The first thing Warren Beatty wants you to know about his new film (which he directs, wrote and stars in) RULES DON’T APPLY is that it’s not a film about Howard Hughes; it’s simply a film in which Hughes is the dominant force and a pair of young, would-be lovers (Alden Ehrenreich and Lily Collins) must decide if they value their relationship with each other more than the sway that being affiliated with the billionaire Hughes brings them. Which doesn’t mean that Beatty doesn’t put his all into the manic genius that Hughes embodied or capture every intricate detail of the late 1950s period, as he does in all of his film.
RULES DON’T APPLY is Beatty’s first film in front of the camera since 2001’s TOWN AND COUNTRY and his first behind it since 2000’s borderline prophetic BULWORTH. In my line of work, you keep an unwritten list in your head of people you’d like to interview before you die or leave the business, and Beatty’s name never dared to enter my list because it seemed too ridiculous to even conceive of a circumstance in which talking to him might occur. And yet there I was, being led into a room where he was waiting to talk to me one-on-one for a fleeting few minutes about whatever we could cram into the time.
Your brain flashes to the films he’s directed (HEAVEN CAN WAIT, REDS, DICK TRACY) or his long career as an actor who straddled the line between Hollywood contract player and one of the leading forces in maverick ’70s American cinema—SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS, MICKEY ONE, BONNIE AND CLYDE, MCCABE & MRS. MILLER, THE PARALLAX VIEW, SHAMPOO, ISHTAR, BUGSY, LOVE AFFAIR. And then there’s his demeanor: he’s got that classic way of making you feel like he’s just as interested in your life as you are in his, and that might actually be true, since he doesn’t make the rounds the way he used to. But his answers are all well-considered, hesitant, but when he gets going, it’s best just to step out of the way and let him go because you’re about to get treated to pure gold.
Chicago was one of the very few places Beatty travelled to to promote RULES DON’T APPLY, and I’m enterally grateful I got a chance to pick his brain about the film’s many layers and the long process to bring this story to the screen. Please enjoy my all-too-brief talk with Warren Beatty…
Capone: Hello, sir. Great to meet you.
Warren Beatty: Steve. How are you?
Capone: Excellent. I accept your premise whole heartedly that this is not a movie about Howard Hughes, that this is about these two young people. That being said, you’ve placed this budding young romance in the middle of Hurricane Howard. There’s no way to survive, there’s no way to thrive, and that they realize at different times in their lives that the only way this is going to work between hem is if they evacuate the area.
WB: He’s definitely an obstacle, and what a love story needs is an obstacle.
Capone: What’s also interesting is the reason they don’t realize it until much later in the film that they have to get out of this relationship with Hughes in order for theirs to work is he’s a big draw. There’s a lot there that they want from him. So yeah, it’s an interesting lesson in power and wealth. Why did you want to create this story about these two young people in this particular environment?
WB: Well, I’ve always wanted to do a movie about this massively important subject, what I’d say we’ve come to call American sexual puritanism, and its very strong effect on the entire society and a strong effect on my life. I grew up in Virginia. I was a Southern Baptist. All of these pictures that I’ve done, I carry around the thought of doing the picture for a long time. I’m very lucky, because I began with a movie that was I guess what you’d call a hit [SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS], then I became whatever that’s called. So I was able actually from the very beginning to not have to do one movie after another movie after another; I didn’t have to do them for money. And I was able to see early the importance ,if I wanted to, of maintaining control of a project. George Stevens used to say “Making a movie is like going to war.”
So in the back of my mind, I always had a thought of including in a movie Howard Hughes, because he was just so amusing to me, the stories I’d hear about him, the predicaments that people would get in. I never met him, but the people that did know him, they did not speak ill of him, but they spoke with great humor about the things they had to go through to be able to cope with his strange scheduling, etc. I’ve always thought that was a good farcical situation, and to have two kids come to Hollywood when I came to Hollywood, 1958, dealing with the sexual morays, the sexual restrictions, which were still in existence while feminism was really beginning to emerge in the late ’50s, and the early ’60s, and led to what we usually refer to as the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s. It did not erase the hypocritical sexual puritanism that has so often made us the laughing stock of France and other countries, but it did affect, I think positively, the progress in sorting out the truth.
Capone: This is set in the time when you first came to Hollywood, and I found things about both of your young lead characters that embodied parts of you in a way. She’s a young actor who feels like a piece of meat to a certain degree, but she’s also got this religious background; he’s this young kid with aspirations and a certain amount of drive. Did you take your personality and split it between them to a certain degree?
WB: I don’t think of it that way, but maybe I should. These characters for me, when I’m writing them, they take on their own life, and certain things affect male and female in similar ways. I felt in retrospect, that might have been somewhat freeing to have the boy in the movie come from Fresno, California, and be a Methodist when I was a Southern Baptist from Virginia, as the girl is.
These characters are composites of people that I have known and things that have happened. You might say I’m part of the composition. I wouldn’t venture to try to speculate on that. The character of Howard Hughes, I never met, but I like to say I met everybody who did ever meet him, and everybody spoke very highly of him, they liked him, but he was impossible to deal with. I thought that he would be, from all of the stories, great fodder for a farcical situation in dealing with American sexual hypocrisy.
Capone: One of the things I didn’t know going in, you have a story credit for Bo Goldman, who has a little history with writing about Hughes.
