our chemistry dialogue is accurate and up to date. We also have a chemist with the Drug Enforcement Association based out of Dallas who has just been hugely helpful to us.’

‘My writers and I took a former drug dealer to lunch and picked his brain for a couple of hours,’ says Gilligan. ‘I think he was moving large quantities of marijuana – not methamphetamine – but a lot of the same general philosophies apply to both in the sense of: How do you stay one step ahead of the police? How do you launder large quantities of cash? So things such as that, we seek professional help – just as we do with the chemistry.’

‘There will be 16 more episodes in Season 5. How much darker can Walt get? Is his journey complete – his journey along that arc from good guy to bad guy? At this point, it’s a tricky thing to answer,’ he says. ‘Probably a casual viewer to the show might think [the show is] about morality or amorality. I suppose that there are things that Walt does probably need to atone for – and perhaps he will, when it’s all said and done.’

In an extensive interview in 2010 Vince Gilligan discussed in detail his attitude towards writing and the writing process on Breaking Bad with Kasey Carpenter:

VG: I always like hearing how other writers work. The way we do it is that the breaking of the episode is the hardest part, and the single most important part. We spend the most time on that. It’s very much an all hands on deck scenario. Back on The X-Files, when we did episodes that were stand alone episodes, writers could retreat to their separate offices and brainstorm, take walks, whatever - to figure out their episode. But with a show as serialized as Breaking Bad that just doesn’t work, so what we do is we sit around a big conference table in our very un-fancy offices here in Burbank, and it’s very much like being on a sequestered jury that never ends. Six writers and myself plus our writer’s assistant who, sort of like a court reporter, takes down the notes of what we’re saying on her laptop as we talk so every now and then if we need to pick through the chaff, we can find something good that we would’ve missed if she hadn’t have typed it down. It takes us about two weeks per episode to break it out, five days a week, Monday through Friday, seven to ten hours a day. And the average is pretty consistent, two weeks to break out an episode. We stare at these four three-by-five corkboards that ring the room, we fill one at a time, and when we get to the fifth episode in the cycle, we take number one down from the board and replace it, and so on. Two weeks per corkboard. Each board has: teaser, act one, act two, act three, act four - and brick by brick we build out these episodes, we write out on index cards with sharpies, and each card represents not necessarily a scene, but a beat within a scene so that a teaser will be five or six index cards, and each act will be somewhere between sixteen and eighteen cards, and we try to put as much detail as possible into this portion of the creating of the episode.

KC: If you write better in the beginning, you have less to clean up later.

VG: Exactly. In other words, we try to build the best architectural drawings in the beginning so that any of the writers in the room can go off and write a particular episode by themselves. We cycle through the writers, everyone gets their name on at least two scripts, one by themselves and one shared towards the end of the season. The idea being that it is a group effort. And as I said before, we are asking ourselves those two questions, except we’re asking them over and over again, where is each character’s head at, and what happens next. We can spend a whole day just talking through where Walt’s head is at. He’s done this, he’s done that, and he’s responsible for a plane crash, what is he afraid of, what is he hoping for, what is his goal? And we are trying to think thematically, but we’re employing simple showmanship as well. We want to keep the audience interested, we want to keep the thing moving along like any good cliffhanger/potboiler story. But also, we’re trying to be true to the characters.

KC: What advice do you have for writers?

VG: Well I don’t have any advice that hasn’t been heard a hundred times before, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t good. Writers should write, whether or not you’re getting paid to do it. You’re not a writer unless you’re writing. Then the only differentiation is ‘am I writer who’s making a living off of it, or am I a writer who is currently unsold?’ – and that isn’t a big differentiation. The real differentiation is, are you a writer...?

KC: [laughs] And you can fall in and out of those two pretty easily.

VG: Yes you can, very easily. So that’s not a differentiation worth making. The only one worth making is: are you a writer? Do you write every day? Are you actively involved in creating something, whether you sell it or not. Or are you someone who likes to think about being a writer, but doesn’t actually get much done. That is the only differentiation worth noting. Read as much as possible, view as much as possible. As far as the literary end of things, I don’t have as much experience with novels and short stories, but I can speak to how it is to get a job in the movie and television end of things, although someday I would like to write a book. I don’t know if I’d be any good at it, but that’s always the reason to try something new, to see if you’d be any good at it.

