Kelly Masterson: On ‘Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead’

Kelly Masterson started as a playwright in the 1980s with limited success. He wrote the original screenplay for ‘Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead’ in 1999. A powerful and bleak crime drama that meticulously reconstructs how an apparently perfect crime goes spectacularly wrong. Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is an insolvent real estate agent. His younger brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) is falling behind on his alimony payments. To relieve their financial troubles they decide to rob their parents’ suburban jewellery store with tragic consequences. Their father’s (Albert Finney) relentless pursuit of the culprits brings everything spiralling towards a terrible climax. The script was optioned by a succession of producers until, after several false starts, the project was given the go-ahead with veteran director Sidney Lumet on board. A superb crime melodrama it was Lumet’s final and greatest achievement. The following is an extract from an interview in which Kelly Masterson speaks about his experience of writing the script: 

What was the inspiration for ‘Before the Devil Knows You're Dead’?

KELLY MASTERSON: I had read a novel I admired called Reservation Road by John Burnham Schwarz. I really liked the structure. It involved a terrible incident followed by an examination of the incident from the point of view of the various participants. I thought it would make an interesting structure for a movie.

I invented my terrible incident: the robbery and shooting of the mother. Then I took each character and followed them to and from the incident.

I also knew it was a tragedy and purposely gave each of the main characters a tragic ‘flaw’ – obsessive behavior they cannot break. For example, the father becomes obsessed with the notion of revenge and cannot stop himself even when he discovers it is his own son who must wreak revenge upon. Devil was the result of my structure and character choices.

Were you involved in any re-writing before or during the production?

KELLY MASTERSON: Fortunately, and unfortunately, no. The good news is I didn’t have to rewrite the script based on someone else’s vision or ideas. I wrote the script and tweaked it here and there over the years. Sidney did a rewrite to get his final shooting script but I was not involved nor consulted. I wish he would have come to me and asked me to make the changes he wanted. The end result, though, is terrific and I am very proud of the movie.

Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead (Directed by Sidney Lumet)

What surprised you most about the transition from script to screen?

KELLY MASTERSON: Lots of things surprised me and most of them pleasantly. I was surprised by the casting of Brian F. O’Byrne as Bobby, the punk accomplice. I had written the part as a 22 year old, stupid kid. I had see Brian on stage in Doubt and thought him remarkably gifted but not right for Bobby. His performance, however, is spectacular and casting a 35 year old made him more pathetic and frightening. It was a stroke of genius on Sidney’s part.

I was surprised by the remarkable restraint and outer calm Philip brought to Andy’s breakdown late in the film. I wrote a cliché scene in which Andy trashes his apartment. Sidney and Philip came up with an eerie, fascinating, slow meltdown that is so much better. Most of all, I was most surprised by the deep, rich, tense and painful relationship between Hank and Andy – Sidney’s rewrite and the performances of Philip and Ethan took this to a level that surprised and enthralled me.

What did you learn in the process of writing ‘Before the Devil Knows You're Dead’ that you’ll take with you to other projects?

KELLY MASTERSON: Raise the stakes. I don’t mean, put the hero in more jeopardy or add a ticking clock. I mean dig deeper – make it more personal and more emotionally significant. Get right into the guts of the characters. While I often try to pull my characters in two or more directions, I think Sidney’s contribution took my material into richer psychological territory. This gave the wonderful actors great stuff to work with in which the emotional stakes were very high. When I am working on projects now, I ask myself the question: how do I get further into this character and really rock him?

What advice would you give to screenwriters who are still struggling to get their work seen and (hopefully) produced?

KELLY MASTERSON: Don’t give up. I wrote for 20 years before Devil got made. And find your voice. I tried for many years to imitate others or to write in ‘commercial’ genres and did not have any success. I wrote Devil from some original place within myself and never dreamed it would get made, let alone succeed. Keep at it.

 - Interview with ‘Kelly Masterson on “Before the Devil Knows You're Dead”’. From Fast, Cheap Movie Thrills.

John Cassavetes: On Writing for Films

A Woman Under the Influence (Directed by John Cassavetes)

As a director, Cassavetes was a genius at portraying domestic issues. For Husbands (1970), Cassavetes assembled a high-profile ensemble. Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, and Cassavetes himself portrayed a trio of suburban husbands who, reeling from the death of a friend, embark on a spree of drink, escape, and sex that includes a sojourn in London. Husbands was initially panned by critic Pauline Kael as “banal,” but others compared it to the work of Bergman and found episodes of rare power in the largely improvised relations between the three leads.

The moderate success of Husbands enabled Cassavetes to secure a deal to make Minnie and Moskowitz (1971). More optimistic than any of his other films, Minnie and Moskowitz was Cassavetes’s reworking of a screwball comedy. Seymour Cassel played a parking-lot employee who falls for a museum worker (Rowlands), who is recovering from the fallout of a relationship with a married man (Cassavetes).

Funny and infused with a lighter spirit, Cassavetes next project was a return to psychodrama with A Woman Under the Influence (1974), an unrelenting and raw account of a Los Angeles housewife’s mental breakdown. Intended initially as a theatrical vehicle for Rowlands, who balked at the role’s stage demands it was brought to the screen instead by Cassavetes’s Faces International production company. 