WB: I didn’t know Bo very well. I got to know him, and I thought since he had a history doing MELVIN AND HOWARD —
Capone: Another film not about Howard Hughes, but featuring Howard Hughes.
WB: That’s right. I felt that Bo would be somebody that would be fun to kick it around with. We did work briefly on it. Yes, that’s true.
Capone: He won an Oscar for it too, right? For MELVIN AND HOWARD.
WB: Is that right?
Capone: I think he did. He’s won two. I think that was one of them.
WB: I like Bo very much. We haven't been in contact for quite a long time. I think they’re different, but I see your point. I actually haven’t seen MELVIN AND HOWARD since it was made. I liked it. I thought it was good, and that’s part of why I thought that Bo might want to kick around another dealing with Hughes.
Capone: Do you think you would have been as intrigued by him if you had met Hughes?
WB: It would be hard for me to take the responsibility of making a movie about somebody I actually knew, because I feel that all history to some extent or another is fiction, and I used to have a few opening titles on the movie. I had “History is bunk”—Henry Ford. Winston Churchill said, “History will be very kind to me, because I intend to write it.” Napoleon said, “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” And then I scrapped them all and I just used a very good quote from Howard Hughes, which is “Never check an interesting fact.”
So all the things that happen to Howard Hughes in this picture are things I was told by other people had happened to him, or that they knew that this had happened to Howard. But what you do when you’re making a movie that involves someone who actually lived is you scrunch chronologies, you change places and times, you make the other characters who are composites of people that you might have known or they have known, and you finally turn them into a reality for yourself, then you discard what you’ve heard. Then you realize “That’s where I got that from. That actually happened to Howard Hughes.” So I could go back and remember. Anything that happens, if I sat and say, “Oh yeah, I think I know where this idea came from.” Then what you have from your composite characters—it’s called imagination.
Capone: I love the way, I think it Oliver Platt who said it last night—you have all of these lunches and meetings and dinners and rehearsals, and then you transition that very smoothly into the actual work, into the actual filming. It just glides right in. When did you discover that that was the best way to work for your directing style?
WB: I haven't done it really any other way. You meet people and you say “I could see that person doing this, I could see that person doing that,” and then little by little, the story begins to solidify, and you find yourself using things that you’ve forgotten that you said years ago, then you remember and you think “Oh!” That happened about an hour ago. I was talking to someone, and I realized “Oh, that’s where I got that from.”.
Capone: I want ask you about the song “Rules Don’t Apply,” because it’s used a few times in the film, each time it’s in a different context that adds a layer of meaning to it, and each of the men in the film think it’s about him. We know the truth. That’s actually happened to you before, where a song has taken on this mythology that it might be about you. Where did you get the idea to have a song like that that each man can sort of embrace it as his own?
WB: Well, she’s a songwriter, and I wanted her to write a song. That seemed important. I think it’s more about Frank than it is about Howard.
Capone: Well we know who it’s about, but they don’t know who it’s about.
WB: Well Howard is just the type to think it’s about him. That’s how we respond to songs sometimes.
Capone: He seems to get strength from it, Howard, to a certain degree. Like it means something to him.
WB: [long pause] That is the power of song.
Capone: I did not know going in that Caleb Deschanel was your cinematographer. A lot of the film, especially your scenes, is set in very dark rooms with very little light. Technically, was that a tough thing to shoot?
WB: What I’ve been told is Howard liked to have as much darkness as possible, and it’s difficult to do, but if you’re Caleb, you’re good enough to do it. That has been one of the big changes in filmmaking over the years that I’ve been in film. Many years ago, you couldn’t do that. And Gordon Willis came in and everybody said, “Well, you’ve got to turn the lights on.” And he said, “Well, no.” And then these pictures came out that were big hits, and then it became permissible.
But I think the whole proposition of Howard hiding is fun, crazy, interesting, laughable, and true, and I think that that would be much more difficult today with the technology that we have. We’re not able to hide the way that Howard Hughes or Greta Garbo hid, thereby making themselves much more mysterious and much more interesting. In fact, you could make the case that maybe if Howard just had the lights on, he wouldn’t have been so interesting. I mean that metaphorically.
Capone: You haven't been in a film or made a film in about 15 years. I miss you as an actor, and I’m wondering, even when you’re not at the helm, why aren’t you acting more?
WB: My answer to that is I have been lucky enough to have this thing that we like to call a life [laughs]. I got married almost 25 years ago, and I had these kids which I like to refer to my four, small, Eastern European countries, and they just filled up my life. I think it was the smartest thing I ever did. Do you have have kids?
Capone: No.
WB: Well, it makes it completely different. Best thing that’s ever happened to me. I had the movie life, and I can still have it if I am a good boy.
Capone: Do it when you want to. That’s a great philosophy. Thank you so much. I’m really glad you’re here.
WB: Thank you for coming up. I’m really sorry that these conversations are so brief. Do you live in town?
Capone: I do, up by Wrigley Field actually.
WB: Are you a Cubs fan?
Capone: Of course. But you have to be if you live around there, or you just get angry, especially lately when the festivities are going on all night.
WB: Yeah, they’re doing great. Unbelievable [this interview took place just before the World Series began].
Capone: I know, I’m excited for this week for sure.
WB: My 22 year old is not.
Capone: He’s a Dodgers fan I’m guessing. Again, thank you so much. I’m glad you got to come to Chicago.