KC: Well it is a lot more solitary than your current situation.

VG: Very true. I like the idea that you can do it anywhere in the world.

KC: And you don’t have to worry about budgetary constraints, CGI, casting, or any of that - it’s just you and the paper, you create your own world and it doesn’t cost you a thing.

VG: That’s true too. I like that. But as far as making it into television or movies, my best advice I give when I’m asked how to get an agent, how to get your stuff read – which is a time-honored question – my answer to that, to speak to how I got started, is to enter screenwriting contests. I was entering these competitions from college on, and I would enter every contest that came down the pike, and once I started writing feature-length things, I would enter these screenplays in every competition I could find. That is how I got my start in the business because of one of those contests, The Governor’s Screenwriting Competition, in my home state of Virginia. I was lucky enough to be one of the winners of it back in 1989, and it was small contest with only thirty or forty entries...

- Extract from ‘Terry Gross: Breaking Bad: Vince Gilligan on Meth And Morals’. NPR article and audio link here

- Extract from ‘Kasey Carpenter: The Voice in Walter White’s Head: An interview with Breaking Bad's creator Vince Gilligan’. Full article here.

Robert Altman: On Inspiration and Dreams

Three Women (Directed by Robert Altman)

Three Women directed by Robert Altman is set in a dry, sparsely populated California resort town, where a naive southern lost soul, Pinky Rose (Sissy Spacek), worships and befriends her fellow nurse, the would-be sophisticate Millie Lammoreaux (Shelley Duvall). When Millie takes Pinky in as her flatmate, Pinky’s hero worship gradually evolves into something far stranger and more sinister than either could have expected. 

Clearly borrowing its structure from Bergman’s masterly Persona, Altman’s film has typically fine performances from Spacek and Duvall. Often overlooked in Altman’s prestigious oeuvre, it’s now recognised as a a dreamlike triumph that veers from the witty to the frightening and to the surreal, resulting in one of the most remarkable and gripping films of the 1970s.

The following extract is from an interview with the director Robert Altman by Leo Braudy an Robert P. Kolke in front of an audience in Baltimore, Maryland, on March 28, 1981 in which he discusses his inspiration for Three Women, the ending of McCabe and Mrs. Miller and his thoughts on his Raymond Chandler adaptation The Long Goodbye.

AUDIENCE: What kind of preproduction plans do you make?

RA: When we start, when we think about a project and get it to the point where we say we are going to make a film out of this, the first decision I’ll make will be the cinematographer. I’ll set that person or at least do a lot of thinking about it and try to work out what my limitations are, or, in other words, what is out of my control. Then I decide what the visual and audio style of that film is going to be. For instance, in Nashville, or Health, or Brewster McCloud [1970] we were dealing with a real city and real places and we couldn’t control what people wore. We couldn’t say, “All right, nobody in St. Petersburg can wear a red shirt tomorrow.” We have no control, so I know I have to change the style of how that’s going to look, and I have to blend my film in with what is there. A lot of times that will determine the type of cameraman I want to use. In the case of Popeye, Three Women, and Images [1972], where we control, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, where we create the whole environment, then we can decide how we want this to look to the audience because we do the wardrobe and the construction. Then we start putting our crew together based on what we can’t control and how we are going to do it, and we cast it...

AUDIENCE: Was Three Women based on a dream and how did you cast it? I think it should have won awards.

