James Toback: Writing on the Edge

Fingers (Directed by James Toback)

Since Karel Reisz directed his screenplay of The Gambler in 1974, James Toback’s films have focused obsessively on their creators’ pet themes: sexuality, class, race, gambling, compulsion, music, sports and philosophy. After graduating from Harvard, Toback wrote a book about American football legend Jim Brown which reflected the intensely personal, autobiographical nature of much of his subsequent work. Brown went on to appear in Toback’s 1978 directorial debut Fingers, a moody drama about a tortured young man (Harvey Keitel) torn between working as an enforcer for his father and his dreams of becoming a concert pianist. A French remake The Beat That My Heart Skipped was released in 2005.

At the time of its release "Fingers" was widely praised notably by Pauline Kael who compared Toback’s screenplay to the style of a young Tennessee Williams or Norman Mailer when he is “high on excess," adding that “There’s almost a swagger in the way [Toback] consciously goes beyond the rationally acceptable; he’s looking for art in that beyond, wanting the unknown—the dangerous—to take over.” She also admires Toback's cinematography. Richard Brody points out that what she does not do is make a connection between Toback's "avidity for filming" and the characters' irascible conduct. “Fingers” is a classical-music film on one level and a crime drama on another; the fingers in question belong to Harvey Keitel and his character, Jimmy Angelelli; a pianist who plays Bach at one moment while working as an enforcer for his gangster father, using those same fingers as fists or to pull the trigger of a gun. 

The film's central theme — and possibly the central theme of Toback's work — is the relationship between the two: in effect, the civilised surface on the verge of breaking down. Fingers is a study in stark contrasts, fusing the sublime and vulgar, classical music and 1950s rock, raw machismo and sexual perplexity. Harvey Keitel, in his first main performance since Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets, revels in a character whose low-level crime necessitates an iron resolve that he lacks. Keitel sits in his Soho apartment days before his audition at Carnegie Hall, intensely studying a Bach sonata, but is quickly sidetracked by domestic obligations and sexual allure that he sees out of his window. Keitel falls for Tisa Farrow, a sculptor who is more attracted to a womanising stud Jim Brown, whose absolute confidence contrasts sharply with Keitel's vulnerability and insecurity. Fingers, produced independently, explores racial and sexual boundaries that were deemed taboo even in the increasingly free 1970s studio system. More than any previous Toback work, the picture articulates the underlying worries of a man at odds with himself, divided between suppressed desires and the demands of the outside world.

In 1987 Toback made a tentative move towards the mainstream with The Pick-Up Artist, his first film with Robert Downey Jr., who later collaborated with Toback in 1997’s Two Girls And A Guy and 1999’s Black And White. The controversial, largely improvised Black And White also marked the beginning of Toback’s working relationship with Mike Tyson, who appears briefly in Toback’s quirky 2004 comedy-drama When Will I Be Loved and is the subject of Tyson, an intense first-person exploration of the boxer’s life and career. 

This is an extract from a 2009 interview with the AV Club when the writer, director and documentary-maker discussed his work: 

AVC: You’re known for the highly personal nature of your films. Have you ever made a movie that wasn’t on some level autobiographical?

JT: I’m not a woman, so I would say the movies Exposed and When Will I Be Loved, which were basically written for Nastassja Kinski and Neve Campbell, were only autobiographical in a very oblique sense. The themes are the same, definitely. I think, without sounding too high-minded about it, if you approach film as an artform that you’re expressing yourself through, there’s a limited number of themes that any artist has had. Look at any of the people I’ve admired—Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Oscar Wilde—all of them had certain themes that they’re dealing with over and over again. It isn’t that all of sudden Dostoyevsky’s gonna be writing about the world that Henry James wrote about. They’re just not in the same milieu. I’m pretty much where I am, I don’t want to go elsewhere. I like mining this terrain. I like the idea of switching contacts, but this is the world that I like to deal with.

Fingers (Directed by James Toback)

AVC: I remember hearing about The Beat That My Heart Skipped and thinking that sounds impossible. Some movies are so rooted in a time and place and sensibility that putting them in another country seems insane. How did you feel about the film?

