Munich American
Peace Committee (MAPC)
Radio Lora, 13. Oktober 2008
Alternative Radio
JOHN SAYLES
Politics & Film
Interviewed by David Barsamian Santa Fe, New Mexico 8 September 2004
Silver City is set in Colorado, a
state undergoing enormous transformation - building booms,
subdivisions, malls all over the place. The film is a story about
development, greed, corruption, and politics.
I wanted to do something, pretty much starting the year 2000, about
electoral politics. We were in Florida shooting Sunshine State, and a
lot of people in our crew and in the local community kept talking to us
about, “So what's the deal with the national media? Don't they
know the real story down here is how many people were not allowed to
vote who should have been allowed to? Not about chads, which seems to
have been an accident. But people prevented from voting. That wasn't an
accident. And how come that's not the A story? How come that's not a
nationwide scandal?” And that got me thinking about both
electoral politics and our mainstream media, and what we expect from
them and what they've become. I was looking for a place to set a story
about those issues, I wanted a state that was kind of a battleground
for a lot of things: for our laws on immigration; for this question
about what we're going to do about water, which is going to become the
next oil, that people are privatizing left and right; for questions
about the environment and development. Colorado has this nice
schizophrenia. In the Front Range you have Denver kind of in the
middle, and then north of it you have the People's Republic of Boulder,
and then south of it you have Colorado Springs. So you've got that
spectrum right within the same state.
Two of the characters in the film are
journalists who used to work for what had once been an investigative
weekly called The Mountain Monitor. And one of the journalists, played
by Maria Bello, laments that journalists should change things, not just
report.
What she's really saying is that if you do your reporting right - you
make a few connections, you dig for the facts, you don't just report
what people say is the truth - that's automatically going to change
things. And that was their idea. Another character in the movie, played
by Tim Roth was their editor when they were at that kind of alternative
weekly. And now, because he's continued to do that - he hasn't gone
mainstream, he hasn't dropped out of the race the way the main
character, Danny O'Brien, has - been so marginalized that he's
literally underground. He's running a little news Website. And as he
says, all he can do is break these stories on his Website and then hope
that he plants the seeds of doubt in the mainstream media and that one
of them gets bold enough to at least reprint his accusation almost as
a, well, here's something from left field.
And the moment that that's reprinted in a mainstream outlet, the powers
that be have to respond to it. And then they're caught in lies.
The film is set against the backdrop
of a political campaign. Dickie Pilager is the candidate for governor.
He's the scion of a senator. He is also not terribly articulate. There
have been some comparisons made in reviews of the film that he's
somewhat similar to George W. Bush.
The character that Chris Cooper plays, Dickie Pilager, is very much
based on George Bush when he first ran for governor of Texas. He's
totally new at it. His father has been a senator from Colorado for a
long time, has a lot of clout. Pilager has an enormous amount of
corporate money behind him. But he's not very articulate, and he's
especially not good when he gets caught off the script. He's got this
kind of rabid, take-no-prisoners campaign manager, played by Richard
Dreyfuss, who is trying to teach him slowly to stay more on the script.
But I think the important thing about Pilager is the two things the Tim
Roth character says about him. The first is that there is not a corrupt
bone in his body at this point. He really believes what he's saying,
when he knows what it is. And that he's user-friendly. Those two things
mean they found the right candidate. He didn't decide to run for
office. A bunch of people got together and said, “Who shall we
run? Whoever has been in this office before has not been doing what we
wanted them to do, they have not been as user-friendly as we'd like
them to be.
Here's a kid with the right name, and maybe he'll do what we tell him to.”
There is a very interesting scene -
and for me it was a key part of the film - and that's a conversation
between the candidate, Dickie Pilager, and Wes Benteen, a developer and
kind of an eminence grise, patron of the candidate.
Kris Kristofferson plays Wes Benteen, who is multicorporate.
He has hospitals, media, cattle, and mining. You name it, he's got
something. So there is an enormous amount of regulation, or
deregulation, that affects his businesses. And he's basically the guy
who has funded this candidate.
In this conversation they have, what he's trying to get through to this
young candidate is his philosophy, which is basically, There are
visionaries like you and me, Dickie, and then there are the people. And
the people need to be dragged by the horns to what's good for them. To
me that's kind of the crux of this movie. Yes, I want people to draw
lines between this movie and the Bush administration. But there is this
bigger issue, which is, do we expect our politicians to have as their
constituency the voting public, or do we expect them to just serve the
masters who put them into power?