RA: Thank you. It did, though. Shelley Duvall did win best actress at the Cannes Film Festival for it and the film itself came awful close that year except for three women who were on the jury: [director] Agnes Varda, who felt that the film was dangerous to women and should not be released, [actress] Marthe Keller, and [film critic] Pauline Kael, who loved the first two-thirds of the movie and hated the last third. I tried to point out to her that I don’t make movies in sections, but she just hated the film. But anyway, it did happen from a dream. I dreamed that I was making a film in the desert with Sissy Spacek and Shelley Duvall and that it was called Three Women and it was a character stealing, personality theft kind of thing. I woke up and made some notes on this yellow pad next to my bed and went back to sleep, and then I dreamed some more that I was sending my pro- duction manager out to look for desert locations and I woke up and made more notes on it and went back to sleep. Then I woke up and realized that I don’t keep a yellow pad next to my bed—the whole damn thing was a dream, but it was a dream about making a picture, not of what the picture was, but suggestions came from it. The next day was Sunday. I was depressed at the time. A film had been cancelled that we were going to do, or I chose to step out and cancel it myself. My wife was in the hospital and she was very ill at the time—we didn’t know how seriously. (She is fine now.) I called up the girl who does the casting for me and wardrobe and is probably the top creative associate I have, and I said I read a short story last night and let me tell you what it’s about, and I kind of faked through the thing. I said, do you think it could make a good movie and she said, “Yeah, can you get the rights?” And I said, “Yeah, I think so.” Within nine days of that time I went in to Alan Ladd Jr. That was the first film I did with him and I told him that story. I said I won’t write a script, but I’ll do an outline, and we had the deal for making the picture.

Three Women (Directed by Robert Altman)

LB: You were talking about actors before and the large creative input that they give to films. In Three Women and Images you were attracted to themes about people turning into other people, robbing personalities. I wonder if actors inspire you that way, the ease with which they go from role to role. Is there something fragile about the actor’s temperament?

RA: I don’t know where that comes from. It is very easy in retrospect for me to see that I make those kinds of pictures. That Cold Day in the Park [1969] was that kind of a picture, Images was that kind of picture, and so was Three Women. They are all very closely akin, what I would call an interior film—where I am dealing with the inside of the person’s head, and what they see or what you see or what I show you that they see may not necessarily be what’s happening. I have some fascination with that. Obviously, I don’t know what it is and I don’t want to know because I keep dealing with that.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Directed by Robert Altman)

LB: When the camera at the end of McCabe and Mrs. Miller goes into Julie Christie’s eye, are we to take that as the film having been seen in some great part from her point of view?

RA: No. I don’t know what that was. I was trying to do the opposite of the normal ending because there is no way to end a film. I mean, life doesn’t stop. The only way I really know to end a film is with the main character’s death. That is the easiest way, so usually you do this big pull back, but I thought why not just go inside of somebody’s head. That little vase that she was using and looking at—we brought that into a studio or garage in order to shoot it, to get as close as we did with that—suddenly it seemed to me when we shot it that it looked like another planet. It’s just the idea that occurs. I’m sure you didn’t see it in Popeye, but if you see Popeye again, you will notice that when Popeye first comes in to the bordello looking for Wimpy and Sweet Pea, we go around that room and in one of those bottom bunks you will see the woman who I call Cinderella, the wash woman, the raggedy woman who is kind of around in the background, who also I think is probably Sweet Pea’s mother. She is lying in that bunk. The preacher is above her smoking an opium pipe and she is look- ing at this same vase, and that’s just fun for me. If it became obvious to an audience, it would be destructive.

The Long Goodbye (Directed by Robert Altman)

AUDIENCE: Was The Long Goodbye [1973] difficult to make?

RA: That was a successful film and should have been much more successful. That film was hurt originally because United Artists wanted to release it as a serious film. They had a poster of Elliot with a cat on his shoulder and a smoking gun and it looked like the ad for The Postman Always Rings Twice [1946]. People went in to see that kind of a film and they were disappointed, and they didn’t like it. We got them to pull the film, and we redid the campaign, opened it several months later in New York, and had that been the original opening, it would have been a very, very successful film. The real dyed-in-the-wool Raymond Chandler fans didn’t like it because, they said, it wasn’t true to the book or to Raymond Chandler, that wasn’t Philip Marlowe. But they weren’t thinking about Raymond Chandler, they were thinking about Humphrey Bogart. I would love to show that film to Raymond Chandler because I think that what I tried to do in The Long Goodbye was the same thing he did in the book. He used those crappy plots that he couldn’t follow himself—I never finished that book either, by the way—but he used them as a device to hang a bunch of thumbnail essays on, observations, and that’s the approach that we took on that picture.

RK: Visually it is your most elaborate film. There is not one shot in that film in which the camera is not moving.