JT: First of all, I was flattered ‘cause it’s the only French movie ever made remaking an American movie. No original American movie has ever been remade as a French film. And also the fact that it was done by a very good director, and a very good actor. I thought it was extremely well-done. I was glad that it called attention to Fingers. A lot of people revisited Fingers as a result, or discovered Fingers. I did not think it was a great idea to change the ending and have him get away with beating up the—and not killing him, he cries instead of killing him, and I didn’t believe that moment. And then the end, which has him happily there with his girlfriend at the concert, I really don’t believe, because that Russian gangster would not have let him live. You don’t beat up a guy like that and then he says, ‘Well I guess I lost the fight fair and square.’ It’s, ‘I’m gonna get that guy’, and since he’s very much available to be gotten I just didn’t believe that he wouldn’t get killed. So that kind of stuff actually always bothers me in any movie I see, but particularly since I knew the psychology behind the scenes I felt that was a mistake. But overall I thought it was a very impressive film and very well-done.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped (Directed by Jacques Audiard) 

AVC: Harvard Man was a project that had been floating around for decades. Are there other pet projects that you would like to someday get made?

JT: I wrote this movie about Victoria Woodhull for Faye Dunaway, which George Cukor was going to direct. I worked with Cukor on it for a year and it never got made. In Faye Dunaway’s autobiography the following sentence appears: ‘It is one of the great tragedies in the history of the movie business that James Toback’s Victoria Woodhull script has not yet been made.’ So I’ll take Faye’s word for it.

AVC: Do you think it was one of the great tragedies in the movie business?

JT: Might be a bit hyperbolic.

AVC: One of the great tragedies of western civilization?

JT: Yes, that would be better. I feel like Alain Delon, who once said, ‘It doesn’t matter that I’m not a star in America because I’m a huge star in France, I’m a legend in Spain, and I’m a god in Japan.’ So yeah, one of the true tragedies of western civilization. I think that would be—also, I’m writing a movie now called The Director which I’m very eager to make. Those are the two right now that I’d be really interested in doing.

AVC: What’s The Director about?

JT: It’s about a guy in middle age and making another movie, his 10th movie, and he’s going through some serious doubts about himself, his life, his career. He’s forced to confront his realities while making this movie and writes them into the movie. So the movie becomes a reflection of his life and his life is influenced by the movie he’s making. And you’re on the set of this drama throughout, that’s the substance of the movie. And it becomes criminal, and a lot of intriguing things happen.

The Gambler (Directed by Karel Reisz)

AVC: You had an interesting relationship with Barry Levinson on Bugsy. How was your relationship with the director when you made The Gambler?

JT: With Karel Reisz? He was my teacher. I never went to film school, never had a single hour of film study. And I wrote the script not even knowing what the script form was. I had to look up a script ‘cause I didn’t know what the proper form was. Karel spent a year with me in London going over everything in my life that resembled the film, the character, the context. We studied Las Vegas together. There was no one like Karel. He was a truly great human being. Then when it was finished, I was in the editing room, and that’s how he was my film course. So when I made Fingers I said I can make my own movie now, because I’ve been studying with Karel Reisz by having my own movie made. And I never felt I needed to go back.

Bugsy (Directed by Barry Levinson)

AVC: If you had directed Bugsy, how would it have been different from Barry Levinson’s version?

JT: I don’t know but I doubt it would have been as good, unless I directed it and the three of us [Levinson, himself and star Warren Beatty] were all together. It was a great collaboration and the three of us fed each other. If any one of us had directed it and the other two had not been there, the movie would have suffered. Did you see the new DVD? Did you see the three of us talking? You gotta see it, it’s hysterical. We had a great time. It was actually one of the best times I’ve ever had in my life and I’m sure the two of them feel the same way. It was very productive, very creative, but also the most fun I ever had on a movie. We had so long to do it, it seemed to be an unlimited amount of time.

AVC: How was your experience with The Pick-Up Artist?

JT: I felt there was a bit too much time with that particular movie. You wait around and sit in your trailer and that’s not necessarily a good thing for actors. Wasn’t good for Downey in that movie. There’s something to be said for shooting a movie on the run, being very fast. But Bugsy was an extreme form of, not only a movie about Hollywood, but a movie that was Hollywood and Las Vegas. We pulled out all the stops, and we weren’t rushed. We had time to let ideas percolate and talk about them, and each one would be open to what the others were saying. It was a once in a lifetime collaboration.

The Pick-Up Artist (Directed by James Toback)

AVC: On the one hand it has your intensity and pet themes, but it also has a bigness and gloss that isn’t in your other films.

