The Coen Brothers: Fargo, Crime and Realism

Fargo (Directed by Joel and Ethan Coen)

‘Based on actual events’ the Coen Brothers’ Fargo tells the story of indebted Minneapolis car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) who hires two lowlifes Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife Jean (Kristin Rudrüd) and ransom her for money from his rich father-in-law Wade (Harve Presnell). The scheme unravels when one of the kidnappers kills a state trooper during a routine traffic stop. As Carl and Gaear leave more bodies in their wake, the pregnant local police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) begins to investigate. 

From its opening shot – in which a car trundles down a harsh, snowy road – to its bleak conclusion, the film transforms its dull, Upper Midwestern landscape into the setting for a narrative that explores the soul of modern America. The Coens take a standard film noir plot and transform it into epic drama, forming out of the grim events a portrait of the pursuit of the American Dream and its consequences. 

The films of the Coen brothers are often noted for their highly self-conscious relation to preceding film forms. In Fargo the screenplay resolutely undermines the traditional police procedural, most notably with the creation of the main female police investigator. Fargo deliberately turns against film convention in favour of a naturalism that gives its characters identifiable, clearly grounded lives. There’s a richness in the portrayal of the characters that fills the movie with closely observed, realistic details instead of clichés. This extends to the portrayal of the ineptitude of Carl and Jerry – the would-be ‘masterminds’ of Fargo’s kidnap plot. As Ethan Coen explains:

One of the reasons for making them simple-minded was our desire to go against the Hollywood cliché of the bad guy as a super-professional who controls everything he does. In fact, in most cases criminals belong to the strata of society least equipped to face life, and that’s the reason they’re caught so often. In this sense too, our movie is closer to life than the conventions of cinema and genre movies.

The true nightmare of Fargo is that many of the characters have unthinkingly bought into the promise of "the American Dream," yet they appear incapable of reconciling those impossible visions of optimism with the persistent problems that plague their lives – often caused by their own lack of self-awareness. Jerry Lundegaard is the living embodiment of this ubiquitous emotional crisis; yet, we get glimpses of it even in the most insignificant characters, such as the cashier at the restaurant, whose forced grin and artificially happy demeanour threaten to burst wide open at any time. 

Only Marge and her husband, Norm (John Carroll Lynch), seemed to be completely happy in their lives. They are not adhering to a preset model of "family life" derived from television, as the Lundegaards so ineptly do; rather, their lifestyle is less formulaic, less preset. As a stay-at-home spouse, Norm finds fulfilment in his job – despite the kitschy nature of his wildlife paintings – and eventually achieves professional renown; while Marge maintains a mostly optimistic outlook on life despite the daily horrors of police work. Thus, the couple may look forward to the arrival of their kid in "only two more months" with true hope and optimism, as well as to the pleasure it will bring.

Marge's worldview has been described as naive by some commentators due to her inability to comprehend the presence of evil. She is, however, more intricate than that. “There is... with Frances a really honest style, a very open presentation of her character,” Joel Coen remarked. Marge is prevented from becoming a caricature of herself by this.” Others regard Marge as the film's moral core, implying that it is her morality that endows her with the capacity to empathise, as well as the capacity for shame - a quality noticeably missing in the majority of the film's characters. 

In the interview which follows, initially published in 1996, Joel and Ethan Cohen discuss the writing and filming of Fargo, its precise characterizations, acting performances and the visual style that emphasizes the spiritual landscape of the bleak Midwestern setting:

Did some news item inspire ‘Fargo’, as the press kit suggests, or is that another false trail that you two have laid?

JOEL COEN: In its general structure, the film is based on a real event, but the details of the story and the characters are fictional. We were not interested in making a documentary film, and we did no research about the nature of the murders or the events connected to them. But in warning viewers that we had found our inspiration from a real story, we were preparing them to not view the film like an ordinary thriller.

Did this kidnapping of a wife organized by her husband create a good deal of sensation in 1987?

ETHAN COEN: It didn’t. In fact, its surprising how many things of this land get very little publicity. We heard about it from a friend who lived very close to where the story unfolded in Minnesota, which also happens to be where we are from.

Why did you call the film ‘Fargo’ when the important action of the film is set in Brainerd, which is in Minnesota, and not ‘Fargo’?

JC: Fargo seemed a more evocative title than ‘Brainerd’ – that’s the only reason.

EC: It was just that we liked the sound of the word – there’s no hidden meaning.

JC: There was, to be sure, a kind of western connection with Wells Fargo, but that was not part of our intention, and it’s too bad that some people should have thought so.

Here you returned somewhat to the territory of your first films, ‘Blood Simple’ and ‘Raising Arizona’.

JC: There are some similarities, but also some important differences. These three films are all small-scale productions, their main themes relate to criminality, to kidnapping, and they are also very specific in their reference to geographical locale. Furthermore, Frances McDormand plays a role in Fargo and Blood Simple. But we have always thought that Blood Simple belongs to the tradition of flamboyant melodrama, as given expression in the novels of James M. Cain, along with some influence from the horror film. In Fargo, we tried out a very different stylistic approach, introducing the subject in a quite dry fashion. Our intention was also that the camera should tell the story like an observer. The structure of the film also follows from the origin of the story in an actual event: we allowed ourselves more digressions and detours. Each incident did not necessarily have to be connected to the plot. We also allowed ourselves to withhold the appearance of the heroine, Marge Gunderson, until the middle of the film.

EC: This is also a way of signifying to the viewer that he was not watching a genre film, that we were not going to satisfy expectations of this kind. In this way too, the film differs from Blood Simple.

What is it that drew you to the subject?

JC: There were two or three things about the actual events that interested us. In the first place, the story takes place in a time and place with which we were familiar and could explore. And then again it features a kidnapping, a subject that has always fascinated us. In fact, we had a screenplay that was quite different from Fargo that we would have been very happy to shoot. Finally, this subject offered us the chance to shoot a crime film with characters quite different from genre stereotypes.

EC: It’s probably not a subject we would have worked with had it not been connected to this particular context. When we begin writing, we need to imagine in a quite specific way the world where the story unfolds. The difference is that until this point these universes were purely fictional, while in the case of Fargo there was an air of authenticity we had to communicate. Since we come from the area, that helped us take into account the particular character of the place.

A ‘dialogue coach’ is listed in the credits. Is that a gag?

EC: No, not at all. Most of the actors come from this part of the country, and they did not need coaching, but Frances McDormand, Bill Macy, and Harve Presnell had to have some training so their accents would blend with the others. This was partly how the characters were developed, and it also contributed to the air of authenticity.