Wes Benteen says the struggle is
public versus private, and he calls the West “a treasure chest
waiting to be opened, only there is a 500-pound bureaucrat sitting on
it.”
There is a mindset among the movers and shakers of the world that all
that public land is being wasted because it's not being developed by
somebody smart like them. And it's not necessarily that they want an
Oklahoma land rush, where the people kind of get in their Winnebagos
and bump across the land and stake out their own claims. They want the
inside track on who is going to develop it and who is going to make the
money off it. But they basically feel like it's being wasted. And they
have done quite a good job, I must say, with this administration of
finding people who are willing and happy to roll back environmental
rules, to open lands up, usually secretly.
Most of their environmental changes have been done without public
review, usually announced on a Friday just after the news is closed for
the weekend. And nobody quite notices it until it's too late.
Energy policy has been designed by the major energy corporations.
There is a character in the movie who is a lobbyist, played by Billy
Zane. And what you see is this process that's happened certainly within
the Bush administration, and somewhat in the Clinton administration, of
lobbyists for the energy industry or for logging or whatever becoming
slowly the heads of the agencies that were supposed to protect those
resources for the American public. So at one point he's explaining some
legislation which he has written as a lobbyist that he's just handing
over whole to the candidate's campaign manager, saying, “The real
name of this should be the Developer's Bill of Rights, but we're
calling it the Environmental Heritage Initiative.” There is that
incredible, Orwellian “Let's do one thing and call it the exact
opposite.”
Operation Iraqi Freedom.
It is a version of the big lie technique. And when you have enough
money, when you have a whole cadre of spin doctors, when you have a
couple of your own radio and TV outlets to kind of echo everything you
say, it becomes a kind of more than half-truth.
Wes Benteen identifies the enemy as ”the pencil pushers in Washington” that just don't get it.
He's talking there about the bureaucrats who are still trying to do
their jobs as mandated. The EPA, worker safety, all these agencies that
were mandated by the American public were there to do a job. And pretty
much since the Nixon administration on and off there has been an
assault. And the assault hasn't been, “We're going to go back to
Congress and say we don't need this thing anymore, the American people
were wrong,” because they don't want to lose popularity that way.
They've said, We get to choose the head of it. We'll put somebody in
there who is going to castrate that agency or do the exact opposite of
what that agency was set up to do.”
Silver City is also about race and class.
You can't really separate economics from race and class. They have been
used so often to manipulate economics. So one of the things that you
find throughout the country now - it's pretty hard to go somewhere
where you don't hear Spanish spoken in the U.S. now. And one of the
reasons for that is there is this enormous hypocrisy in our immigration
policy, which is that we're playing cat and mouse down on the border,
chasing people into the desert, people are dying, spending too much
money to get into the country to work for less than our already-too-low
minimum wage. At the same time that we're spending all this money on
the border, there is a tacit understanding that certain industries,
especially the restaurant and construction industries, would not exist
as they do now without that very, very cheap labor, who have no
recourse, who sometimes get stiffed and don't get paid, who don't get
any benefits, who can't really go to get medical help if they get sick
or hurt, who are unprotected.
And it's been a bonanza for people in the lower end of those industries.
In the West in general, and in
Colorado in particular, there are many people from Latin and Central
America, and Mexico that are doing the work in the ski industry - in
Aspen, in Vail, and Breckenridge. On the Front Range they do most of
the construction work. They are what I call the invisible armies of the
brown doing all of the labor.
What it is interesting. It's kind of an internal outsourcing. So
instead of sending the jobs to Bangladesh, because they have to be done
here, because they are service industries that have to stay here, you
bring the Third World people into the United States and then pretend
that they're not there and pretend that you don't want them there. And
it's a pretty thin pretense.
Another interesting thing that I found and that I put into Silver City
is that you're finding in communities now tension between Mexican
Americans, who have been here for maybe three, four, five generations,
and new immigrants. It certainly happened in Chicago in the 1930s with
the African Americans who had been there for a couple generations and
the people coming up from the South. And you had it, I'm sure, in New
York City, with the greenhorns coming from whatever country and running
into the people who had been here a whole three years thinking, Who are
these people? There goes the neighborhood.
There is a political struggle over
the lexicon in the West also, over Chicano or Hispanic. Even Latino is
a politically charged word.
There has been no overall agreement. So you really almost have to go
county by county. And I find the best thing is, If I'm going to
generalize, what would you like to be called? And there are separations
within it. They say, “Oh, these people, those aren't Chicanos.
