John Cassavetes: On the Making of Husbands

Husbands (Directed by John Cassavetes)

Subtitled a ‘comedy about life, death and freedom’ John Cassavetes’ extraordinary drama Husbands tells the story of three suburban family men who react to a friend’s premature death by embarking on an extended binge, initially in New York and then London. Cassavetes conceived the film as a showcase for the acting talents of himself, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara, basing the story around incidents from his own life and writing the dialogue after extended improvising with Gazzara and Falk. In the actors’ fully realized performances – replete with emotional outbursts and boisterous clowning – these long-suppressed characters’ identities break out in a provocative and uncompromising journey into the psyche of the American male. Cassavetes focuses on the complex emotions and relationships that constrain individual freedom, exposing the confusion and chaos that underlies the yearnings of the American dream. In the words of the film critic Geoff Andrew Husbands is ‘a marvellous example of [Cassavetes’] methods. With its ultra-naturalistic performances, its simple, meandering narrative and its long takes, it makes for a warts-and-all study of male pride, self-pity, frustration and friendship that is at once properly serious and sharply funny.’

Here is an edited extract from an interview John Cassavetes gave at the time of the film’s original release. The full version can be found in Raymond Carney’s Cassavetes on Cassavetes:

Before Husbands was a screenplay, I must have done about 400 pages of notes. I thought about it for several years. Then there was a screenplay. My first draft was abominable – all the pitfalls of that first-told tale – a slick farce predicated on men running away from their wives to the lure of the will. There are certain catchphrases that people are attracted to made famous by Time magazine, such as ‘Swinging London’ – and there‘s always someone standing around behind you who says, ‘That sounds funny,’ but when you look into the eyes of two artists who want the best for themselves and want to be associated with something that has some meaning that’s not good enough. The characters were empty. During the second half of 1968, Ben, Peter and I passed dozens of revisions of the script around everywhere we went. From Rome [where Cassavetes was acting in Machine Gun McCain] we had been to Las Vegas, New York, San Francisco [where the exteriors for Machine Gun McCain were filmed], Los Angeles and back to New York [where Gazzara lived and Cassavetes was supervising the release of Faces]. We had followed each other around using every spare moment we could find to assess the values of three men - three New Yorkers with jobs, who had passed the plateau of youth, who were married and happy and living in Port Washington, Long Island, the commuters’ paradise. That’s as far as we got in one year. Long conversations until five o’clock in the morning. Back and forth the story went.

Cassavetes’ method was to discover what a film was about in the process of writing, rehearsing and filming it and to follow those discoveries wherever they led.

The characters in Husbands are quite different from those in Faces. I mean Faces was about people who were just getting by. These guys don’t want to just get by in life. They want to live. I don’t really know what Husbands is about at this point. You could say it’s about three married guys who want something for themselves. They don’t know what they want, but they get scared when their best friend dies. Or you could say it is about three men that are in search of love and don’t know how to attain it. Or you could say it is about a person of sentiment. Every scene in the picture will be our opinions about sentiment. I try to talk to the actors and try to find out what I really think about sentiment. It may turn harsh or bitter; but I can allow anything as long as I know we are honest. We worked with no story, basically no story except what I mentioned, and worked for a year to try to solve it and to gain, to get something out of it.

When you make a film whose interest is to take an extremely difficult subject, deal with it in depth and see if you can find something in yourself, and if other people can find other things within themselves that they will be able to develop in their personal life, it’s great. After being an actor for a few years you really don’t care about money, fame or glory anymore; those things are good, but you need something more.

Cassavetes’ elusiveness about the subject of his film was neither modesty nor coyness. He believed that to lock himself into a predetermined story or a preconceived conception of his characters’ identities was too limiting. To play a ‘character’ in a ‘narrative’ was to reduce the sliding, shifting complexity of life to cartoon clichés.

Each moment was found as we went along – not off the cuff, not without reason – but without a preconceived notion that forbids people from behaving like people and tells a ‘story’ that is predictable – and untrue. I hate knowing my theme and my story before I really start. I like to discover it as I work. In Husbands the off-the-set relationship between Gazzara, Falk and myself determined a lot of the scenes we created as we went along. It was a process of discovering the story and the theme. When you know in advance what the story is going to be, it gets boring really fast. At one point we decided that we weren’t even going to shoot in London; Peter broke into laughter and so did I. What a terrific thrill to tell the truth – to not protect some stupid idea that doesn’t work. From then on, it didn’t matter if it was London, Paris, Hamburg – or Duluth!