Peter Falk was cast as the loutish husband, and Rowlands’s magisterial portrayal of the tormented woman at the heart of the film earned her an Academy Award nomination for best actress. Despite some criticism that Cassavetes had diluted  the power of the performances by allowing some scenes to go on for an extended time, A Woman Under the Influence was Cassavetes’ most successful film to date. Moreover, it earned Cassavetes his only Academy Award nomination for best director. It looked like Cassavetes had taken on the film industry and won: he had found a formula to write and produce deeply personal films on his own terms, while winning praise from the industry which he secretly despised.

The following is an excerpt from a rare interview with John Cassavetes by Nicholas Pasquariello published in The Daily Californian, May 1975, in which he discusses the writing and themes of A Woman Under the Influence which starred Gene Rowlands and Peter Falk. Two years in the making, independently-produced,  financed largely by family and friends, and with an extraordinary performance from Gena Rowlands, it remains one of Cassavetes’ most popular and provocative films. This interview was conducted during the editing of the film.

D.C.: How did you write A Woman Under The Influence?

Cassavetes: When I first start writing, there’s a sense of discovery. In some way it’s not just working, it’s finding some romance in the lives of these people. You get fascinated with their lives. If they stay with you than you want to do something – make it into a movie, put it on in some way. It was that which propelled us to keep on working at it. I wrote it originally as a play for Gena [Rowlands] and then Peter [Falk] read one of the plays and he said he’d like to act the part. I say ‘Why, I mean, the husband’s part is not nearly as good as the woman’s part.‘ He said, ‘Well, I still like it and I’d like to do it.’ So I began with that in mind, knowing who the two central characters are, and wrote a screenplay in about a month, and then revised it.

I have a very funny view on writing for films. It keeps changing, but my current view on writing for films is that dialogue should be tied up so heavily with the incident that you don’t feel dialogue and you don’t feel talk, rather you feel the emotions of the people.

D.C.: How much improvisation was involved in the making of A Woman Under The lnfluence?

Cassavetes: Hardly any. On Faces there was none either. On the first picture I did, Shadows, was all improvised, Faces was not, Husbands was about fifty-fifty, Minnie And Moskowitz was all written and this one was all written.

D.C.: Can you tell me the story of A Woman Under The Influence, as you now see it?

Cassavetes: It’s about a woman, it’s about her husband. The influence is the male, and she’s terribly in love with this man, and she’s crazy. He’s in love with her, and she counts on him. The rest of the story involves their lives, how they resolve the problem of her being crazy and him being sane, and being in love with each other.

You deal with an impossible situation, a woman who is really nuts, who can only function with the deepest love and respect from her mate, and when she has that she functions just admirably fine. When it’s taken away in the slightest form, if the man is human and has a bad mood, the woman goes totally berserk. Ordinarily you just let that woman go and say she’s a pain in the ass. Outside of having sympathy for her, she’d be impossible, but he happens to be in love with her, so strongly that it’s taken two people who absolutely have no right to be together except that they’re in love with each other, and they find a way to work it out through enormous difficulties.

He’s a working man, a guy that lays sewer pipes. He has a gang and they work outside in the fields, and they’re quite happy. She’s a prisoner in her household, not really caring about anything except a love affair that exists between herself and her husband. It’s impossible for him really to cope, to understand fully his need for her. And he has an enormous need for her. Every scene in the picture is dealing with their mothers, their friends, their families. Everything is on a level that he doesn’t understand, he can’t comply with, because he doesn’t think that she has any friends except himself.

People love her, and when she goes insane and comes back from the institution, when she’s so-called cured, no one likes her that way, they want her to be what she was, in a controlled area. He’s the only one that can make it that way, that can make her that way. A Woman Under the Influence really is about all women being crazy, because I believe that’s true (laughter).

D.C.: Don’t you think all men are crazy, too?

Cassavetes: I think they wish they were crazy (laughter). Our [men’s] stakes are not as high, and our weapons are greater. Their [women’s] weapons are sharp and finely honed and steeled, but their problems remain constant. And sometimes they can’t use their weapons, and then they don’t know what to do because they have no way of fighting, and then they go crazy. So, a woman who is absolutely in love with a man cannot in any way compete, because she’s in love with him, and so she’s not in competition with him. But I do believe at the end of the picture that love is possible, not only possible but it’s practical and appealing and not maudlin and quite noble.

Paul Schrader: Notes On Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

A screenwriter, director and film critic, Paul Schrader is best known for his work with the award-winning director Martin Scorsese. Schrader worked on screenplays for a number of Scorsese films including Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ and Bringing Out the Dead. Schrader’s films and scripts are haunted by one dominant and recurring theme: they focus on a lone protagonist hurtling towards self-destruction.

Schrader’s early script about the disturbed New York City cab driver Travis Bickle was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture and, eventually, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Having initially worked as a noted film critic, Taxi Driver was Schrader’s breakthrough.

