Monday 6 April 2020

Budd Schulberg: Waterfront Memories

On the Waterfront (Directed by Elia Kazan)
Budd Schulberg was born in New York in 1914, son of B.P. Schulberg, production chief at Paramount Studios. Schulberg grew up in Hollywood becoming a script reader and then a screenwriter after completing his education at Dartmouth College. He began to write and publish short stories in the 1930s and became a member of the Communist Party after visiting the Soviet Union in 1934. He would later recall his decision to join the party: ‘It didn’t take a genius to tell you that something was vitally wrong with the country. The unemployment was all around us. The bread lines and the apple sellers. I couldn’t help comparing that with my own family’s status, with my father; at one point he was making $11,000 a week. And I felt a shameful contrast between the haves and the have-nots very early’.

His commitment to the Communist Party ended after it insisted that his first novel be written to reflect Marxist dogma. He eventually published What Makes Sammy Run (1941), about an unscrupulous Hollywood studio mogul, to great critical acclaim.

During World War II, Schulberg worked in the OSS, the intelligence-gathering forerunner to the CIA. Working with director John Ford’s film unit, he documented the atrocities of the concentration camps, then personally arrested the Nazi film-maker Leni Riefenstahl at her Austrian chalet.

After the war, Schulberg published The Disenchanted (1950), his semi-fictionalized account of collaborating with F. Scott Fitzgerald on a screenplay.

In 1951 Schulberg was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during its investigation of the Communist Party’s alleged influence on the film industry. Having been named himself Schulberg acknowledged his former membership, offering his full cooperation. In his testimony before the Committee, Schulberg claimed he left the party because it refused to break with the Soviet dictatorship, and had tried to influence his work. He publicly named eight other Hollywood figures as members, including the screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. and the director Herbert Biberman – two of the Hollywood Ten who claimed the First Amendment gave them the right to silence before the committee. Schulberg’s testimony was seen as a betrayal. The liberal consensus in Hollywood was that Lardner had acquitted himself with more dignity before the committee when asked if he had been a Communist: ‘I could answer it, but if I did, I would hate myself in the morning.’

In a 2006 interview with the New York Times, Schulberg claimed that in hindsight he believed that the attacks against Communists in the United States were a greater threat to the country than the Communist Party itself. But he said he had named names because the party represented a genuine threat to freedom of speech: ‘They say that you testified against your friends, but once they supported the party against me, even though I did have some personal attachments, they were really no longer my friends... and I felt that if they cared about real freedom of speech, they should have stood up for me when I was fighting the party.’

After his testimony Schulberg worked on the screenplay for On the Waterfront which grew out of a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles written for The New York Sun about the influence of organized crime on the New York docks. The film was directed by Elia Kazan who had also testified before the Committee. Marlon Brando played the washed-up boxer, Terry Malloy, who turns against the power of the mob.

The allegorical parallels between the film and the McCarthy hearings are a subject of continuing controversy. The issue has been played down by Schulberg and Kazan. In his autobiography Kazan claimed he had wanted to do a picture about the waterfront long before the HUAC hearings. For Schulberg the film is a tragedy in which the system comes up against the little guy, a fixed fight in a world where ‘the love of a lousy buck’ and a ‘cushy job’ were ‘more important than the love of man,’ in the words of Father Barry, the crusading priest in On the Waterfront played by Karl Malden.

‘It’s the writer’s responsibility to stand up against that power,’ Schulberg later said. ‘The writers are really almost the only ones, except for very honest politicians, who can make any dent on that system. I tried to do that. And that’s affected me my whole life.’

In the following interview from 1998, Budd Schulberg recalled the making of On the Waterfront after a screening in New York.


Budd Schulberg: When I saw the other day on a list that our old movie was in the top ten... as one of the best pictures of all time, I thought again about travelling to Hollywood - Kazan and me. Kazan who directed this film, who already won an Academy Award for A Gentleman’s Agreement – all the way out telling me what a great script we had. He was saying we were so lucky because [he] had Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar and that [On the Waterfront] is one of the best three scripts [he'd] ever had. And I was worried... I told him I was worried about coming back [to Hollywood]. I told him I didn’t think they would like it out there.

Kazan was annoyed with me. I’ll try to make it brief, but we got off the train and there was no one to meet us and I said, ‘Kaz, there’s no limo’. Now Kazan is a very down to earth guy and he said ‘we don’t need a limo, I hate limos’. So we went up to the Beverly Hills Hotel and got there, checked in and no invitations from Daryl Zanuck – it was a film to be made for Zanuck – no invitation to come down to Palm Springs and play croquet. I said ‘there’s no invitation to play croquet’. Kazan says ‘I HATE croquet!’

And we went up to the room, we had a little suite, and there weren’t no flowers. I looked around and didn’t see no flowers. And I said, ‘Kaz, we have no flowers’. Kazan says, ‘What it is with you, I don’t need flowers. To hell with the flowers.’ And I said, ‘Kaz, you come from New York, I come from Hollywood. And I know the unspoken language of Hollywood and Zanuck is telling us something’. Kazan didn’t believe me.

But the following Monday, when Daryl Zanuck met us, raving about Cinemascope, he said ‘I’m so excited, I’m so excited, we have this great new medium, Cinemascope’. He said ‘that’s the great thing about our business. First it was flickers, and the films jumped, and then we learned how to make them more smoothly. And then we had colour and then we had sound and now we have the Cinemascope. 

Kazan and I looked at each other because we had written that this film should be something in flat black and white. As he went on about what could be done, he said, ‘Can you imagine what Prince Valiant would look like in Cinemascope?’ And finally Kazan said, ‘Daryl, what about our picture?’ There was a long, pregnant pause and Mr. Zanuck said, ‘Boys, I’m sorry, but I don’t like a single thing about it’. And I think I was quiet and Kazan said not a single thing.

He said, ‘Whatta ya got except a bunch of sweaty longshoremen’. And that stabbed me in the heart because when Kazan came to talk with me about doing this movie, I went down on the Lower West Side, in the Chelsea area – you’ll see some of that experience up here in the movie – and I got involved with an amazing man, one of the most amazing I ever met, the waterfront priest – Father John Corridon.


I mean, we’ve learned now that the ILA – the International Longshoreman’s Association – was totally in the hands of the mob. They were killers and thieves. Corridon was really filling the vacuum and trying to guide the rebel longshoremen into making some effort to win back their young and make a real living. This went on for several years and I hung in with these people. I love these people and when Zanuck said that all you got is a lot of sweaty longshoremen... my heart was broken. After that, every studio in town, had the same reaction.

We went to Warners, Paramount, MGM, every single one said no. They wouldn’t make the picture. And as I said... what we were talking about a few minutes ago... one thing that really warmed me to Kazan... and I tried, I really tried... and I turned on him. Back at the hotel... I was so mad. I had spent about two years, I had actually mortgaged my farm, I was going broke doing this movie... and I turned on him and I said, ‘Goddamit, I told you they weren’t going to make this movie’. And Kazan said, ‘Budd, I promise I’ll make it. I have to get on the docks with a handheld IMO and use the actual longshoremen – the rebel longshoremen who were working with Ed Xavier and some of the actors out of the (Actor’s) Studio and make this movie. And that’s pretty much how it was made. It really was the longest of the longshots. It was almost accidental that the movie ever got made at all. It was a longshot.