JC: The people there speak is a very economical fashion, which is almost monosyllabic. This seems as exotic to other Americans as it does to you Europeans! In fact, the Scandinavian influence on the culture of that area, the rhythm of the sentences, the accent, all of this is not familiar at all to the rest of America. The story could have just as well taken place on the moon! New Yorkers have a general conception of Midwesterners, but they know nothing about these cultural ‘pockets,’ these microsocieties with their idiosyncrasies and peculiarities.

EC: When we were small, we were not really conscious of this Scandinavian heritage that so strongly affects this part of the country simply because we had no points for comparison. When we got to New York City, we were astonished not to find any Gustafsons or Sondergaards. Certainly, all the exoticism comes from this Nordic character, with its polite and reserved manner. There’s something almost Japanese in this refusal to register even the least emotion, in this resistance to saying no. One of the sources of comedy in the story comes from the opposition between this constant avoidance of all confrontation and the murders gradually piling up.

JC: We didn’t need to do any research since this manner of speech, these expressions, these sentence cadences were familiar to us. Our parents had always lived in this part of the country, and that means we returned there regularly and were familiar with the culture. After all, it’s this culture that shaped us. Because we had not lived there for some time, we had the feeling of being separated in part from the environment where we had grown up.

The episode between Marge and her old high-school friend is a digression from the central narrative, which is fairly compressed.

EC: Someone mentioned to us that in this scene, Frances acts in the very restrained manner of an Oriental, while her Japanese friend is talkative and irrational in the American style. It was certainly our intention while writing this sequence that it should be a digression.

JC: We wanted to provide another point of view on Frances’s character, one that had nothing to do with the police investigation. This is also what happens in the scenes with her husband.

EC: Our intention was to demonstrate that this story is more closely connected to real life than to fiction, and we felt free to create a scene that had no links to the plot.

‘The Hudsucker Proxy’ is no doubt your most stylized film. This one, in contrast, is probably your least.

JC: We wanted to take a new approach to style in this film, to make something radically different from our previous films. And it is true that we were pressured in this direction because the preceding film was the most ‘theatrical’ of them all. But curiously, working from actual events, we came to yet another form of stylization, in the largest sense of that term. The end result was then not as different as we imagined it would be!

A little like Kubrick did with ‘Dr. Strangelove’, you begin with a somewhat documentary presentation, then little by little, with icy humor, everything comes unglued and turns in the direction of the absurd.

EC: That resulted in part from the nature of the story. There is a plan that is established at the beginning and which in the end changes as the characters lose control of it.

JC: That’s an effect implicit in the form of the story. When a character, in the first scene, tells you how things are going to go, we know very well that the unfolding of the story will go in a quite different direction. Others have also made reference to Kubrick, and I see the connection. His approach to the material is very formal, but then progresses regularly from the prosaic to the baroque.

How did you succeed in never falling into caricature, a danger because of the kind of story you work with?

JC: I suppose intuition plays some role with regard to our choice of style, and, even more, it depends a great deal on the actors and their ability to know when they might be going too far. For example, Frances’s way of presenting her character is very sincere, very direct. That prevents Marge from becoming a parody of herself. Frances was very conscious of the dangers posed by excessiveness because of the quirk she used of dragging out the end of every sentence.

EC: We worked constantly on the set making adjustments with the actors. They’d give us a fairly wide range of behaviors for their characters, and we never stopped discussing that while shooting proceeded.

JC: We worked a good deal on ‘feeling.’ It’s hard to say in words why Marge, in the film, is not a caricature, but a real person with three dimensions.

EC: What’s certain about this is that when we were writing the screenplay and the actors were interpreting their roles, none of us thought of the story as a comedy.

JC: And that certainly helped, at the same time, to create comic effects and make the characters plausible. The comedy would not have worked if the film had been shot as a comedy, instead of sincerely and directly.

The relationship between Marge and her husband is also quite strange.

JC: We were intrigued from the moment we started casting by the notion of very simple interplay between them and by the impassive expression of John Caroll Lynch, which seemed to suit the tone of the film perfectly.

EC: He is the perfect incarnation of the undemonstrative personality of people from that region. The relations between husband and wife are based on what is not said, and yet they succeed nevertheless in communicating in some sense.

The end seems to be a parody of the classic Hollywood happy ending with the husband and wife on their bed symbolizing the return to order and to the natural.

JC: It is true that this is a return to order, but we did not have the intention of finishing up with a scene that’s a parody. There was an article in the New York Times in which the writer asked why the people in Minnesota did not like the film’s end, even though everything turned out for the best, as they are fond of believing there!

The only point at issue in the ending has to do with money. But isn’t money the film’s principal subject?

JC: All the characters in the film are obsessed with money.

EC: At the same time, we did not want to be too specific, for example, concerning the debt Jerry owes. It was enough to understand that this character had trapped himself by getting involved in some deal that had turned out badly. Moreover, during the entire film, Jerry is a pathetic loser who never stops improvising solutions in order to escape from the impasses he finds himself blocked by. He never stops trying everything, never stops bursting with activity. That almost makes him admirable!

JC: What we found interesting from the beginning in the character played by William Macy is his absolute incapacity, for even one minute, to project himself into the future so that he might evaluate the consequences of the decisions he has made. There is something fascinating about his total inability to gain any perspective. He’s one of those people who build a pyramid but never think for a minute about it crumbling.

Did writing the screenplay take a lot of time?

EC: We had begun it before shooting The Hudsucker Proxy; afterward we went back to it, so it is pretty hard for us to estimate the time it all took. But two years had passed. What is certain is that the writing was easy and relatively quick, especially in comparison with our other screenplays, such as the one for Miller’s Crossing.

Was it determined from the beginning that the wife, once kidnapped, would no longer be a physical presence?

JC: Yes, absolutely. And at a certain point in the story, it was also evident to us that she would cease to be a person for those who had kidnapped her. Moreover, it was no longer the actress Kristin Rudrud who played her, but a double with a hood over her head. In this case, we had no interest in the victim. It did not seem that at any point the husband himself was worried about what might happen to her. And Carl, one of the kidnappers, didn’t even know her name.

Did you pick Steve Buscemi for this part before you had settled on Peter Stormare to play the other bad guy?

