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Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment

Critics: Who needs 'em?
In a culture increasingly driven by hype, you do.
By Charles Taylor
[08/18/99]

Television
Basketball diary
Showtime's sorry drama "The Hoop Life" and its young writer want to dramatize the sporting life, but on the court or off, reality is always far more interesting than fiction.
By Robert Wilonsky
[08/18/99]

Movie Review
"Illuminata"
In John Turturro's ambitious and arresting American tragicomedy, the actor-director invents himself an artistic tradition.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[08/17/99]

Music
Here comes a Nazarene ... looks good in a magazine
On "Juxtapose," the Bristol MC negotiates the tension between B-boy roots and raw, tender soul.
By Michelle Goldberg
[08/17/99]

Theater in black and white
Two Chicago plays -- "Jitney" and "Spinning into Butter" -- tackle racial issues from opposite sides of the tracks.
By David Moberg
[08/16/99]

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I suspect a lot of people went to Rome over the years and tried to get to see Federico Fellini or meet him. And he'd find ways to tell them to come over to the set and he'd have a meal with them, or something. I saw him many times in my visits to Rome over the years, or when he came to New York or California. I never wanted to bother him. But when I was living in Rome, he used to call me: "Paul, you know what you are doing today?"

I'd say, "Well, I think I'll have an argument with my wife, then have some coffee."

"After the argument, I pick you up in front of the cafe; I'm going to see my lawyer today; you can sit, you have nothing to say to him. Then we go to Cinecitta and meet some nuns."

"Can't wait, Federico." I used to do it. That was a treat. Federico Fellini goes to a lawyer, and they talk in rapid-fire Italian, then I ask him what it was about.

"Eh, I have to get money from a moron in Milan who thinks I'm about to make a movie about a spaghetti factory."

Was part of the closeness people felt for Fellini that he put his own personality at the center of his movies?

I think you're right. I don't think I would have felt as close to Antonioni, whom I did meet. Seemed like a nice gentleman, intelligent, but Fellini was funny. His humor was part of all the films. The least humorous of his films, in some ways, was "La Dolce Vita," but it still had humor. When Anita Ekberg and Mastroianni go into the fountain, it's funny. But it's a movie where there's a suicide and tragic, scary things.

I was more than touched by Fellini; I loved him. I don't think many directors had the chance to show their first film to Federico Fellini and be in a room with him when he saw it. I still can't believe I went over there and it happened, just like that. He must have thought that it was crazy in a nice way.

Peter Sellers was crazy in not so nice a way. He kept you from directing "I Love You, Alice B. Toklas" because he thought you had sex with his then-wife, Britt Ekland; later, he went into a fit because a script girl came on the set wearing purple.

I want to make a movie of that, but I haven't gotten anyone interested; I have to forget it or just go ahead and write the script. It was a nerve-wracking experience. And nerve-wracking things are always good for comedy. You don't know it at the time, but the higher the stakes, the funnier a picture will be.

Sellers was one of a kind. I never was with anyone like him. In fact, I never knew who I was with -- Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde. When he was the nice guy he was charming as hell. But you were always a little nervous in the presence of the nice guy, because you knew the nice guy could suddenly turn into the other one. I never saw him take the magic potion and swallow; it just happened. He'd go crazy, as I wrote in the book, about a purple sweater, or, really, just a look. But all of this was set up by his talent. If he wasn't a movie star and brilliantly talented, you'd tell him to fuck himself and walk away from the whole thing. When I did say that kind of thing to him, several times, people were shocked. I just lost it. But would I have worked with him again? Yeah -- he was so gifted. Who could do what he did in "Toklas," "Strangelove," "I'm All Right, Jack," "Lolita"?

You describe observing Sellers on the set of a Blake Edwards movie, and Sellers never talking to Edwards directly, only through an assistant.

I know Blake, and I asked how he could operate like that. And he said, "Easy, you just get used to it." As if there were never any attempt to say, "Peter, let's cut through the nonsense." Blake's a smart guy. He told me one or two stories that were more of the same but fabulous. The thing about Blake is that he has a very dark side, I would guess; there's been tragedy in his life, and that movie that he made, "S.O.B."? Dark! He's another example, along with several others of us, who thank God we made our movies when we made them, because we couldn't make them now in the studio system. I mean the Hollywood studio system, in addition to the Inspector Clouseau films, financed all those other Edwards movies, and some of them are interesting or daring, even if they're not all successful.

What about the co-financing deals that directors are resorting to these days?

That generally means more interference. When you see a movie that has nine producing credits -- three executive producers, four associates, two regulars -- you know that there's a lot of people looking at your shots through video monitors on the set. Drives you nuts. I've never had that. I couldn't take it, couldn't do it. When I did "Winchell" for HBO, I had one video monitor, and the only one who could look through it was me -- and the actors if I let them. That was it. I put a cardboard rim around it.

What's always a problem is distribution. When a studio has very little invested in a film, you have less of a good chance that they will really back your movie. And they have to back it for it to do well, unless some kind of miracle happens. Warner Bros. did everything they could for the Kubrick picture; they spent a fortune on the promotion. And it worked for a week, that's it.

Were you amazed that, in "Eyes Wide Shut," the picture Kidman is watching on her TV is "Blume in Love"?

What do you think of that?

