Jonathan Demme: Story Teller

The Silence of the Lambs (Directed by Jonathan Demme)

Jonathan Demme came to mainstream prominence as a director with his adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs in 1990. Based on Thomas Harris’s novel about a female FBI agent’s hunt for a serial killer under the guidance of the psychopathic Hannibal Lector, the film was a huge success thanks in part to the memorable performance of Anthony Hopkins and garnered five Oscars, including one for Demme. The darkness and bleak humour of the film however is in stark contrast to the brightness and spirited tone of his other work.

Demme was born in 1944 in Baldwin, New York.  Exposed by his parents in his early years to foreign films, Demme dropped out of school and worked as a film reviewer which brought him to the attention of the producer Joseph H. Levine. Demme worked tor Levine as a film publicist, and had a sideline as an occasional music writer until a fortunate encounter with producer/director Roger Corman, led him to writing and producing two biker movies with Joe Viola. Demme’s first attempt at directing, the female prison drama Caged Heat (1974), exhibited aspects that would become central to his work; humour, a solidarity with the underdog, a strongly feminist slant, and a love of pop music.

Demme moved into independent films with Handle with Care (1977), renamed Citizens Band, an offbeat comedy that was critically lauded but a box office failure.

Next was a tribute to Alfred Hitchcock, Last Embrace (1979), and Melvin and Howard (1980) a fact based drama about Melvin Dummar’s claim to be a beneficiary to Howard Hughes’ estate. As before, critical praise was not matched by commercial success.

Demme’s next film, Swing Shift (1984), a fictionalised account of the women factory workers of World War II, was marred by production problems.  Something Wild (1987), a ‘yuppie nightmare’ movie, Married to the Mob (1988) and The Silence of the Lambs, were more successful and were marked by Demme’s use of strong female leads.

The latter’s huge success now gave Demme considerable influence as a director, and his response was Philadelphia (1993) the first mainstream Hollywood movie to address the AIDS pandemic. Beloved (1998), based on Toni Morrison’s book, tackled slavery, and The Manchurian Candidate (2004) was a new version of the classic 1960s conspiracy thriller. 

Throughout Demme’s career, his film ventures were bisected by work in other genres and fields, most notably documentaries that addressed his political interests – on the struggles in Haiti, Hurricane Katrina, and the legacy of former President Jimmy Carter.

Demme was also a highly influential director of rock concerts most notably with Stop Making Sense featuring Talking Heads; Storefront Hitchcock with Robyn Hitchcock; and Neil Young: Heart of Gold. Latterly he was more involved with television work, directing episodes of The Killing and Shots Fired, his final credits as a director.

An intense, gritty, crime odyssey in which an FBI cadet tracks down a serial killer with the help of another incarcerated and manipulative serial killer, The Silence of the Lambs was director Jonathan Demme’s masterwork in suspense, full of unsettling close-ups and disconcerting dialogue. Due to its mix of impressive performances and a sense of claustrophobic dread, it became a modern classic.

In the following extract from an interview with Film Comment magazine, Jonathan Demme discusses his approach to Ted Tally’s screenplay adaptation.

FILM COMMENT: Aside from the fact that it’s a good story with good characters, what was it in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ that really resonated in you?

JONATHAN DEMME: Ever since my days of working with Roger Corman, and perhaps before that, I’ve been a sucker for a woman’s picture. A film with a woman protagonist at the forefront. A woman in jeopardy. A woman on a mission. These are themes that have tremendous appeal to me as a moviegoer and also as a director.

You weren’t drawn to the serial-killer aspect?

No, I was repelled by the idea of doing a film about a serial killer. Quite apart from do you want to make a film of it, do you want to see a film of it? [Then] I started reading the book, when Orion sent it to me, and I leapt at the chance to get involved with characters of such dimension, and a story with so many complicated and interesting themes.

Why is it that you are drawn to women’s stories?

It has to do with the fact that just in everyday life, in this male-dominated society, women are operating under some handicaps. For women to achieve what they want is harder than for men to achieve what they want. That brings a touch of the underdog to them, and I respond to that. So I’m partial to women in that sense. I think they’re better people, by and large.

Also, the male characters in ‘Melvin and Howard’, ‘Something Wild’, and ‘Married to the Mob’ are not men’s men in their masculinity — there’s a sensitivity to them, a more feminine side in some way.

Well now, Gavin, I don’t want to come across as some kind of sissy in this interview! But I’m pleased you feel that way. Because from what I understand on the subject, we’ve got our female hormones and our male hormones regardless of which sex we happen to be. If I have a female side to me, I value it for the reasons I said before. And I like it when men feel free to not show that they’re the toughest guy around. I find a lot of fault with aggressively tough guys. On every level, globally, personally, this is the sort of attitude that gets us into trouble. I don’t think I’ve particularly done anything with the characters as written, to sort of take them away from a 100-percent maleness. But I may be more drawn to men who are willing to show their vulnerability.

Did you see ‘Silence’ as having a kind of subversive potential?

No. I need to find good scripts that I have regard for in order to do what I do. And apart from constantly searching for a script that would work in the race-relations arena, I don’t really seek out particular kinds of scripts. Something Wild I thought was a wonderful screenplay. I liked its originality. I liked very much that E. Max Frye was able to start us out thinking that we’re seeing one kind of story, and then gradually take us into a much darker kind of story. If there were certain themes about the dark side of America lurking beneath the surface, terrific. But it’s not like a deep-seated vision that exists already within me, and now ‘Something Wild’ comes along and gives me an opportunity to express that. I just respond to writers’ work.

My whole process is really, come to think of it, a series of responses. First, I respond to a writer’s work, and then the next big thing is responding to the work of the actors. And finally, in the cutting room, I’m responding to the footage we’ve wound up with.

I did like that The Silence of the Lambs was a woman’s picture. Is that vaguely subversive? – I don’t know. I haven’t talked to Tom Harris about this, and ultimately I don’t think this is of special interest to moviegoers, but I love that he’s taking some really good pokes at patriarchy while spinning this tale. And I think the movie sort of manages to do that, too.

Some people say directing doesn’t require the creativity or imagination of acting or writing. You talk about responding to things instead of, say, ‘the director’s vision.’

The director doesn’t have to take the creative responsibility of dreaming up what all the actors and crew should be doing. When you start out you think you have to. If you’re working on tight budgets and fast schedules, you think you have to know everything, because if you don’t then how’s it all going to get done in time? But the better the people you work with, the more you realize you can relax and perceive and enjoy and respond.

How did you arrive at your portrayal of Dr. Lecter? There’s almost an abstract quality to him, and you place him in very stylized, gothic settings – not quite real.

More than anything, I was trying to be utterly loyal to the spirit of Lecter as I understood it from the books [Red Dragon – filmed as Manhunter in 1986 – and The Silence of the Lambs] and the script. You read them and you just get a certain kind of feeling about Lecter which stands apart, I think, from all other characters in all other works of fiction. And now he’s got to be on screen. And luckily, it’s going to be Anthony Hopkins bringing him to life. Anthony really knew exactly what to do there. He got this joke.

Kristi Zea – the production designer – and I spent a tremendous amount of time trying to deal with the bars on Lecter’s cage. We were never happy with the different looks we were experimenting with. And finally we went to glass. The looks of Lecter’s environments are sort of one step beyond, one step into active imagination in the presence of a lot of ultrarealism elsewhere in the picture.