I believe that if an actor creates a character out of his emotions and experiences, he should do with that character what he wants. If what he is doing comes out of that, then it has to be meaningful. If Peter and Ben and I have three characters, why should a director come in and impose a fourth will? If the feelings are true and the relationship is pure, the story will come out of that. If you don’t have a script, you don’t have a commitment to just saying lines. If you don’t have a script, then you take the essence of what you really feel and say that. You can behave more as yourself than you would ordinarily with someone else’s lines. Most directors make a big mystery of their work; they tell you about your character and your responsibility to the overall thing. Bullshit. With people like Ben and Peter you don’t give directions. You give freedom and ideas.

Cassavetes and his actors couldn’t say where they were going to come out in advance because the actors were on a voyage of exploration. Acting was not about pretending to be something but about discovering what you really were. The feelings in the film were not poses but states of real emotional exposure. You were really to listen, think and react.

An actor can’t suddenly deny or reject a part of himself under the pretext of playing a particular character, even if that’s what he would like to do. You can’t ask someone to forget themselves and become another person. If you were asked to play Napoleon in a picture, for example, you can’t really have his emotions and thoughts, only yours. You could never actually be Napoleon, only yourself playing him. I’ve never wanted to play a role. Honestly, I never have! That indicates to me that you want to step forward and show someone something, and that terrifies me, really. What you want to do is be invisible as that character, so that there’s no pressure on you worrying about the outside world.

Cassavetes was committed to exploring the truth about these men and their feelings, wherever it might lead.

Husbands depicts the American man without any camouflage. It’s very difficult for some people to feel, or to see themselves in a bad form. I think that people in films are expected to be heroes, even with the anti-hero situation going on for years and years in literature. People expect too much from themselves, they want to look great. You know what actors are? They’re ‘professional people.’ They get paid for being people. If you don’t have any weaknesses, you’d be a superhero! [I try to have] the actors try not to be better than they are. The strange thing is that in this way they reveal themselves as human beings.

The goal was to explore emotional realities, however ugly, embarrassing, or painful they might be:

The job that has to be done here is for three men to investigate themselves – honestly, without suppression. It’s very difficult for someone to reveal themselves. It’s very difficult to say what you really mean, because what you really mean is painful. I can’t help being like most everybody else sometimes, pushing down what I feel so far that even when I hear my own feelings described, it sounds alien, foreign, unconnected. The most terrifying thing for me is to face myself utterly and truthfully. While working on [Husbands], I was forced to ask myself questions I never asked myself before. Ben and Peter had to do the same thing. We had to open ourselves up and look at ourselves, and we all have hang-ups. Is it really better to be a man-child or to be a man? I don’t know. The minute you settle down and say, ‘That’s it. I’m closing shop. I know what I am,’ then you’re a man, no longer a man-child. And none of us are really all that open, and we’re a little defensive. So the three of us would sit down and talk and improvise and give ourselves a problem by putting ourselves in a real situation and trying to find out the honest answers. And I’d write the scene, and rewrite, and we’d improvise again. Every actor – every good actor – does this or tries to do this with every part he plays. What we have given to the film as actors has been what we are. Where we have failed is when we couldn’t reach ourselves and the essence of what we really feel, or we were too shy or inhibited to let it out.

The only thing that counts is that you’re all doing the same thing, you’re testing each other, testing yourself. In that situation each actor is thinking, ‘How far up can I reach?’ That’s selfish – and honest. I don’t think Peter and Benny were too concerned about how far I could go as a director; they were thinking about how far they could go as actors. And, in a realistic sense, Benny couldn’t go any place unless Peter was good and unless I was good. So we knew we had to work on that level, and in order to do that, we had to get tight with each other.

