Elia Kazan: From Theatre to Film

A Streetcar Named Desire (Directed by Elia Kazan)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Streetcar Named Desire (Directed by Elia Kazan)

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

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

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

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

Wild River (Directed by Elia Kazan)

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

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

Paul Schrader on ‘Light Sleeper’

Light Sleeper (Directed by Paul Schrader)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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