Were we on some level trying to make it easier for the audience to deal with Lecter? One of the big challenges for this movie was, how do you depict some of the shocking scenes described in the screenplay? Like when the police officers burst into the room in Memphis to discover their fallen partners. Ted wrote, ‘What greets them is a snapshot of hell.’ [Laughs.] Thanks, Ted. But it’s okay, we got that.

It was very hard, because you want to own up to the content of the book and script. But you don’t want to cross the line with people, make people physically ill. You don’t want to compromise them to that extent. You want to give them the good old-fashioned kind of shock they paid their money for without mortifying them. I’m not against mortification in films, by the way, as a moviegoer; but in my own films I think I will always stop well short of it.

But, again, the look of Lecter’s cell block was gothic, even medieval – anything but modern and institutional.

I didn’t want people to feel, for a second, they were seeing anything remotely like a prison movie. When Clarice and Lecter square off against each other, one on the inside of the cage, one on the outside, I didn’t want to settle into a someone-visiting-a-prisoner scene. We aspired to creating a setting for these encounters that would not evoke any other films, that would have a freshness and a scariness all their own.

To me, those encounters are staged somewhere between psychoanalysis sessions — given that Lecter is a psychiatrist – and Catholic confessionals.

I thought it was essential that the movie really put the viewer in Clarice’s shoes. That meant shooting a lot of subjective camera in every sequence she was in; you always had to see what Clarice was seeing. So as the scenes between her and Lecter intensify, inevitably we work our way into the subjective positions. And maybe that brings that heightened sense of intimacy we associate with confessionals or with the psychiatrist’s couch.

You had the actors looking as close to the lens – without looking into the lens – as possible. Standard over-the-shoulder shots or matching singles are done with plenty of distance between the eyeline and the lens – but you cut them as close as possible during those scenes.

Well, in most of them, one is looking slightly off – just slightly – and the other one is smack into the lens. We really pushed for that.

Then in the final sequence in Gumb’s basement she can’t see and the subjective shooting shifts to the killer’s POV through his infrared nightvision goggles.

Exactly. I relished that on a technique-of-making-a-movie level: the idea that we’ll be predominantly in the shoes of the protagonist throughout, and then when she’s deprived of her sight, we’ll be in the shoes of the killer. And perhaps that abandonment of Clarice’s point of view will make the situation even more distressing on a certain dialectic level.

In that scene I felt he was way too close to her. In the book I visualized him stalking her across the basement, instead of on top of her. You made it more claustrophobic.

The idea that Gumb would try to get as close as he possibly could, and touch her hair and – given that he holds the power, he has the gun – he would play with this proximity: that appealed to me as a way to stage the scene.

Overall, how did you approach the material stylistically? What were you aiming for in terms of the look of the film?

It started off with wanting to have a film that was rich in closeups and subjective camera. One of the reasons I work so consistently with Tak Fujimoto is that Tak comes up with a brand new look for every movie. Which is what gifted DPs are supposed to do. I’ve almost stopped talking to him about lighting going into films, because his conception of a look for a film is inevitably going to be a lot more interesting and appropriate than what I might have dreamed up. Because that’s not really one of my strong points – conceiving the kind of lights and shades of a look for a movie.

My only thing was, I didn’t want the film to look like another modish, stylish, moody broody long-shadow catch-the-killer movie. And because of the incredible heaviness of the subject matter, it was important to aspire to a certain brightness whenever possible. To that end, Tak and I looked at Rosemary’s Baby together a couple of times. A very bright picture most of the time. Tak then spun off from there.

But as a director, how do you make sure you’re all making the same movie? Do you sit down with your key people and give them a concrete image to work from?

Noooo...no...no...[Laughs.] I wish I had, but no. We sit down, Tak, Kristi and Chris Newman – our soundman – and we swap views and impressions. The thing is, we were all responding to the book and the screenplay. You read that book and you’re going to come away with an impression of what that stuff looks like. None of us were thrilled about having to depict some of the more shocking aspects of the story. It took months during the pre-production process to get over being appalled at the subject matter. By the time it came to film it, I was happily desensitized, to the degree that I could go out and just do it with great gusto and abandon.

Did the demands of making a real down-the-line, narrative-driven film result in a suppression of your tendency to direct the viewer’s attention towards what’s going on at the edges of the story – the incidental details you have a fondness for?

No, all that energy gets channeled into what the new demands are. I was thrilled to have such a strong story, told at such a relentless pace, to focus all that energy on. What was at the forefront was too important to be distracted by the details on the fringes.

It’s the same thing with any kind of comedic aspect, because most of the pictures I do try to have a very active sense of humor about them, whether or not they’re comedy. And I was just delighted to be freed from the discipline of comedy – not to have to think in terms of where are the laughs going to be, and is this funny enough?

 – Gavin Smith, ‘Identity Check: Jonathan Demme Interviewed by Gavin Smith,’ Film Comment 27, no. 1 (1991).

Nicolas Winding Refn: Faith and Violence

Valhalla Rising (Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn)

Nicolas Winding Refn was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1970. At the age of 10 he moved to New York with his parents, who both worked in the film industry. After graduating from high school, Refn attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, but found the environment difficult to cope with and was soon expelled. Back in Denmark he was accepted by the Danish Film School but he never took up his place, having decided to drop out prior to the start of the first term. After seeing a short film by Refn on cable TV, a Danish film producer offered him 3.2 million Danish kroner to adapt his short into a feature. At the age of 24, Refn was writing and directing his gritty and uncompromising feature film debut Pusher about a drug dealer in over his head. Pusher became a cult hit and won Refn widespread critical acclaim. 

Refn explored the seedy underbelly of Copenhagen further with Bleeder – a stylized and grim tale exploring the relationship between two friends living on the city’s margins. Bleeder premiered at the 1999 Venice Film Festival and proved a big domestic hit. Fear X, Refn’s third feature and his first in English, is a complex, evocative drama starring John Turturro as a man searching for his wife’s killer. Co-written by renowned novelist Hubert Selby Jr and with a musical score by Brian Eno, Fear X received positive reviews but was a commercial failure. Refn returned to the mean streets of Copenhagen with Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands and Pusher III: I’m the Angel of Death, completing the renowned Pusher trilogy and consolidating his critical status.

Refn was next approached to write and direct Bronson, a violent and surreal film about one of England’s most notorious criminals. Featuring a remarkable performance from Tom Hardy, Bronson combines theatrical tradition and British pop cinema of the 1960s to make a movie about a man who creates his own mythology. After the success of Bronson, Refn co-wrote and directed Valhalla Rising – a bleak and relentless film set in the middle ages about a silent, one-eyed prisoner who escapes from his captors and falls into the company of a group of Christian Vikings preparing to embark on a crusade. Uncertain whether One-Eye is a visitor from heaven or hell, they take him with them on their ship across the sea. 

Returning to Hollywood, Refn next directed the hugely successful Drive in 2011 – a retro genre movie based on a James Sallis novel starring Ryan Gosling as a stunt-car driver who moonlights as a getaway driver. 

While Drive was in preproduction, Nicolas Winding Refn spoke to Adam Stovall of Creative Sceenwriting Weekly about his recently completed Viking odyssey and his approach to screenwriting:

Valhalla Rising (Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn)

‘Valhalla Rising’ opens with a man, One-Eye (Mads Mikkelsen), beating another man to a bloody pulp. Then another, and another, and another. Once there is no one else to defeat, he is released and crosses the barren Nordic landscape, accompanied by a boy (Maarten Stevenson). Eventually, they find themselves on a ship with Vikings searching for a new land. More beatings ensue. ‘Valhalla Rising’ is the latest film from director Nicolas Winding Refn, who co-wrote the film with Roy Jacobsen. CS Weekly sat down with Refn to discuss his tale of faith and violence, and how the two are often found in each other’s company.

