Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I apologize for the non-update this morning, everybody, but business calls, and I actually have to sleep tonight. As a result, all I have time to post is this wonderful interview between our own Mr. Beaks and Roger Avary, whose RULES OF ATTRACTION is opening today.
What more do you need from me? Get to it!
Beaks: I was perusing your site, and I noticed you said that the world of Bret Easton Ellis is a world you understand.
Roger: That’s probably a frightening statement to make.
B: But it’s honest. What is the attraction?
R: You know what it is? People confuse Bret for often glorifying his subjects because he comes from that world. What they don’t recognize for some reason – or not everybody recognizes – is that Brett is a social satirist. He writes about what upsets and disturbs and disgusts him in society. And I’ve always, though it sounds like the height of hubris to say, thought of myself in much the same way. When I first read this book, I was at a very similar college. I was at the west coast version of Bennington, this little liberal arts college with a bunch of kids living in close confines with money and drugs. (Bennington is the school on which Camden is based.) And I was reading the book, laughing my ass off because I consider myself something of an observer. Everything I was reading was a harsh, critical examination of what was happening around me every day. So I would look up from the pages of the book and see the characters walking by.
B: Was it a grotesque version of the book?
R: Don’t get me wrong. It was a lot of fun. (laughs.) I maybe portrayed everything in the film in a hyper-real way. I tend to shoot in a hyper-real style as opposed to realism. The movie is not meant to be reality. The movie is meant to be, if anything, a condemnation of the luxurious debauchery of the ruling class. Not too unlike what I had always imagined Renoir did in the thirties just before World War II with RULES OF THE GAME, or LA REGLE DU JEU. With that film, people in France, up until that movie, had been used to seeing goofy, light comedies. You know, rich people clinking champagne glasses, not too unlike our versions of AMERICAN PIE or ROAD TRIP, or something like that. Light fare. They had not been used to seeing the wealthy portrayed as a bunch of socially correct savages who eat each other, essentially, alive. So it’s almost a very – it sounds so pompous to say it – done in almost a very Bunuel-like fashion. I wanted to attack this sort of sub-class of our social strata – people who are dancing on the rim of a volcano and don’t even know it. So I expressed all of my thoughts to Greg Shapiro, the producer, and he said, “Roger, you know, that’s fine, but it’s very different historically right now. There’s no war coming.” And, sure enough we started making the movie, and here comes the war. So I actually think, you know, people talk about 80’s nihilism, and I hate using the word “nihilism”, but the fact of the matter is that social attitude, that nihilistic attitude, has been evident and prevalent throughout history, and France in the 30’s owes more to this movie than, say, the 80’s when the book was written, so much so that I in fact had my costume designer, Louise Frogley, research the fashions of Coco Chanel during that time period and try to imitate or take her design cues from Coco Chanel.
B: You know, I’ve seen the film twice and I keep veering back and forth between “satire” and “morality play”. Because the characters…..
R: It’s Brecht.
B: Yeah.
R: It’s funny because I remember at one point telling a journalist after KILLING ZOE “look man, I’m not a moralist. I’m not out here to satisfy any kind of moral agenda.” And by the end interview, and it was a very long interview, it was like a four hour interview, and we talked and talked and talked…. and by the very end of it, he said “so you are a moralist.” I essentially had talked myself around to the point of realizing that, actually, I am. It’s just that there are two ways of expressing morality and one of them is teaching by example and the other one is teaching by how not to do something. In the case of this film, I’m doing social satire. So, yeah, I guess it is, to a certain extent, a morality play. It’s a chamber piece.
B: You were talking about working in a hyper-real style. I know a lot of people at our screening were very interested in drawing Kubrick comparisons. I see it as a complete love of cinema. Something akin to maybe what De Palma does, and gets harangued for, fairly consistently.
R: I’ll tell you what it is. The very first movies took their cinematic language…. The only phrase that existed, the only cue that they could go from was vaudeville or theater. So those movies started out as just shots: wide shots from the side as if you were in theater looking at the stage. It’s because there was no visual grammar with which to speak cinematically. Over history, it’s gradually become much more complex; there’s been a much greater quantity of divergent languages, if you will: dialects, phrases and grammar. If you watch the films of Martin Scorsese you see so much Elia Kazan. In fact, if you watch the films of Kubrick, you see so much Fritz Lang. You build on top of your cinematic forefathers. I have to say that the cinematic language I prefer to speak….. bits of it come from Kubrick, Fritz Lang, Roman Polanski. There’s a bit of John Boorman in there. A little bit of Russ Meyer. A little bit of a number of dialects that I’m attracted to. You know, I see something and it’s visually pleasing; that’s why I align myself with it. I’m not sure there’s any crime in doing that. A lot of people have blamed De Palma for that, and I’m really not so sure there’s any crime in this. I mean, as De Palma was doing it, it’s not like Hitchcock was out there still doing it. A lot of people have bitched about Paul Thomas Anderson ripping off Robert Altman; Robert Altman’s not really doing it much anymore either. So he’s kind of taken two great tastes that go great together – Altman and Scorsese – and started making his kind of movies. I can totally appreciate that. Wes Anderson feels a lot to me like Hal Ashby – Hal Ashby is dead; I’m glad somebody’s carrying that torch.