EC: In fact, we wrote the parts for these two comedians. And it was the same for Marge, played by Frances McDormand. Peter is an old friend, and he seemed an interesting choice for the role. Of course, his character is an outsider in the milieu where he finds himself, but at the same time he has an ethnic connection to it.

How do you work with your music director Carter Burwell?

JC: He has worked with us since our first project. Usually, he screens the film all the way through, then he plays a little bit of what he has in mind for us on the synthesizer so that he can give us some idea of what direction he’d like to go in. Before planning the orchestration, he plays parts of it for us on the piano, and we think about the connections these might have with certain sequences of the film. Then he goes on to the next step.

EC: In the case of this film, the main theme is based on a popular Scandinavian melody that Carter found for us.

JC: This is often how we work with him. For Miller’s Crossing, the music came from an Irish folk tune that he used as the basis for his orchestration, adding bits he wrote himself. For Raising Arizona, he used a popular American tune that Holly Hunter sings part of. On the other hand, for Blood Simple and Barton Fink, the music is all his own composition; it wasn’t inspired by anything else. For The Hudsucker Proxy, it was different yet again, a mix of an original composition by Carter and bits and pieces of Khachaturian.

EC: After he completes the orchestration, we go along with him to the sound recording studio. For our last two productions, he directed the orchestra himself. While the film is projected, we are still able to make last-minute changes. All told, the collaboration with him does not last more than two or three months.

How long did the editing take?

JC: About twelve weeks. That was a pretty short time for us because usually we take more, depending on whether we start editing while we’re still shooting.

Did the principal photography pose any problems for you?

JC: It was easier for us in this case than with our other films. We talked it over a great deal with Roger Deakins because we wanted to shoot a good many exterior long shots. From the very beginning, we determined to use nothing but shots where the camera does not move.

EC: Afterward we decided that this purist attitude was pretty stupid.

JC: And so we decided then to move the camera sometimes, but in such a way that the viewer would not notice it. We didn’t want to make the camera movement dramatic like we’d done in the past because we did not want to emphasize the action, make it seem either too dramatic or
irrational.

EC: Roger Deakins worked on this production with a camera operator although, in the past, he was most often his own camera operator, including the two films he had made for us. This time he did not take charge of everything because he was often busy with the camera. On Fargo, we had problems with the weather because we needed snow, but the winter when we shot the film was particularly mild and dry. We had to work in Minneapolis with artificial snow. Then, because the snow didn’t always work out, we had to travel in the end to North Dakota to shoot the large-scale exteriors. There we found exactly what we were looking for: a sky with a very low ceiling, no direct sunlight, no line marking the horizon, only a neutral and diffuse light.

JC: The landscapes we used were really dramatic and oppressive. There were no mountains or trees, only desolate flatlands extending into the distance. That’s what we wanted to put on the screen.

Do you spend a lot of time looking through the camera?

JC: For the first film we made with Roger Deakins, Barton Fink, we were constantly looking through the viewfinder. For Hudsucker Proxy, less. And even less in the case of Fargo. This was no doubt a reflection of the material in each case and of the visual effects we were looking for, but it also resulted from our developing collaboration with the director of photography. When we work regularly with someone, we rather quickly develop a sort of telepathic language. I also think that Roger likes to work with people like us who take an active interest in problems of lighting, rather than with directors who depend entirely on him.

There’s a contradiction between what it says in the press kit, which credits you with the editing, and the film credits that name a certain Roderick Jaynes.

JC: Whenever we edit the film ourselves, we use the pseudonym Roderick Jaynes. We prefer a hands-on approach rather than sitting next to someone and telling them when to cut. We think that’s easier. In any case, there are two of us in the editing room. As for everything else, we work together, and we never have the feeling of isolation that other people sometimes have. On Barton Fink and Blood Simple, we were also our own editor. On the other projects, we have used an editor, but we were always there, of course, whenever we could be. But if we called upon Tom Noble or Michael Miller in these other cases, it was because the editing, for reasons of scheduling, had to start while we were shooting.

Your films are set in New Orleans [sic], in New York, in Hollywood, in the West, or the Midwest. It seems you are interested in exploring American geography.

JC: We would like to shoot somewhere else, but, bizarrely, the subjects we come up with are always set in America. That’s what seems to attract us.

EC: It’s always necessary, or so it seems, that the universe in which our stories take place has some kind of connection, however distant, with us. In the case of Fargo, the connection was obviously even closer.

JC: We have a need to know a subject intimately or, at least, feel some emotional connection to it. At the same time, we are not interested unless there is something exotic about it. For example, we know Minnesota very well, but not the people who inhabit Fargo or their way of life. On the other hand, in the case of Barton Fink and Miller’s Crossing, the exoticism came from the story’s being set in a distant time.

What are your connections with the characters in ‘Fargo’, who for the most part seem somewhat retarded?

JC: We have affection for them all and perhaps particularly for those who are plain and simple.

EC: One of the reasons for making them simple-minded was our desire to go against the Hollywood cliché of the bad guy as a super-professional who controls everything he does. In fact, in most cases criminals belong to the strata of society least equipped to face life, and that’s the reason they’re caught so often. In this sense too, our movie is closer to life than the conventions of cinema and genre movies.
 

JC: We are often asked how we manage injecting comedy into the material. But it seems to us that comedy is part of life. Look at the recent example of the people who tried to blow up the World Trade Center. They rented a panel truck to use for the explosion and then, after committing the crime, went back to the rental agency to get back the money they left on deposit. The absurdity of this kind of behavior is terribly funny in itself.

What projects are you working on?

EC: At this point we’re working on two screenplays but don’t know which one we’ll finish first or which one will get financing first.

JC: One is also about a kidnapping, but of a very different sort. [This is a reference to The Ladykillers project, released in 2004]. The other is a kind of film noir about a barber from northern California, at the end of the 1940s. [This is the project that became The Man Who Wasn’t There.]

– From Closer to Life Than the Conventions of Cinema by Michel Ciment and Hubert Niogret (Positif, 1996). Revised version in The Coen Brothers: Interviews (Conversations with Filmmakers) Ed. William Rodney Allen. (University Press of Mississippi, 2006).