What was the initial seed of the idea?

When I was five, I was at my parents’ friend’s house and they had a pulp sci-fi novel with a spaceship on the cover. I can’t remember why it was there or what happened, but the obsession with traveling into outer space has been very much a part of what I do. I became interested in making a Viking film that was a film about the discovery of America, because for the Vikings to go out and travel the oceans was the equivalent of us going to the moon.

Can you walk us through how that initial seed became this story?

When you sit down, you come up with all the obvious solutions, and you try them out and see that they don’t ring true, and you get kind of frustrated. It wasn’t until one night, I was having some kind of dream, maybe I was trying to meditate, but the idea of a mutant man who has no past or present and lives on top of a mountain came to me. That was the genesis, because what would happen if that was how the film opened? The idea of the child came about because he needed a companion to travel with. If he had a person his own age, it would be a friendship. If it were a woman, there would be a tension of love and sexuality. A child, however, makes it almost innocent in a way.

The man and child travel the wasteland and encounter a group of Vikings who are off to the Holy Land. Originally, they were pagans who were basically being outlawed by the Christians, who, in the 1100s, were spreading through the North either by violence and war or they would use money to buy influence and sell Jesus to the Vikings. People who didn’t believe were on the run, and America was an interesting concept.

Valhalla Rising (Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn)

Originally the film had a more conventional kind of approach, a more conventional kind of story structure. I called Roy Jacobsen, who is a very famous Norwegian novelist, and is also a historian on these matters. I felt like I knew nothing of this history, so it was essential that I find someone who could be part of this journey. Well, two weeks before we were supposed to shoot, I had a complete meltdown and was just lost. I shut down the movie, I said I wouldn’t make it, sorry, bye. Budget had been spent and people were panicking. Roy Jacobsen flew up and sat with me for a few hours in my apartment trying to talk some sense into me, but it wasn’t happening. Until, finally, he said to just make them Christian Vikings. I asked him if there were Christian Vikings, and he said absolutely. They were Vikings, but they were Christians as well. They would travel all around to fight wars. They were warriors and mercenaries in Russia. Suddenly, the whole film became about the future, not about the past. Christianity became an order that was about the future. Everything had always been about the past, and I couldn’t relate to that. I couldn’t get my mind around it. So, that changed everything, and I swapped what the characters wanted to achieve.

The movie is about faith and the rise of mythology. One-Eye goes through four stages. He is born out of mythology. Nobody knows who he is or where he comes from, you only know that he doesn’t belong to anyone for more than four or five years. Then he escapes slavery and becomes a warrior, then he becomes God. Then he becomes Man when he sacrifices himself. And then he’s a ghost, who returns to the mythology he rose from. Then there’s the relationship with the boy, who says he wants to find home – which is very existential because he doesn’t say where. The boy claims that One-Eye speaks through him. It’s like the boy becomes organized religion, because everyone becomes superstitious again, and the boy manipulates everyone else. Also, when the Christians travel for war and they take hallucinogenic drugs to become stronger, that’s true – they would actually do that.

Valhalla Rising (Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn)

Your films are known for having these very strong central characters. Do you tend to start scripts with a character in mind or a story?

The way I usually come up with an idea is I come up with what I would like to see. That’s usually based on character. Then I wrap a story around that character. Bronson, for example, there was no story, because Charlie Bronson’s life is not that interesting. Michael Peterson’s life is not that interesting. But the transformation from Michael Peterson to Charlie Bronson was interesting. That came about when I asked myself what this guy would want and realized that he would want to be famous. Then I knew, that’s what this movie is about. That’s usually how I approach everything I do, follow one person’s point of view and a story comes up around it.

What is your habit? Do you have a number of hours you like to work, or is there a page count you’re going for?

I consider writing very painful, and I don’t think I’m very good at it. I wish I was, because I certainly admire it a lot. I write longhand to begin with. If the story is complex, or if I need to be challenged not to repeat myself, I bring in other people – once with Hubert Selby, Jr. and once with Roy Jacobsen. When I sit down to write, though, it’s usually with a pack of index cards and a pen, just writing things down that I would like to see. Eventually that evolves into some kind of story. When it has to be shown to financiers, or people who don’t know me very well, I will sometimes bring a writer in to polish it verbally so it doesn’t just read as ‘Man walks, sees sign, crosses.’ Things you would be sent back to school for. To make it a sellable document, it sometimes needs to be polished up. But it also comes from me being dyslexic. I am very dyslexic and I have trouble reading and writing.

Pusher II (Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn)

How important is outlining to you?

Outlining doesn’t become important until I have the core structure. I believe everything is structure. In that way, oddly, art is a complete, organic element – and in that organism a mathematical evolution is apparent.

How particular are you about your workspace and how you work, both alone and when you’re working with someone else?

In that sense, I am completely collaborative. I like to work at night. I can’t go into an office every day, but I admire people who can just sit down and write. I have to go through a process where I try to do everything that can keep me from writing. Dishes, cleaning up, looking through old email, deleting junk mail, anything that takes me away from writing – and once I’ve done everything I can and there’s nothing left, then I start writing because once I start, I cannot stop. I become unbearable to be around, and when you have kids and a wife, that’s difficult because you have to be theirs. So, that means I work at night, sometimes for a couple of hours, sometimes for a long time.

I have many different movies I want to make, so I’ve begun to enjoy the process of making films simultaneously. For example, while [my next film] Drive is in preproduction, I’ve also started preproduction on the film after it, which is called Only God Forgives. That’s a movie I’ve written myself, an original idea. It’s good because having Drive on one side, I can put things in that movie and other things into Only God Forgives, and know I will make both movies. I can sort of steal from both.

Bronson (Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn)

Do you listen to music while you write, or do you find that distracting?

I love all kinds of music. The way that I work is, I sometimes come up with a musical approach to the film before there’s an actual story. Each movie I’ve made so far has a musicality to it. Pusher 1, my first film, is The Ramones. Bleeder, my second film, was definitely glam rock. Fear X was basically Brian Eno, who became the third person I ever hired on the movie. He would send me sounds and music ideas as me and Mr. Selby worked on the script. Pusher 2 is Iron Maiden. Pusher 3 is Neil Diamond. Bronson is opera. Valhalla Rising is Einstürzende Neubauten. Drive is Depeche Mode. I definitely prefer to listen to music while I write, it’s certainly the closest thing to cocaine I can get while I write.

– Adam Stovall: ‘He Came From Myth: Valhalla Rising’s Nicolas Winding Refn’. Courtesy of Creative Screenwriting Weekly.

Roger Corman: The Changing Scene

The Raven (Directed by Roger Corman)

Starting his Hollywood career as a runner for Fox in 1950, Roger Corman quickly discovered he had very little tolerance for studio ways and its crumbling system. Unafraid to grab the bull by the horns, he produced movies before he directed them — a sure sign of things to come. Corman had an excellent grasp of story, and coupled with his business acumen, had a knack for turning out good product fast and cheap. In the realm that he worked, his movies stood out above the rest. His talent caught the attention of eager showmen Jim Nicholson and Sam Arkoff, and together they discovered the most important audience of the movie marketplace: teenage America. Forming American International Pictures (AIP), they specialized in fun, hip, sexy, and contemporary alternatives to Hollywood’s stuffy spectacles and mundane melodramas. By satisfying this hungry portion of cinemagoers, AIP became the most successful independent film company in the world, of which no small part was due to Corman’s entertaining and energetic pictures.