You make films based on the ecstasies that you experienced in the theater. Paul Schrader….. so much of what he does is directly out of Bertolucci and THE CONFORMIST because when he came into being with, um –
B: Coming out of that whole Calvinist upbringing –
R: Yeah. And he was, what, twenty or so when he saw his first movie? It was right during that explosion from the Italian New Wave, and so there’s a lot of Antonioni and Bertolucci in his work. Even if he spikes it a little here and there, it’s obvious, and it’s exciting to go see those films because it feels like there’s a history and a lineage involved with it. Werner Herzog always talks how during World War II there was a time of barbarism in Germany where there were no cultural forefathers for the next wave of filmmakers to come out of the country after World War II; they had no one to immediately look back to and draw from. They had to go back several generations to silent film, to Fritz Lang and Murnau, (to find a style) to grow out of.
Cinema is a language. And language evolves over time.
B: Is there any place where you draw the line between indulging your love for cinema – tracking shots, split screen and devices like that? Is there a worry of getting carried away?
R: There would be a worry if that’s all you were doing. The fact of the matter is, the visual styles that I think in, I only apply them as necessary and when appropriate. Just as when I’m speaking with you, I’m not going to start swearing and abusing you verbally because it’s not part of our conversation.
B: Give me a minute.
R: Should it lead that way, my usage of language would change as necessary. You do what’s appropriate. In fact, I come from a philosophy, and I have to say more than visual style, I come at it philosophically. People say stealing visually? I don’t believe I actually steal visually. I think I steal philosophically from filmmakers. I very, very much believe in certain philosophical approaches to extracting a performance out of an actor. I tend to do less set-ups and more takes because I want to get a variety of spontaneous moments that I can attempt to edit together. To me, it’s not a contest; I’m not trying to get as many set-ups as I can, or shoot from every angle and use it all. I instead sit down and watch the performance; I talk to the actors and I find out where they’re coming from and, then, I try to allow the language of the camera to evolve out of the language of the performance.
I could think about you and I sitting here having a conversation six months in advance and think, “oh, I’m going to shoot it like the coffee shop sequence in RESERVOIR DOGS; I’m going to do it low at the table here, and then a shot from here and a shot from there,” you know, which probably owes something to Scorsese and TAXI DRIVER. What happens if we arrive on the location and there’s a mirror over there and I can see the camera, so I’d have to move it? Or maybe, even more different, maybe the actor just quit smoking and can’t sit still, and feels the need to get up and start walking around? I can’t anticipate that until the moment occurs. So, maybe, rather than forcing somebody to sit down, and hampering them and forcing them to do something that they don’t feel from the inside of their soul that they should do, maybe the camera should get up and walk around with them. And that way, the language of the performance and the language of the camera are intimately connected. That kind of philosophical approach really comes from a pastiche of filmmaking styles that I have taken from other people. I definitely don’t come from the Hitchcock school –
B: You don’t storyboard?
R: I do storyboard, but I never use it. I storyboard it and I think about how I’m going to do stuff, but the fact of the matter is, things just change. Storyboards are great to fall back on. You go to some place and you freeze and you don’t know what to do? You’ve got your storyboards. They’re like cheat notes. You only use them if you need to cheat. In fact, I always find that, in the past, whenever I’ve fixated on something before understanding the moment – when I’ve fixated on my preconceived notions of how things are – I’ve noticed that it never feels right, and when I’m watching it later on, it feels cold and distant. It doesn’t feel like I’ve crawled into the psychology of the moment. And when I notice that that’s happened, I feel like I’ve failed. I just employ a vocabulary; a cinematic vocabulary of words, phrases and dialects that excite me. Just in the way that I probably never use the word….. um, I’m trying to think of a word I never use. That’s a tough one. (Laughs.) That’s a tough exercise!
B: “Peripatetic”, maybe?
R: Exactly! I’ve never used that word, but some people might use it daily. And I think that’s how cinema works; you just speak the way you learned how to speak. It’s cinefage, really, instead of being a cineaste. It’s the act of cinefage, where you’re fageing together. It’s a French concept, I guess.