   

Dream As Reality: An Interview with Fellini

8 1/2 (Directed by Federico Fellini)

’The difference is that I know I live in a fantasy world. I prefer it that way and resent anything that disturbs my vision’ - Federico Fellini

After an uneventful provincial youth during which he exhibited an aptitude for cartooning, Fellini came to Rome at the age of 19, where he contributed drawings, gags, and stories to the satirical journal Marc'Aurelio. Fellini worked as a scriptwriter for the radio series Cico e Pallina during World War II, which starred Giulietta Masina, the actress who married Fellini in 1943 and went on to star in several of the director's biggest films over the course of their 50-year marriage. In 1944, Fellini met director Roberto Rossellini, who hired him as a member of a writing team for Roma, Città Aperta (1945; Open City or Rome, Open City), which is frequently recognised as the first film of the Italian Neorealist style. Fellini received his first Academy Award nomination for his screenwriting effort. 

Fellini soon established himself as one of Italy's most prolific screenwriters. Although he wrote a number of significant scripts for directors such as Pietro Germi (Il Cammino Della Speranza [1950; The Path of Hope]), Alberto Lattuada (Senza Pietá [1948; Without Pity]), and Luigi Comencini (Persiane Chiuse [1951; Drawn Shutters]), his scripts for Rossellini are the most significant in terms of Italian cinema history. These include Paisà (1946; Paisan), perhaps the purest example of Italian Neorealism; Il Miracolo (1948; The Miracle, an episode of the film L'Amore); and Europa '51 (1952; The Greatest Love), one of the first postwar Italian films to move beyond the documentary realism of the Neorealist period toward an examination of psychological prowess. 

Fellini made his directorial debut with Luci Del Varietà, a collaboration with Lattuada (1951; Variety Lights). This was the first of a sequence of works on rural life, which included Lo Sceicco Bianco (1951; The White Sheik) and I Vitelloni (1953; Spivs or The Young and the Passionate), his first critical and commercial triumph. This film, a cruelly satirical look at the idle'mama's boys' of the provinces, is still regarded as Fellini's masterpiece by some reviewers. 

Fellini's subsequent films were a trilogy about salvation and the fate of innocence in an amoral and unsentimental world. La Strada (1954; The Road), one of Fellini's best-known movies, stars Anthony Quinn as a brutal, animalistic circus strongman and Masina as the pitiful waif who loves him. The film was shot on location in the bleak countryside between Viterbo and Abruzzo, with the vast empty areas echoing the characters' virtual inhumanity. Although it received criticism from Italy's left-wing press, the film received widespread acclaim abroad, receiving an Academy Award for best foreign film. Il Bidone (1955; The Swindle), starring Broderick Crawford in a part originally written for Humphrey Bogart, was an unsettling tale about minor swindlers posing as priests in order to plunder the peasantry. The more popular Le Notti Di Cabiria (1957; The Nights of Cabiria) earned Fellini a second foreign film Oscar, with Masina reprising her role as a simple, always hopeful Roman prostitute. Although not often regarded as one of Fellini's greatest works, Le Notti Di Cabiria (which inspired the Broadway musical Sweet Charity) is a critical favourite and one of Fellini's most immediately charming pictures. 

Fellini's second film, La Dolce Vita (1960; The Sweet Life), marked his first work with Marcello Mastroianni, the actor who would portray Fellini's alter ego in a number of subsequent films over the next two decades. The film – for which Fellini reconstructed Rome's major street, the Via Veneto – proved to be a snapshot of the era, replete with bizarre images and a scathing indictment of popular media, decadent intellectuals, and aristocrats. Instantly recognised as one of the most significant films ever produced, La Dolce Vita introduced the English language to the term paparazzi (unscrupulous yellow-press photographers) and the cinema reviewers' lexicon to the phrase 'Felliniesque.' 

Otto e mezzo (1963; 8 1/2) is undoubtedly Fellini's most lauded picture, earning the director his third Academy Award for best foreign film. The work, dubbed 8 1/2 after the number of films Fellini had done up to that point (seven features and three shorts), depicts the creative paralysis of a great director (based on Fellini and played by Mastroianni). The film's high modernist style became synonymous with the concept of unrestricted artistic creativity, and in 1987, a jury of film historians from 18 European countries deemed 8 1/2 the best European film ever made. 

Following the success of 8 1/2, Fellini's name became inextricably associated to the postwar European art film craze. He began to deal with Rome's mythology, film, and, most importantly, the director's own life and fantasy world, all of which Fellini treated as interconnected motifs in his films. His late 1960s films mix surreal imagery with innovative applications of colour photography. Satyricon (1969), inspired by ancient Roman writers such as Petronius and Apuleius, chronicles the wanderings of a group of wayward young men in antiquity. Fellini, who was unconcerned about historical truth, attempted to examine the human condition in an era prior to the advent of Christianity and the concept of original sin. Satyricon, a weird, flamboyant masterpiece, continues to divide critics. Roma (1971; Fellini's Roma) is the director's personal depiction of the Eternal City, whereas Amarcord (1973), which earned Fellini his fourth Academy Award for best foreign film, is a wistful recollection of the director's provincial upbringing during the Fascist period.

I Vitelloni (Directed by Federico Fellini)

The following interview with Fellini by Bert Cardullo took place in the lobby of the Grand Hotel in Milan, Italy, during the summer of 1986, not long after the release of ‘Ginger and Fred’.

BERT CARDULLO: Signor Fellini, tell me a little about your background and your first film job.

FEDERICO FELLINI: I reached the cinema through screenplays, and these through my collaboration on humorous publications – Marc’ Aurelio especially – for which I wrote stories and columns in addition to drawing cartoons. If, one day in 1944, Roberto Rossellini hadn’t invited me to collaborate on the screenplay of Rome, Open City, I would never even have considered the cinema as a profession. Rossellini helped me go from a foggy, apathetic period in my life to the stage of cinema. It was an important encounter but more in the sense of my future destiny than in the sense of influence. As far as I’m concerned, Rossellini’s was an Adam-like paternity; he is a kind of forefather from whom many of my generation descend. Let’s just say I was open to this particular endeavour, and he appeared at the right time to guide me into it. But I wasn’t thinking of becoming a director at this juncture. I felt I lacked the director’s propensity to be tyrannically overpowering, coherent and fussy, hardworking, and – most important – authoritative on every subject: all endowments missing from my temperament. The conviction that I could direct a film came later, when I was directly involved on one and could no longer pull out.

After having written a number of screenplays for Rossellini, Pietro Germi, and Alberto Lattuada, I wrote a story called Variety Lights. It contained my recollections of when I toured Italy with a variety troupe. Some of those memories were true, others invented. Two of us directed the film: Lattuada and myself. He said ‘camera,’ ‘action,’ ‘cut,’ ‘everyone out,’ ‘silence,’ etc. And I stood by his side in a rather comfortable yet irresponsible position. The same year, 1950, I wrote a story called The White Sheik together with Tullio Pinelli. Michelangelo Antonioni was supposed to direct the film, but he didn’t like the screenplay, so Luigi Rovere – the producer – told me to film it. I can therefore unequivocally state that I never decided to be a director. Rovere’s rather reckless faith induced me to become one.