Note that word pictures. More often than not, Corman refers to his output as pictures, a subtle but telling distinction. Maybe this is because he was informed with an old Hollywood attitude that viewed films first and foremost as entertainment. He might also have been referring to cinema as the art of the moving picture, a form that he loves with passion, not pretense. But he was an artisan first, artist second, and he made pictures.

Throughout the fifties, he developed both his intuitive knack for staying ahead of the curve and his reputation for speed, key factors necessary to maintain his output. He produced nearly every film he directed and established a tight unit that allowed him both comfort and control; this period climaxed with his first real film of merit, A Bucket of Blood, in which Corman basically created the horror satire. The sixties gave us Corman at his peak, starting with the first of his classic Poe cycle, House of Usher, which re-established American horror as a viable and lucrative genre and properly launched Corman as a filmmaker with a vision; at the same time, he could still crank out an auspicious programmer like The Little Shop of Horrors, which to this day remains a remarkable black comedy whose celebrated reputation has lifted it well above its poverty-row roots. The seventies saw Corman turn from directing to producing and distributing through New World Pictures, a period crucial in his establishment of New Hollywood and his support of foreign artists; cinema after Corman, both at home and abroad, would never be the same. After selling New World in 1983, he remained exploitative, and usually profitable, but the critical value of his direct-to-video and television productions are far removed from the strength of his early work. Even his brief return behind the camera, aptly named Roger Corman’s Frankenstein, was a throwback to an era that Hollywood had left behind.

His oeuvre is a mixed bag, but that comes with the territory he staked out. Remembered today as a “fearmaker,” he worked in every known genre: comedy, western, musical, gangster, suspense / thriller, action, war, sci-fi, drama, period, swords-n-sandals, fantasy, and of course, horror. Even his singular big-studio picture, The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre (1967), is remarkably at odds with Hollywood gangster fare, in structure and style, and yet it still nails down the consistent Corman anti-hero embodied by both Al Capone (Jason Robards) and Bugs Moran (Ralph Meeker).

Regardless of his milieu, Corman remains a thinking-man’s filmmaker, passionate about the value of ideas. His deep fascination with human psychology boils below the surface of his stories and in the actions of his characters, who, like Corman, are rebels, distrustful and disdainful of conventional, even conservative, norms. They are social misfits, outsiders, strangers, intruders, all struggling to find their place in a senseless world, and there is no better example of the Corman complex than in his adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe. (C. Nasr).

The following is an excerpt from a speech delivered by Roger Corman on May 31 at the Thirteenth Annual Motion Picture Seminar of the Northwest, held in Seattle, Washington.

My subject today includes spotting new talent for the motion picture industry, which, to a certain extent, is a matter of being lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time and, on top of that, hopefully exercising some judgment.

I’ve just arbitrarily divided the subject up into four sections—those that I am the most familiar with and have dealt with most frequently: actors, writers, directors, and producers. However, Cal Bernstein, who spoke a little bit earlier, was talking about various cameramen and I realized that he and I had worked with some of the same cameramen, so I will mention them a bit, too.

Actually, I think there are four top cinematographers who either did their first feature for me or their first American film: Haskell Wexler, John Alonzo, Nestor Almendros, and Laszlo Kovacs. Vilmos Zsigmond and a number of others have worked with us, as well. As to how I chose these cinematographers, I’m not exactly certain. In some cases I looked at their film, but not in all cases. I never saw anything that Johnny Alonzo had done. He just came highly recommended to me. But usually it was a combination of looking at some film and really listening to other people’s advice—taking recommendations and then talking with the person. I’m a very firm believer in really sitting down and talking with somebody. In that way you gain a certain insight into the person’s ability and his temperament, as well as his willingness to work, particularly in low-budget films. But I feel that in any kind of filmmaking a person has to have not only ability, but also a certain stability, because this is a notoriously unstable field. You also have to be willing to work very, very hard. It’s almost as if you had a dedication, in the true religious sense. It’s almost a Catholic calling to a vocation, to work in films. Living in Southern California, if we simply wanted money we could all be working in real estate. We could make a lot of money more easily.

Now, breaking my subject down into actors, writers, directors, and producers, let me start with actors. You are on a little bit more solid ground in evaluating actors because you are able to look at film that they may have done previously, or to see them possibly on the stage. Then you can conduct interviews, which can be very misleading, because a person may come in and do very well in a cold reading or in an improvisation and either hang up on the set or be unable to go beyond that on the set.

I work on the basis of holding cold readings for actors when they come in. I explain the part to them a little bit, give them a script so that they can step into another room and look at it for a little while, and then ask them to come back and do the reading. I also work on the basis of improvisation, because you sometimes learn more from an improvisa- tion than you do from a cold reading. All of these methods are imper- fect, but they are the two ways in which I’ve found I could work the best. Plus, just talking with the actor and talking with other actors and other directors. We very seldom use screen tests, which are very good, but on our budgets, if I’m going to put together a crew for a day I’m not going to shoot a screen test; I’m going to shoot a day’s work on the film. Beyond that there are intangibles; charisma and, unfortunately, looks for a lead do mean something, although they don’t mean as much as they formerly did. We’ve had some success with the actors and actresses who have started with us.

In selecting writers you are on even more solid ground. We simply read what they have written before, but not necessarily screenplays. As a matter of fact, for our purposes, probably not screenplays, because working in a low-budget field we find that most of the established screenwriters are already beyond our budget limitations, so we must go elsewhere. We will go to film schools and find people who have written scripts or written and directed scripts in the course of their film training, or maybe written a script that has never been produced that we think has merit.

Very often we will go to novelists or short story writers who have been well reviewed. We subscribe to a number of literary journals and we read the reviews quite religiously, particularly of new novelists, new short story writers and a number of our best writers have come from that field. Bob Towne is a writer who won an Academy Award a couple of years ago and started with us and will be directing soon, as well. I might mention a number of the directors we have worked with who have been writers, as well, particularly Francis Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, and Marty Scorsese. There is a unity between the work of the writer and the director, and the French, I know, refer continually to the auteur theory, although they have been referring to it a little bit less now than they formerly did. To me the true auteur is the writer-director-producer, the Ingmar Bergman, or somebody of that sort who combines all of those elements of the creative function in his hands. Now, as for directors, we have had some of our greatest success with directors such as Coppola, Bogdanovich, Scorsese, and Irv Kershner—I think someone mentioned a picture I had almost forgotten, Stakeout on Dope Street. The cameraman on that was Haskell Wexler, doing his first feature film, and the director was Irv Kershner, doing his first feature film.

Having been a director myself, I talk at great length to the director and listen to what he has to say. I look at previous film, particularly student films, more recently sometimes commercials. We have given first opportunities to many directors but we are not doing that quite as much as we have in the past because, like most other production companies, our budgets have risen and when I was making films for $50,000 or $100,000 or $150,000 it was not a difficult gamble to take somebody directly out of film school or somebody like Peter Bogdanovich, who had never even gone to film school, who just was a critic who had worked for me as an assistant and whom I felt was so bright that I could finance him in such a film.