It was all shot in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the river from the Manhattan West Side docks. It was made for 800,000 dollars and it was shot in 37 days. And every single night, every single night, twelve o’clock, one’o clock, two o’clock my phone would ring and it would be our producer, Sam Speigel and he would say, ‘Budd, you’ve got to make them go faster, you’ve got to make them go faster’. So, the film was a film that was almost like our own film, that nobody would like so we would say to each other, ‘Oh well, it doesn’t matter that nobody likes it, at least we like it’. And so, I’m really pleased that you’re here to see the movie and that there’s still that much interest in it after all these years.

Question: What were the initial reactions after the film was made?

Budd Schulberg: Our producer, Sam Speigel, was still very worried. Columbia had looked at it and they didn’t like it. So Sam Speigel got the idea that maybe it needed some kind of lift, and he got Bernstein to do the score for the film. It was the only one that he ever wrote and he did a terrific job. And when we got all those Oscar nominations and we won... all those Oscars, we were really amazed that Bernstein was left out completely. But the score wasn’t left out, it’ll always be there. Occasionally it’s played in philharmonic programs and it was the only one he did and he did one hell of a job at that.

Question: In most modern films, the score fades into the background, but in your film the score is right up in front. Was that Speigel, or was that your choice?

Budd Schulberg: That was in the mixing. As the writer of the picture, as much as I admired the score, there were times that I thought it was maybe it was a little bit... too loud. (laughter)



Question: I know it’s a general question, but how do you approach writing dialogue. Is there a certain method that you use?

Budd Schulberg: One thing you do in writing dialogue is that you make up as little of it as you can and you listen as much as you can. Watching it this evening, I was reminded how many times something in there was not really written by me, I simply wrote down what they were actually saying. The scene in the hold, after Doogan gets killed, Father Barry comes down and when he talks about Christ and the shake-up, that was something that I actually heard. When I heard the real waterfront priest talk about that Christ is here and he carries a hook and he sees the men who get passed over and who gets the jobs and the wine and I was just so amazed by it that I just had to try and put this old sermon, or whatever you call it, in the film.

Dialogue, you try to build your characters... if you try to get an idea about who you’re writing about, then you listen to that person or those people. When Charlie gets killed, the ordinary cliché for Terry would be ‘I’ll get ‘em’ or ‘I’ll kill ‘em’ or something like that, but I actually heard a longshoreman say ‘I'll take it out of their skulls!’ And it just rang a bell, a loud bell, that that’s the line I should use.  I’ll say what I heard my friend the longshoreman say, ‘I'll take it out of their skulls’. So a lot of dialogue comes out of listening, carefully, to the characters and getting an ear for how they talk and plus, you have to shape your scenes and build your scenes on all of that. I find it very, very valuable, I think. 

– Interview transcript with Budd Schulberg in ‘New York Conversations’, by Mikael Colville-Andersen.


Friday 3 April 2020

Wim Wenders: Impossible Stories

The American Friend (Directed by Wim Wenders)
German filmmaker Wim Wenders came to prominence in the 1970s with his acclaimed trilogy of road movies, Alice in the Cities (1974), The Wrong Move (1975), Kings of the Road (1976), and his adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game as The American Friend (1977). After the documentary Lightning Over Water (1980) about the final days of director Nicholas Ray, Wenders embarked on Hammett (1982), a fictional account of the life of writer Dashiell Hammet, for producer Frances Ford Coppola. Friction with Coppola led to a break in the production in order for the script to be rewritten. In the interval Wenders returned to Europe to film The State of Things (1982) about a film crew stranded in a seaside hotel waiting for the missing producer to come up with the finance in order for the film to be completed.

The following talk from 1982 by Wenders was given at a summer film colloquium in Livorno on narrative technique. It documents his loss of faith in film images and his subsequent resolve to find a new, more viable relation between images and narrative. 

Where French and German each have a single word for it, English has only a two-part phrase: to ‘tell stories’. That hints at my difficulty: the man you’ve invited to talk to you about telling stories is a man who over the years has had nothing but problems with stories.

Let me go back to the very beginning. Once I was a painter. What interested me was space; I painted cityscapes and landscapes. I became a film-maker when I realized that I wasn’t getting anywhere as a painter. Painting lacked something, as did my individual paintings. It would have been too easy to say that they lacked life; I thought that what was missing was an understanding of time. So when I began filming, I thought of myself as a painter of space engaged on a quest for time. It never occurred to me that this search should be called ‘storytelling’. I must have been very naive. I thought filming was simple. I thought you only had to see something to be able to depict it, and I also thought a storyteller (and of course I wasn’t one) had to listen first and speak afterwards. Making a film to me meant connecting all these things. That was a misconception, but before I straighten it out, there is something else I must talk about.


Alice in the Cities (Directed by Wim Wenders)
My stories all begin from pictures. When I started making my first film, I wanted to make ‘landscape portraits’. My very first film, Silver City, contained ten shots of three minutes each; that was the length of a reel of 16 mm film. Each shot was of a cityscape. I didn’t move the camera; nothing happened. The shots were like the paintings and watercolours I’d done previously, only in a different medium. However, there was one shot that was different: it was of an empty landscape with railway tracks; the camera was placed very close to these. I knew the train schedule. I began filming two minutes before one was due, and everything seemed to be exactly as it had been in all the other shots: a deserted scene. Except that two minutes later someone ran into shot from the right, jumped over the tracks just a couple of yards in front of the camera, and ran out of the left edge of the frame. The moment he disappeared, even more surprisingly, the train thundered into the picture, also from the right. (It couldn’t be heard approaching, because there was no sync. sound, only music.) This tiny ‘action’ – man crosses tracks ahead of train – signals the beginning of a ‘story’. What is wrong with the man? Is he being followed? Does he want to kill himself? Why is he in such a hurry? Etc., etc. I think it was from that moment that I became a storyteller. And from that moment all my difficulties began too, because it was the first time that something had happened in a scene I had set up.


Alice in the Cities (Directed by Wim Wenders)
After that, the problems came thick and fast. When I was cutting together the ten shots, I realized that after the shot where the man crosses the tracks hell for leather there would be the expectation that every subsequent shot would contain some action. So for the first time I had to consider the order of the shots, some kind of dramaturgy. My original idea, simply to run a series of fixed-frame shots, one after another, ‘unconnected’ and in no special order, became impossible. The assembling of scenes and their arrangement in an order was, it seemed already, a first step towards narrative. People would see entirely fanciful connections between scenes and interpret them as having narrative intentions. But that wasn’t what I wanted. I was only combining time and space; but from that moment on, I was pressed into telling stories. From then on and until the present moment, I have felt an opposition between images and stories. A mutual incompatibility, a mutual undermining. I have always been more interested in pictures, and the fact that – as soon as you assemble them – they seem to want to tell a story, is still a problem for me today.

My stories start with places, cities, landscapes and roads. A map is like a screenplay to me. When I look at a road, for example, I begin to ask myself what kind of thing might happen on it; similarly with a building, like my own hotel room here in Livorno: I look out of the window, it’s raining hard and a car stops in front of the hotel. A man gets out of it and looks around. Then he starts walking down the road, without an umbrella, in spite of the rain. My head starts working on a story right away, because I want to know where he’s going, what kind of street he might be turning into.