As it did in Faces, Cassavetes’ references to ‘improvisation’ in post-release interviews created misunderstandings about his working methods. It is clear that, for him, improvisation was a way of refining a script – not of doing without it:

I think you have to define what improvisation does – not what it is. Improvisation to me means that there is a characteristic spontaneity in the work which makes it appear not to have been planned. I write a very tight script, and from there on in I allow the actors to interpret it the way they wish. But once they choose their way, then I’m extremely disciplined – and they must also be extremely disciplined about their own interpretations. There’s a difference between ad-libbing and improvising, and there’s a difference between not knowing what to do and just saying something. [I believe in] improvising on the basis of the written work, and not on undisciplined creativity. When you have an important scene, you want it written; but there are still times when you want things just to happen.

Illustrations of how Cassavetes worked. Here he is planning and directing the scene involving Harry, his wife, and his mother-in-law:

I realized in making the picture, that it was more difficult dealing with three guys and what three guys wanted, than it was dealing with one guy and what he wanted. I was constantly aware of the structural problems. One of us had a turn, and then another, and then another. Somehow the picture had to start taking over so that nobody had any more turns. What is happening evolves out of the action, but there is no specific importance to individual incidents. This scene with Ben evolved because we knew that people would say, ‘Gee, you never saw one wife.’ That just kept ringing in my mind. I didn’t want people to approach me on the street and say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful? You never saw a wife in that.’ That’s kind of a nightmare. We decided to show the one wife. To do that we had to come up with some kind of relationship that would be meaningful for the other two guys. We wrote a very quick scene. We got the actors in, and got a stage. It was all very stagy. I knew that it would pay off once he choked the mother-in-law.

On the set:

Ben, you’ll go into the bathroom and start to shave. Your mother-in-law comes in. I don’t know what I’ll do with her, maybe I’ll have her sit on the edge of the tub and watch you. There are three things you have to keep in mind – one, she’s a mother, that’s what she is first of all; two, you like her and she likes you – she’s an intelligent woman and she knows that what’s wrong with the marriage is that you try too hard; three, she’s the enemy and don’t you forget it – because if the marriage breaks up, she’s not going with you.

The scene with the ‘Countess’ was inspired by an extra in the casino scene. Cassavetes’ comments illustrate his willingness to do anything necessary to get a good performance – even to the point of making the actor uncomfortable.

You see that woman sitting there and you’ve got to have her in the scene. So I took that lady and Peter and I wrote a scene [on the spot] and gave it to him. The secretary wrote it out and gave it to Peter and to the lady, and she looked at it. Peter was all right, but how could she catch up? She was just sitting there. She was out of place. She didn’t know what to expect. All the camera crew and everybody else was looking at this woman. What was going to happen? She had a few lines, and she had to, in a sense, be romantic. Sometimes it’s utter and total cruelty to elicit something pretty out of somebody. You have to be cruel to somebody sometimes, but it is only cruel in some kind of a social bullshit way. I mean, we’re all there to get something good. The woman was tight. She didn’t know what was expected of her, and it was too late for her to find out in the course of the filming. I would say terrible things to her, just awful things. She would fight them off like a lady. She reached a point where she could do everything by herself. She was grateful for that attitude of not giving a shit of what anybody else thought, because everything bad had already happened. From there on in, she just started to play. She was herself, which she had to be. Peter played the scene with her. It was very good, and she was very good. I would say things like, ‘Look at that face.’

It’s terrific for Peter to try to pick up that woman. It’s right that he would pick her up, because she is the safest woman in the place. It was very easy for him to talk to her. Peter was all right, because he was really comfortable. He was more comfortable in that scene than in a lot of other scenes, because it was right. The situation was right. He would go over and talk to that woman. She’s a terrific woman.

I’m a great believer in spontaneity, because I think planning is the most destructive thing in the world. Because it kills the human spirit. So does too much discipline, because then you can’t get caught up in the moment, and if you can’t get caught up in the moment, life has no magic. Without the magic, we might as well all give up and admit we’re going to be dead in a few years. We need magic in our lives to take us away from those realities. The hope is that people stay crazy. It’s really no fun to work with sane people, people who have a set way of doing things.

The use of a professional crew presented a host of problems.