An extraordinary and influential film Taxi Driver is however rooted in a dark time of  Schrader’s life: “Travis Bickle is me,” he has repeatedly stated said in interviews. “At the time I wrote it, I was in a rather low and bad place,” Schrader has explained. “I had broken with Pauline [Kael], I had broken with my wife, I had broken with the woman I left my wife for, I had broken with the American Film Institute and I was in debt,” he goes on to explain.

A contemporary interview with Film Comment offers a revealing insight into Shrader’s state of mind at the time of writing Taxi Driver: “I got to wandering around at night; I couldn’t sleep because I was so depressed. I’d stay in bed till four or five P.M. then I’d say, ‘Well, I can get a drink now’,” he claimed.

“I’d get up and get a drink and take the bottle with me and start wandering around the streets in my car at night. After the bars closed, I’d go to pornography. I’d do this all night, till morning, and I did it for about three or four weeks, a very destructive syndrome until I was saved from it by an ulcer: I had not been eating, just drinking,” he added.

It was during hospital treatment, that he conceived the metaphor of the taxi cab: “That is what I was: this person in an iron box, a coffin, floating around the city, but seemingly alone,” he explained.

Schrader has stated that his motivation to write the screenplay was done out of a sense of therapy rather than a quest for success, “I wrote the script very quickly, in something like fifteen days. The script just jumped from my mind almost intact”.

“As soon as I finished writing – I wrote it for no commercial reason, just because I saw that was the need — I gave it to my agent and I left L.A. and bummed around the country.”

“Taxi Driver was written when I couldn’t really distinguish between the pain in the work and the pain in my life,” he said in the ’70s. “I hope I’ll continue to write stuff that is as good.”

Paul Schrader was 26 and destitute when he wrote Taxi Driver. In a discussion published in Martin Scorsese - A Journey he reflects on the origins of the script, its transition to the screen and subsequent reaction to the film.

The script of Taxi Driver is the genuine thing. It came from the gut, and while it banged around town everyone who read it realized it was authentic, the real item. After a number of years enough people said somebody should make it so that finally someone did.

In 1973 I had been through a particularly rough time, living more or less in my car in Los Angeles. riding around all night, drinking heavily, going to porno movies because they were open all night, and crashing some place during the day. Then, finally, I went to the emergency room in serious pain, and it turned out I had an ulcer. While I was in the hospital, talking to the nurse, I realized I hadn’t spoken to anyone in two or three weeks. It really hit me, an image that I was like a taxi driver, floating around in this metal coffin in the city, seemingly in the middle of people, but absolutely, totally alone.

The taxicab was a metaphor for loneliness, and once I had that, it was just a matter of creating a plot: the girl he wants but can’t have, and the one he can have but doesn’t want. He tries to kill the surrogate father of the first and fails, so he kills the surrogate father of the other. I think it took ten days, it may have been twelve – I just wrote continuously. I was staying at an old girlfriend’s house, where the heat and gas were all turned off, and I just wrote. When I stopped, I slept on the couch, then I woke up and I went back to typing. As you get older it takes more work. Hovering in the back of my mind is a fondness for those days when it was so painful it just had to come out.

I didn’t really write it the way people write scripts today – you know, with a market in mind. I wrote it because it was something that I wanted to write and it was the first thing I wrote. It jumped out of my head.

Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

Right after writing it, I left town for about six months. I came back to Los Angeles after I was feeling a little stronger emotionally and decided to go at it again. I was a freelance critic at the time. I had written a review of Sisters and interviewed Brian De Palma at his place at the beach. That afternoon, we were playing chess – we were about evenly matched – and somehow the fact that I had written a script came up. So I gave it to him and he liked it a lot and wanted to do it. De Palma showed the script to the producers, Michael and Julia Phillips, who were three houses down the beach, and he showed it to Marty, who was in town after finishing Mean Streets. Michael and Julia told me they wanted to do it but that Marty was a better director for it. So Julia and I went and saw a rough cut of Mean Streets, and I agreed. In fact, I thought Marty and Bob De Niro would be the ideal combination, so we aligned ourselves – De Niro, the Phillipses and myself – but we were not powerful enough to get the film made. Then there was a hiatus of a couple of years, and in the intervening time, each of us had successes of our own. I sold my first script, The Yakuza, for a lot of money. Marty did Alice the Phillipses did The Sting, and De Niro did The Godfather; Part II.

At the time I remember describing Taxi Driver’s Travis as sort of a young man who wandered from the snowy waste of the Midwest into an over-heated New York cathedral. My own background was anti-Catholic in the style of the Reformation and the Glorious Revolution. The town I was raised in was about one-third Dutch Calvinist and one-third Catholic, and the other third were trying to figure out why they were there, and sort of keeping peace. Well, both cultures, Catholic and Calvinist, are infused with the sense of guilt, redemption by blood, and moral purpose – all acts are moral acts, all acts have consequence. It’s impossible to act amorally. There’s a kind of divine eye in the sky that ensures your acts are morally judged. So you know once you’re raised in that kind of environment, you don’t shake that, you shake a lot of things, but the sense of moral responsibility, guilt, and redemption you carry with you forever. So Scorsese and I shared that. I came from essentially a rural, Midwestern Protestant and Dutch background, and he is urban and Italian Catholic, so in a way it’s a very felicitous joining. The bedrock is the same.