I wanted to ask you!

Somebody told me about it and I ran out to see the picture. And I had several reactions. One was: Stanley in some way put that in to reach out to me. Because nothing happens in a Kubrick film by accident. One reason he chose those clips was that "Blume in Love" was a Warner Bros. movie, so they were probably free. And another reason is that "Blume in Love" is about marriage -- about a man who is in love with his ex-wife. Kubrick uses about four shots from it: as the man yearns for his wife and dreams of her as he sits in a cafe in Venice, and later as he and his wife are at the beginning of a honeymoon in Venice. It can't be an accident. It could just have been an arbitrary decision to use them, but I don't believe that, because I know Stanley -- although I hadn't spoken to him since 1971, when I was in England.

You mention in the book that you were going to ask Kubrick about what it was like to work with Sellers. Did you ever do that?

Never got through to him. Stanley wasn't easy. I always hear about people talking to him on the phone for hours on end, but I never did. I was very close to him when we made "Fear and Desire," which means I was around him for six or seven weeks, then around him for another month when we looped. And then I'd see him every now and then in the Village, 1954-55. I moved to California in '60. He was out there making something. And he came to see me in a Jean Genet play, "Deathwatch." I think he had the new wife, his last wife, Christiane, who painted all those pictures in the last movie.

Ten years later I was in London -- by then I had made "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," and people knew who I was -- and I got hold of him at Shepperton Studios. He was very friendly, but he was editing a movie. And I said, "I'd love to see you, can we have lunch?" And he said, "Not while I'm editing, I can't see anyone socially while I'm editing." I said, "I'll be in London for some time." And he said, "Well I'll be editing for about a year." And I said, "Well, see you again, Stanley," and that was the end of it. Too bad -- in "Eyes Wide Shut" I could have played the Sydney Pollack part. Anyway, look, he was a genius, a unique movie director.

He certainly seems to have been able to convince a wide variety of people that he was a genius.

Stanley was like Woody Allen in the capacity to be shocked that you know certain things.

One day I was asking Woody about something, and he said, "Oh, I'm going to screen 'Sunrise.' " And I said, "Oh, yeah, Murnau." And he said, "You know it?" I said, "I saw it at the Museum of Modern Art when I was 22 years old, but ..." "Oh, but you know Murnau?" Like how would anyone else know him?

Both Stanley and Woody never went to college. So -- in trying to be Freudian in my interpretation -- these people hear about a subject they are not familiar with and do massive comprehensive research to get to know about, say, an Iranian rug. "I want to know about every Iranian rug ever made, who makes them, how many stitches, what colors, who buys them -- get me an Iranian rug." And that's 'cause they never had college, where even if it's not great you've got an underpinning of subjects. And they missed it.

In Brooklyn College I did what was normal college reading in the early '50s. The Greeks, Chaucer, Shakespeare, all that stuff. And when I went to Greenwich Village I was reading people whose books were being carried under my friends' arms. Anaïs Nin, Celine -- who the hell was that? I felt privileged reading Kafka, all this stuff I didn't know about. And since I considered myself an actor and was studying acting, I had a part-time job. I worked four hours a day, and I read every day; I read all of Faulkner in one summer.

Now, Woody and Stanley are both geniuses and geniuses don't need to study anything. But sometimes I would say, "Jesus, didn't he take American Lit I? It's no big deal to know X, Y or Z." By the way, when Woody showed me "Sunrise," the Murnau picture, I had almost completely forgotten it and was dazzled by it. And he then went and made this movie that didn't work, "Shadows and Fog." He's got three kinds of movies: the early "Bananas" movies, which are hilarious; then he's got the Woody Allen human comedy things, the wonderful "Broadway Danny Rose" or "Husbands and Wives," whatever they're called; then he's got his Bergman-Kafka period -- and those are difficult. And those are probably his favorites! I wish him well; he's given me a lot of pleasure.

Stanley was a great chess player. So every now and then I would just say, "Pawn to king four." I wasn't that good. But those were great days. You see, when you know somebody before they know who they are, it's a little different. But I believe things I read about Stanley in the last few months, that he was in his own way a kind and social person who didn't want to leave his home. I read that he did get out a little bit. Basically, he made a choice -- and it's fascinating, because most people I know make the opposite choice. As much as they like where they live, they want to get out. They want to go to Bali. I'm a fantastic traveler: I'm thinking of writing a book about it. In the last 25 years I've been to Nepal, I've been down the Amazon, I've been to Japan, China, Africa, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Israel.

Cuba is a great trip. The Cubans live real close to the bone. Everything's old and needs a paint job. But there's real spirit there, something's going on. And even though there are a lot of problems, it's exciting. Again, the stakes are high, and the people derive happiness from them more palpably than they do here. Because of the politics you have a heightened life -- everything is based on clear-cut problems. There's not much time for laziness, intellectually. And when you get a nice cheeseburger you're glad you got it. Here, it's all softer.

You can't get what you get from traveling by phone calls. You can only get, say, "It's cloudy." When I travel I often ask, "Where are the synagogues?" You know what kind of Jew I am from reading the book, but it always leads to interesting things. I should have asked where the synagogue was in Nairobi. I could have met the seven Jewish guys there.

Next page | Becoming "the Jewish Chekhov"