The vocation itself was altogether rather mysterious to me. As I said, my temperament led me elsewhere. Even today, when a film is finished, I find myself wondering how the devil I could have been so active, gotten so many people into motion, made a thousand decisions a day, said ‘yes’ to this and ‘no’ to that, and at the same time not have fallen madly in love with all those beautiful women that actresses are.

La Strada (Directed by Federico Fellini)

BC: Apart from women, how do you find inspiration in our mediocre times? Or perhaps you don’t find that we are constantly surrounded by mediocrity.

FF: No, it’s a barbaric era all right. People say this is an era of transition, but that’s true of every period. Certainly we have no more myths left. The Christian myth doesn’t seem to be able to help humanity anymore. So, we’re waiting for a new myth to comfort us. But which one? Nonetheless, it’s very interesting to live at a time like this. We must accept the time in which we live. We have no choice. Having said that, I feel that my mission in life, my vocation if you will, is to be a witness; and if your life consists of such testimony, you have to accept what you witness. Sure, you can be nostalgic about the past and how great it was, and you can lament the erosion of values, but there’s no point in doing that. From a generational point of view, I’m aware that there’s a certain regret about things past, but I personally try to live with the confidence that the future will assimilate the past. The past will transform itself into the future, so in a sense it will be relived—not in regret, but as part and parcel of the world to come.

BC: Does this vision of yours have to do with your looking into an interior reality rather than an exterior one? Are the dreams and fantasies of which an interior reality consists the basis of your inspiration?

FF: I don’t dwell too much on what it is that inspires me. Instead I have to be in touch with my delusions, my discomforts, and my fears; they provide me the material with which I work. I make a bundle of all these, along with my disasters, my voids, and my chasms, and I try to observe them with sanity, in a conciliatory manner.

La Strada (Directed by Federico Fellini)

BC: What are you afraid of, if I may ask?

FF: I’m afraid of solitude, of the gap between action and observation in which solitude dwells. That’s a reflection on my existence, in which I attempt to act without being swept away by the action, so as to be able to bear witness at the same time. I fear losing my spontaneity precisely because of such testimony or witnessing, because of my habit of constantly analysing and commenting. I also fear old age, madness, decline. I fear not being able to make love ten times a day...

BC: Do you make films because solitude ranks high among your fears?

FF: Making films for me is not just a creative outlet but an existential expression. I also write and paint in isolation, in an ascetic manner. Perhaps my character is too hard, too severe. The cinema itself is a miracle, though, because you can live life just as you tell it. It’s very stimulating. For my temperament and sensibility, this correlation between daily life and the life I create on screen is fantastic. Creative people live in a very vague territory, where what we call ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’ are disjointed – where one interferes with the other. They both become one and the same thing. In sum, I enjoy telling stories with an inextricable mixture of sincerity and invention, as well as a desire to astound, to shamelessly confess and absolve myself, to be liked, to interest, to moralize, to be a prophet, witness, clown... to make people laugh and to move them. Are any other motives necessary?

BC: Not really! Let’s talk now about the description of your early films as socially realistic, while your later ones are described as more hallucinatory.

FF: You could call hallucination a ‘deeper reality.’ Critics have a need to categorize and classify. I don’t see it that way. I detest the world of labels, the world that confuses the label with the thing labeled. I just do what I have to do. Realism is a bad word, in any event. In a sense, everything is realistic. I see no line between the imaginary and the real; I see much reality in the imaginary.

La Dolce Vita (Directed by Federico Fellini)

BC: Critics also have termed your characters ‘grotesque’ and ‘exaggerated.’ How do you react to such accusations?

FF: To answer this question, I must see my films, which I never do. People say that I’m a bit too much, that I exaggerate. Maybe they’re right. But even if it’s true, it’s not intentional on my part. I’m delighted when I come across an expressive face, however bizarre. I am, after all, a caricaturist, and I have to accept the limitation this imposes on me. A creative person has something childish about him: He both loves to be surprised and wants to do the surprising. So, I choose to show whatever is too big or too small or simply unfamiliar. I try to express the feeling of surprise in the way I myself felt it. The world of Picasso, for example, could be described as strange and monstrous, but not for him. I, too, don’t see my characters as strange. I simply try to go beyond appearances, to unveil what lies behind what we call ‘normality.’ Maybe I overdo it. People ask me, ‘Signor Fellini, where do you find such strange characters?’ So I respond, ‘That’s what I see in the mirror every day... a monstrous face indeed!’

Look, I’m not cruel. It’s not true what some critics say, that I hate humanity. For me, curiosity and amusement are proof of my affection for what I depict. When I choose a certain face and have it made up in a certain way, it’s not because I want to ridicule, but because I want to convey in an immediate manner something that isn’t psychological. My characters never undergo psychological development. My films are a bit more innocent than that, and the characters have to be themselves as soon as they appear. So the need to be expressive is immediate.

La Dolce Vita (Directed by Federico Fellini)

BC: You show beauty – of women like Claudia Cardinale and Anita Ekberg – alongside the grotesque: for example, a huge woman like Saraghina in ‘8 1/2’. Isn’t there a dichotomy here after all?

FF: Beauty is not limited to beauty in the classical sense. It can be everywhere. I must admit that I don’t recognize the category of the grotesque; to me even the grotesque is beautiful. You mention La Saraghina. In Rimini, near the seminary for priests, there was in fact a big prostitute like that who used to expose herself. When I show something like that, it’s usually through the eyes of a boy, and sometimes I exaggerate just to show the astonishment or fear or ecstasy of that boy. Also, if I use a big or fat woman, it’s because I’m telling a story about an Italian boy who is hungry for women and wants a lot of woman, so to speak. Just because the Catholic Church has described women as something to put out of your mind, Italian males of a certain generation developed an appetite for them and not just for food. So the big women indicate the big appetite of these men – or boys.

BC: How do you feel about the relations between the sexes today, when a certain role reversal seems to be at work?

FF: Man has always been unsure of women. A woman for a man is the part that he doesn’t know about himself, so he’s always afraid of her. He feels weak and vulnerable with her, because she may cause him to lose his identity. Just by projecting the part of himself that he doesn’t know on a woman, he loses a lot of himself. So he knows he can be destroyed, devoured... That’s a natural law.