Taxi Driver was as much a product of luck and timing as everything else – three sensibilities together at the right time, doing the right thing. It was still a low-budget, long-shot movie, but that’s how it got made. At one point, we could have financed the film with Jeff Bridges, but we elected to hold out and wait until we could finance it with De Niro. It was just a matter of luck and timing. Marty was fully ready to make the film; De Niro was ready to make it. And the nation was ready to see it. You can’t plan or scheme for that kind of luck. It just sort of happens – the right film at the right time...

Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

Bob was so determined to get the character of Travis down, he drove a cab for a couple of weeks. He got a licence, had his fingerprints taken by the police and hit the streets.

The dialogue in Taxi Driver is somewhat improvised. The most memorable piece of dialogue in the film is an improvisation: the “Are you talking to me?” part. In the script it just says Travis speaks to himself in the mirror. Bobby asked me what he would say, and I said, ‘Well, he’s a little kid playing with guns and acting tough.’ So De Niro used this rap that an underground New York comedian had been using at the same time as the basis for his lines.

I remember the night before Taxi Driver opened, we all got together and had dinner and said, ‘No matter what happens tomorrow we have made a terrific movie and we’re damn proud of it even if it goes down the toilet.’ The next day, I went over to the cinema for the noon show. There was a long line that went all the way around the block. And then I realised, this line was for the two o’clock show, not the noon show! I ran in and watched the film and everyone was standing at the back and there was a sense of exhilaration about what we had done.

Jean-Luc Godard once said that all the great movies are successful for the wrong reasons. There were a lot of wrong reasons why Taxi Driver was successful. The sheer violence of it brought out the Times Square crowd.

I’m not opposed to censorship in principle but I think that if you censor a film like Taxi Driver all you do is censor a film, not confront a problem. These characters are running around and can be triggered off by anything.

When I talk to younger filmmakers they tell me that it was really the film that informed them, that it was their seminal film, and listening to them talk, I really can see it as a kind of social watermark. But it was meant as a personal film, not a political commentary.

– Paul Schrader in Martin Scorsese - A Journey by Mary Pat Kelly. Pages 87-98.

   

Paul Schrader: On Screenwriting

Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

The films and screenplays of Paul Schrader and his eventual effect on the American cinema is considerably larger than his collaborations with Martin Scorsese, despite the creation of Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle whose energy and mysterious terror are a notable career achievement. 

Paul Schrader can be mentioned in the same breath as Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas among the generation of directors known as the "Movie Brats." However, he doesn't have any connection to the era of populist cinema of the classical Hollywood era or that which found inspiration in morning serials. Instead, 'Transcendental Style in Picture: From Robert Bresson to Yasujiro Ozu' is key to understanding his intentions.

Divergent cultural cinema styles, as described by Schrader, employ a universal style, also known as the transcendental style, to express transcendence. Although it can never be reached, to always strive for the unknowable and unseen is part of the work itself. Schrader's quest is to get to the bottom of things, yet never hope to fix anything impossible. The style of transcendentalism is the subject of the book titled "Transcendental Style in Film." 

This book analyses the unique characteristics and triumphs of the films showcased, which exemplify the quest for transcendental sensation. Schrader looks at all the individual traits these movies share, rather than seeing what separates them. After that, however, the critical focus is no longer on their differences, but on their similarities. And then Schrader introduces the universal, overpowering ability of these films to transcend their own (intentional) trappings of a "cold, unfeeling world" by just providing a "irrational and undefined" passion into a heartless existence. The final catharsis of the work does not come out, but as Schrader calls it, the "stasis," which means a re-configuration of the harsh, homogenised style of the picture, merely impacted by the events. 

Paul Schrader's work is considered to be one of the most important in establishing the distinction between experiential and expressive modes of artistic expression, and demonstrating that big emotional reactions have a foundation in intellectual theory and knowledge. The publication examined the works of directors such as Yasujiro Ozu, Bresson, and Carl Theodor Dreyer, and included numerous cinematic references. As Andre Bazin and Donald Richie present an extended framework of Schrader's didactic expansions, critical theory is considerably more important in ‘Transcendental Style'. 

A more accurate statement may be that this 1972 work represents the arrival of academics and criticism in the New Hollywood epoch. Schrader was Pauline Kael's protege. However, it is surprising how long this topic sticks with the reader after he or she finishes reading. Films such as Ordet and Day of Wrath are continually becoming visible through their application of the ruminations of Schrader (though it helps Dreyer to be the 20th century Canon Film Founder) and those who move towards a more popular art-house mode, such as Ingmar Bergman, are reinforced by found elements of a transcendental style.

In the following extract Paul Schrader discusses the screenwriting process in relation to his work on the seminal films Taxi Driver, Raging Bull and The Last Temptation of Christ – each directed by Martin Scorsese. 

You wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver in about ten days, and I know you’re of the school of thought that the faster you write a screenplay, the better.


You have to understand that the gestation period could be months, or even years, and the idea of writing fast is to keep from writing as long as possible, so that it just endures time and obstacles. By the time it comes out, it comes out almost fully formed. Then you write in approximately a time frame that’s like viewing a movie. You can sort of feel the experience as you’re living it, it doesn’t get attenuated, it doesn’t get threshed out. But I’m also of the school of I’m not going to write unless I know what I’m going to write. I pretty much know what’s going to happen on page seventy-five before I sit down and write.

So you have to have the whole thing in your head before you write it? 

Yeah, and outlined. It moves and shapes itself as you go along, but it is pretty well worked out, and it has endured numerous tests before it is written. By tests, I mean the oral tradition, telling people. You sit down and you tell people the story. You say, ‘Look, I wanna tell you a story. Man walks into a bank. There’s a robbery going on....’ There you are, you’re off and running, and you can watch people. It doesn’t really matter what they say, it’s what they do with their eyes and how they sit. You can see whether or not this story has a resonance, and as you tell it, sometimes you have to make changes. Because like a stand-up comedian, you realize you’re losing your audience, you gotta do something drastic. I think it was Chandler who once said, ‘If you ever get in trouble, introduce a character with a gun. Your reader will be so glad he’s there, he won’t ask where he came from.’ The same thing with telling a story; you realize you’re losing your listener, then you say, ‘All of a sudden, a red car pulls up, and these two guys in black coats come out.’ Boom! You got your listener back. Of course, you’ve also got a red car and two guys in black coats, but that’s one of the things you do when you work the oral tradition. By the time you write that script, you’re pretty confident that it’s worth writing because you have seen it work. If you can tell a story for forty-five minutes and keep people interested, you have a movie.

Taxi Driver (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

Who would you use as a sounding board? 

Anybody. The more ordinary someone is, the better, because they’re not going to give you arcane points, you’re just going to see if they’re interested. It’s like telling a joke – you know when it works. Obviously, certain material is very sophisticated, and it’s not going to work that way. I’m not going to sit and tell Mishima to somebody at the 7-11! But in general, if you’re dealing with a kind of a narrative, you want to get that kind of feedback. Also, another good thing about it is it stops you from writing a lot of scripts, because you see them die, and you see yourself getting stuck. It is very discouraging to write scripts that don’t get sold or made. If you can stop yourself from writing those scripts, you can prolong your career. Because all you have to do is write five or six of those scripts, and you’re about beat up. So if you have a bad idea, you can catch it in time. You haven’t lost a script, you’ve saved yourself four months. I lecture from time to time on screenwriting, and when I lecture, it’s a five-point program. It goes from theme, to metaphor, to plot, to oral tradition, to outline. That’s the progress of an idea. It all begins with a theme, and another word for a theme is a personal problem. In Taxi Driver it was loneliness, the metaphor was a taxicab. Bing-Bang-Boom, it starts to move.

When you sit down to write an original screenplay, where do you begin?

At any given time in your life, there are a number of problems running around. Problems that have a lot to do with where you are in your life cycle, whether it’s a mid-life crisis, problems with parents or children. You’re always looking for metaphors that will somehow address that problem. And once you find that metaphor, particularly if you’ve written as much as I have, it’s like a factory is standing there, fully manned, ready to go. All it needs is the raw material. The metaphor is the raw material. Once they get that, they can go to work.

The Last Temptation of Christ (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

But your last few projects have been adaptations? 

About four years ago, I ran into a little dry period. Like so many others I turned to books. I did some adaptations where I originated the projects: Touch and Affliction. For about a year now I sort of fell back into the groove and have been doing a lot of writing again. That feeling of not having anything original to say has sort of gone away. I think I’ll be good for a couple more years.

It goes through cycles. 

Yeah. I don’t think anybody has something fresh to say every year. You just don’t have an original script every year.

You adapted ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’, which was not an easy novel to turn into a film. How did you approach that adaptation?


I do the same process in terms of problem/metaphor. You look at the book, and you say, ‘Where’s the problem?’ And it’s not necessarily the problem in the book, it’s your problem that you find in the book. ‘What part of me exists in this book that I can address?’ You have to personalize it, and therefore in a book like Last Temptation, there were probably five or six different scripts that could have been written from that. You have a 600-page philosophical novel, and it’s going to become a 110-page script. What I did in that case was I listed every single thing that happened in the book – there were probably 400 or 500 things that happened in the book – then I did columns. Did they address my problem? Were they important for expositional needs? Did they address any of the sub-themes? I went through all the scenes and put checks behind them to the degree that they were useful to me. And then I just took the top fifty scenes, because only between forty to fifty-five things happen in a movie anyway, and said, ‘Okay, what do I have to add?’ Or, ‘How do I make this meld all together?’ That way I was able to take three- quarters of the book, and just wipe it off the table in one grand stroke and reduce the size of the book. Then I went back and picked up from those pages I had swiped off, whatever little bits and pieces I might need.