JT: Exposed has it in a different way, it has a real size and scope. It’s also partly that it’s a period piece. It’s the era itself that was depicted, and if you’re gonna do it right you have to do it that way. It was palpable.

AVC: A lot of your recent films have been improvised or largely improvised. What led to this shift away from scripting?

JT: It’s a question of what’s the scene. Half of Black And White is improvised, half is strictly written. Half of When Will I Be Loved is strictly written, half is invented. For instance the scene with Dominic Chianese and Neve Campbell had to be very tightly scripted. It just never would have worked otherwise. The scene with her and me walking in a street in Columbia had to be improvised. It would’ve felt wrong any other way. I think you have to take it case by case.

When Will I Be Loved (Directed by James Toback)

AVC: Tyson seems to be one of your recent muses, and Jim Brown was one of your first sources of fascination. Do you think similar things attracted you to both men?

JT: What attracted me to Jim was moving into that world. It was a hedonistic era, pre-AIDS, with a lot of extremely impressive black athletes, of which Jim was by far the most gifted, dealing with life in a very bold way in a kind of wild, open-ended, free-spirited time. I just thought it’d be a great learning experience. I’d been married to the granddaughter of the Duke Of Marlborough just before that, and I thought this would be an interesting juxtaposition, in what I still considered to be a learning part of my life. Mike and Jim are quite different people. Jim is a really well controlled person. Jim is an organized character, a focused character; he knows what he’s saying, what he’s doing, what he wants to accomplish. And Mike is in a kind of parallel reality. The only thing they really have in common is that I think each is the best in the history of his sport. 

AVC: Do you see a lot of yourself in Mike Tyson?

JT: Well I certainly feel I have the personality of what he calls an extremist, somebody who is always pushing it to one extreme or another. He says nobody can understand the mind of an extremist who isn’t one. Similarly, no extremist can understand the mind of a moderate. When people are temperate in their behavior, in their lives, someone who is addictive or extreme or obsessive can’t understand how people can just go through their lives in the middle, and people who are rational and balanced can’t understand the opposite. I’m one who’s in the extreme camp in almost every area of my life and I always have been. I’ve observed that I’m in a minority, but I never understand people who are measured. And it may be one of the foundations of the odd relationship I’ve had with him over the years with him. We’ve had a lot of long interesting conversations in the middle of the night about all the fundamental aspects of life, which are in effect the fundamental aspects of this movie, namely identity, race, sex, love, madness, crime and death. And boxing.

Tyson (Directed by James Toback)

AVC: How did your relationship with Mike Tyson begin?

JT: I met him on the set of The Pick-Up Artist in 1985. He’d come to meet [Robert] Downey [Jr.]. We hit it off immediately. It was just a natural easy rapport, which is actually not difficult to start with him because it’s his way. He speaks in a kind of unadulterated, uncensored way, and gives you a sense that he is going to be direct and truthful with you and you feel obligated to be that way with him. We had a long walk through Central Park at about five in the morning in which it became very clear to me anyway that we had a lot to say to each other despite superficial differences and that it would be probably a rather interesting relationship.

AVC: How did Tyson go from being a friend to a subject of your movies?

JT: Well, he was in Black And White, and that struck me as a very impressive performance. He was great in the improvised scenes with Downey and Brooke Shields, and then in the next scene where he’s talking meditatively and self-reflexively about being incarcerated and being strip-searched, and wanting both to kill the guy who was about to betray him and to withhold murder because he was trying to maintain an image. He was very impressive and articulate. And I thought I could take this Mike Tyson and expand it into a movie easily. And I suggested it to him and he said whenever you’re ready, let’s do it.

Black And White (Directed by James Toback)

AVC: How much of a framework did you give Mike Tyson or Robert Downey Jr. or Brooke Shields when you were making Black And White?

JT: I told them what the intentions were. I said to Tyson, just stand by the window, Downey’s gonna come over and chat with you, and just respond. And to Downey I said hit on Mike relentlessly until he responds, and to Brooke I said shoot it with your minicam and respond any way you like. The initial effect was that Downey hit on Tyson so relentlessly that Tyson did respond. Oh, actually Downey said to me, ‘what if he kills me?’ I said well, it raises an interesting question. As of right now you’re headed for a likely death in a parking lot in Santa Monica or a motel in Culver City. What’s better, that death or dying by being killed live by Mike Tyson? And he cracked up and went ahead and hit on him. And he crawled away, and I almost called out to Brooke, ‘don’t pay any attention to Downey’, ‘cause I was afraid she was going to be solicitous of Downey, which would have blown the rest of the scenes. But fortunately she had very good instincts and hit on Mike and discombobulated him. That was played out to the end of the scene, and they came up with all that stuff...