The most boring thing in the world is to direct a film, set the camera here, mark the actors, get your focus and light it. The sound should be clear and the shot should be good – [but] professional accuracy seems to me to have nothing to do with content and since the only people in the film that are truly interested in what the film has to say are the actors, it seemed to me the best choice to make an alliance with them rather than the usual alliance with the crew. The director of a film has a tremendous advantage over the actors and there is no way that he won’t use that advantage. He is usually the friend of some 50 odd technicians on the floor and when there is a disagreement between actor and director, the actor is not arguing with one man, but with 51. In front of a crew, I’m always in the position of being in the right and it’s easy to blame the actor and to look hurt. But then I’m only destroying him, turning him into an enemy, destroying his dreams and ours too. If I defend myself I’m only destroying myself and I’ve never liked directors because this is the attitude they take. The problem for me, therefore, was the same problem that most actors face, they are outnumbered – they are pressed into conformity by the schedule, by accepted sociability, by heart-warming good mornings and pleasant good nights, platitudes that take up valuable time, being invited to dinner, cliques of crew that say I like him or I don’t like him; insipid arguments over the content when the scene is good and deathly silence when it’s bad; that feeling that one gets when someone is being shrewd with you and does not want to offend you enough to lose his next job; that getting-behind-you-for-the-moment dialogue revolts the person talking and the person listening at once. It’s amazing the hate I can feel to people who pretend they’re doing it and are not, that are lying, and know they are lying. They’re the ones who insist on behaving in a manner which says: ‘Please don’t reveal or expose me, because I have to live. I’m a person!’ Those are the ones I always feel like saying to: ‘Why don’t you live someplace else, because I don’t want you around!’ I hate people who become stagnant and just go through life and retreat from any kind of creating or loving. For them life is a vacuum and even when they get ideas they are afraid to do anything about it. I don’t really feel sorry for those people. I just hate them. For that reason, the choice of the crew becomes extremely important. They have to understand that what they’re doing – no matter how hard they’re working – is only to help what’s going on in front of the camera. Audiences are not watching the technical processes as hard as they’re watching the actors. If the actors are good, the picture looks good – I mean, the actual photography looks better when the actors are better.

– ‘On the making of Husbands’. Excerpted from Cassavetes on Cassavetes by Raymond Carney.

Stanley Kubrick: Thoughts On Narrative

2001: A Space Odyssey (Directed by Stanley Kubrick)

Stanley Kubrick insisted that a feature film can be constructed from six to eight ‘non-submersible units’. A non-submersible unit is a fundamental story sequence where all the non-essential elements have been stripped away. These units would be so robust and compelling that they would, by themselves, be able to keep the viewer interested. They would contain only what is necessary for the storyline. And when joined together they would form a greater narrative.

Kubrick’s ideas on cinematic narrative seem to have been formed at an early stage, as far back as 1960, where he summed up his approach: 

I think the best plot is no apparent plot. I like a slow start, the start gets under the audience’s skin and involves them so that they can appreciate grace notes and soft tones and don’t have to be pounded over the head with plot points and suspense hooks.

The way Kubrick reduced 2001: A Space Odyssey to its most important elements was indicative of his emerging method of telling stories. Over the years, Kubrick had adapted many books into films. By the time he came to conceive of 2001: A Space Odyssey he realised that all he needed – as he later told science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss – are six or eight ‘non-submersible units’: basic story points that cannot be reduced any further. When the story points are linked together they form a narrative that will contain a balanced mix of all the themes, images and characters.

On release in 1968, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey polarized critical and public opinion. Many of its admirers considered it a prophetic masterpiece while its detractors praised the special effects but found it confusing and disappointing as drama.

The final scenes in particular remained for many an enigmatic, purely emotional, non-verbal experience. Indeed, less than half the film had dialogue. It was a re-organization of the traditional dramatic structure. Process became more important than plot. As one critic put it: ‘It was a film not about space travel; it was space travel’. 

Kubrick retorted: ‘The feel of the experience is the important thing, not the ability to verbalize or analyze it.’ Notably, 2001: A Space Odyssey was Kubrick’s first experiment with restructuring the conventions of the three-act drama. It’s likely it started out to be something quite different. The book based on the original screenplay by Arthur C. Clarke and Kubrick is literal, more explicit. The film, in its early stages, had a narrator’s voice. It was cut gradually and then eliminated completely, by virtue of which 2001: A Space Odyssey evolved as a more visual experience.