RA: That was another experiment we tried. The camera is constantly moving, but not moving with something, not moving the way it should. You know how you would be in a crowd. You are trying to watch something and it moves and somebody is here and you are just always kind of at the wrong place at the wrong time. That was the kind of tension or attitude I was trying to get in that film. The idea came from a small sequence that we did in Images, where we did the same kind of thing in a short slice, so I felt safe with it, but it seemed to work so well in Images that we thought maybe we could do a whole film that way and The Long Goodbye was the film that followed Images.

– Leo Braudy and Robert P. Kolke. Interview with Robert Altman, In Gerald Duchovnay (ed): Film Voices.

David Lynch on Mulholland Drive.

Mulholland Dr. (Directed by David Lynch)

In terms of style, theme and structure, David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. is less a story about dreams than it is about the corrupt, twisted fantasy of Tinseltown. Laid out as a convoluted network of interwoven plots, the film is told through the ruptured fantasies of Diane Selwyn (played by Naomi Watts in a superb breakout performance) who is experiencing a mental breakdown and has resorted to self-delusion in order to cope.

We are initially introduced to her as an aspiring young actress named Betty Elms, newly arrived in Los Angeles, who meets a beautiful amnesic woman, Rita (Laura Elena Harring), who takes refuge in Betty’s aunt’s apartment after a car accident. Assuming Rita must be a friend of her aunt, she allows her to stay. Before long, an intimate friendship starts to blossom, and the eternally optimistic Betty attempts to piece together Rita’s misplaced identity.

A captivating subplot, which is mysteriously and inextricably linked to both characters, then takes over the film, involving film director Adam (Justin Theroux), who is railroaded into casting a certain actress in his new production. Toying with notions of appearance, artificiality and deception, the film’s narrative becomes increasingly skewed and distorted as both women’s personalities begin to fracture and merge.

Part paranoid nightmare, part wish-fulfilling dream, Mulholland Dr. embraces the dark heart of film noir in its outstanding portrayal of Diane Selwyn/Betty Elms’ rapid slide into mania and suicidal despair. (Amy Simmons).

The following interview was originally published in the 2005 edition of filmmaker and writer Chris Rodley’s book Lynch on Lynch. The interviews included in the book were conducted by Rodley between 1993 and 2005. For Criterion’s release of Mulholland Dr., they republished Rodley's chapter on the film as a selection of excerpts from Rodley’s conversation with Lynch about his masterpiece Hollywood love story.

So how did you first pitch the idea to ABC as a potential TV series?

I just had two pages that were read to them, and then more pitch stuff to give them a mood and more of a thing. And at that point, they were all saying, “Sounds great. Let’s do it.”

But what was on those two pages?

A couple of things: a woman trying to become a star in Hollywood, and at the same time finding herself becoming a detective and possibly going into a dangerous world.

As the idea developed in your mind, what was it about ‘Mulholland Dr.’ that made you fall in love with it?

If someone said to you, “What was it about that girl that really made you fall in love with her?” you couldn’t say just one thing. It’s so many things. It’s everything. Same with this. You get an idea. A moment before, it wasn’t there. And it comes SO FAST! And when you get the idea, it sometimes comes with an inspiration, an energy, that fires you up. Maybe the love is in the idea, and it just comes into you. I don’t know. But the idea is really small, and then it expands and shows itself to you so you see it completely. And then it goes to the memory bank so that you can examine it some more. It’s very complete. It’s like a seed. The tree is really there, but it’s not a tree yet. It wants to be a tree, but it’s just a seed.

Sometimes an idea presents itself to you and you’re just as surprised as anyone else. I remember when I was writing Mulholland Dr., the character of the Cowboy just came walking in one night. I just started talking about this cowboy. That’s what happens—something starts occurring, but it wasn’t there a moment ago.

Do you then get anxious about how this idea is going to fit in with everything else?

No, because you’re just in that world yourself. You’re just going. There is no movie yet. Until the process completes itself, you’re just going to carry on. Somewhere along the way, when it looks like it’s taking some sort of shape, the rest of the ideas all gather around to see if they can fit into that shape. Maybe you’ll find out that that thing isn’t going to work, so you save it in a box for later.

You’ve got to be the audience for most of this trip. You can’t second-guess them. If you did, you’d be removing yourself from yourself. Then you’d be out there in really dangerous territory, trying to build something for some abstract group that’s always changing. I think you’d fail. You’ve got to do it from the inside first and hope for the best.