- Extracted from Nathan Rabin: ‘Interview: James Toback’, April 2009. Full article here: http://www.avclub.com

Charlie Kaufman: On Adaptation

Adaptation (Directed by Spike Jonze) 

Adaptation tells the story of a misunderstood and socially inept screenwriter called Charlie Kaufman struggling to adapt Susan Orlean’s dense book The Orchid Thief about John Laroche, a colorful character who was arrested in Florida for stealing rare orchids from a state-protected preserve. Facing severe writer’s block, Nicolas Cage (playing Charlie Kaufman) early on states his fateful goal of: ‘I just don’t want to ruin it by making it a ‘Hollywood’ thing. It’s like I don’t want to cram in sex, or guns, or car chases or characters overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end.’ While the film deliberately meanders through the first two acts, the appearance of screenwriting guru and seminar leader Robert McKee sends the third act into motion when he tells Kaufman, ‘You can have an uninvolving, tedious movie, but wow them at the end, and you’ve got a hit.’ The initial draft of Adaptation took this advice and the third act sent Kaufman and his brother, Donald, into the drug lair of Orlean and Laroche, who’ve kidnapped Charlie and plan to kill him in a Florida swamp. Donald bites the dust while trying to save Charlie, but just as the gun is turned on Charlie, an act-two throwaway joke about a mystic Swamp Ape manifests itself into the scene and saves Kaufman. The finished film ended up taking a different course, however...

The following extract is taken from an interview with Creative Screenwriting in which Charlie Kaufman discusses how he came to write the script of Adaptation and why the Swamp Ape never made it into the final cut of the film:

CS: When you began adapting The Orchid Thief were you given free rein to do what ever you wanted?


CK: They approached me with the book, and I liked it a lot. I was getting other kinds of offers, but this one just seemed more substantial to me. It seemed to be about something other than the usual stuff I get offered. So I took it. I kind of thought I would figure it out, and I guess this is how I figured it out. Or not. They certainly left me alone. I don’t think they imagined... I didn’t tell them what I had in mind because I wasn’t sure what I’d do when I took the job. And when I decided I wanted to take the material in this direction, I felt like I needed to write it before showing it to them. Because if I pitched it, I thought I’d be, you know, dismissed! I don’t think they expected this kind of script; they expected something a little more faithful.

CS: You essentially blew your assignment and handed in a script about yourself. Most writers would either be fired or sued for doing this – why weren’t you?


CK: I wasn’t fired when I turned it in for two reasons. First, my work was done. I guess they could’ve fired me and hired another writer to do it at that point, but I think the other reason is that they liked it. I didn’t know that they were going to like it, but I lucked out, and they liked it.

CS: What did your agent think?

CK: I don’t think my agent saw it until [Jonathan] Demme’s company saw it. I don’t remember the chronology exactly, but by the time my agent saw it, I think it was a good thing, not a bad thing. I didn’t tell anybody what I was doing, because by the time I came up with this idea to do it this way, I was pretty much out of ideas. I thought I’d better do it rather than pitch it because if I did, they would say no and I had no other ideas. I wanted to try it even though I thought it was going to be a disaster.

CS: Were you ever worried about the repercussions?

CK: Yeah, I thought I wasn’t going to work anymore. I thought it was gonna be like, ya know, like you said, they paid good money for this thing, they hired me, I took a very long time to write it, and this is what I finally gave them after they’d been waiting all this time. But at the same time, I’d been talking about the movie/script to people, and I got the sense that people thought it was a funny idea, so I had a little bit of confidence that it might not be so terrible.

CS: Do you have any sort of support group, close friends, etc., that reads your material before you go out with it?


CK: No. No one reads anything I write until I turn it in. I thought the mentions in the film of the Casablanca screenplay were a hilarious insider writer’s joke. Most in the industry know that Casablanca was rewritten continually on set, as opposed to being a screenplay that was simply written and then filmed. I’m actually just quoting verbatim Robert McKee. That’s all McKee always talks about, so I was doing a Robert McKee thing.