The Wrong Move (Directed by Wim Wenders)
For a writer, a story seems to be the logical end-product: words want to form sentences, and the sentences want to stand in some continuous discourse; a writer doesn’t have to force the words into a sentence or the sentences into a story. There seems to be a kind of inevitability in the way stories come to be told. In films – or at least in my films, because of course there are other ways of going about it – in films the images don’t necessarily lead to anything else; they stand on their own. I think a picture stands on its own more readily, whereas a word tends to seek the context of a story. For me, images don’t automatically lend themselves to be part of a story. If they’re to function in the way that words and sentences do, they have to be ‘forced’ – that is, I have to manipulate them.

My thesis is that for me as a film-maker, narrative involves forcing the images in some way. Sometimes this manipulation becomes narrative art, but not necessarily. Often enough, the result is only abused pictures.

I dislike the manipulation that’s necessary to press all the images of a film into one story; it’s very harmful for the images because it tends to drain them of their ‘life’. In the relationship between story and image, I see the story as a kind of vampire, trying to suck all the blood from an image. Images are acutely sensitive; like snails they shrink back when you touch their horns. They don’t have it in them to be carthorses: carrying and transporting messages or significance or intention or a moral. But that’s precisely what a story wants from them.

Kings of the Road (Directed by Wim Wenders)
So far everything seems to have spoken out against story, as though it were the enemy. But of course stories are very exciting; they are powerful and important for mankind. They give people what they want, on a very profound level – more than merely amusement or entertainment or suspense. People’s primary requirement is that some kind of coherence be provided. Stories give people the feeling that there is meaning, that there is ultimately an order lurking behind the incredible confusion of appearances and phenomena that surrounds them. This order is what people require more than anything else; yes, I would almost say that the notion of order or story is connected with the godhead. Stories are substitutes for God. Or maybe the other way round.

For myself – and hence my problems with story – I incline to believe in chaos, in the inexplicable complexity of the events around me. Basically, I think that individual situations are unrelated to each other, and my experience seems to consist entirely of individual situations; I’ve never yet been involved in a story with a beginning, middle and end. For someone who tells stories this is positively sinful, but I must confess that I have yet to experience a story. I think stories are actually lies. But they are incredibly important to our survival. Their artificial structure helps us to overcome our worst fears: that there is no God; that we are nothing but tiny fluctuating particles with perception and consciousness, but lost in a universe that remains altogether beyond our conception. By producing coherence, stories make life bearable and combat fears. That’s why children like to hear stories at bedtime. That’s why the Bible is one long storybook, and why stories should always end happily.

Of course the stories in my films also work as a means of ordering the images. Without stories, the images that interest me would threaten to lose themselves and seem purely arbitrary.


Kings of the Road (Directed by Wim Wenders)
Of course the stories in my films also work as a means of ordering the images. Without stories, the images that interest me would threaten to lose themselves and seem purely arbitrary.

For this reason, film-stories are like routes. A map is the most exciting thing in the world for me; when I see a map, I immediately feel restless, especially when it’s of a country or city where I’ve never been. I look at all the names and I want to know the things they refer to, the cities of a country, the streets of a city. When I look at a map, it turns into an allegory for the whole of life. The only thing that makes it bearable is to try to mark out a route, and follow it through the city or country. Stories do just that: they become your roads in a strange land, where but for them, you might go to thousands of places without ever arriving anywhere.

What are the stories that are told in my films? There are two sorts; I draw a sharp distinction between them, because they exist in two completely separate systems or traditions. Furthermore, there is a continual alternation between the two categories of film, with a single exception, The Scarlet Letter, and that was a mistake.


The American Friend (Directed by Wim Wenders)
In the first group (A) all the films are in black and white, except for Nick’s Film (Lightning Over Water), which belongs to neither tradition. (I’m not even sure that it counts as a film at all, so let’s leave that one out.) In the other group (B) all the films are in colour, and they are all based on published novels. The films in group A, on the other hand, are based without exception on ideas of mine – the word ‘idea’ is used loosely to refer to dreams, daydreams and experiences of all kinds. All the A-films were more or less unscripted, whereas the others followed scripts very closely. The A-films are loosely structured, whereas the B-films are all tightly structured. The A-films were all shot in chronological sequence, beginning from an initial situation that was often the only known point in them; the B-films were shot in the traditional hopping-around way, and with an eye to the exigencies of a production team. With group A films, I never knew how they would finish; I knew the endings of B-films before I started.

Basically all the group A films operate in a very open system, the B-films in a very closed one. Both represent not only systems but also attitudes: openness on the one hand, discipline on the other. The themes of the A-films were identified only during shooting. The themes of the B-films were known; it was just a matter of deciding which bits should go in. The A-films were made from the inside, working out; the B-films the opposite. For the A-films a story had to be found; for the B-films the story had to be lost sight of.

The fact that – with the exception of the already-mentioned mistake – there has been a constant pendulum swing between A- and B-films shows that each film is a reaction to its predecessor, which is exactly my dilemma.


The American Friend (Directed by Wim Wenders)
I made each of my A-films because the film before had had too many rules, hadn’t been sufficiently spontaneous, and I’d got bored with the characters; also I felt that I had to ‘expose’ myself and the crew and the actors to a new situation. With the B-films it was exactly the other way round: I made them because I was unhappy that the film before had been so ‘subjective’, and because I needed to work within a firm structure, using the framework of a story. Actors in the B-films played parts ‘other’ than themselves, represented fictional characters; in the A-films they interpreted and depicted themselves, they were themselves. In these films I saw my task as bringing in as much as possible of what (already) existed. For the B-films, things had to be invented. It became ever clearer that one group could be called ‘subjective’ and the other ‘search for objectivity’. Though, of course, it wasn’t quite so simple.

In what follows I will talk about how the A-films began, and the role that story played in them. My first film was called Summer in the City; it’s about a man who’s spent a couple of years in prison. The first frame shows him emerging from prison and suddenly confronting life again. He tries to see his old friends and get into his old relationships, but he quickly realizes that nothing can be the way it was before. In the end he takes off and emigrates to America. The second film in the A-group, Alice in the Cities, is about a man who’s supposed to be writing a feature about America. He can’t do it, and the film begins with his decision to return to Europe. He happens to meet a little girl, Alice, and her mother, and promises to take her back to her grandmother in Europe. Only he doesn’t know where she lives; all he has is a photograph of the house. The remainder of the film is taken up by the search for the house.

The State of Things (Directed by Wim Wenders)
A man tries to kill himself – that’s how Kings of the Road starts. By chance, there’s another man watching, so he gives up his kamikaze behaviour. The other man is a truck-driver. They decide to travel together – pure chance, again. The film is about their journey and whether the two have anything to say to each other or not.

The last of the A-films, The State of Things, is about a film crew who have to stop working because the money’s run out and the producer’s vanished. The crew don’t know whether they’ll be able to finish the shoot or not. The film is about a group of people who’ve lost their way, particularly the director, who in the end goes to Hollywood to look for the producer.