They just got here. They don't speak English yet.
Those are Mexicans.” Or sometimes they will say, “Those are
Indians.” They might be more specific about where they come from
in Mexico.
The older generations, who have been
here for a number of years, identify themselves, in the West
particularly, as Hispanic, in other words, identifying with Spain, with
whiteness, rather than the mestizo or the Indian culture of Mexico and
Central America.
Certainly in Texas, and even more in New Mexico, you have people who
were here before the so-called white people got here. And as far as
they were concerned, they were Castillanos or whatever. And, yes, there
were mestizos running around and there were Indians running around and
there were black people running around, and they had nothing to do with
those people.
Some like to think that they never any background have in their family
tree. And perhaps they haven't. But that kind of class thing, economics
get into it sometimes, is hard to kill. It becomes part of a family's
lore, even if it's somewhat mythic.
Silver City opens with a dead body
fished out of a lake by Dickie Pilager, of all people. So there is a
detective story running underneath the whole issue of development and
environmental degradation around the death of a Mexican laborer Lazaro
Huerta.
What I wanted was to have a kind of film noir murder mystery in the
tradition of Chinatown. That film is mostly based on Raymond Chandler.
And the great thing about Raymond Chandler mysteries is the trip is
important; what you find out about the world on your way to finding out
who killed who is what's important. And very often, by the end of a
Raymond Chandler book, who killed who is a minor thing. Oh, yes, by the
way, so-and-so shot so-and-so. But you've had this incredible window on
those worlds within Los Angeles. So for me, I wanted Silver City to be
a metaphor as well as a real place, just like Chinatown is a metaphor
for a certain kind of corruption in that movie.
I also felt like what a journalist does is look under the rock, is try
to find out what people aren't necessarily telling you at first. And I
feel like Danny O'Brien, the character that Danny Huston plays, whom is
this, at the beginning, apathetic, almost cynical ex-journalist, who
says, “I don't do politics anymore.
There is nothing you can do anyway,” as he gets into this case,
which he has kind of grudgingly taken on. He's not a very good
detective. For me he's the American voter, who really is kind of sick
of politics and doesn't think much of either side, or the whole
process. They think it's really just kind of a sell-out and a scam.
As he gets involved in this, what happens is not so much that he
triumphs, or the good, virtuous people are victorious and the evil
people are punished. He gets his sense of moral outrage back. And my
feeling is that for America to really become a democracy, we the people
have to take that same journey. And unfortunately for us, we can't do
it just sitting back in our living rooms and listening to one radio
show or reading one newspaper or watching one TV network's news. You
have to do some digging. You have to connect some dots and do a little
analysis.
And then you're really going to get your sense of moral outrage back.
And then you have to do something about it. And voting is the minimum
you can do about it. Informing yourself is the first step. And that's a
hard thing to do when there are so many news outlets and so few of them
are doing anything that I would call real investigative journalism.
Daryl Hannah, who plays Maddy
Pilager, the sister of the candidate for governor, the daughter of the
senator, complains that people have lost the ability to be scandalized.
She's the black sheep of the family. And at first, just because she's
mad at her own family, she tries to make scandals that are
self-defeating in some ways. But as she's gotten older and gotten a
little more analysis of how the world works, she's really disappointed
that people aren't scandalized. That it becomes just a juicy story that
lasts in the news for about three days, and that the American public's
appetite for the O.J. murder trial can last for months and months and
months, but something that really affects everybody's life, or our
foreign policy, they kind of get bored with after a couple days unless
there is another big explosion or a lot of people get killed.
I'm interested that you mentioned
Chinatown, directed by John Houston, because it, too, is a tale about
political corruption and the bringing of water from the Rocky Mountains
to make L.A. green.
It was actually directed by Roman Polanski. John Houston plays the kind
of Wes Benteen character in it. Yes, it is about something similar. He
is that old-fashioned robber baron visionary like a Carnegie or Jay
Gould or Rockefeller. I think it was Henry Ford who started that
Pyramid Club. And there was this idea that they were the people on the
pinnacle of the pyramid and they really made the world work. I think
the World Trade Organization is kind of our present-day version of
that, and certainly the people in the Bush administration, who figure
out our energy policy in closed sessions. The NAFTA treaty was a big
help to those people. Let's not have these people who are inconvenient,
have all their little problems, have all their little worries. Let's
not have them get in our way. They're really just speed bumps.