Our films are now inching their way up to half-a-million, a million dollars. Battle Beyond the Stars will be close to $5 million, so we have become a little bit more cautious in those areas. As a matter of fact, speaking of Battle Beyond the Stars, we chose Jimmy Murakami as the director. He had never directed a feature film before, but was an Academy Award–winning animator and had worked for me as a second unit director and an art director in Ireland a number of years earlier and had been shooting some commercials in Europe. I chose Jimmy as the director of this film for a totally unrelated reason. We knew we were going to be shooting live action that would have to cut into special effects shots that might be shot six months later and, while I much appreciate the type of director who comes onto the set and becomes inspired and says, “I believe the camera should go there” (after an hour or so of deliberation) however, for the particular film I wanted a director who could storyboard the entire film, who could take a close-up of a pilot in a space ship with the camera right in front of him and, at a particular moment, that pilot looks in that direction to match a shot that will be filmed maybe ninety days later of another spaceship coming by. So Jimmy’s qualities as an animator and as a director of TV commercials working off of storyboards became very important for that type of work.

As to some of the more intangible attributes of a director, intelligence, I think, is important above all. I have never met in my life a successful director who was not intelligent. Beyond that there is this intangible spark, the creativity, the mark of the poet to go with the intelligence and again, as I say, the dedication to film and the ability to work very hard, because directing pictures is physically very hard work. I think people sometimes forget that.

Speaking now of producers, I might mention that a lot of people are producer-directors, like Coppola, Bogdanovich, and so forth. I might also mention my wife, who has had the most successful production career of anybody I know. She’s produced eight films and has had eight consecutive successes. I’ve had a couple of failures; everybody I know has had a couple of failures, but my wife is truly the only producer I’ve ever met who never had a failure. She may well support the family if Battle Beyond the Stars doesn’t do it this summer.

The attributes of the producer, I think, are very, very close to those of the director: The same intelligence, the same ability to work very hard. There are some theories today on right and left brain in which the left brain is possibly a fraction more poetic. The right hemisphere of the brain, if I have these correct, is more logical. I would say the function of the producer and the director are almost the same, or the attributes are almost the same, except that I would say that while the director might lean a little more to the left brain, I would look for a little bit more logic on the part of the producer I was going to hire.

On the other hand, the producer doesn’t generally get hired and you can underestimate what the producer does if you see what he is doing on the set, because if he’s really done his job he doesn’t do much on the set. His work is primarily accomplished before the picture goes into production. Most films start with an idea of a producer and then the decision is made to make that idea into a film. Now, that’s the most important decision that will ever be made on the film. So the producer, who must then carry forward on a logical basis, at that moment is functioning on a creative basis, as well.

As I say, putting all of this together you find, in general, that you are dealing with intelligent people who have learned the requisite technical skills, who are dedicated to the film medium and who are then willing to work very, very hard. Beyond that I don’t know. There is a certain personal feeling I get talking with people and that conversation, or series of conversations, is extremely important because it determines whether or not I think I can work well with them. Somebody might very well be successful with another producer or some other company but might not work well with me because of my own personal ways of functioning and because of the budget limitations of New World. Now this is possibly not as specific as some of you might like it to be, but it’s not a specific thing. It’s kind of an informed guess—to talk to somebody and say, “Yes, I think you can do this job.” That’s particularly true when you are dealing with new people who have never done the job before.

– Filmmaking in Hollywood: The Changing Scene. By Roger Corman. From American Cinematographer, August 1980.

Scorsese: Goodfellas, Gangsters and Guilt

Goodfellas (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

Goodfellas is about guilt more than anything else. But it is not a straightforward morality play, in which good is established and guilt is the appropriate reaction toward evil. No, the hero of this film feels guilty for not upholding the Mafia code – guilty of the sin of betrayal. And his punishment is banishment, into the witness protection program, where nobody has a name and the headwaiter certainly doesn't know it. What finally got to me after seeing this film – what makes it a great film – is that I understood Henry Hill's feelings. Just as his wife Karen grew so completely absorbed by the Mafia inner life that its values became her own, so did the film weave a seductive spell. It is almost possible to think, sometimes, of the characters as really being good fellows. Their camaraderie is so strong, their loyalty so unquestioned. But the laughter is strained and forced at times, and sometimes it's an effort to enjoy the party, and eventually, the whole mythology comes crashing down, and then the guilt – the real guilt, the guilt a Catholic like Scorsese understands intimately – is not that they did sinful things, but that they want to do them again. – Roger Ebert

Martin Scorsese's mid career masterwork GoodFellas (1990) is a follow-up to his own Mean Streets (1973), released in the same year as Francis Ford Coppola's third episode of his gangster epic The Godfather, Part III (1990). It is a gritty, honest examination of a true life mobster scenario involving three violent "wiseguys" accentuated by the Italian-American director's personal experience growing up in Little Italy. Scorsese reunites with one of his favourite actors, Robert De Niro, who previously featured in Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), New York, New York (1977), Raging Bull (1980), and The King of Comedy (1982)

The film's factual, semi-documentary narrative was adapted from Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese's script, which was based on Pileggi's 1985 non-fiction book Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family. 

The true story involved a low-level, marginalised gangster (or 'foot-soldier') with mixed ethnic ancestry (half-Irish, half-Sicilian) - Henry Hill - who eventually broke the gangster's code of 'never ratting on your friends' and became an informant for the FBI.

The fast-paced, exhilarating, episodic plot, which is peppered with profanity, bold editing cuts and graphics, changing points of view, and people speaking directly to the camera, is delivered via voice-over narration by Henry Hill (Ray Liotta). It spans thirty years of his life, from his adolescent years in a Brooklyn Irish neighbourhood to his exploits as an adult gangster, ranging from the 1950s to the drug-fueled 1970s, during which he was married to Karen (Lorraine Bracco). The inclusion of his wife's voice-over gives more insight into the all-encompassing culture and allure of 'family life.' The freeze frames interspersed throughout emphasise the lasting, formative events of Henry's life. 

GoodFellas is a film defined by an extraordinary, almost anthropological attention to experiential and procedural detail, stylistic virtuosity manifested through freeze-frames, majestic subjective tracking shots, overlapping and occasionally improvised dialogue, propulsive editing, dual voice-overs, a breathless pop-rock soundtrack, and an insider's knowledge of organised crime. 

The picture is both wonderfully constructed and produced, as well as a bravura mash-up of tones, genres, and sensibilities, inspired by films such as Truffaut's Jules et Jim. 

This overpowering sense of the material realities and pleasures inherent in the film's chosen, sometimes gaudy, environment draws us into a mostly male, chauvinist world characterised by easy corruption, hair-trigger violence, moral ambiguity, and a sense of imperiousness. 

GoodFellas creates a minutely portrayed atmosphere that we both repelled and seduced by. As is the case with many Scorsese films, we identify with the scenario of an outsider being indoctrinated into a highly ritualised environment with each picture "filled with activity and texture," as Scorsese puts it. 

While essential collaborators such as editor Thelma Schoonmaker and cinematographer Michael Ballhaus have been rightfully recognised for their work, Kristi Zea's production design really brings this "cloistered" and insular universe to life. The garish, residential interiors are densely evocative and immersive. We're fascinated from the minute the picture starts in the middle of the tale, with bright red taillights illuminating Henry's face as he declares, "As long back as I can remember, I've always wanted to be a gangster." 

Scorsese's films often derive their cues from snippets of music, riffs from certain songs, or the rapid-fire transitions between tracks. This approach to music contributes to its jagged, sometimes abrupt, almost jazz-like rhythms and tones by Harry Nilsson, Eric Clapton and The Rolling Stones.

Scorsese's career peaked with GoodFellas, and marked a notable return to form after his more disjointed work of the 1980s. The film ushers in an era of unprecedented output in the first half of the 1990s, which includes such landmark works as The Age of Innocence, his documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Films, and an equally violent and kaleidoscopic slice of mob life, Casino. 

In many respects, GoodFellas is an unsettling love letter to the gangster cinema, packed with distinctive allusions to earlier inspirations such as The Roaring Twenties, Public Enemy, and Scarface.