All these films are about people who encounter unfamiliar situations on the road; all of them are to do with seeing and perception, about people who suddenly have to take a different view of things. To be as specific about this as I can, I’d like to go back to Kings of the Road. How did that come about? One answer would be: because I’d just finished The Wrong Move – it was a reaction to that previous work. I felt that I had to devise a story in which I could investigate myself and my country – Germany (the subject of my previous film too, though treated in a different way). This time it was to be a trip to an unknown country, to an unknown country in myself, and in the middle of Germany. I knew what I wanted but I didn’t know how to begin. Then everything was set off by an image.

I was overtaking a truck on the Autobahn; it was very hot and it was an old lorry without air-conditioning. There were two men in the cab, and the driver had opened the door and was dangling his leg out in order to cool off. This image, seen from the corner of my eye when driving past, impressed me. I happened to stop at a motorway cafe where the lorry also stopped. I went up to the bar where the two men from the lorry were standing. Not a word passed between them; it was as though they had absolutely nothing in common. You got the impression they were strangers. I asked myself what do these two men see, how do they see, as they drive across Germany?

The State of Things (Directed by Wim Wenders)
At that time I was doing quite a lot of travelling around Germany with my previous film, The Wrong Move. During my travels I became aware of the situation of the rural cinema. The halls, the projection booths and the projectionists all fascinated me. Then I looked at a map of Germany and I realized there was one route down through it that I barely knew. It ran along the border between the GDR and the FRG; not only down the middle of Germany, but also along the very edge. And I suddenly realized that I had everything I needed for my new film: a route and the story of two men who don’t know each other. I was interested to see what might happen to them, and between them. One of them would have a job that was something to do with the cinema, and I knew where the cinemas were to be found: along the border.

Of course that’s not enough to make a story. All the films in the A-group started off with a few situations that I hoped might develop into a story. To assist that development, I followed the method of ‘day-dreaming’. Story always assumes control, it knows its course, it knows what matters, it knows where it begins and ends. Daydream is quite different; it doesn’t have that ‘dramaturgical’ control. What it has is a kind of subconscious guide who wants to get on, no matter where; every dream is going somewhere, but who can say where that is? Something in the subconscious knows, but you can only discover it if you let it take its course, and that’s what I attempted in all these films. The English word ‘drifting’ expresses it very well. Not the shortest line between two points, but a zigzag. Perhaps a better word would be ‘meander’, because that has the idea of distance in it as well.

A journey is an adventure in space and time. Adventure, space and time – all three are involved. Stories and journeys have them in common. A journey is always accompanied by curiosity about the unknown; it creates expectations and intensity of perception: you see things on the road that you never would at home. To get back to Kings of the Road: after ten weeks’ filming we were still only halfway through, though I’d aimed to finish the film in that time. There was no money to go on filming, and we were still a long way short of an ending. The problem was: how should the journey end? Or: how might it be converted into a story? At first I thought of an accident. If it had been shot in America, it would certainly have finished with an accident. But thank God we weren’t in America; we were free to do otherwise and get to the ‘truth of our story’. So we broke off the filming and I tried to raise money for another five weeks’ shooting. Of course a film of that type can be literally never ending, and that’s a danger. The solution, finally, turned out to be that the men would have to realize they couldn’t go on like that; a break had to come and they would have to change their lives.

The State of Things (Directed by Wim Wenders)
But before that I had another idea, another ‘bend’ in the meander: the two protagonists look for their parents. I thought that might lead them to break off their relationship. So we filmed a long story about the first of them, how he visits his father, and then another long story about the second returning to the place where he grew up with his mother. Unfortunately, though, that only improved their relationship and left us even further from an ending than we were before. Suddenly, and for the first time, the two were able to speak to each other. We broke off the filming a second time. I thought the film might end with them both questioning what they had done before their relationship, and reconsidering their aims in life. The one travelling from cinema to cinema wonders whether there was any sense in keeping these places going, and the other goes back to his work as a paediatrician and speech therapist. In the end, that was how we shot it.

The State of Things is also about stories. Of course the director figure represents my own dilemma, to a certain extent; at one stage he actually says: ‘Life and stories are mutually incompatible.’ That’s his theory as a director. Later on, though, when he goes back to Hollywood, he himself becomes embroiled in a story, in one of those stories he never believed in, and in the end it kills him. Paradoxical, of course. And that’s really the only thing I have to say about stories: they are one huge, impossible paradox! I totally reject stories, because for me they only bring out lies, nothing but lies, and the biggest lie is that they show coherence where there is none. Then again, our need for these lies is so consuming that it’s completely pointless to fight them and to put together a sequence of images without a story – without the lie of a story. Stories are impossible, but it’s impossible to live without them.

That’s the mess I’m in. 

– Wim Wenders: Impossible stories. Talk given at a colloquium on narrative technique, 1982. In Wim Wenders: The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversations (Faber and Faber, 1992)


   

Monday 30 March 2020

The Art of John Cassavetes

The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie (Directed by John Cassavetes

"Cassavetes made things hard to understand. That's why a work of art exists."

Born on December 9th, 1929, in New York City,  John Cassavetes, went to Mohawk College and Colgate University after graduating from high school, then attended the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts before graduating in 1950. After appearances in minor films in the early his first major break was when he landed a part on the long-running television series “Johnny Staccato”.

Cassavetes started his filmmaking career by financing his first picture, Shadows, using the money he had gained through television work. Notable for its improvised acting, street locations, realistic portrayal of New York life, and experimental direction, Shadows was an instant critical success.

Invited to Hollywood to work on higher-budgeted studio pictures both Too Late Blues (released in 1961) and A Child Is Waiting (released in 1962) didn't have the enthusiasm or improvisational energy of Shadows. 

Cassavetes continued to work as a jobbing actor throughout the 1960s. Starring in The Killers (1964), The Dirty Dozen (1967), and Rosemary’s Baby (1968). By 1968, however, Cassavetes had moved back into the director's chair to create films based on his own scripts.

In Faces, the characters' struggles with suburban life continued the style first seen from Shadows, and the writing and photography mirrored the actors' spontaneous performances. However, although some found the unscripted sequences exhausting compared to traditional Hollywood scenes, a lot of others were persuaded by Cassavetes' capabilities to depict more truthful and poignant situations. 

His subsequent movie Husbands, in which he played alongside Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara was a searing, funny, painful semi-improvised account of three best friends grappling with life and death as a result of the death of a close friend.

Though neither Faces nor Husbands were popular with the general moviegoing public, both films were important in helping to pave the way for future Hollywood films to include more film verité techniques.. For the most part, Cassavetes' most successful pictures blend the techniques of the experimental with the commercial. Though the screenplay for A Woman Under the  Influence (1974) was complete, much of the improvised and spontaneous performance of the early Cassavetes films was kept. Starring Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk it delved into the breakdown of a woman's marriage, and delved into her complex emotional state.

The following extract is from a piece by Raymond Carney on Cassavetes’ working methods. 