By the time Stanley Kubrick began working with Brian Aldiss on A.I. Artificial Intelligence (eventually filmed by Stephen Spielberg) Kubrick had formulated his theory of storytelling. As Aldiss recalls, Kubrick told him:

To forget about the narrative, you don’t want narrative, just concentrate on various scenes. He then expounded his theory of non-submersible units… you can see it working out in particular in 2001 where there are these chunks of narrative. This I believe is one of the attractions of 2001 – not only the music, not only the extraordinary silences and the beauty of the photography, but the fact that they don’t quite fit together. This gives the film a sense of mystery, so the intelligent viewer has to construct their own narrative.

In an interview for the documentary Stanley and Us, Brian Aldiss expanded on Kubrick’s notion of constructing a film based around a succession of irreducible sequences:

I was always keen on the idea of narrative. My books always have a narrative. That is to say, cause and effect. That’s what I like. But Stanley was less interested in that and he said to me ‘now forget about the narrative’. He said ‘what you need to make a movie is six ‘non-submersible units’’. That was the phrase he used: ‘non-submersible units’. And he said when we’ve got those we’re away. And I did actually produce one [a script] that he loved and was really enthusiastic about. It was the one time in our working relationship when he was enthusiastic and he said to me ‘Brian, I have the impression that you have two styles of writing – one is brilliant and the other’s not so good’. But when you think about this philosophy of the ‘non-submersible unit’ you can see it in action most effectively, I think, in The Shining. You have an episode and then it’s linked to another by a blackboard that would just say ‘Thursday, Four PM’. You know something bad is going to happen on Thursday at Four PM. It heightens the suspense and so in that respect it’s a very good device. But when you examine 2001, you can see the non-submersible units and they don’t actually quite link up. For instance, the last mysterious episode is almost complete in itself. And then there’s the episode on the ship with HAL. These are the units. And it’s because they don’t link up that we find 2001 so interesting. There’s something that our intellects can’t quite resolve and that’s an attraction in a movie.

Thus 2001: A Space Odyssey can be understood as a break with traditional cinematic narrative, an attempt to remove itself from a conventional way of telling a cinematic story. It was a ‘new way of assimilating narrative’. 2001: A Space Odyssey was not an articulated plot but a ‘succession of vivid moments’. 

In the case of the narrative structure of 2001: A Space Odyssey one can distinguish four such sections or units: ‘The Dawn of Man’, an untitled second section, the third section called ‘Jupiter Mission – 18 months Later’, and finally ‘Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite’, with each section separated by a narrative ellipsis.

This visual approach to storytelling was later discussed by Stanley Kubrick in an interview with Playboy Magazine in which he elaborates on the intention behind the non-conventional narrative of 2001: A Space Odyssey:

PLAYBOY: Much of the controversy surrounding 2001 deals with the meaning of the metaphysical symbols that abound in the film – the polished black monoliths, the orbital conjunction of Earth, Moon and sun at each stage of the monoliths’ intervention in human destiny, the stunning final kaleidoscopic maelstrom of time and space that engulfs the surviving astronaut and sets the stage for his rebirth as a ‘star-child’ drifting toward Earth in a translucent placenta. One critic even called ‘2001’ ‘the first Nietzschean film,’ contending that its essential theme is Nietzsche’s concept of man’s evolution from ape to human to superman. What was the metaphysical message of ‘2001’?

KUBRICK: It’s not a message that I ever intend to convey in words. 2001 is a non-verbal experience; out of two hours and 19 minutes of film, there are only a little less than 40 minutes of dialog. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, in 2001 the message is the medium. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to ‘explain’ a Beethoven symphony would be to emasculate it by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation. You’re free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film – and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level – but I don’t want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he’s missed the point. I think that if 2001 succeeds at all, it is in reaching a wide spectrum of people who would not often give a thought to man’s destiny, his role in the cosmos and his relationship to higher forms of life. But even in the case of someone who is highly intelligent, certain ideas found in 2001 would, if presented as abstractions, fall rather lifelessly and be automatically assigned to pat intellectual categories; experienced in a moving visual and emotional context, however, they can resonate within the deepest fibers of one’s being.

PLAYBOY: Without laying out a philosophical road map for the viewer, can you tell us your own interpretation of the meaning of the film?