Tell me about the character of Diane—or Betty—as there are two differently named characters, both played by Naomi Watts. What do we call her?

This particular girl—Diane—sees things she wants, but she just can’t get them. It’s all there—the party—but she’s not invited. And it gets to her. You could call it fate—if it doesn’t smile on you, there’s nothing you can do. You can have the greatest talent and the greatest ideas, but if that door doesn’t open, you’re fresh out of luck. It takes so many ingredients and the door opening to finally make it.

There are jokes about how in L.A. everyone is writing a script and everyone has got a résumé and a photo. So there’s a yearning to get the chance to express yourself—a sort of creativity in the air. Everyone is willing to go for broke and take a chance. It’s a modern town in that way. It’s like you want to go to Las Vegas and turn that one dollar into a million dollars. Sunset Boulevard says so much about that Hollywood dream thing to me.

Did you ever feel that way about this town yourself—that it was the place to make your career as a filmmaker?

No. I came in through a weird door, and I didn’t really know about it. I arrived here in August 1970, at night, and I woke up in the morning, and I’d never seen the light so bright. A feeling comes with this light—a feeling of creative freedom. So for me it was almost an immediate full-tilt love affair from then on. Hopefully, everybody finds a place where they feel good about being where they are—a place that does something to them. That’s L.A. to me.

I’m always intrigued by the exact time frame in a lot of your films. […] ‘Mulholland Dr.’ is defiantly contemporary, and yet it has a feeling that it’s happening in the past—the fifties or even the thirties and forties.

But that’s so much like our actual lives. Many times during the day, we plan for the future, and many times in the day we think of the past. We’re listening to retro radio and watching retro TV. There are all kinds of opportunities to relive the past, and there are new things coming up every second. There is some kind of present, but the present is the most elusive, because it’s going real fast.

There are still many places you could go in L.A. to catch the drift of the old golden age, but they’re getting fewer. It’s like the old oil well that used to be where the Beverly Center is now. That was one of the locations we used for Eraserhead, and it was one of my favorite places in the whole world. You’d go over this doughnut of earth and down inside this place, and you’d be in a completely different world. There were these oil tanks and this working oil well just standing there. It was just incredible. There was a pony ride from the twenties or the thirties. And there was this little key shop that was like four feet by four feet, with a roof. And then there was the Tail o’ the Pup hot dog stand, which has moved to another place now. And there was Hull Bros. Lumber, which was a working sawmill, I think, with a hundred-foot-tall mound of sawdust next to it. There was also a nursery. It was all, like, from the thirties—mostly dirt, with this stuff scattered around. The buildings were ancient, and guys wore those green-colored visors and armbands. They were old-timers who knew about wood and Hollywood and everything.

Why are you attracted to all of that?

For me, it’s a thing that I felt as a kid in Our Gang comedies—The Little Rascals. It was feeling the thirties—a feeling of a place back in time, because it hadn’t changed. It was like a set. This place just existed there. And then it was gone. It became the Beverly Center. Now it’s just, like, a congestion of shops and parking and lights and signs. It’s just a huge change.

In its transition from TV pilot to feature film, did ‘Mulholland Dr.’ become more complicated?

No, it got much simpler. It became obvious what it was. It was like the day I was in the food room at the stable in AFI when we were shooting Eraserhead. We’d been shooting for almost a year by then, and I was drawing the Lady in the Radiator. I tried to picture the radiator in Henry’s room—which was twenty feet away—and I couldn’t. So I went running into Henry’s room, and I looked at the radiator, and I almost started weeping for joy. It was perfect. It was unique because it had a place built in it—for her. But she didn’t exist when that radiator had been handpicked. So the Lady in the Radiator married with what had gone before. I knew it already, of course. It was the same kind of thing with Mulholland Dr.

But there were many more elements to mesh and narrative threads to tie up in ‘Mulholland Dr.’

Sure, but when you’re working on something, you have strings that go out here and there, and they end. But one of those strings is going to continue, while others atrophy and fall away. You sometimes go in different directions to find your main path. And maybe one of those strings that were started comes back by surprise at the very end, in a different form, and you say, “That’s how that thing fits in.” All the threads in Mulholland Dr. are tied up.