Cassavetes' insights came from life, not from theory – which is of course the best place to get them. It's the opposite to how most critics function, which is why a critic has to be very, very careful about the conclusions he draws. The films didn't begin as ideas. Shadows didn't begin as a study of “beat drifters” or “race relations.” It was Cassavetes' effort to give voice to the mixed-up feelings he had as a young man (particularly about his relation to his brother). Faces and Husbands didn't originate as analyses of the “male ego” or studies of the frustrations of “suburban life.” They were Cassavetes giving voice to his own personal disillusionments about marriage, middle-age, and his career. They were documentaries of everything he knew and felt at that point in his life – not sorted out into a series of “points” or “critiques” or “views.”

That's actually a fairly unusual way to proceed. La Dolce Vita was released three years before Cassavetes wrote Faces, and has some superficial similarities with it (as well as being referred to in it). I sat through a screening the other night at Harvard and the scenes practically had labels on them. This one was an attack on the idle rich. That one was a critique of on the superficiality of journalists. This other one commented on the vapidity of modern architecture. The majority of films are organized this way. Look at NashvilleWelcome to the DollhouseMagnolia, and American Beauty. They have theses. They make points. The characters represent generalized views and ideas – and the critics eat it up! They love abstract movies, since they make their jobs easy. Films that originate in ideas can be translated back into ideas with almost nothing lost in the translation. These films are eminently discussible. You can write an essay about them. Because ideas are abstract. They are simple. They say one thing. They stand still.

Cassavetes' work resists that kind of understanding. Every time we want to lasso a character or a scene with an idea, it scoots away from us. The incredibly detailed behaviors, facial expressions, and tones of voice that comprise his scenes defeat generalizations. The characters in Faces and Husbands are too changeable, too emotionally unresolved to be pigeonholed intellectually. As Cassavetes says in Cassavetes on Cassavetes, they may be bastards one minute but they can be terrific the next. In A Woman Under the Influence just when we're about to decide that Nick Longhetti is a “male chauvinist,” he says or does something kind and thoughtful. Just when we want to turn Mabel into an “oppressed housewife,” she sleeps with another man to show us she is not under the thumb of her husband and has genuine emotional problems. The racial incident at the center of Shadows invites an unwary critic to view the main drama of the film as being about race, but the film's narrative and characterizations subvert the attempt. The racial misunderstanding at the center of the film is largely a device to create other, more interesting, more slippery dramatic problems for them to deal with. The characters are given such individualized emotional structures of feeling that it becomes impossible to treat them generically as racial representatives. We can't factor out their personalities. Character is at the heart of Cassavetes' work, always displacing incident as the center of interest, and the particularity of the characterizations in all of the films prevents us from treating the characters' situations in a depersonalized way, which is what ideological analysis always requires to some extent.

I'm convinced that this aspect of Cassavetes' work is the reason that during his lifetime reviewers wrote off his work as being confused or disorganized. They wanted to be able to label characters and situations, and when they couldn't, decided it was the films' fault. They wanted to be able to stabilize their relationship to an experience by being able to maintain a fixed point of view on it. In Shadows, they wanted to be able to conclude that Lelia and Ben were victims of racial prejudice; in Faces, that the figures were being morally judged; in Husbands, that the three men were being satirized. When the movies defeated such easy relationships to the experiences they presented, the critics wrote them off as muddle-headed, self-indulgent actors' exercises. 

Cassavetes made things hard to understand. That's why a work of art exists. Otherwise, you might as well write an essay about your subject. Real art is never reducible to the sort of moral lessons and sociological platitudes that Spike Lee or Oliver Stone give us or that reviewers and academic critics want. Art speech is a way of experiencing and knowing far, far more complex than the ways journalists, or history, sociology, or film professors think and talk.


- Raymond Carney on John Cassavetes

Monday 9 March 2020

Paul Schrader: Steps to Writing a Script


Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)
The films of the 1970s, according to the author Robert Kolker, are part of "a cinema of loneliness." Nothing, he believes, better captures contemporary man's loneliness than Taxi Driver. The book's cover depicts Robert DeNiro strolling through New York's streets, past the posters of long-gone porno cinemas that formerly dotted the city's central business district prior to the introduction of the video. 

Since the film's 1976 release, other interpretations have been made. According to some, it is a resctionary and violent picture that conveys a very conservative message. Others regard it as a reflection of the turbulent decade of the 1970s in America, presenting a nightmare vision that ensued following the demise of the hippie dream. The truth is that the film does not provide answers; rather, it raises more questions. 

According to the film's writer Paul Schrader, Travis Bickle – the cab driver played by Robert DeNiro – is not a victim of a socially imposed loneliness or wrath; it is rather an existential type of rage that confronts us with Scorsese's and Schrader's religious crises after they abandoned their studies in theology to pursue careers in film. 

Martin Scorsese's failed attempt to attend Catholic seminary is well known while Paul Schrader was born into a strict Calvinist family where he was not permitted to see films until the age of eighteen. 

“I believe that what makes the film so vivid is what has made all my collaborations with Scorsese so interesting – says Schrader, who has collaborated with the Italian-American director on films such as "Raging Bull" and "The Last Temptation of Christ" – which is that we share a similar moral foundation – a kind of closed-society Christian morality, though mine is rural and Protestant and his is Roman Catholic. 

Scorsese and Schrader's work is frequently described as a quest for atonement. Their troubled and obsessed characters exemplify contemporary man's state of being stuck in his own contradictions. These are characters like Travis who are buried in an urban inferno, continuously battling their sins via a catharsis of violence and horror. 

“At the time I wrote it,” Schrader explains, “I was obsessed with guns, suicidal, drinking heavily, and obsessed with pornography in the manner that a lonely person is.” According to the writer, "all of those elements are included in the script." According to the filmmaker, "the book I reread just before sitting down to write the script was Sartre's Nausea, and if anything serves as a model for Taxi Driver, it is that." 

In his paranoid solitude, Robert DeNiro's character spirals into a violent fantasy that culminates in a bloodletting. Taxi Driver, like "Hardcore" or "Light Sleeper," is an urban epic about vice and evil that contrasts with Travis's quest for purity. These are ethically ambiguous creatures trapped in a neon inferno who battle their own selves in order to transcend their misery and reach some measure of serenity. 

Drawing on his own battle with his demons, Paul Schrader clarified the screenwriting development process in an interview with Richard Thompson from 1976 when ‘Taxi Driver’ had just opened. Below are excerpted comments from that interview. 

Paul Schrader: I think there are three steps to writing a script. First, you have to have a theme, something you want to say. It doesn’t have to be a particularly great thing, but you have to have something that’s bothering you. In the case of Taxi Driver, the theme was loneliness. Then you find a metaphor for that theme, one that expresses it. In Taxi Driver, that was the cabbie, the perfect expression of urban loneliness. Then you have to find a plot, which is the easiest part of the process. All plots have been done; they’re fairly easy, you just work through all the permutations until the plot accurately reflects the theme and the metaphor. You push the theme through the metaphor and you should come out with the plot.

Schrader reveals how he arrived at his plot for ‘Taxi Driver’:

Two things happened which tied the project [Taxi Driver] together: a Harry Chapin song called ‘Taxi,’ in which an old girlfriend gets into a guy’s cab; and [Arthur] Bremer shot [Presidential Candidate, George] Wallace. That was the thread which led to the script. Maybe I shouldn’t admit to this, but why not be honest? After all, there’s really nothing new on the face of the earth.