KUBRICK: No, for the reasons I’ve already given. How much would we appreciate La Gioconda   today if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: ‘This lady is smiling slightly because she has rotten teeth’ – or ‘because she’s hiding a secret from her lover.’ It would shut off the viewer’s appreciation and shackle him to a ‘reality’ other than his own. I don’t want that to happen to 2001.

PLAYBOY: Arthur Clarke has said of the film, ‘If anyone understands it on the first viewing, we’ve failed in our intention.’ Why should the viewer have to see a film twice to get its message?

KUBRICK: I don’t agree with that statement of Arthur’s, and I believe he made it facetiously. The very nature of the visual experience in 2001 is to give the viewer an instantaneous, visceral reaction that does not – and should not – require further amplification. Just speaking generally, however, I would say that there are elements in any good film that would increase the viewer’s interest and appreciation on a second viewing; the momentum of a movie often prevents every stimulating detail or nuance from having a full impact the first time it’s seen. The whole idea that a movie should be seen only once is an extension of our traditional conception of the film as an ephemeral entertainment rather than as a visual work of art. We don’t believe that we should hear a great piece of music only once, or see a great painting once, or even read a great book just once. But the film has until recent years been exempted from the category of art – a situation I’m glad is finally changing.

PLAYBOY: Some prominent critics – including Renata Adler of ‘The New York Times’, John Simon of ‘The New Leader’, Judith Crist of ‘New York’ magazine and Andrew Sarris of  ‘The Village Voice’ – apparently felt that 2001 should be among those films still exempted from the category of art; all four castigated it as dull, pretentious and overlong. [KAEL: ’It’s a monumentally unimaginative movie’; ADLER: ’Incredibly boring’; SARRIS: ’A disaster’] How do you account for their hostility?

KUBRICK: The four critics you mention all work for New York publications. The reviews across America and around the world have been 95 percent enthusiastic. Some were more perceptive than others, of course, but even those who praised the film on relatively superficial grounds were able to get something of its message. New York was the only really hostile city. Perhaps there is a certain element of the lumpen literati that is so dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earth-bound that it finds the grandeur of space and the myriad mysteries of cosmic intelligence anathema, But film critics, fortunately, rarely have any effect on the general public; houses everywhere are packed and the film is well on its way to becoming the greatest moneymaker in M-G-M’s history. Perhaps this sounds like a crass way to evaluate one’s work, but I think that, especially with a film that is so obviously different, record audience attendance means people are saying the right things to one another after they see it – and isn’t this really what it’s all about?

PLAYBOY: Speaking of what it’s all about – if you’ll allow us to return to the philosophical interpretation of ‘2001’ – would you agree with those critics who call it a profoundly religious film?

KUBRICK: I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001 but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God. I don’t believe in any of Earth’s monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that each star is a life-giving sun and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe. Given a planet in a stable orbit, not too hot and not too cold, and given a few billion years of chance chemical reactions created by the interaction of a sun’s energy on the planet’s chemicals, it’s fairly certain that life in one form or another will eventually emerge. It’s reasonable to assume that there must be, in fact, countless billions of such planets where biological life has arisen, and the odds of some proportion of such life developing intelligence are high. Now, the sun is by no means an old star, and its planets are mere children in cosmic age, so it seems likely that there are billions of planets in the universe not only where intelligent life is on a lower scale than man but other billions where it is approximately equal and others still where it is hundreds of thousands of millions of years in advance of us. When you think of the giant technological strides that man has made in a few millennia – less than a microsecond in the chronology of the universe – can you imagine the evolutionary development that much older life forms have taken? They may have progressed from biological species, which are fragile shells for the mind at best, into immortal machine entities – and then, over innumerable eons, they could emerge from the chrysalis of matter transformed into beings of pure energy and spirit. Their potentialities would be limitless and their intelligence ungraspable by humans.

– Extract from Eric Nordern: Playboy Interview: Stanley Kubrick, 1968.

   

Paul Schrader on ‘Performance’

Performance (Directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg)

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

– Performance (1970)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elia Kazan: From Theatre to Film

A Streetcar Named Desire (Directed by Elia Kazan)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Streetcar Named Desire (Directed by Elia Kazan)

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

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

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

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

Wild River (Directed by Elia Kazan)

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

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

Paul Schrader on ‘Light Sleeper’

Light Sleeper (Directed by Paul Schrader)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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