CS: Interesting. I assume you went to a McKee seminar?

CK: Yes, I didn’t go to it for the reason that Kaufman goes in the movie. I went for research on this film.

CS: Were there ever any plans to have the real McKee in Adaptation?


CK: We talked about it, but we weren’t putting anyone else real in there, so we thought it’d be weird.

CS: What’d he think about being a character in your film?

CK: Ultimately, he really liked the movie. He came to a screening recently and was very pleased.

CS: I was sad to see McKee’s one-page speech about how you can’t do a one-page speech in a movie go. Why was it cut?

CK: 
I think it was filmed but cut because the movie was so long... a lot of that stuff was filmed, and the assembly of the movie was so dense, so much stuff happened. Even as it is now it’s a little bit overwhelming. So, we’re trying to get the movie moving at that point, and that was obviously, intentionally a complete stop in everything, so I think that’s why it’s gone. I think we’re going to publish the script as we went into production with it, so that will be in there.

CS: Do you think the film remained true to the tone of the screenplay?


CK: Adaptation is an interesting thing because it’s an extremely modular structure. The order is completely open. It isn’t arbitrary. I mean it’s all intention al on my part, but at the same time when you’re cutting any movie, you’re moving stuff around because you have to, or because you’ve cut out scenes and you need to make things work again. Inevitably, you do move things, and with a more linear story there are certain constrictions; it leaves you options but not as many. There are infinite number of options to Adaptation. It’s sort of a godsend, but it’s also daunting because you never really know how to ultimately structure it. You say to yourself, ‘Oh, you could do this.’ Or, ‘Wait, we could do this. Move this here.’ And it goes on and on. So it’s been tricky. We’re probably about two-thirds of the way through at this point, and we still have to shoot. So we’ll see what kind of shape it takes...

CS: Do you ever take rewrite assignments?

CK: No. I’ve thought about taking rewrite work or production polish stuff, but I haven’t yet. I’ve been busy with my own stuff; it’s what I prefer to do. But I guess at some point maybe I will.

CS: Do you plan to direct?

CK: I’ve been writing something now. I’ve cleaned my plate a bit; I’ve been dealing with stuff that I had to do for a long time now. I finished a draft of another script which Michel [Gondry] is going to direct, and that was something that’s been haunting me for quite a while. So there’s a draft in, and there’s more work to do, but it frees me up to start a new spec. My intention is to direct it.

CS: Tell me about your new project, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It’s set to star Kate Winslet and Jim Carrey, right?


CK: Yes. What initially happened was Michel Gondry had a friend in France who had an idea – he’s kind of a conceptual artist – and the thought was, ‘What if you got a card in the mail one day that said you’d been erased from someone’s memory?’ So, Michel came to me with that idea, and we kind of worked it into a bit of story. And we pitched it –

CS: Don’t say ‘pitched’; that’s what Donald Kaufman would say.


CK: [Laughs] Yep, Kaufman’s dialogue in Adaptation. I hated when Donald would say that. Anyway, it was my one sort of pitching experience, and I went around to a bunch of different studios with Michel and ended up selling it. I started writing it probably in 1998, and because there was all this other stuff happening with Adaptation and Human Nature, it kind of took a while. It was also very complicated for me to write. The conceit is sort of tricky, because not only is it going backward, but the memory is being erased while the character is going through it, and there are a lot of technical problems there.

CS: I really liked the screenplay. I heard you cut out the sci-fi beginning and ending from your first draft in order to keep things more rooted in reality?

CK: 
Yeah, I like starting it this way because it doesn’t tell the audience anything about what they’re going to see. I like the idea of taking the audience in one direction and then jerking them in another direction and having them have to catch up to figure out what’s going on, and I think this does that.

CS: Okay, now for the question I’ve been waiting to ask. I loved the Swamp Ape from the first draft of Adaptation and was sad to see it go –


CK: Oh, no...

CS: I’m curious about the decision to leave that and a lot of the other surrealistic scenes from the first draft behind.

CK: It’s a discussion and an argument that Spike [Jonze] and I had for a long time. I think that was Spike’s decision or insistence. The difference in the last part of the movie that we shot and the last part of the movie as I originally wrote it is that it’s less broad. Spike felt it was important that there be no demarcation between the first part of the movie and the last part of the movie – that they blend together so that you could watch the whole thing and be emotionally engaged and then afterward think about it and go, ‘Oh, wait a minute, isn’t that what he said he wasn’t going to do?’ So, that’s the reasoning why it’s not there, and I think ultimately I agree with it, especially in the form that the movie has taken – even though I had an affection for the Swamp Ape too. But I think looking at the movie the way it is, it would have been very out of place.