The movie is full of obvious clues, but there are many other things that are important visual and audio indicators that are not obvious. So at times it does seem as if you’re delighting in teasing or mystifying the viewer.

No, you never do that to an audience. An idea comes, and you make it the way the idea says it wants to be, and you just stay true to that. Clues are beautiful because I believe we’re all detectives. We mull things over, and we figure things out. We’re always working this way. People’s minds hold things and form conclusions with indications. It’s like music. Music starts, a theme comes in, it goes away, and when it comes back, it’s so much greater because of what’s gone before.

But audiences have struggled with trying to work the movie out and, at a certain point, they just want you to tell them what it all means—to you.

Yeah, and I always say the same thing: I think they really know for themselves what it’s about. I think that intuition—the detective in us—puts things together in a way that makes sense for us. They say intuition gives you an inner knowing, but the weird thing about inner knowing is that it’s really hard to communicate that to someone else. As soon as you try, you realize that you don’t have the words, or the ability to say that inner knowing to your friend. But you still know it! It’s really frustrating. I think you can’t communicate it because the knowing is too beautifully abstract. And yet poets can catch an abstraction in words and give you a feeling that you can’t get any other way.

I think people know what Mulholland Dr. is to them, but they don’t trust it. They want to have someone else tell them. I love people analyzing it, but they don’t need me to help them out. That’s the beautiful thing, to figure things out as a detective. Telling them robs them of the joy of thinking it through and feeling it through and coming to a conclusion.

And it doesn’t matter if that conclusion isn’t the same as yours?

Right, because even if you get the whole thing, there would still be some abstract elements in it that you’d have to kind of feel-think. You’d have to say, “I kind of understand that, but I don’t know exactly what it is.” Sort of. The frames are always the same on the film—it’s always the same length, and the same soundtrack is always running along it. But the experience in the room changes depending on the audience. That’s another reason why people shouldn’t be told too much, because “knowing” putrefies that experience.

What is it about women crying that fascinates you?

I don’t know! What IS it? It’s a lot of things swimming together, I guess. I’ve done that kind of scene a few times. Maybe I’ll do it a bunch more. I don’t want to say exactly what it is, because it won’t be enough.

In ‘Mulholland Dr.’, both Diane and Rita sob uncontrollably while watching Rebekah Del Rio mime to her own performance of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” at Club Silencio. How did the latter come about?

That was an accident. My friend and former music agent at CAA, Brian Loucks, calls from time to time and says, “I want you to meet so-and-so, can we come over for a coffee?” One day he calls me and says, “I want you to meet Rebekah Del Rio.” So Rebekah comes over with Brian at ten o’clock in the morning, and because I’d said to John Neff, “I think she’s gonna sing,” he’d set up the microphone—a very beautiful microphone—in one of the booths in my recording studio. Rebekah just wanted to come over for a coffee and sing in front of us. She didn’t want to record anything, but she came in and four minutes later—I think before she’d had her coffee—she’s in the booth. And the one take that she sang, four minutes off the street, is the vocal that’s in the film. THE ACTUAL RECORDING!

The weird thing is that she chose to sing that particular Roy Orbison song. I was about to start shooting Blue Velvet, and “Crying” came on the radio. I said, “Jeez! I’ve got to get that song to see if it would work in the film.” In the end, it wasn’t quite right, but I started listening to other cuts, and “In Dreams” came up. It was destined to change things in the most beautiful ways after that. Rebekah knows Barbara Orbison, Roy’s second wife, and she’s the one who translated “Crying” into Spanish, but it’s just so strange that that was the song that was almost in Blue Velvet.

Rebekah’s got one of the most beautiful voices in the world, so I said, “Damn, this is unbelievable!” And I start thinking about it. We listened to it after she left, and I said, “She’s gonna be in the film.” I’d had this other idea that I’d written down one night, so that jumped in and provided the slot for Rebekah.

The lip sync that she did when we actually shot that scene much later was, like, the best I’ve ever seen. She’s the original singer, of course, but even so, there are singers who can’t do that—the lips and the tongue and the breaths don’t work. But this was perfect in every way.