Elaborating on his method Schrader goes on to explain:

One of the problems with screenwriters is that they think first in terms of plot or in terms of metaphor, and they’re going the reverse way; it’s awfully hard to do. Once you have a plot, it’s hard to infuse a theme into it, because it’s not an indigenous expression of the plot; that’s why you must start with the theme and not the plot.

Metaphor is extremely important to a movie. A perfect example is Deliverance, where you have point A and point B, and four men going from A to B—the first time [theme] for the men, the last time [metaphor] for the river. On the strength of that metaphor, you could put the Marx Brothers in that boat and something would happen. When somebody walks up to you and says, ‘I’ve got a great idea for a Western and this is the twist,’ you know right off the bat that they’re in trouble, because they’re coming at it the wrong way. Maybe they’ll be able to write a novel that sells, make a lot of money, and live in Beverly Hills; but it’s not interesting to me; not something I really care about.

Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)
As Pipeliner [his first script] was falling through, I got hit with two other blows to the body at the same time: my marriage fell through, and the affair that caused the marriage to fall through fell through, all within the same four or five months. I fell into a state of manic depression. I was living with someone at the time, and she got so fed up with me that she split. I was staying in her apartment waiting for the cupboard to run out of food.

I got to wandering around at night; I couldn’t sleep because I was so depressed. I’d stay in bed till four or five P.M. then I’d say, ‘Well, I can get a drink now.’ I’d get up and get a drink and take my bottle with me and start wandering around the streets in my car at night. After the bars closed, I’d go to pornography. I’d do this all night, till morning, and I did it for about three or four weeks, a very destructive syndrome, until I was saved from it by an ulcer; I had not been eating, just drinking.

When I got out of the hospital I realized I had to change my life because I would die and everything; I decided to leave L.A. That was when the metaphor hit me for Taxi Driver, and I realized that was the metaphor I had been looking for: the man who will take anybody any place for money; the man who moves through the city like a rat through the sewer; the man who is constantly surrounded by people, yet has no friends. The absolute symbol of urban loneliness. That’s the thing I’d been living; that was my symbol, my metaphor. The film is about a car as the symbol of urban loneliness, a metal coffin.

I wrote the script very quickly, in something like fifteen days. The script just jumped from my mind almost intact ...When you’re writing films, you’re dealing with a kind of nascent, primitive force that’s alive.

The Yakuza (Directed by Sidney Pollack)
Schrader goes on to recall:

Before I sat down to write Taxi Driver, I re-read [Jean-Paul] Sartre’s Nausea, because I saw the script as an attempt to take the European existential hero, that is, the man from The Stranger, Notes From The Underground, Nausea, Pickpocket, Le Feu Follet, and A Man Escaped, and put him in an American context. In so doing, you find that he becomes more ignorant, ignorant of the nature of his problem. Travis’s problem is the same as the existential hero’s, that is, ‘should I exist?’ But Travis doesn’t understand that this is his problem, so he focuses it elsewhere, and I think that is a mark of the immaturity and the youngness of our country. We don’t properly understand the nature of the problem, so the self-destructive impulse, instead of being inner-directed, as it is in Japan, Europe, any of the older cultures, becomes outer-directed. The man who feels the time has come to die will go out and kill other people rather than kill himself. There’s a line in The Yakuza which says, ‘When a Japanese cracks up, he’ll close the window and kill himself; when an American cracks up, he’ll open the window and kill somebody else.’ That’s essentially how the existential hero changes when he becomes American. There is not enough intellectual tradition in this country, and not enough history; and Travis is just not smart enough to understand his problem. He should be killing himself instead of these other people. At the end, when he shoots himself in a playful way, that’s what he’s been trying to do all along.

- Paul Schrader interviewed by Richard Thompson,  Film Comment magazine, March-April 1976.

Monday 2 March 2020

Reflecting Realism: An Interview with the Dardenne Brothers

The Son (Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
Olivier (Olivier Gourmet) works as a lone carpentry instructor at a vocational training centre for at-risk youth. He is bothered by a sore back and an inability to communicate with others effectively. However, he has found a way to survive in a nondescript apartment in his own quiet way. He appears to be uninterested in anything other than his work. 

Olivier's routine is upended when Francis (Morgan Marinne), a sixteen-year-old recently released from a juvenile detention centre, arrives. The teacher realises the boy is the one who murdered his small son five years ago during a robbery. The same day, Olivier's ex-wife Magali (Isabella Soupart) calls to announce her pregnancy and decision to marry her lover. His reaction to her demonstrates that they have had difficulty grieving the loss of their son and that this schism resulted in their separation. To summarise, Olivier's stiff body reveals burdens he has struggled to bear and even more difficult to release. 

At first, the teacher is adamant about not having Francis in his class, but he eventually relents. The young man is serious about pursuing a career in carpentry. Olivier steals the keys to his place after discovering where he lives. He lies in the boy's bed for a brief moment. He later meets Francis at a fast food restaurant and impresses him with his ability to judge distances with his eye. 

The two go on a trip to the mill to purchase wood for the training center's projects. The boy approaches Olivier about becoming his mentor, but the teacher requires some clarification first. He interrogates him about his stay in the detention centre. Francis describes the robbery and strangling a boy who refused to let go of him as he attempted to steal a car radio. Olivier is desperate to hear Francis express regret, but none is forthcoming. When they arrive at the mill, the atmosphere is charged with tension, and the teacher's body language oozes with anger and impending violence. 

The Son is a haunting parable that contains numerous instances of quiet dignity. However, only the most daring filmgoer will be able to navigate Alain Marcoen's hand-held camera work, which is heavily focused on Olivier's neck. There is no music accompanying this master woodworker's daily activities. Nonetheless, the Dardenne brothers have crafted a touching storey of moral imagination in an austere and unusual manner, concluding with an unexpected grace note that defies precise measurement.

The Son (2002) was Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s fifth fiction feature following the international success of La Promesse (1996), and Rosetta (1999). They are credited with introducing a unique realistic aesthetic into European narrative cinema, drawing precise social portrayals characterized by restless camerawork, detailed performances and a concern with the urban dispossessed. In the following extract the filmmakers discuss The Son and related topics in an interview first published in Cineaste magazine in 2003. 

Cineaste: The relationship between parents and children seems to be at the heart of your films – ‘La Promesse’, ‘Rosetta’, and now ‘The Son’. Why?

Luc Dardenne: It was the father who interested us the most. What is a father? What does it mean to be a father? Of course, for there to be a father there has to be a son, or a daughter. In La Promesse, the father, Roger, is outside the law – he is illegal, he traffics in immigrants; he takes up space in the unemployment line; he lies so that he can cut in front of people. He lets a man die and pulls his son Igor into the scheme, making him an accessory. He treats his son as if he were an accomplice, a member of the same gang. But he does not show his son the rules. He is not teaching him how to grow up, to become a man. He is teaching him to become a crook and simply a kind of friend, an associate.

Murder, however, is not what a father is supposed to teach. The father – well the parents, really, because there is also obviously the mother – are the ones who say to a child, ‘Do not kill.’ In La Promesse, it is actually because of Roger that Igor is able to find another ’parent’ and thus to free himself from the coercive relationship with his father. And it is a woman, Assita the foreigner, who is instrumental in accomplishing this change. Because of her Igor discovers guilt. He comes to regret having participated in a murder with his father and learns that not everything is permitted. Assita assumes the role of the father, the adult who says, ‘No. Not that. This, yes, but not that. Right and wrong are different, you cannot confuse them.’