It is considered the defining work of Scorsese's career, drawing the audience into its hellish world through cinematic virtuosity, and dazzling performances, simultaneously promising the fulfilment of one’s deepest desires and the pain of getting what you want.

The filming is enticing because it portrays Hill's criminal lifestyle as alluring; it invites us into his world. Thus, Scorsese creates a subjective experience, frequently literally: in the shot introducing the film's various gangsters and hangers-on, all of whom speak directly into the camera ("I'm going to go get the papers, get the papers"), or in the film's infamous "May 11, 1980" sequence, which uses jagged cutting, jittery camerawork, and clashing musical cues to transport us directly into the action.

In comparison to prior tales of mob life (including The Godfather films), the immediacy of Goodfellas is striking, terrifying and visceral.

It left clear imprints on a number of subsequent films and television series. “Boogie Nights is unmistakably Goodfellas,” Glenn Kenny, author of the forthcoming book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, stated. He also finds a strong parallel to Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs - specifically the repeated theme of gangsters who hang around, speak trash, and go about their business as if it were a business. 

The majority of gangster films concentrate on the top bosses and godfathers; Goodfellas and its sequels focus on the grinders, intermediaries, and lower level thugs. 

Kenny also identifies the concept of "mobsters having other facets of their existence," such as ordinary marital and family difficulties, which was a critical component of David Chase's groundbreaking series, The Sopranos. Chase has openly cited the film as his holy book, not only for the tone and viewpoint of the picture as inspiration for The Sopranos, but also the cast, which includes numerous future Sopranos co-stars. 

In the following extract from Richard Schickel’s Conversations with Scorsese, director Martin Scorsese discusses guilt, celebrity and the gangster in his great movie of mob life:

RICHARD SCHICKEL: Your next full-length feature after ‘Last Temptation’ was ‘Goodfellas’ in 1990, which I suppose with ‘Raging Bull’ is one of my two favorite movies of yours. Perhaps part of my feeling for that is based on the fact that most of us share a sort of love for gangsters as outsiders, or rebels. I mean, we always sort of sympathize with the gangster Jim Cagney, or people like him. They seem to have such a nice, rich life: lovely meals they’re always making for each other, a certain amount of friendship, brotherhood, and all that. They enjoy the good life, and at the same time they get to whack people.

MARTIN SCORSESE: When I was doing The Color of Money in Chicago, I was reading The New York Review of Books and saw a review of a book by Nick Pileggi called Wiseguy. It seemed like Nick was taking us through the different levels of purgatory and hell in the underworld, like Virgil or like Dante. Irwin Winkler said, ‘Are you interested in that?’ I said yes and he bought it for me. I said yes because I thought Nick was telling the story in a different way. It’s about that lifestyle, and the dangerous seduction of that lifestyle.

I remember I was talking to Marlon Brando from time to time, and he said, ‘Don’t do another gangster picture. You’ve done Mean Streets, you did the gangsters in Raging Bull. You don’t have to do that.’ I came to feel the same way. So I said to Michael Powell, ‘I think I don’t want to do this Goodfellas thing,’ or Wiseguys, as it was then called.

Michael Powell went back to his apartment with Thelma Schoonmaker, whom he’d married right after Raging Bull. He couldn’t see anymore, so she read the script to him. I was in the editing room, I remember, in the Brill Building, and suddenly he called and said, ‘This is wonderful. You must do it. It’s funny and no one’s ever seen this way of life before. You must do it.’ And that’s why I did it.

RS: Well, there’s a William Wellman story on ‘Public Enemy’. He found the script and he took it to [Darryl] Zanuck, who was running Warner Bros. It was then called ‘Beer and Blood.’ He loved it – these young writers had lived in Chicago and knew some of the mobsters. But Zanuck said, I can’t do another one of these. I’ve just done this, I’ve just done that. Tell me one good reason to do it. And Wellman said, ‘Because I’ll make it the toughest one you ever saw.’ And Zanuck said, ‘You got it.’ You could argue that, of all the modern gangland things, ‘Goodfellas’ is the toughest one of all. Was there some aspect of ‘Goodfellas’ for you that was like Wellman’s attitude, that you could do it tougher?

MS: I thought of it as being a kind of attack.

RS: Attack?

MS: Attacking the audience. I remember talking about it at one point and saying, ‘I want people to get infuriated by it.’ I wanted to seduce everybody into the movie and into the style. And then just take them apart with it. I guess I wanted to make a kind of angry gesture.

RS: Why were you angry?

MS: I guess I used to feel I was the outsider who has to punch his way back in, constantly. Some people don’t have to do that, but I do. I’m not just talking about films, but everything.

I get angry about the way things are and the way people are. I get very involved in stories and the way a character behaves and the way the world behaves. More than anger, I think, maybe it’s caring about how characters behave, how the world behaves. I’m curious about those things. I still get excited by the story. I still get upset by what a character does. And the anger is something to get me working. I have to get sometimes rather upset with myself or a situation before I can really start working, thinking clearly. Some other people can do it very quickly, which doesn’t mean they don’t put energy into it. But they don’t put their heart and soul into it. I’m one of those people who does. It’s every minute of the day and night.

In the Rolling Stones documentary, I do a takeoff on myself for the first ten minutes. It’s about everything that could go wrong for me as the director. And things do go wrong. And they affect you.

I remember a priest told my father to come to talk to him and bring me with him to the rectory one day. I wondered why, what I did that was so bad? I must’ve been about twelve. He said something about me going around with the seriousness and the weight of the world on my shoulders. At that age I shouldn’t be that way, the priest said. I should have been enjoying my life. And he told my father something I’ll never forget. He said, ‘This boy,’ he says, ‘behaves.’ I did really, because I always was sick and never got in trouble.

But then later, when they threw me out of the preparatory seminary, the monsignor told my father, ‘Your son? There’s a brick wall. Don’t hit your head against it, you’re going to get hurt.’ The monsignor gets up, mimes hitting his head against the brick wall, and that was the end of it.

Everybody cares about what they do. But I tend to get emotionally involved, or let it get to me. I get too emotionally involved with everything. So over the years it became funny. Except when it wasn’t funny. In my mind, whether it’s the stroke of a pen or a bullet, a lot can happen to people. In our America, businesspeople are slaughtered every day. People are robbed every day.

RS: Well, there’s that whole theory of Robert Warshow, about ‘the gangster as tragic hero.’

MS: I was going to mention Warshow.

RS: I’m not sure I completely buy into that in a movie like ‘Goodfellas’; there’s actually nothing very tragic about those guys.

MS: No.

RS: What happens to Henry Hill is not tragic; he’s just not having fun anymore.

MS: Right. Too bad for him!

RS: And it’s not a tragic ending.

MS: No, he’s still breathing.

RS: I guess I need you to explain where you’re coming from with that because it really is a unique movie, I think. You’ve said you can’t see ‘The Sopranos’ in it, but I see a sort of precursor in it.

MS: A lot of the wonderful actors in The Sopranos were in my pictures, so we always talk about it. A lot of the people in Goodfellas are not on the upper levels, so they’re not tragic. It’s just everyday tragedy. These guys are dealing on the everyday level. I knew them as people, not as criminals. If something fell off the truck, you know, we all bought it. It was part of surviving, part of living. Some of those guys were smarter than others. Some overstepped their bounds and were killed. That was based on reality.