You're described as an independent filmmaker. What does that mean? How are you independent?
What it means for me is I start with a story I want to tell, and then
we try to raise the money to make that story in such a way that the
final product is what we wanted it to be. So we control the casting, we
control the business decisions that are made, and we control the final
cut.
If you're not an independent filmmaker, generally it means that it's a
negotiation all the way down the line. We'll give you the money if you
cast somebody we want. If it's not somebody you like, too bad. You can
either not make the movie or make the movie, accept this person or
don’t. We'll give you the money if we can review the final cut
and then make some changes and put it in front of an audience and get
their numbers of how many liked it, how many really liked it, how many
didn't like it, would they recommend it. And then we may recommend some
changes that we will expect you to do.
There are certainly people I would consider independent filmmakers who
get to work within the Hollywood system usually, because their movies
have been successful enough. The Coen Brothers make the movies that
they want to make. It's not necessarily how you get financed, but it
has something to do with who generates the story and how does that
story come out the other end. I've often said, getting a movie through
the studio system is like getting a bill through Congress: What comes
out the other end may not resemble much what went in, and a lot of
stuff may be attached to it that waters down or actually does the
opposite of what you originally wanted that bill to do.
The big Hollywood studios, mirroring
trends in other media, are owned by a handful of conglomerates. Ben
Bagdikian says that there are now five corporations that control most
of the media in the United States. Talk about their influence and
power, particularly in the light of Disney/ABC trying to prevent the
distribution of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. There is another
studio right now, Warner Brothers, that doesn't want to release a new
edition of Three Kings.
They are going to release the new edition of Three Kings.
They're not going to release the documentary that David Russell made to
go with it that kind of brings it up to date. Look, these are big
corporations. There’s all this talk about liberal Hollywood.
Finally, the people who have the green-light power, who really run
Hollywood, are owned by corporations. And whatever their personal
politics might be, they're in the business of making money and staying
in business, and so they don't want to rattle the cage of anybody in
power. So if they see something coming out that is going to make those
people nervous, they're likely to say, “Let's not open it
yet,” or, “Let's not open it at all.” It's not so
much that they tried to stop the distribution of that movie; they just
didn't want their names on it. They didn't want to be liable. All big
corporations now have these risk management people. These are boards of
lawyers who say, “Could we be liable or could we be seen to be
responsible or could we be associated with something that is bad for
our whole corporation?” Not just for this little film division,
which may not even be the moneymaking part of it.
The most egregious example is Haskell Wexler, who shot Silver City. He
made a wonderful movie in 1968 called Medium Cool. I saw it in
Washington, D.C., after marching against the bombing of Cambodia one
day. It had just opened. The crowd was just up on their feet at the end
of it. You could still smell tear gas from the day in the air. And I
said, “This movie is going to be a great tool for everybody to
think about the war, and it's going to play to everywhere in
America.” And within a week it was off the screen. Somebody in
the State Department knew somebody at the studio and basically said,
“Give us a break here. Get this thing off the screen.” And
Haskell couldn't buy it back from the studio. It was truly repressed.
What I think you see a little bit more now is not so much repression as
disassociation. And usually it happens that you don't even get the
money in the first place to make something that might upset people. But
if it somehow happened accidentally within their system, they're there
to kind of say, “Okay, good luck. Go find another distributor, if
you can, but we don't want to be associated with it.” Even Mel
Gibson, who is really popular, those big studios did not want to touch
his Passion of the Christ. Now they're kind of saying, “Geez, he
made a lot of money on that thing. Maybe we should have been a little
more open-minded.” But I think it was just more, “The money
we make is not worth the trouble we're going to get.” Martin
Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ, that was a movie where
Universal, I think, made it partly because they wanted him to make
other movies for them. And I don't think they were happy that they made
it. And it's very hard to see a print, to see it on the screen, to this
day, because they got so much grief from religious groups, especially
Catholic groups, for distributing it.
But it's, in my view, not just
political considerations or worrying about offending the powers that
be. There are also crass economic interests. According to Michael
Moore, in the discussions with Disney/ABC to distribute Fahrenheit
9/11, the parent corporation was worried about possibly offending
Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, where Disney has major economic interests.
You see this, for instance, in the publishing industry, where people
who are very tight with whatever government has power at that point all
of a sudden are getting multi-million-dollar book advances for their
letters or their book, which you would say, “How are they going
to make that back?” Well, they're not going to necessarily make
it back on the book, but the corporation that owns that publishing
house is very happy to have that person happy with them, because they
have strings that they can pull. They can smile favorably on them when
there is new legislation about corporations, about vertical integration
and all those things coming up.