La Promesse (Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
La Promesse was the moral trajectory of a boy. The same is true in The Son. Olivier is haunted by the murder of his son by this boy, Francis. He feels somehow that it is legitimate to want to avenge oneself; what becomes illegitimate is finding satisfaction in it. How will Olivier withstand the action of not avenging himself? He has become a kind of father for Francis – even though he is the father of the child who died. He has transformed his own son into Francis. Can he teach, bequeath, his trade to this boy? Certainly, the greatest lesson Olivier gives the teenager is not killing him. That is what can save this kid – teaching him that murder is an act that only perpetuates itself from generation to generation. Perhaps this is the reason why Francis approaches Olivier at the end, because Olivier did not kill him. It is not in order to ask forgiveness. Olivier does not say he forgives him. It is more as if the boy is thinking, ‘He didn’t kill me. Normally he would have. But he didn’t.’ That is the lesson the boy learns.

Jean-Pierre Dardenne: This is a story about transmission.

LD: Yes, about what one gives to the next generation. We do not wish to get carried away with accusations against adults, against parents; but, as La Promesse suggests, we feel that these days it is as if we adults no longer want to die to allow the generation coming after us to live. In order to educate someone, you have to know how to die so that he or she can live; so that, simply put, they can take your place. We adults want to be immortal, we want not to die. Somehow it is as if, when all is said and done, we have this desire to eat our children, like the Greek god, Cronos. In short, we have nothing to say to our children anymore unless it is, ‘Hey, go play, get out of our hair! We like you. We give you birthday parties. We do everything you want, but we have absolutely nothing to say to you. We have nothing to pass on to you.’ That is a bit of what we felt and what we attempted to show, how adults were trying to be adolescents and not fathers, not mothers – just buddies.

La Promesse (Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
Cineaste: A question about ‘The Son’: generally speaking, films that explore the theme of forgiveness in any serious manner are not common in the history of cinema. How was it that you decided to develop a project around this topic?

LD: Actually, our idea was not to write a scenario about pardon but rather about the interdiction against murder, and about desire as well. Obviously, if an act is forbidden, the desire to commit it must also exist – otherwise the act would not be forbidden. It was Olivier who attracted us. We asked ourselves what a human being is and came to the definition that certainly a human being is an individual who succeeds in not killing. Because killing is a human possibility. We wanted to see how we could push Olivier to the point of killing this adolescent and then have him not do it. How someone could remain human in such circumstances – that is what interested us. Olivier is no angel. If the boy were to say, ‘Yes, I regret what I did,’ Olivier would have become a real bastard if he just simply killed him. But suppose that the boy gets down on his knees, cries, asks forgiveness? Olivier might say, ‘Well, OK, fine – goodbye.’

However, this kid does not do that. He is not conscious of what he did; he even seems to think it was a matter of small importance. This provokes Olivier. So even though he asks himself why not teach the boy his craft, why not help this kid as he has others, we have to ask ourselves if Olivier did not, in his heart, unconsciously wish to avenge himself after all. And then he finds himself faced with the possibility of committing murder. I think that when Olivier almost kills Francis, but then gets up, he is ashamed because he almost became like the boy. He almost became a murderer, too. Killing, then, is a human possibility. It is easy. Well, difficult too, because you leave traces; you have to hide the body. That part is complicated; the killing is easy. Olivier realizes that he was almost caught in a repetition. For us the film is about how to get out of this repetition.

La Promesse (Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
Cineaste: Memory seems to be a central theme in ‘The Son’. The father has too many recollections and the boy practically none.

LD:Yes.

JPD: Yes, and you could say that Francis’s body seems to remember. He is not well and has to take medications in order to sleep. You could also say that the entire journey Olivier makes in the film is to free himself from these memories. Life returns a bit at the end of the film and begins to reestablish its prerogatives. Olivier is a man so caught up in his memories that they have become a prison for him. This is not so in the case of his ex-wife. She has not forgotten, but she has begun to live again. Not Olivier. In spite of his involvement helping his students, teaching them a trade, he continues to be obsessed by his memories. They are the only thing that interests him. Why did he decide to teach in that kind of school – a school where he is likely to meet someone like Francis? If he chose to teach there it is because one day he said to himself, perhaps unconsciously, that he was going to meet his son’s murderer.

Cineaste: So when Olivier forces Francis to admit that he had killed a child, this is not necessarily meant as an act of charity towards the youth? Although, even if Olivier is acting out of his own interests, such a verbal admission is still, nonetheless, a charitable act that will free Francis and allow him to take up his life again and to grow up.

JPD: Of course. It represents a way out for both of them. But a way out does not mean forgetting – it means being able to continue to live. You can go on living without forgetting.

Rosetta (Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
Cineaste: The sense of Olivier as a carpenter is very strong in your film. Why did you choose to give him this particular profession?

LD: In fact, in our first drafts we made Olivier a cook because we wanted something alive – preparing food, cooking, nourishing – to contrast with the presence of death in the story. But then we got a little scared of the knives because that was becoming a bit symbolic. As soon as Olivier would have gone to pick up a knife and with the audience’s knowledge that the boy had killed – the effect would have been dreadful! The idea of a carpenter came from the fact that carpenters are always measuring. Once we had decided on a carpenter the scenario was easy to do because we knew what woodworkers are, how skillful they are, how they wear overalls with a special pocket for their folding ruler, how they use a pencil to mark. And woodworking as a choice was interesting, too, because carpentry shops really exist in these schools for social rehabilitation.

Most significantly we chose carpentry as a trade for Olivier because in the end – if you consider the film in terms of a purely cinematographic sense of form – you have a man and a boy, and between them a murder that is of special significance to Olivier. How will they be able to approach each other? They are closed up in a car, for example. How will we be able to calculate, to measure the distance between these two bodies? We have that night scene where Francis measures the distance between his foot and Olivier’s. And when the moment comes for them to touch each other, will it be to forgive or to kill? Thinking about carpentry really allowed us to understand what we were trying to do in this film.

Rosetta (Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
Cineaste: In ‘The Son’ there seems to be the suggestion that, beyond physical constructions, Olivier is also bedeviled by building problems of a more metaphysical nature, such as the challenge he has faced for five years to reconstruct a meaningful life for himself after the death of his son. Olivier appears to come to the conclusion, perhaps not consciously, that Francis is salvageable building material in the sense that the youth is capable of building a life as a responsible adult. Are there hints here of religious allegory? Might your film be a kind of morality play for the modern world?

LD: Certainly when we set out to make this film we were aware that Christ was the son of a carpenter; and, therefore, that his father must have taught him a little of the trade. And that Christ died on a wooden cross. However, that was not our point of departure. I can understand how a Christian might say he or she sees the story as being about forgiveness. Why not? We, however, did not take the pardon all the way to its conclusion because we saw the main problem as being Olivier himself. At the end of the film, the protagonist does not kill the boy, whom he has forcibly restrained; later, after he has been released, Francis then approaches Olivier. Olivier is now able to teach the lad his trade.