There’s a danger in idolizing that world, but many of the police who were down there in that neighborhood were on the take. I was surprised the first time I saw the American system at work, which was in Twelve Angry Men, Sidney Lumet’s film. Today, I credit the priests in the neighborhood who screened a 16 millimeter print of it down in the basement of the church for some of the kids. It was like being on Mars.

RS: The surrogate in your film, practicing that idolization as a kid, is the Henry Hill character.

MS: Yes. If you engage in that life, certain things are expected of you. First of all, to make a lot of money for everybody. Or to be the muscle. You have to perform, and you have to be careful: the scene that Joe Pesci asked to be put in, and improvised with Ray Liotta – the ‘You think I’m funny?’ scene – shows that you could be killed any second. They don’t care who’s around. The trick in the picture was to sort of ignore that danger, make it a rollicking road movie in a way – like a kind of Bob Hope and Bing Crosby picture, with everybody on the road and having a great time.

When the Sicilian police finally broke up the Mafia in the early nineties, they arrested some guy – I forget his name, but he was the second in command – and an Italian reporter asked him if any movie about that world was accurate. And he said, Well, Goodfellas, in the scene where the guy says, ‘Do you think I’m funny?’ Because that’s the life we lead. You could be smiling and laughing one second, and [snaps fingers] in a split second you’re in a situation where you could lose your life.

RS: Quite an amazing anecdote.

MS: That is exactly where you live all the time. That’s the truth of it. Now that happened to Joe Pesci, originally, with a friend of his. He got out of it just by doing what Ray did. So when he told me the story, I said, ‘We’ve got to use that. That really encapsulates it completely. That’s the lifestyle.’

Remember when Jimmy Cagney got the AFI [American Film Institute] award, he thanked somebody I think was called Two-Times Ernie and the other street guys he knew as a kid. Because they taught him how to act. The kids in my neighborhood who told stories on the street corner, they’d have you enthralled, and often with a sense of humor about themselves. And these were some tough kids.

I’ll never forget one of the toughest I’d ever met telling a story about losing a fight in such a funny way, and not being embarrassed about it. [Laughs.] Not losing any dignity. I thought, That is brilliant: to accept the fact that he was knocked down so badly, had to get up again, get knocked down again. We were all laughing, and he was laughing. I’ll never forget it.

In the Wiseguy book, Henry Hill speaks that way, almost like a standup comic. He’s got his own rhythm. There’s a truth to it. Someone owes you money, and he doesn’t pay you. So you go to him, and he says, ‘Oh, my wife got sick.’ ‘Fuck you, pay me.’ ‘My daughter is –’ ‘Fuck you, pay me,’ a guy like Hill says. ‘My mother –’ ‘Fuck you, pay me’.

RS: De Niro in ‘Mean Streets’ has no conscious sense of consequences, always living in the moment. That’s symbolized in ‘Goodfellas’ by the great tracking shot into the Copacabana, when they all go out on the town. That’s the privileged moment they pay for in blood and death.

MS: Well, the Copacabana – that’s the top of the line for Henry – it was Valhalla. When you were able to get a table there, it was like being in the court of the kings. The Mob guys were really the ones in charge. The Copa lounge was always more significant because the real guys were up there. That’s why you have a lot happening in Raging Bull in the Copa lounge. My friend’s father, the one who would read and listen to opera, his father was the head bartender there. We have him in Raging Bull. Nice guy.

Everyone paid for the privilege eventually. The danger of the picture is that young people could look at it and think, Hey, what a great life. But you’ve got to see the last hour of the picture when things start going wrong in a big way.

RS: I think in one of the voice-over lines Henry Hill says, You only have it for maybe ten years.

MS: That’s right.

RS: That made me think about celebrity. Ballplayers, for example, only have maybe ten years.

MS: Right. Actors, filmmakers, you’ve got about ten years. Some of the greatest filmmakers had a run for ten years. It’s part of American celebrity.

– From Richard Schickel: Conversations with Scorsese (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). Copyright © 2011 by Richard Schickel.

The Art of War: David O. Russell on Three Kings

Three Kings (Directed by David O. Russell)

Writer/director David O. Russell is best known for Oscar-nominated films such as Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle and The Fighter. But before these, it was his critically-aclaimed 1999 film Three Kings that arguably launched his career. 

Three Kings is a darkly comic action-adventure set in the aftermath of the Gulf War. The military battle has barely concluded as the film opens, with the discovery of a map hidden on the person an Iraqi POW. For Capt. Archie Gates (George Clooney), a suavely cynical Green Beret, the find promises legendary fortune, since the map seems to indicate desert bunkers where Iraq has stored piles of stolen Kuwaiti bullion. Archie quickly assembles his own three-man liberation squad and departs through the dunes in a Humvee draped in an American flag.

The three enlisted guys are likeable youngsters engaged in risky play; they are also acted quite flawlessly. Sgt. Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg) is a devout Army reserve who wishes to return to his wife and infant daughter in Detroit. Chief Elgin (Ice Cube) is a devout Christian who thinks that "the good Lord has provided us with this map." Conrad Vig (Spike Jonze) inquires if Kuwaiti bullion refers to "those small cubes you put in boiling water to make soup"; Conrad makes up for his lack of intelligence with a passion for high explosives. 

Archie, on the other hand, is a fully developed adult and an apt hero for an unusually complicated picture. If his warrior's cynicism is strong, his sense of outraged humanity is as powerful. He savours the surreal craziness that ensues when he and his companions first enter labyrinthine bunkers filled with such lesser riches as televisions, stereos, and mobile phones; the contemporary world is suddenly regarded as a massive underground appliance shop. When Kuwait's stolen gold is discovered, carefully packed in soft-sided luggage, the bars are gleaming and ready to be taken again, but there is a catch, and it is located in Archie's heart. 

And at the core of the film, because writer-director David Russell has blended terrific, hard-edged action with a profoundly felt morality drama. His script takes subtle aim at the United States' foreign policy as he reveals that the US Administration supported a revolt against the Iraqi tyrant and then abandoned the defenceless rebels to their destiny. 

David O. Russell is at ease in the scatological mayhem that unfolds. His early films, the dark comedies, 1994's Spanking the Monkey and 1996's Flirting With Disaster, first brought his piercing comedy style to the festival circuit. 

Three Kings is replete with allusions to previous films: Apocalypse Now, The Man Who Would Be King, also paying homage to Natural Born Killers by including an aspirational television journalist. The film's visuals are frantic, striking. Archie, Troy, Vig, and Chief gallop their Humvee through an overexposed inferno that bursts in gunfire, mine explosions, and rapid dialogue. Apart from the contemporary generation of action filmmakers Quentin Tarantino and John Woo, there is also a good deal of John Huston here. As with Huston's The Asphalt Jungle, The Maltese Falcon, and Beat the Devil, this is a sublime caper picture that openly wishes for the success of its criminal enterprise and finds its crooks far more appealing than the forces of decency they resist. 

Its strongest visuals owe much to the surreal comic work of the novelist Thomas Pynchon. The desert is place of striking contrast, an ancient landscape that the West has devastated without logic and less compassion. The troops of Three Kings have nothing to say about the vague diplomatic world that justified the war; they are much more concerned with what they they can carry home. For Archie and his troops,  the war is an opportunity for what they can get away with and Russell interweaves the antics of his crew with the more serious issue of an American foreign policy gone awry with respect to the oppressed people's freedom that was the war’s justification.

In the following extract from an interview with Creative Screenwriting Russell discusses disagreements over writing credits, moving from independent to studio films, and the dark heart of the movie.

How did you set up ‘Three Kings’ at Warner Bros.? It’s a very brave film for a major studio. Did they come to you?