He also probably remembers the very ancient matriarchal society in which man was nothing and women thought they became pregnant just because the wind blew some seed into their vagina, or the seed came from the ocean or from the moon. A thousand years passed before man and woman had a relationship and discovered orgasm. Suddenly someone started thinking, ‘Wait a minute, why does it take nine months? Which kind of wind is it? What ocean started it all nine months ago?’ In those matriarchal societies, if men were to assert themselves, they had to put on false breasts and dress like women, complete with wigs. Men, as men, didn’t exist at all – worse than rats. When the queen decided to take a companion, he would last a year, after which he was killed, cut to pieces like an animal, and eaten.

8 1/2 (Directed by Federico Fellini)

BC: What society was that, Signor Fellini?

FF: Now. It’s today... And then, for centuries, man took advantage of women to avenge himself for what he had suffered for thousands of years. Now women want to be considered as persons, not as mere projections, and their attempt to escape the image to which man has confined them frightens man. But finally he understands that he won’t be free until women are free as well. I tried to show all that in City of Women.

BC: Do you see yourself as a romantic?

FF: I don’t think I have a romantic view of the world, because I don’t recognize a particular view of the world. I probably have a romantic conception of the artist and art, but of life, no. I like to probe behind appearances and discover what’s really there, like a naughty boy. In this I recognize the skeptic, who tries not to put too much faith in façades, who tries to unmask falsehood. I think that’s the most important thing: I have no ideology, but if I had to identify myself with one, it would be that the beauty of art is in its unmasking of falsehood; in educating; in planting in people’s minds the suspicion that reality is something more complex than it appears to be; in giving people the pleasure of suspicion, not just the burden of doubt; in keeping them from feeling too protected by taboos, concepts, ideologies. Life is more complex than all that. If, in my pictures, I were asked to recognize a motif – a thread that runs through them – I’d say that this is the only one. It’s an attempt to create emancipation from conventional schemes, liberation from moral rules: that is to say, an attempt to retrieve life’s authentic rhythm or mode, its vital cadence, as opposed to all the inauthentic forms life is forced to take. That, I believe, is the central idea to be found in all the films I have made.

BC: Does this mean that you avoid judgment?

FF: That’s not really possible. We are slaves of our culture, prisoners of our emotions. We always have a subjective point of view. Subjectivity means that we’ve had a certain education, that we read certain books, that we have cultivated certain emotions. All these mysterious and contradictory things serve as the basis for our judgment. Even when you can pretend to be just a witness, you can’t ignore this subjective element. I try to be open and not to be schematic, but always in terms of what is commensurate with my background.

8 1/2 (Directed by Federico Fellini)

BC: Is that partly why you don’t make films in other countries? Because you’re so very Italian?

FF: Yes, in the same way that you’re so very American despite your Sicilian last name... When I go to a foreign country, everything is a mystery to me. I see images, colours, lines, but they don’t add up to anything. I could make a picture about New York, but in Cinecittà, not in America. I’d have to remember what I saw in New York and what emotions it triggered in me, and then I would try to recreate them here in Italy with the same colours and lights. I was so presumptuous as to say several times to American producers that I wanted to make such a film about America in Italy, where I would be protected by an atmosphere in which I could move without being unsettled or even mortified by laws I don’t know and a language I can’t speak.

Your question, by the way, is evidence of a reductive attitude toward the movies. No one ever asks writers why they don’t write in other languages. The equivocal birth of the cinema was indeed technical – the camera, the lens, the lights, and then you develop the film — but that’s purely a mechanical point of view. If I want to try to express what’s going on here during this interview, however, I can’t just put a camera in front of us. I would have to recreate the feeling of our meeting: what I feel about the fact that you are an Italian-American, about the fact that Fiammetta is trying to create a bridge between us by helping you with your Italian and me with my English, about the décor of this hotel lobby, the colour of the sofa on which we sit... To think that the camera can take all that in by itself is highly reductive, just as it is to think that an Italian like me could make a picture in New York simply by turning on a camera and filming what’s in front of me.

People ask me, ‘Signor Fellini, why do you recreate Venice in a studio instead of using the real one?’ And I’m always a bit surprised by such questions. I have to recreate Venice, because that’s the way I put myself in it.

8 1/2 (Directed by Federico Fellini)

BC: The décor becomes expressive of your vision, then.

FF: Of course. In America, I’d have to depend on information culled from others – such as the kind of tails a Chicago lawyer wears. Maybe I’m just trying to look for pretexts – the real reason for not filming in other countries being that I’m too old and lazy – but I think it’s more sincere to say that I can’t create from life that I am seeing more or less for the first time. I need a period of long and immersed reflection. I could do a wholly impressionistic report on a place like New York, seen from a newspaperman’s eye as it were, but that would mean absolutely nothing.

BC: Do you feel transformed when you’re on the set, or are you always the same?

FF: I’m always the same confused man. There’s no difference. When I work, I am perhaps healthier because the pressure to do, to escape, to be alive gives me added neurotic energy. When I’m in between pictures, I’m a bit weaker. But I’m always in the same situation of not knowing what I’m doing.

BC: How does such confusion evolve into a unified, focused vision?

FF: That’s a very difficult question to answer. I don’t want to appear too mystical or too mysterious, but there’s a part of me that sometimes comes out at the last moment. The more confused I am, the more I’m ready for this new tenant that inhabits my imagination to take possession of me. This is what makes everything fall into place. The more I feel lost, the more I believe I can be helped by this unknown source of knowledge or understanding. It’s magic. Perhaps I’m being a bit superstitious with this trust of mine in the unknown. Of course, what I really mean by saying that I don’t know what I’m doing is that my knowledge comes after I have tried everything. For example, I look at a hundred faces to choose one that will just inhabit a dark corner of the screen, and only for a very short period of time. That’s the kind of effort I’m talking about.

8 1/2 (Directed by Federico Fellini)

BC: You’re saying, then, that this knowledge of yours goes beyond reason.

FF: That’s right. You can get lost by being too rational. But if you work with faith, and you know your limits – at the same time as you are modest, humble, and also arrogant, like a real man — you can arrive at the truth. If you’re as true to yourself as you possibly can be, you will be helped, and you’ll come closer to artistic truth. Still, I don’t claim to know all the secrets.

BC: Does any one of your films represent you more completely than the others? Is any one of them more key than the others – a film to preserve, as they say?