Raging Bull (Directed by Martin Scorsese)

You did a rewrite on the film ‘Raging Bull’, and Martin Scorsese said that your version of the script was the breakthrough that helped get the film made. What exactly did you bring to the script for ‘Raging Bull’?


Well there was no Joey La Motta. Jake La Motta had written a book called Raging Bull with Pete Savage, and he cut his brother out of his book because he didn’t like his brother! So I started doing research, and I started hearing about the fighting La Motta brothers and that they were boxers together. I interviewed Vickie [Jake’s ex-wife] and Joey, and I realized you had a sibling story. The movie was about these two brothers who had this contract. Basically the contract was, they were both boxers, but one of them had the gift of gab, and the other one didn’t. So Joey basically said to Jake, ‘Here’s the deal. You get the beatings, you get the fame, I get the girls, we set up the bookies, and we split the money.’ Well that contract is fraught with dangers [laughs]! That was the implicit contract between these two men. Jake would be the headliner and take the beatings, and Joey would be the pretty boy who got the girls and they would split the money. You know that there’s going to come a day that someone doesn’t agree with that contract! So without Joey, you didn’t have a movie...

From – Paul Schrader Interviewed by Jim Mercurio and David Konow: Creative Screenwriting, vol 6, #1 (Jan/Feb 1999) and vol 9, #5 (Sept/Oct 2002).

Charlie Chaplin: The Lost Interview

City Lights (Directed by Charlie Chaplin)

‘If only one of Charles Chaplin's films could be preserved, ‘City Lights’ (1931) would come 
the closest to representing all the different notes 
of his genius. It contains the slapstick, the
 pathos, the pantomime, the effortless physical 
coordination, the melodrama, the bawdiness, 
the grace, and, of course, the Little Tramp – the 
character said, at one time, to be the most 
famous image on earth.’
– Roger Ebert

‘The Tramp was something within me’ - Charlie Chaplin

City Lights proved to be Chaplin's most difficult and lengthy project. It took him two years and eight months to complete the task, and about 190 days of shooting time.

No trace of this difficulty can be found in the completed movie. Alistair Cooke, a British film reviewer, has said that the picture, despite the challenges, "flows gently like water over pebbles." 

Like Chaplin's efforts, the plot had several iterations. From the beginning, he made up his mind thst the project would focus on blindness. Chaplin began with the concept that he would portray a clown who lost his sight, and was attempting to conceal his condition from his young daughter. 

Eventually he settled on the notion of a blind girl, who creates a romanticised picture of the little tramp who falls in love with her and devotes himself to spending money to help her receive treatment. 

No sooner had this notion been developed, Chaplin  had a good notion of how the movie would conclude when the blind girl realises the truth of who her benefactor is. In fact, he already has it in mind that if the scene was a success, it would be one of his greatest achievements.

Chaplin claimed throughout his lifetime that he marvelled at the wondrous enchantment of the concluding sequence in City Lights: “I’ve had that once or twice, he said, …in City Lights just the last scene … I’m not acting …. Almost apologetic, standing outside myself and looking … It’s a beautiful scene, beautiful, and because it isn’t over-acted.”

Virginia Cherrill, who at twenty-years-old and recently divorced, played the blind girl in the production. Chaplin had no patience for less-experienced performers. He only wanted his performers to obey his orders. He found her talent to make it appear as though she was blind to be quite impressive. He counselled her to "gaze inwards" rather than see him, but Chaplin found it difficult to build a personal connection with her. When Miss Cherrill made her declaration several years later, she said, “Charlie didn't like me and I didn't like him.” 

As far as he was concerned, she was simply an amateur. On one occasion, he tried to replace her with his leading woman in “The Gold Rush,” who was a rising star named Georgia Hale. Despite the challenges, her performance eventually succeeded.

As brutal as Chaplin was in his treatment of others, he was much harder on himself. The sound film had been well  established before City Lights began production. Chaplin found this new revolution difficult. His tramp figure was understood throughout the world as a mime. The tramp didn’t have a voice.

Chaplin tackled the matter head-on by creating City Lights the way he had previously made films, using silent cinema. The only compromise he made was to include a synchronised musical soundtrack, and to provide a few sound effects.

Using sound as creatively as visuals for humour was immensely successful. Already, because of his immobile face, he has paid close attention to the orchestral music playing throughout the early days of his feature films. People and the press were impressed and astonished when it turned out that Chaplin was responsible for the soundtrack for City Lights. 

City lights premiered in Los Angeles to great acclaim and is now widely considered to be not just Chaplin’s masterpiece but a masterpiece of world cinema.

In 1966, Charlie Chaplin talked to Richard Meryman about the inspiration behind his films. The full interview was never published. The following extract is an edited version that appeared in Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema, by Jeffrey Vance.

Richard Meryman: This interview is entirely concerned with your work and your art, and nothing else. I want to give some indication of how you work.

Charlie Chaplin: The summation of my character is that I care about my work. I care about everything I do. If I could do something else better, I would do it, but I can’t.

RM Can you talk about the moment you created the Tramp outfit?