There seems to be a lot of miming in ‘Mulholland Dr.’, to music—at the auditions for Adam Kesher’s movie—but also people “miming” entire lives. Is the character of Betty in some respects Diane’s “mime”?

[Long pause]

Someone who only becomes “real” when she plays someone else for that brilliant audition at Paramount Pictures?

[Pause continues]

Doing exactly the same scene we’ve already watched her rehearse rather badly with Rita? What was that all about?

It’s like doing something twice—the same piece of material two different ways. It’s always interesting. In Blue Velvet, the song “In Dreams” is played twice, and it’s got a completely different feeling each time, and a different meaning. Or maybe it’s the same meaning but you see it a different way. All the characters are dealing somewhat with a question of identity. Like everyone.

– David Lynch on Mulholland Dr. By Chris Rodley. Article here 

Charlie Kaufman: On Screenwriting

Being John Malkovich (Directed by Spike Jonze)

One of modern cinema’s most celebrated screenwriters, Charlie Kaufman’s work includes surreal fantasy Being John Malkovich, cerebral sci-fi Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and comedy dramas Human Nature and Adaptation. The following extract is taken from an interview with Creative Screenwriting in 2001 in which Kaufman discusses his work with David and Jeff Goldsmith.

CS: When you write, do you take into consideration commercial potential or how an audience might respond to the writing?


CK: I think it’s my responsibility to write about the things that interest me. I feel that I’d be doing a disservice to anybody and everybody to not do what I thought was good. Because other than that, you should be in advertising or something.

CS: Unfortunately, too many screenwriters approach the job like they were in advertising.

CK: I think that’s what you’re trained to do. I think that’s what the studios do to a certain extent. But I think you have to ask yourself, ‘Is this interesting to me?’ ‘Is this funny to me?’ ‘Is this something I’d want to see?’ That’s something I always ask myself: ‘Is this a movie that I would go to see?’ And if the answer is yes, then it’s something to pursue. Otherwise you’re being cynical.

CS: It seems to me that your stories resonate with audiences because they’re as honest as they are imaginative.


CK: I’m fortunate to be able to do that. I guess at some point I may not be able to write that way, and I’ll have to make a living. Then I’ll have to write what other people want me to write. But right now I’m going to grab the bull by the horns and do what I want.

CS: How do you go about deciding on subject matter?

CK: I don’t conceive of things from a very conscious place. I just write about things that interest me – that I find moving – and then I trust it. I don’t think it serves me to do it any other way because that’s where I get the most passion and intimacy in my work. So I don’t know the answer; I like an idea, and then I tend to have three or four ideas that I might combine – which I did in Human Nature. Then I try to force myself to figure out how these things might fit together. I did the same thing in [Being John] Malkovich, and with Adaptation. It’s taking disparate ideas and then working out how and why they should fit together. How the story should be told.

CS: You began in TV and years ago wrote some TV pilots that remain produced. One was called Ramblin’ Pants, the other Depressed Roomies. Are there any plans to get these off the ground?


CK: I actually wrote four or five and nothing happened with them. They already made the rounds years ago.

CS: But you’re a different person now, those could be greenlit overnight.

CK: I am, but I think that I’d rather come up with something new than just go back to those.

CS: There are some fairly successful screenwriters who view their work as a grind. I get the feeling you’re someone who really loves writing.


CK: It’s important to me to do the best I can; I don’t think I’d want to approach it in any kind of weary way. I’d be ashamed to do that. Human Nature was a spec script. I wasn’t even working as a screenwriter professionally when I wrote it; I was working as a television writer. The same with  Malkovich. They were written during my television years; I just did them during hiatus.

CS: That was a while ago. How did Human Nature come to be made now?


CK: Both of those scripts had been kicking around for several years. I think I wrote them in the mid-nineties. Malkovich got made and it got positive attention; then people were interested in this one. Michel Gondry wanted to direct it. There had been others interested in directing it – at one point I was going to direct it – but Michel wanted to do it. I figured that would be good, so I came on as a producer, along with Good Machine and Spike Jonze.

CS: What was your involvement as a producer?

CK: I was involved throughout the production in every stage: pre-production, production, casting, and post. I was very involved in the editing along with Michel and Russell Icke, the editor; and the other producers, Anthony Bregman, Ted Hope, and Spike.