These actions might be understood as a kind of forgiveness by some people; but Olivier does not say, ‘I forgive you’ to the boy, and the boy does not say, ‘I ask your pardon.’ To have a scene of forgiveness, it would have been necessary for the boy to ask for it. And there is the question we obviously asked ourselves – can Olivier grant forgiveness in his son’s stead? No. We did think that Olivier’s being able to teach his trade was not really such an insignificant decision. Perhaps in twenty years, when the boy will be a thirty-something-year-old man, he will write Olivier a letter thanking him for not having killed him. At that point he will understand fully all that he does not understand now.

The Son (Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
Cineaste: Why are there so many silences and so little dialogue in your films?

JPD: In fact, The Son is a film about the difficulty of speaking: Olivier has difficulty saying, ‘It was my son you killed,’ and Francis has difficulty saying what he had done. We are more interested in trying to give meaning to a scene by the way we film the relations between the characters’ bodies and what gestures a character makes – how he passes a cup to someone else, how he pours coffee into his cup. This is more interesting than presenting actions as pretexts for talking. Words come afterwards, when you cannot do anything else. In general I think there is too much talking in movies; it is an easy thing to do. But why clutter up a film with chattering?

Cineaste: Given the emphasis you place on characters’ gestures, do you use any special techniques working with your actors to get them to express what you had in mind?

LD: On the set we do not speak to the actor about why his or her character does this or that. No psychological explanations on why a character acts a certain way. Certainly actors have their own opinions; they make their own films in their heads. On the occasions when an actor tries to speak to us about such opinions, we always try to contradict him in order to keep him slightly off-balance.
What we do with the actors is also very physical. The day filming begins we do not feel obliged to do things exactly the way they were rehearsed; we pretend that we are starting over from zero so that we can rediscover things that we did before. The instructions we give the actors are above all physical. We start working without the cameraman – just the actors and my brother and me. We walk them through the blocking, first one then the other, trying several different versions. They say but do not act their lines. We do not tell them what the tone of their lines should be; we just say that we will see once the camera is rolling. At this point there is no cameraman, no sound engineer, no lighting. Then we set up all the camera movements exactly and the rhythm of the shot, which is usually a long take. Doing it this way allows us the ability to modify the actors’ movements or any small details. Then we begin and the actors really say the dialog for the first time. If a line is not delivered as we would like it, we do not say, ‘No, you should say it this way.’ It is rather, ‘Not like that, hold back.’ We ask for less, less, less, more neutral, more blank. We try to comment in a way that is negative and physical so that the actors themselves can bring something to the process.

The Son (Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
Cineaste: It strikes us that your characters run a lot. They always seem to be hurrying, and your camera is always following them from behind.

JPD: Well, since I can never be a viewer in the same sense that you are, I see things from a different angle; and, personally, I have another impression. I feel rather that in The Son it is more a question of waiting. In Rosetta we are in a dash towards something she wants – a job. Everything she does is out of her will to have, to be, to exist, to run, and the camera tries to stick to her heels. In The Son it is more a question of waiting for a word that is supposed to be spoken but is not forthcoming, and of waiting to see what Olivier will do. Even Olivier does not know. We try to show this, to take seriously the fact that when Magali asks Olivier why he is doing all this, he says that he does not know. We wanted to have the acting and the mise-en-scene reflect this state of imbalance. Maybe he is going to kill the boy; maybe he is going to teach him his trade. Maybe in teaching he will also want to kill him. So, except when we are following Olivier up and down the stairs, my impression is that we are stuck to him waiting to escape this situation.

And seen from behind. Quite so. Perhaps when there are more views of a person’s back than usual, then when you see the face, you really look at it – more than you would if you had been looking at it all the time.

LD: We filmed Olivier from the back for a lot of reasons, really. Not too long ago I saw a photograph by Dorothea Lange that I think suggests one of these reasons. The picture shows a woman of color, perhaps seventy or seventy-five, seated on a bench, probably in a New York park or street, and we are viewing her from behind. I had the feeling – very subjective –  that I was seeing her whole life there on her back, on the nape of her neck. Looking at her from this angle gave me the impression of a story, one of suffering perhaps. There she was looking at the world in front of her and there on her back were the traces of her entire history. There was today’s world and the character outside of it with her own particular history that the world does not notice, but we do perceive it because we are behind her. And I said to myself that Olivier is pretty much like that. There is the entire story with his son – which we do not know when the film begins; but observing him from behind we see something private and peculiar to him. However, it is something that he cannot see because he cannot look at his back.

The Son (Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
Cineaste: In your films we see many characters who come from the working class and who really strive to work. Would you comment on the sociopolitical positions that have led to your interest in depicting such characters.

JPD: Oh la . . . This may stem from sociopolitical positions, but it also comes from our stance as filmmakers. Making a film is also a pleasure; it is fun. Although it is also a job, no one is forcing us do it. You have to do things that you want to do, and there are certain things that you want to film more than others. You not only have to be interested in filming but you also have to be able to find a certain element of passion and desire in the process.

It is true that our characters belong to the working class or at least to what used to be the working class. You might say that Roger in La Promesse is déclassé, a man who no longer belongs to a class. He does not have a job, although we can guess that he once did have a job. Quite visibly he does not come from the upper middle class. Rosetta, too, has been ‘de-classed.’ The working class is no longer the working class. It is no longer structured as it was at the beginning of the last century. We are truly at the end of an age, of industry, of what we have known for a hundred years. Perhaps in an immediate sense, it is because we have lived a good part of our lives within this time that we choose to film it and to anchor our stories around these de-classed people. If our characters had been from the 1920s or the 1930s we would not have filmed them in the same manner. Nor would we have told the story of a former worker who becomes an exploiter of foreign laborers. Such a character does not belong in the twenties or thirties; he belongs in a period when the social structures are becoming destructured. In such times you see people who are a bit lost, who try to live by exploiting those worse off than they; people who, like Rosetta, are trying to survive.

The Son (Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne)
The Son is more abstract since Olivier is someone who has a connection with manual labor. Such an attachment does exist, quite strongly, where we come from. Even Roger, who exploits immigrant labor, works and gets his hands dirty – even if it is to bury someone. He pushes wheelbarrows around; he labors. We explained why Olivier is a carpenter. But it might have been possible, and quite interesting, to make him teach French or math to kids who have not succeeded in the regular schools. In the end, the way we depict our characters has something, and at the same time, nothing to do with sociopolitical positions.

LD: But perhaps filming gestures and very specific, material things is what allows the viewer to sense everything that is spiritual, unseen, and not a part of materiality. We tend to think that the closer one gets to the cup, to the hand, to the mouth whose lips are drinking, the more one will be able to feel something invisible – a dimension we want to follow and which would otherwise be less present in the film. How does one capture what happens when a gesture is taught? For example, when Olivier teaches the boy the movements of his trade. Yes, there is certainly the fact that the other person will do the same thing, but something else is happening, too. How can you capture that on film? Perhaps by filming the gestures as precisely as possible you can render apprehensible that which is not seen?

– Joan And Dennis West: ‘Taking The Measure Of Human Relationships: An Interview With The Dardenne Brothers’ (Cineaste, Fall 2003).