CS: Were you worried about changing an ending that so many of your various executives and producers loved?


CK: Even Malkovich got changed. Malkovich was a lot sillier than it ended up being as a movie. The last third of Malkovich is completely changed from my original draft. It was very much more comedic, less angst-ridden...

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

 

Oliver Stone: On Film Biography

Nixon (Directed by Oliver Stone)

Despite the remarkable impact that Oliver Stone's filmography has had on the general public's perception of American history, notably the tumult surrounding the Vietnam War and the killing of John F. Kennedy, he remains controversial among critics. His unique approach has been defined as subjectively and vividly imaginative, uncompromising, fearless, emotional, and unapologetically male. The way in which Stone employs his own storytelling technique is most effective when employed within the context of a particular storyline and historical milieu. Western male characters are his strongest areas of expertise, and so are plots in which the action centres on matters he is passionately invested in, as is the case with the films Platoon, JFK, and Natural Born Killers. 

In the beginning of Oliver Stone's Nixon, we are first introduced to gloomy imagery, accompanied by television news coverage of the Watergate affair, all set to a compelling theme song by composer John Williams. But as the movie begins, the aftermath of Watergate is not the main interest of Stone. 

In the movie, the Biblical quote, “What benefit comes to a man if he gains the whole world but loses his soul?” is evident, and the remarkable lead performance from Anthony Hopkins, who plays the 37th president, clearly lays out the film’s concern with the man himself. Hopkins enters the character's nervousness, intellect, and fears, together with his physical challenges, in a portrayal that goes beyond his actual physical limits. 

Stone is compelled by a fascination with the president's ability to overcome adversity and sadness over his failures. The film presents events that span decades of the subject's life in around three hours of running time (the director's cut gives a rough estimate of three and a half hours). 

Using alternating tilted perspectives, black-and-white stock film, and false newsreel video, he was able to use all of those aspects to his advantage in his creation of the muddled paranoia in JFK, and inescapable sensory overload in Natural Born Killers. Nixon's collage takes an unexpected turn, moving towards elegance. The cast of characters is extensive and includes Dan Hedaya, who went on to play Nixon in Dick. But the president, tarnished by his failings, stands aloof and ultimately alone.

Writer-director Oliver Stone was in the final weeks of postproduction on Nixon when he conducted an interview with writer and critic Ric Gentry. Gentry comments:

“Under unavoidable pressure, appearing a bit weary, Stone was nevertheless spirited, buoyant, and often jovial, prone to laughing frequently and heartily, including at some of his own foibles. In retrospect, I have the impression that he welcomed the opportunity to emerge from prolonged, intense work on the film to begin reflecting on its processes as well as preparing himself for how Nixon [1995] would be received. Stone was also very generous with his time, despite several necessary interruptions.

“While projecting twentieth-century U.S. history through the biography of the thirty-seventh president, Stone also projects a veritable history of the film medium through a profusion of techniques—from the associative metaphors of Griffith to the high-tech digital matting of Industrial Light and Magic; Soviet con- struction to the deep focus of Welles; the experimentation of the 1950s and 1960s to the Saturday afternoon newsreels of the pretelevision era. Though a “calm, thoughtful” film, as Stone describes it, the freewheeling incorporation of techniques and formal devices works to hypercharge, indeed transcend what is usually one of the most staid of genres, the solemn historical biography.

“Nixon also enables Stone to amplify themes at the crux of several of his other films: the ascent and influence of the military industrial complex, the Vietnam War, the CIA-organized crime coalition, the JFK assassination, how power and avarice corrupt, how mass media pollutes American culture and society, how the 1960s were a turning point in our historical destiny, how individuals must struggle for their own redemption. The issues in Nixon, however, are viewed from the apex of power, which in part shades the steep, abrupt fall of the protagonist.