CS: Was that a new situation for you?


CK: This is my second film as producer. The first one was Malkovich, which I was involved in unofficially because I had a relationship with Spike, and he respects my opinion...

My involvement as producer is creative; I’m obviously not scheduling and doing that sort of stuff. It’s important for me to be there because it’s a way of having my voice heard and protecting my intentions... I’m engaged and involved because the people who direct these movies realize, correctly I think, that it’s important to have the person who wrote the material there to talk to. It doesn’t happen a lot, but I think it’s stupid, very stupid, not to utilize your resources, and the person who invented something is a very valuable resource. We’re doing post-production rewrites as things get moved around. There’s a lot of stuff to finesse or fix.

CS: Do you mean moving scenes around? Or rewriting and re-shooting?


CK: We didn’t do any re-shooting for Human Nature. We did some for Malkovich and we’re going to do some for Adaptation. But when you’re cutting a movie down and moving scenes around there’s stuff that doesn’t work anymore. You have to cheat in dialogue, to smooth it, so there’s that kind of writing to do.

CS: Being involved in the editing process must give you a new perspective on screenwriting.

CK: It really does. I think editing is most akin to writing the movie, more than any other aspect of production. It really is writing, you know? You’re doing a lot more than I would have imagined: finding connections that weren’t intended, but that work in this new form. It’s very interesting, and it requires you to really let go of what you’ve gone in with. You’re not really in service of the script anymore. Now it’s, ‘This is what you have,’ and, ‘This is what it is; now how do you make this work?’ As opposed to keep going back and saying, ‘Well this isn’t what I wrote.’ Or, ‘this isn’t how I wrote it.’ I’m fortunate because all writers should be in this situation. But it’s good for me that I’m a partner in this because I know a lot of stuff gets taken away from writers and it doesn’t resemble what their intentions were anymore.

Human Nature (Directed by Michel Gondry) 

CS: Has producing changed the way you write?

CK: One of the things I’ve realized is that in all three of the movies I’ve been involved in is if we see a softness or a problem in the script, it should be corrected at that point. The idea of ‘you’ll fix it later’ or ‘nobody will notice’ is insane. Maybe nobody does notice, but we notice and it becomes a major issue in post, like, ‘How do we solve this problem,’ etc. And then it’s glaring, and we have to do all this extra work to fix it. It happened again and again, and the thing that struck me in all cases, without going into detail, is that in almost every case we saw [the problem] before and didn’t think it would be as big a deal as it ended up being for us. So, I think motivation, character intention to the most miniscule degree, needs to be attended to.

CS: Thanks, Mr. McKee. [screenwriting guru Robert McKee]

CK: [Laughs] Right, I guess he would say something like that, but he’d be right.

CS: What’s it like for you to enter the editing room as both a writer and producer and be creatively involved with those important decisions?


CK: It’s hard, but it’s great. I definitely wouldn’t trade it in. It’s exhausting, and it’s frustrating, and it’s an enormously long process. You lose track gradually over all the different versions of the movie. You lose perspective; you don’t know what you’re watching anymore, and that’s where test screenings become very, very important.

CS: You actually like test screenings?

CK: Yes, for that reason. I don’t mean the test screenings with the numbers or whatever those things, the official ones, are. For us, I mean you can cut out a whole scene in a movie that you’ve been working on for three years, and your brain makes the connection between this moment and that moment because you have the information from the previous draft. But you can’t really know if an audience will make that same connection. So you get people saying, ‘I don’t understand the ending. I don’t understand what happened here,’ and to me that’s the most valuable thing about screenings. ‘Do we like this character?’ or ‘Is the character redeeming?’– that kind of shit I don’t care about, but I do care about if the movie makes the sense that we wanted it to make. What’s most interesting is when someone interprets something differently than you had expected them to, like the reason a character does this is because of something you wouldn’t have even considered, but it makes sense now and you understand where they’re coming from.

– Extracted From: ‘Charlie Kaufman Interviewed By David F. Goldsmith & Jeff Goldsmith. Creative Screenwriting, Volume 9, #2 (March/April 2002) & Volume 9, #6 (November/December 2002)’.