FF: Two of them: La Strada and 8 1/2. La Strada is really the complete catalog of my entire mythical or shadow world, a dangerous representation of my identity undertaken without precaution. The point of departure of that film, apart from the spectacle of nature and the fascination with gypsy-like travels, was the story of an enlightenment, a shaking of conscience, through the sacrifice of another human creature. 8 1/2 is meant to be an attempt to reach an agreement with life, an attempt and not a result or conclusion. I think the film may suggest a solution: to make friends with yourself completely, without hesitation, without false modesty, without fears but also without hopes.

BC: Critics have often complained that you end your films in a vague, general way: the appeal to hope in ‘Nights of Cabiria’, the reminder of the little girl’s purity in ‘La Dolce Vita’. Your thoughts on this subject?

FF: This is one of the criticisms that I’ve never understood, for as far as I’m concerned the public writes the ending. The storyteller shouldn’t say, ‘Here the story ends,’ if he doesn’t want his story to be reduced to the level of an anecdote or a joke. If the story has moved you, the ending is up to you – the viewer who has seen it.

Juliet of the Spirits (Directed by Federico Fellini)

BC: How does a project of yours come into being in the first place?

FF: The real ideas come to me when I sign a contract and get an advance that I don’t want to give back, when I’m obliged to make a picture. I’m kidding, naturally. I don’t want to appear brutal, like Groucho Marx, but I’m the kind of creator who needs to have a higher authority – a grand duke, the pope, an emperor, a producer, a bank – to push me. Such a vulgar condition puts me on the right track. It’s only then that I start thinking about what I can, and want to, do.

BC: Why do you think you decided to start using colour – first for the episode in ‘Boccaccio ’70’ and then for ‘Juliet of the Spirits’? Was there an external factor, such as an offer from a producer, the sheer possibility of doing a film in colour, or was this your own aesthetic choice?

FF: The two cases are different. For the episode in Boccaccio ’70, the choice wasn’t mine. It was an episodic or anthology film, and the producers decided that it was to be in colour. I didn’t object at all. The playful air of the whole undertaking and the brief form of the episode seemed just right for an experiment with colour without too great a commitment on my part. I didn’t think about the problem very seriously; I didn’t go into it deeply. In Juliet of the Spirits, on the other hand, colour is an essential part of the film; it was born in colour in my imagination. I don’t think I would have done it in black and white. It is a type of fantasy that is developed through coloured illuminations. As you know, colour is a part not only of the language of dreams but also of the idea and feeling behind them. colours in a dream are concepts, not mere approximations or memories.

That said, I certainly prefer a good black-and-white picture to a bad one in colour. All the more so because in some cases so-called ‘natural colour’ impoverishes the imagination. The more you mimic reality, the more you lose in the imitation. Black and white, in this sense, offers wider margins for the imagination. I know that after having seen a good black-and-white film, many spectators, when asked about its chromatic aspect, will say, ‘The colours were beautiful,’ because each viewer lends to the otherwise black-and-white images the colours he has within himself.

Juliet of the Spirits (Directed by Federico Fellini)

BC: You seem to be saying that you prefer black-and-white to colour cinematography, period.

FF: Well, making films in colour is, I believe, an impossible operation, for cinema is movement, colour immobility; to try to blend these two artistic expressions is a desperate ambition, like wanting to breathe under water. Let me explain. In order to truly express the chromatic values of a face, a landscape, some scene or other, it is necessary to light it according to certain criteria that are functions of both personal taste and technical exigency. And all goes well so long as the camera doesn’t move. But as soon as the camera moves in on the faces or objects to be lighted, the intensity of the light is heightened or lessened, and all the chromatic values are intensified or lessened as a result. In short: The camera moves, the light changes.

There is also an infinitude of contingencies that condition the colour, aside from the grave errors that can occur at the laboratory, where the negative can be totally transformed by its development and printing. These contingencies are the innumerable and continual traps that have to be dealt with every day when you shoot in colour. For instance, colours interfere or clash, set up ‘echoes,’ are conditioned by one another. Once lighted, colour runs over the outline that holds it, emanating a sort of luminous aureola around neighbouring objects. Thus there is an incessant game of tennis, let us say, between the various colours. Sometimes it even happens that the result of these changes is agreeable, better than what one had imagined; but this is always a somewhat chancy, uncontrollable occurrence.

Finally, the human eye selects and in this way already does an artist’s work, because the human eye, the eye of man, sees chromatic reality through the prisms of nostalgia, of memory, of presentiment or imagination. This is not the case with the lens, and it happens that you believe you are bringing out certain values in a face, a set, a costume, while the lens brings out others. In this way, writing with a camera – or caméra stylo, as Astruc put it – becomes very difficult. It is as if, while writing, a modifying word escapes your pen in capital letters, or, still worse, one adjective shows up instead of another, or some form of punctuation appears that completely changes the sense of a line.

Juliet of the Spirits (Directed by Federico Fellini)

BC: Tell me about something not unrelated to the subject of colour: the relationship between your films and television in Italy. I saw ‘Nights of Cabiria’ on television here a few nights ago, and I’m glad I saw it first in a movie theatre some years ago.

FF: Ginger and Fred, my latest picture, was made for television, but it was shown in theatres first. Not many such theatres remain in Italy, however. They’ve just closed 2,117 of them, and there are now many cities, like Perugia – which is the size of Boston – which had three or four theatres but now have none. In Italy, we have over two hundred private television stations. You could watch two hundred pictures on two hundred TV sets at the same time, but that’s not all that’s wrong.

The movies have suffered not only because of the direct competition of television, but also because television has created a different relationship between audiences and images. For example, they can switch off the image whenever they want. Moreover, you watch TV in a small room, in the light, where you can talk. Thus all the ritualistic attention that movies used to command gets canceled. And the fact that you can change channels by remote control every thirty seconds – or less – has created an impatient audience, even a very arrogant and superficial one. Anything it finds annoying, it eliminates. Add to this the fact that television is available twenty-four hours a day, every day of the year, and that images are deployed electronically – they’re doubled and squeezed onto the small screen – and you’ll see that the image as we once knew it has been destroyed.

We are no longer used to being seduced by a pure image. We have no interest in following a story from an author’s point of view. And since telling stories is what I like to do, I must admit I feel frustrated. The man with the remote control has become director and exhibitor. The audience has gained power at the expense of the movies, such that the cinema has become a tainted old lady teetering on the verge of extinction. I would very much like to please the audience, but in the end, I find, I must be faithful to the picture.