“Nixon begins with the beam of a 16mm projector cutting through the confines of a dark room to show a cheerfully ingenuous 1950s-style sales training film, then moves to Nixon in the firelit gloom of the Lincoln Sitting Room in the White House pondering his own involvement in the Watergate quagmire. Stone once remarked that what each of his characters had in common was the fight for identity, integrity, and the fate of their soul—sometimes losing it, sometimes regaining it—and that he felt the highest virtue was the Socratic one: to know thyself. The juxtaposition between a lesson in self-promotion and the psycho- logical disability of the uncomprehending and unrepentant chief executive indi- cates that, by this criterion, Nixon committed the ultimate error. The confusion and doubt at the core of Nixon’s success is Death of a Salesman raised to something like the tenth power.”

The following extract from Ric Gentry’s interview with writer-director Oliver Stone revolves around the idea of cinematic biography, its limitations and possibilities.

Nixon (Directed by Oliver Stone)

RG: How do you prepare for your shot?

OS: Basically it’s a changing process. It’s somewhere in between improvisation and planning. In writing, or cowriting the material, I absorb every single line, totally, as a writer. So it’s set, in my head. It’s visualized. It’s seen. I come to the set. I’m not Hitchcock. I wouldn’t be able to function under that tedium, of shooting something prearranged. So I’m always trying to refine it in my head. So as the day goes, perception happens, enlightenment occurs. That’s what makes it interesting.
Let’s say you come to a scene and you think it out in twelve to fifteen shots and all of a sudden—it clicks. You can do it in seven. Or nine. Or four. That’s when it’s interesting because suddenly you thought you had it preconceived, you thought you had it figured out and you were wrong. So you’re obviously testing yourself and it’s a game you play, a warrior-athlete kind of thing. It’s interesting. It’s fun.

I don’t use storyboards unless it’s ultra complicated and something involving armies and a lot of money. (Where there’s) a lot of money (involved), you might have to do that. But if you can shoot it—within my confines, it’s in my head—I come up with it, my shot list, shot for shot, and that’s the one that’s ready. That’s my fallback position. Rehearsal occurs. Actors bring enormous contributions and changes. This is the second set of rehearsals by the way (on the set). The first set’s already occurred before the production. This is organized. We’re very organized. We improvise off preparation...

Nixon (Directed by Oliver Stone)

RG: How is Nixon structured?

OS: The film is the most complex structure I’ve done. More so than JFK. Natural Born Killers, if you study the structure, is also complicated. Because there are things that happen inside time, and inside of that. In Nixon, we’re outside time, inside time, outside time, inside time, it goes back and forth. I love it. It’s like going into an architecturally modern building and being surprised at every corner. Because we do things . . . there’s a newsreel in the middle of the picture [laughs] which retraces his steps. We retrace his steps two to three to four times in the movie. It is extremely complex.

RG: So you might want to go back over the same event, looking at it from a separate perspective?

OS: Yes.

RG: Like Citizen Kane in a way?

OS: Yes. It’s the totality of his life. It’s an interpretation of his life. It’s a myth about his life. [Laughs.] It’s what we choose to see Nixon as. Nixon is a prism for us, too, and looking at him we can only judge ourselves. Each person can stand in a different position and look and see and reflect and be reflected on.

RG: A man who was elected president and reelected by the most decisive margin in our history has to be a reflection of his country.

Nixon (Directed by Oliver Stone)

OS: That would be an indication. And just his years as a politician. A great many years in public life. One person described it nicely to me in saying, in each scene you never know which Richard Nixon you’re going to meet. So, in other words, sometimes you think he’s contemptible and sometimes you think he’s magnifi- cent. And you go to the things between. So I would say, it’s purpose is character study. When I was pitching it at Warner Brothers and they turned us down, I said it was a character piece, a portrait. And I implied that they could look at examples like Patton [1970] or Gandhi [1982], and consider it that way. That’s why it was called Nixon, as opposed to JFK. JFK was not a biography. JFK’s a code. I imagined it like Z. A code for something else. JFK is not featured. I’ve done biography, with [Jim] Morrison [The Doors] and Kovic and lately [Le Ly] Hayslip [Heaven & Earth, 1993]. And Boyle, Richard Boyle, to some degree [in Salvador, 1986].

RG: And the Midnight Express [1978] character.

OS: Yes.

RG: The Tony Montana character in Scarface [1983, which Stone wrote] is situated in the context of real events. I think one of the great things about your films is how they impinge on or parallel things that have occurred, often examining political situations or cultural institutions through drama. Even the style sometimes strives to make that political or cultural situation more deeply felt with a documentary kind of camera.