CC It all came about in an emergency. The cameraman said put on some funny make-up, and I hadn’t the slightest idea what to do. I went to the dress department and, on the way, I thought, well, I’ll have them make everything in contradiction - baggy trousers, tight coat, large head, small hat - raggedy but at the same time a gentleman. I didn’t know how I was going to do the face, but it was going to be a sad, serious face. I wanted to hide that it was comic, so I found a little moustache. And that moustache was no concept of the characterisation - only saying that it was rather silly. It doesn’t hide my expression.

RM When you looked at yourself, what was your first reaction?

CC It’ll do. It didn’t ignite anything. Not until I absolutely had to play it in the presence of the camera. Making an entrance, I felt dressed; I had an attitude. I felt good, and the character came to me. The scene [from Mabel’s Strange Predicament] was in a hotel lobby, and the Tramp was trying to pretend to be one of the guests just so he can get anchored on a soft seat and rest for a while. Everybody looked at him a little suspiciously, and I did all the things that the guests were doing in the hotel, looked at the register, took out a cigarette, lit it, watched the passing parade. And then I stumbled over the cuspidor. That was the first gag I ever did. And the character was born. And I thought, this is a very good character. But not every character I played followed the same format for all the comedy ideas after that.

One thing I intended to remain - not so much the dress of the Tramp, but the sore feet. No matter how rambunctious or exuberant he felt, he always had these very tired, big feet. I inquired of wardrobe that I wanted two large pairs of old shoes, because I had absurdly small feet, so I wanted these big shoes, and I knew they would give me a comic gait. I’m naturally very graceful, but trying to be graceful in big feet - that’s funny.

RM Do you think the Tramp would work in modern times?

CC I don’t think there’s any place for that sort of person now. The world has become a little bit more ordered. I don’t think it’s happier now, by any means. I’ve noticed the kids with their short clothes and their long hair, and I think some of them want to be tramps. But there’s not the same humility now. They don’t know what humility is, so it has become something of an antique. It belongs to another era. That’s why I couldn’t do anything like that now. And, of course, sound - that’s another reason. When talk came in I couldn’t have my character at all. I wouldn’t know what kind of voice he would have. So he had to go.

RM What do you think was the great appeal of the Tramp?

CC There is that gentle, quiet poverty. Every soda jerk wants to dress up, wants to be a swell. That’s what I enjoy about the character - being very fastidious and very delicate about everything. But I never really thought of the Tramp in terms of appeal. The Tramp was something within myself I had to express. I was motivated by the reaction of the audience, but I never related to an audience. The audience happens when it’s finished, and not during the making. I’ve always related to a sort of a comic spirit, something within me, that said, I must express this. This is funny.

RM How does a gag sequence come to you? Does it come out of nothing, or is there a process?

CC No, there is no process. The best ideas grow out of the situation. If you get a good comedy situation it goes on and on and has many radiations. Like the skating rink sequence [in The Rink]. I found a pair of skates and I went on, with everybody in the audience certain that I was going to fall, and instead I came on and just skated around on one foot gracefully. The audience didn’t expect it from the Tramp. Or the lamppost gag [in Easy Street]. It came out of a situation where I am a policeman, and am trying to subdue a bully. I hit him on the head with a truncheon, and hit him and hit him. It is like a bad dream. He keeps rolling his sleeves up with no reaction to being hit at all. Then he lifts me up and puts me down. Then I thought, well, he has enormous strength, so he can pull the lamppost down, and while he was doing that I would jump on his back, push his head in the light and gas him. I did some funny things that were all made off the cuff that got a tremendous laugh.

But there was a lot of agony, too. Miserable days of nothing working, and getting more despondent. It was up to me to think of something to make them laugh. And you cannot be funny without a funny situation. You can do something clownish, perhaps stumble, but you must have a funny situation.

RM Do you see people doing these things, or do they all come out of your imagination?

CC No, we created a world of our own. Mine was the studio in California. The happiest moments were when I was on the set and I had an idea or just a suggestion of a story, and I felt good, and then things would happen. It was the only surcease that I had. The evening is rather a lonesome place, you know, in California, especially in Hollywood. But it was marvellous, creating a comic world. It was another world, different from the everyday. And it used to be fun. You sit there and you rehearse for half a day, shoot it, and that was it.

RM Is realism an integral part of comedy?

CC Oh, yes, absolutely. I think in make-believe, you have an absurd situation, and you treat it with a complete reality. And the audience knows it, so they’re in the spirit. It’s so real to them and it’s so absurd, it gives them exultation.

RM Well, part of it is the cruelty, there was a lot of cruelty.

CC Cruelty is a basic element in comedy. What appears to be sane is really insane, and if you can make that poignant enough they love it. The audience recognises it as a farce on life, and they laugh at it in order not to die from it, in order not to weep. It’s a question of that mysterious thing called candour coming in. An old man slips on a banana and falls slowly and stumbles and we don’t laugh. But if it’s done with a pompous well-to-do gentleman who has exaggerated pride, then we laugh. All embarrassing situations are funny, especially if they’re treated with humour. With clowns you can expect anything outrageous to happen. But if a man goes into a restaurant, and he thinks he’s very smart but he’s got a big hole in his pants - if that is treated humorously, it’s bound to be funny. Especially if it’s done with dignity and pride.