– ‘An Interview with Federico Fellini’ in Bert Cardullo: Soundings on Cinema – Speaking to Film and Film Artists (2008, State University of New York). © 2008 State University of New York

Graham Greene: ‘The Third Man’ as Story and Film

The Third Man (Directed by Carol Reed)

Sometime in 1947 the prolific producer Alexander Korda, a Hungarian émigré and head of London Films, had the idea to make a film set in Vienna, which at the time was divided into zones and occupied by American, British and French forces. It would make a good backdrop, but this wasn't the only reason for Korda’s interest.

London Films had certain reserves of currency in Austria and this was a time when currency exchange was difficult, requiring permission from government and central banks. Korda scouted out various writers but soon settled on Graham Greene, whom he greatly admired. Greene, Korda and director Carol Reed had collaborated on ‘The Fallen Idol’ (1948), adapted by Greene from his own short story (and at the time in the process of being shot), and Korda wanted to do it again.

He pestered Greene and the writer eventually presented him with a fledgling idea in the form of a single sentence:

I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.

Korda was hooked and ‘The Third Man’ was conceived. The writing didn’t come easily for Greene until the end of September 1947 when suddenly his ‘Risen-from-the-dead story’, as he called it, fell into place in his mind.

From Vienna Greene travelled via Prague to Rome, where he met his mistress and, with money he received for the commission, bought a villa in Anacapri, where he finished the short story, which he delivered to Korda.

At the end of April 1948 Korda, with Reed accompanying him, travelled to the United States to meet with the legendary producer David O. Selznick (who had been responsible for ‘Gone with the Wind’ (1939) with a view to bringing in American finance. By the middle of May a deal had been signed for four films. In return for the right to release Korda’s films in the US Selznick would provide finance and give Korda access to the stars Selznick had under contract. ‘The Third Man’ would be the film to inaugurate the deal... (Rob White: The Origins of The Third Man).

The following observations on story writing and film were written by Graham Greene as a preface to his novella, ‘The Third Man’, published by Viking Press.

The Third Man was never written to be read but only to be seen. Like many love affairs, it started at a dinner table and continued with many headaches in many places, Vienna, Venice, Ravello, London, Santa Monica.

Most novelists, I suppose, carry round in their heads or in their notebooks the first ideas for stories that have never come to be written. Sometimes one turns them over after many years and thinks regretfully that they would have been good once, in a time now dead. So twenty years back, on the flap of an envelope, I had written an opening paragraph:

I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground, so that it was with incredulity that I saw him pass by, without a sign of recognition, among the host of strangers in the Strand.

I, no more than my hero, had pursued Harry, so when Sir Alexander Korda asked me to write a film for Carol Reed to follow our Fallen Idol, I had nothing more to offer than this paragraph. Though Korda wanted a film about the four-power occupation of Vienna, he was prepared to let me pursue the tracks of Harry there.

To me it is almost impossible to write a film play without first writing a story. Even a film depends on more than plot, on a certain measure of characterization, on mood and atmosphere, and these it seems to me almost impossible to capture for the first time in the dull shorthand of a script. One can reproduce an effect caught in another medium but one cannot make the first act of creation in script form. One must have the sense of more material than one need to draw on. The Third Man, therefore, though never intended for publication, had to start as a story before it began those apparently interminable transformations from one treatment to another.

On these treatments Carol Reed and I worked closely together, covering so many feet of carpet a day, acting scenes at each other. No third ever joined our conferences: so much value lies in the clear cut-and-thrust of argument between two people. To the novelist, of course, his novel is the best he can do with a particular subject; he cannot help resenting many of the changes necessary for turning it into a film or a play. But The Third Man was never intended to be more than the raw material for a picture. The reader will notice many differences between the story and the film, and he should not imagine these changes were forced on an unwilling author: as likely as not they were suggested by the author. The film, in fact, is better than the story because it is in this case the finished state of the story.

Some of these changes have obvious superficial reasons. The choice of an American instead of an English star involved a number of alterations. For example, Mr. Joseph Cotten quite reasonably objects to the name Rollo. The name had to be an absurd one, and the name Holley occurred to me when I remembered that figure of literary film, the American poet Thomas Holley Chivers. An American, too, could hardly have been mistaken for the great English writer Dexter, whose literary character bore certain echoes of the gentle genius of Mr. E.M. Forster, so that the confusion of identities would have been impossible, even if Carol Reed had not rightly objected to a rather far-fetched situation involving a great deal of explanation that increased the length of a film already far too long.

Another minor point: in deference to American opinion, a Romanian was substituted for Cooler, since Mr. Orson Welles’ engagement had already supplied us with one American villain. (Incidentally, the popular line of dialogue concerning Swiss cuckoo clocks was written into the script by Mr. Welles himself).

One of the very few major disputes between Carol Reed and myself concerned the ending, and he has been proved triumphantly right. I held the view that an entertainment of this kind, which in England we call a thriller, was too light an affair to carry the weight of an unhappy ending. Reed on his side felt that my ending – indeterminate though it was with no words spoken – would strike the audience, who had just seen Harry die, as unpleasantly cynical. I admit I was only half-convinced: I was afraid few people would wait in their seats during the girl’s long walk from the graveside and that they would leave the cinema under the impression of an ending as conventional as mine and more drawn-out. I had not given enough consideration to the mastery of Reed’s direction, and, at that state, of course, we neither of us could have anticipated Reed’s brilliant discovery of Mr. Karas, the zither player.

The episode of the Russians kidnapping Anna (a perfectly possible incident in Vienna) was eliminated at a fairly late stage. It was not satisfactorily tied into the story, and it threatened to turn the film into a propagandist picture. We had no desire to move people’s political emotions: we wanted to entertain them, to frighten them a little, to make them laugh.

Reality, in fact, was only a background to a fairy tale; none the less, the story of the penicillin racket is based on a truth all the more grim because so many of the agents were more innocent than Joseph Harbin. The other day in London a surgeon took two friends to see the film. He was surprised to find them subdued and depressed by a picture he had himself enjoyed. They then told him that at the end of the war when they were with the Royal Air Force they had themselves sold penicillin in Vienna. The possible consequences of their act had never before occurred to them.

– Graham Greene: ‘The Third Man’ as a Story and a Film (Viking Press, 1950).

    

John Cassavetes: On the Making of Husbands

Husbands (Directed by John Cassavetes)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the set:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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