OS: I’ve been fracturing biography for years. And now with Nixon, I think the first hour and a half of the movie is the antecedents of the man. It’s all the threads that lead to him. At the halfway point, you come up to the Republican convention, national convention (in 1968). Halfway, and that is when he gets the power, so we enter into another arena now. What does he do now, now that we’ve seen the antecedents of the man? What are going to be the consequences? And the second part is more linear. And proceeds in more linear fashion for that reason.

JFK (Directed by Oliver Stone)

RG: So that’s his administration.

OS: Yeah, but I feel the antecedents are complex. And I’m not sure that we even got them all. I think there’s more stuff we could’ve done. But given the limitations of my mind and the script—the opening is intended as antecedent.

RG: What are some of the features of the antecedents?

OS: The threads of his life: loss, death, class warfare, bitterness, Quakerism. These are some of the antecedents. Also great idealism. We must not forget. Great idealism. Invoked by his mother. But, an idealism that is more image than reality.

RG: Is the movie too complex, too confusing to an audience?

OS: I don’t know. Maybe it is. This is a gamble again. I was afraid on Natural Born Killers. That was one of the few movies I ever took out and previewed. I had time to. But I took it out quietly to Seattle and showed it two different nights to younger people, admittedly a music audience, so it was favorable in our direction, but I was enormously relieved that they understood the effect of the film, because it was extremely fast, at that point.

This was probably the first film with that amount of imagery that quick. And I thought, maybe the synapses were just going to collapse. [Laughs.] It was scary. But—it worked. I mean, we pulled back on a lot of the chaos. There was more chaos in that cut. And we pulled back on the chaos a bit.

Natural Born Killers (Directed by Oliver Stone)

RG: In a sense, pacing it out a little less intensely or dynamically?

OS: Yeah, yeah. And pulling out some of the wild cutting, the juxtaposition of imagery is pretty insane. And we pulled back. And we pulled back even a little more with the MPAA. So by the time it came out and everyone was saying it was such a radical film, I was shocked because we made 150 cuts for the MPAA. And on top of that we’d peeled it back a bit for Warners.

I’m glad to say the director’s cut will come out now. It was a struggle for awhile to get it out, but we’re going to get out this director’s cut of NBK. Nobody has seen that film. Those are my rhythms with my editors. That’s the way the film was submitted to the MPAA. And we‘re going to add another twenty minutes of scenes on the back of the video, scenes that were never even submitted that were shot. Some of them—crazy. [Laughs.]

With Nixon, I guess I would say that although the plot is complex, the camera is quieter. More classical. Containing Nixon. And being contained by Nixon. You understand the duality. And Nixon controls much of it. Although, there are overlays, I think, of good air. You need a breather in a word film, a film about the word. This is a dialogue movie. And character movie. Character and dialogue movie. But you need air in these things. I never liked the kinds of movies that go for Academy Award performances by putting the camera on the actor and letting the actor just like run with the ball.

Natural Born Killers (Directed by Oliver Stone)

RG: Just follow the actor.

OS: Yeah, it becomes to me—they say that’s nondistracting. I find that distracting. [Laughs.] Scent of a Woman [1992] is a case in point. It’s made by a very good director but because it’s Al [Pacino], he just puts the camera on Al and that’s it. There’s no judiciousness in that. So I think that attitude is important.

Directors are faced with a tremendous temptation, and choice, each moment of each day. Directors are tested in a sense—their souls are being bought and sold every day. Are they going to sell out or not? The power resides with the actor because he’s being paid more money by the system. The actor therefore dominates or can dominate. And the director ultimately must keep him happy and sometimes suit his style; he cuts his own style to fit that of the nature of the producer, or the nature of the actor, or the nature of the studio, or the nature of the story.

And then other directors maintain their own style but it takes enormous strength to do that. Because you have to resist the power. You know, directors have limited power. They do. I mean, all this nonsense about the megalomania of the Hollywood director, it’s just bullshit because the director is very vulnera- ble. It takes a long time to make a film. Each time a film comes out you’re judged and cut to shreds, or it’s dismissed, it’s nothing. An actor can do three films a year, if he has to. A director, no way. Plus the whole process is mentally exhausting. It really drains you. It takes your body and soul.

– Oliver Stone Interviewed by Ric Gentry in ed. Gerald Duchovny. Film Voices.