Yes. It was a very odd and serendipitous process: David’s Adventure in Studio Land. I thought, what would this be like, to work with something from their candy box? They opened up their logbook to me and this one log line jumped out at me, which was a heist set in the Gulf War, a script by John Ridley. A pretty straight action movie. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. In fact, I was researching another script, a turn-of-the-century story, and I didn’t feel I had cracked it, so I started buying books about the Gulf—photojournalist books that had amazing images in them like hundreds of soldiers being stripped in the desert and Bart Simpson dolls on grills of cars. All this incongruous stuff. There was once a scene where they ate animals in the zoo...

So you found the log line—

It took me by surprise and eventually to everybody’s surprise, I said, ‘I think I want to do this.’ And everybody’s eyebrows went up. Including my agent’s. They were all like, ‘What?’ I said it’s going to be crazy textured, with all the politics and everything. To me, the heist is the least interesting part. So I went off, researched, and wrote it for eighteen months. It was a fun scriptwriting process, like no other I’d ever done. I would make columns of things I found fascinating, and then I would build the script that way. So it’s not character-driven, which is obvious from the movie. There was very volatile material which hadn’t been put in the face of Americans about what really happened there. I read papers, talked to veterans and Iraqis. Then I sewed together the quilt of this script. It was liberating, because it was blank as the desert, a palette where I could do a lot of different things, including action, which I hadn’t done before. I wanted to click on lots of information, like click on their day jobs, click on the wife at home, click on how this punk sees violence as opposed to how violence really is. I’ll do it and see how it works in the editing.

John Ridley has been vocal in his displeasure over credit...

He certainly has. I thought we had an amicable agreement. He was all friendly when we made the credit agreement.

You just used his premise of the heist in the Gulf.

That was all I took from his script, and frankly, that’s the most boring thing about the movie. Which in a way was an albatross, because I thought it was going to help me write faster. It was sort of the opposite.

Ridley was part of the process in the beginning?

Yeah, he sold his script. Like every other writer. I don’t understand what his whining is about because it’s the most common experience in Hollywood. You write a script, you sell it and get paid. Goodbye. You’re lucky you’re not rewritten 700 times. If he wants to direct his own scripts, he should control them a little bit. If he thinks it’s such a work of genius, I think he’d let me publish my script. I even offered to publish both scripts in one volume.

That’s a great idea.

He won’t do it. He got paid, he got co-producer credit, he was all amicable. I wanted to publish the screenplay and then he started playing the jilted writer.

Did he see the film and have a problem with it?

Not to my knowledge.

Was there WGA arbitration at all?

No. He decided not to. I was happy to go either way because I knew I had a very strong case. I think what is truly accurate is screenplay by me, and story by him and me. With him getting first position. He said he wanted sole story credit. I said okay and he got co-producer credit.

Is this going to make you wary in the future?

Oh yeah. [laughs]

You used to be an activist, so did you purposely set out to spotlight our foreign policy?

Definitely. That was one of my main motivations. It wasn’t dealing with characters so much as I did in my other movies, it was being driven by the political charge of the material. I couldn’t believe that no other filmmaker had gone after this and I couldn’t believe that Warner Bros. was going to let me do it.

Why did they?

They were hungry to work with independent filmmakers. They’ve done it before.  They were happy to let me do my thing.

In terms of action movies, are you a fan or was it new territory?

I’m not a huge action movie fan, although the other idea that was a big motivator was violence. There hadn’t been a war film since Platoon, so I thought, ‘Great! I’m going to explore this territory in a totally different way.’ So while I’m writing it I find out that Spielberg and Malick are doing these epic war movies! Yet mine was contemporary and nothing like theirs. The whole process of resensitizing violence cinematically captivated me at the time. I felt that bullets had become glib and cartoonish, even in really smart independent movies, so I wanted to render their impact more real. Sometimes I write in friends’ homes, and I have a friend who was a doctor in an emergency room. I was writing and I said to him, ‘What exactly does a bullet do?’ We talked about it and I thought, ‘I’m going to write this, show this, and if it doesn’t work we can cut it later.’

In the script, you also indicate a lot of visual directions.

That took a lot of work to translate that to the camera department.

So when you’re writing, you see exactly how you want to shoot the scene.

Yes. Then you have to make that technically happen. You have to experiment. Definitely with the shootout. When we looked at the first cut of the shootout, I didn’t think it was going to work. I said, ‘Thank God, we covered this normally.’ And the editor says, ‘But you guys didn’t cover it normally.’ I was shitting my pants thinking we were going to reshoot!

There are lots of cool visual touches in the film.

I’m totally a beginner filmmaker, and I’m learning. My motives were political and informational, but also visual. I’d never been so visually motivated in any screenplay I ever wrote. Any flaws in the film are attributed to this, as well as its assets. I was experimenting with being a more visual writer. We studied these photojournalists, like Kenneth Jarecke’s book Just Another War, and it’s amazing—haunting black and white photos of the Gulf War. A brilliant book. We strove for that look in the film: a big, blank empty landscape with a person here and a truck way far away, that kind of thing. It was a little bit film school for me, so I’ll take a lot that I learned and go back to something that’s closer to my ballpark.

I think the dark heart of the movie is the interrogation scene. You get to hear the other side’s version of things. It’s horrifying what happens to Mark Wahlberg, but you can’t hate the interrogator.

One of the things that inspired me was that the war was like a computer picture from an airplane. So who are the people? It’s a dangerous thing because you can dehumanize the enemy. What would it be like to meet an Iraqi who didn’t want to serve in Saddam’s army—which most of them don’t want to – and bring him face to face with an American. That was exciting to me.

Did you interview any Iraqi soldiers?

We did. A lot of the people in the movie were Iraqi and we cast them out of Deerborn, Michigan, where there’s an Iraqi community.... I met a lot of them after I finished the script and asked if this was right, or this. But as a writer, you’d be surprised at how many of one’s instincts are right, strictly from intuition. I don’t know if it was Henry James who said as a writer, you should be able to walk by a house, and if the door opens for a moment and you get a glimpse into the kitchen where people are eating, then when the door closes, you should be able to write a story about that house.

Do you have certain habits to get yourself in the mood?

I have to write down all the things about an idea that excite me and I have to have the whole menu at my disposal. Sometimes I have charts on the wall. Once I outline—and I outline and outline—I have to insist that I write eight pages a day, otherwise I’ll never finish the script, or I’ll go over a couple pages a million times. Then I give it to another friend of mine so I can’t go back. You have to keep marching forward or you’ll never get it out of your head. I write longhand and then I transcribe onto the computer.

How long did it take to write Three Kings?


I had about a 200-page script after six months, but I wasn’t happy with it. I put it down for a few months before it became closer to my own version.

You gave it to the studio and they said go ahead.

At the beginning, they said, ‘Where’s the script? We paid you the advance and we normally expect a first draft in twelve weeks.‘ And I said, ‘That’s why most of your movies suck.’

‘Three Kings’ has done pretty good box-office. Is the studio happy with the outcome?

They’re very happy with it. Of course, everybody gets all pumped up when the tests are good and the advance press is good. Before that, we had more realistic expectations because the movie is provocative. It’s going to make money for them, I think.

What are the film or script influences on your work?

Definitely the films of the ’70s. I’m a big fan of Wes Anderson and Paul Anderson. All those Andersons. I love Alexander Payne. Chinatown. I watch a lot of movies. But I tend to watch movies I like over and over.

– ‘Not a Typical Action Movie: David. O. Russell on Three Kings’, Creative Screenwriting, March, 2016. Full interview here