B: What’s the difference between GLITTERATI and GLAMORAMA? Are these going to be two separate films?
R: There will definitely be GLITERATI. I didn’t realize I was going to be doing, or potentially doing, GLAMORAMA. We did buy the rights and I’m adapting the screenplay – in fact, I’m almost done with it – but I didn’t anticipate that we’d be doing it. When I made the European sequence, we shot seventy hours of digital video, and I explained at the screening how we did that (editor’s note: it’s a long, fascinating story for another time). I didn’t realize I was going to have this vast wealth of information. And, also, I hadn’t read GLAMORAMA at that point. So, when I read GLAMORAMA, I was startled to discover – have you read it by any chance?
B: Not yet.
R: The Victor character begins to go schizophrenic throughout the course of the book, and he starts to believe he’s being followed by a camera crew that shooting his life as part of a movie. And I was stunned at the similarities between GLITTERATI – which I had just kind of come up with only because I have the footage to do it, I mean, why not cut something together – and GLAMORAMA. Did you by any chance read Jeff Wells’s column? He did a whole thing on GLITTERATI at MoviePoopShoot.com recently.
B: I check out the site, but I haven’t read Jeff’s column recently (hey, never accuse me of being dishonest!)
R: I showed him some stuff, and I have to say – I mean, I made it, so I’m biased obviously – I think it’s stunning. The material is so rich and ripe, it has to be seen. And whether it just ends up as a much shorter movie that’s just an extra on the DVD, or maybe it shows up as a feature film, or possibly as a short-lived series, like maybe a six-part half-hour series, in some form, I will finish it and get it out there.
B: It’s just something you stumbled into and found?
R: I started out just trying to get visual stuff. I ended up, with the camera, living through Victor’s eyes, and a weird transference started to happen. I started seeing through his eyes. It’s a very interesting exercise as a filmmaker to work several weeks, sleep four to five hours a night and shoot all day long. And, literally, all day long; you don’t have time to eat because you’ve got to capture your actor eating. And, so, to literally shoot all day long and to not have a script, not know where you’re going, not know what you’re doing, not know what characters are going to be coming into the frame, and to be having to plan several shots in advance what you’re going to do next. You literally have to think like a movie all day long. It’s a very intense and exhaustive experience. And what I realized halfway through….. I started formulating in my mind because I was seeing these entire, amazing conversations occurring that I couldn’t have planned; I couldn’t have sent actors to play these parts better than the real people played themselves. Halfway through I realized, “I’ve got to make this into a film.” Because, I remember I looked at it….. I was a week into it, I had thirty-seven hours of video….. that alone was enough to make a feature film out of it from what I’d seen. And, so, I immediately started formulating this plan that I was going to make a separate film. And I only revealed very recently that I was going to do it.
B: Just some things I want to cover that I know our readers are very interested in: to begin with, PHANTASM’S END. Is that any closer to getting done?
R: I don’t know, but I think now that Bruce Campbell and Don Coscarelli have a really good, tight working relationship my hope would be that this would happen. Because to bring Bruce Campbell into the PHANTASM universe is, to me, a completely ecstatic possibility; I mean, it gets me hard to think about that movie. I wrote the movie originally because I had an idea, when I first saw PHANTASM, as to what the sequel should be. It was right after the Academy Awards; I had an Academy Award, I’m being offered all of these things and I’m like, “what am I going to do?” You know what? I want to do a PHANTASM film! So I called Don Coscarelli and I’m like, “Hi, I’m Roger Avary.” And he’s like, “I know who you are.” And I told him, “I’d like to write a PHANTASM film, and I’ll do it for free.” So I immediately wrote the ultimate PHANTASM film that had the unified PHANTASM theory built into it and, yet, would also answer some questions and raise several more. I’m calling it PHANTASM’S END, even though it would not be the last PHANTASM.
And that was all. On the way out, but with the tape recorder off, I did ask Roger about the possibility of his SECONDS remake getting off the ground. Right now, the capable Jon Amiel (director of Dennis Potter’s THE SINGING DETECTIVE) is attached, but though I’ve nothing but respect for Amiel, listening to Roger’s enthusiasm and bold ideas for the project makes me wish they’d simply hand the project over to him entirely.
And, then, there’s BEOWULF, which we sadly never got around to.
Want to see these come to fruition? It’s pretty simple. Get your ass out to the theater and plunk down your $7 - $10 for THE RULES OF ATTRACTION this weekend. Even if you don’t end up loving the film, I guarantee that there are brilliant moments in it that will knock you for a loop.
Faithfully submitted,