RM Your comedy in part is a comedy of incident, too. It’s not an intellectual thing, it’s things that are happening, that are funny.

CC I’ve always thought that incidents related will make a story, like the setting up of a pool game on a billiard table. Each ball is an incident in itself. One touches the other, you see. And the whole makes a triangle. I carry that image a great deal in my work.

RM You like to keep a terrific pace going and you pack incidents one on top of the other quite a bit. Do you think this is characteristic of you?

CC Well, I don’t know whether it’s characteristic of me. I’ve watched other comedians who seem to relax their pace. I can feel my way much better with pace than I can with being slow. I haven’t the confidence to move slow, and I haven’t the confidence in what I’m doing.

But action is not always the thing. Everything must have growth, otherwise it loses its reality. You have a problem, and then you intensify it. You don’t deliberately start with intensifying it. But you say, well, now, where do we go from here? You say, what is the natural outcome of this? Realistically and convincingly, the problem keeps getting more and more complicated. And it must be logical, otherwise you will have some sort of comedy, but you won’t have an exciting comedy.

RM Do you worry about sentimentality or cliche?

CC No, not in pantomime. You don’t worry about it, you just avoid it. And I’m not afraid of a cliche - all life is a cliche. We don’t awaken with any sort of originality. We all live and die with three meals a day, fall in and out of love. Nothing could be more of a cliche than a love story, and that must go on, so long as it is treated interestingly.

RM Did you do the eating of the shoe gag [in The Gold Rush] many times?

CC We had about two days of retakes on it. And the poor old actor [Mack Swain] was sick for the last two. The shoes were made of liquorice, and he’d eaten so much of it. He said, ‘I cannot eat any more of those damn shoes!’ I got the idea for this gag from the Donner party [a wagon train of 81 pioneers who, heading to California in 1846, became trapped by snow in the Sierra Nevada]. They resorted to cannibalism and to eating a moccasin. And I thought, stewed boots? There’s something funny there.

I had an agonising time trying to motivate the story, until we got into a simple situation: hunger. The moment you’ve solved the logic of a situation, its feasibility, reality and possibility of being able to happen, ideas fly at you. It is one of the best things in the picture.

RM Did you have any doubts or concerns going into sound?

CC Yes, oh, naturally. In the first place, I had experience, but not academic training, and there’s a great difference. But I felt I had talent, I felt I was a natural actor. I knew it was much easier for me to pantomime than it was to talk. I’m an artist, and I knew very well that in talking a lot of that would disappear. I’d be no better than anybody else with good diction and a very good voice, which is more than half the battle.

RM Was it a question of having an extra dimension of reality that might hurt the fantasy of silent film?

CC Oh yes. I’ve always said that the pantomime is far more poetic and it has a universal appeal that everyone would understand if it were well done. The spoken word reduces everybody to a certain glibness. The voice is a beautiful thing, most revealing, and I didn’t want to be too revealing in my art because it may show a limitation. There are very few people with voices that can reach or give the illusion of great depth, whereas movement is as near to nature as a bird flying. The expression of the eyes - there’s no words. The pure expression of the face that people can’t hide - if it’s one of disappointment it can be ever so subtle. I had to bear all this in mind when I started talking. I knew very well I lost a lot of eloquence. It can never be as good.

RM Do you have a film that’s a favourite?

CC Well, I think I liked City Lights. I think it’s solid, well done. City Lights is a real comedy.

RM That is a powerful film. What impressed me is how close tragedy and comedy are.

CC That has never interested me. That’s been the feeling, I suppose, of subjectivity. I’ve always felt that, and it has more or less been second nature with me. That may be due to environment also. And I don’t think one can do humour without having great pity and a sense of sympathy for one’s fellow man.

RM Is it that we want relief from tragedy?

CC No, I think life is much more. If that were the reason I think there would be more suicides. People would want to get out of life. I think life is a very wonderful thing, and must be lived under all circumstances, even in misery. I think I would prefer life. Prefer the experience, for nothing else but the experience. I think humour does save one’s sanity. We can go overboard with too much tragedy. Tragedy is, of course, a part of life, but we’re also given an equipment to offset anything, a defence against it. I think tragedy is very essential in life. And we are given humour as a defence against it. Humour is a universal thing, which I think is derived from more or less pity.

RM Do you think there is such a thing as a genius?

CC I’ve never known quite what a genius was. I think it’s somebody with a talent, who’s highly emotional about it, and is able to master a technique. Everybody is gifted in some way. The average man has to differentiate between doing a regular sort of unimaginative job, and the fellow who’s a genius doesn’t. He does something different, but does this very well. Many a jack-of-all-trades has been mistaken for a genius.

– This is an edited extract from an interview in Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema, by Jeffrey Vance. A copy of the complete transcript, from which this excerpt was taken, is preserved in the Chaplin Archives.