I think it was Louis B. Mayer who cautioned some writers who, before we
got into World War II, were writing something about what the Nazis were
doing in Europe, saying, “MGM is not at war with anybody.”
He did not want to piss the Nazis off, because they were still buying
his movies. And then, of course, the minute the war broke out with us,
he was walking around Hollywood with a uniform on.
Hollywood is red meat for the
political right wing in this country. It's a guaranteed applause line,
along with secular humanism, the U.N., and France. But as you pointed
out, the media moguls themselves, the people who own the Hollywood
studios, are multimillionaires.
It is kind of a little religious and cultural button they can push,
that Hollywood has always represented decadence. Since Fatty Arbuckle
that's been true. This idea of limousine liberals and swimming pools
and people who have more than you do and who kind of scoff at your
ideas and call you the fly-over states, it's always been there.
The France thing is interesting. If France is so bad, how come we keep
aping their foreign policy? We went into Vietnam after they had made a
mess of it, and we made just a bigger mess. And now we're doing the
same in the Middle East, kind of aping their policy in Algeria.
How do you resolve the issue of your
being the writer, the editor, and the director? Let's say the writer
John Sayles comes up with this absolutely killer line, but then the
director John Sayles says, “This has got to go.” How do you
make those ruthless cuts?
The same way that you do as a novelist. I was a novelist and short
story writer before I was a filmmaker. I wrote the first, second, and
third drafts of my novels. You write something in the heat of the
moment, you're spritzing long, and then you look at it and it doesn't
seem to fit anywhere. I've cut myself out of my own movies. I played a
part in Lone Star, and I did a pretty good job. But when I looked at it
as an editor, one of the scenes was a little confusing to the audience,
and the other ones, it turned out, once they were filmed and I put
everything in order, were not necessary. So to make the movie a little
tighter, I just said, “There goes my character.” I was a
border patrol guard.
I try not to do too much of that. I try to do a lot of my editing while I'm writing, because it's expensive to shoot film.
And the more extra you have, the more days you shoot that you end up
not using that stuff, the more you've wasted of your limited budget.
The last two movies I made -- I had four weeks to shoot Casa de los
Babys and only six weeks to shoot Silver City, which is a very
ambitious movie. So I can't really afford too much waste. So a lot of
what I have to do after I write it is really sit there as a director
and say, “How am I going to do this practically?” And maybe
I make a few rewrites. And then I sit there as an editor and say,
“Is there absolutely anything that I can get rid of or that I can
tighten?” And then you get into the editing room and you do some
more tightening and you move things around. But generally my first cut
is only about ten minutes longer than my final cut.
Does the writer ever say, “Hey, dude,” to the director, “this has got to stay”?
Oh, sure, but you find a way to do it. If it's not working in a scene,
occasionally I've taken information that I thought was important and if
it just seemed like a load of gravel in the middle of a scene,
rethought it and kind of on the spot said, “Well, leave these
three lines out. I'm going to put them in somewhere else, I'm going to
get that information in there somewhere else.” But you don't fall
in love with it. The point of it is to tell the story to an audience.
So with that always in mind, you always ask that question of each
scene: What's the scene there for, what do I want people to know at the
end of it, and what do I want them to feel at the end of it? And
especially with a mystery, so much of movie making is how you release
information. What does the audience know, and what does your
protagonist, who is looking for this information, know? Is the audience
ahead of him or are they behind him?
There is a surge in documentary
filmmaking right now, not just Fahrenheit 9/11, There’s Control
Room, The Fog of War, The Revolution Will Not be Televised, Outfoxed,
9/11 Hijacking Catastrophe. The Corporation, The Take, Unprecedented,
Uncovered. What accounts for this increase in documentary films?
I don't think the number of documentary films that are being made is
any bigger. They've always been there. I think the audience is a little
more interested in them. There have been some very notable ones that
have been very entertaining lately.
But I also think that what people who make documentaries do is they
react to what's going on in the world around them. And what's been
going on in our country, in the last four years especially, has been so
egregious that you can't avoid it. It seems like, well, it would be
kind of a waste to make a documentary on anything but this at this
point. And my God, nobody has made one yet? Geez, I'm going to jump in
there. So that it has not been surprising to me that these
documentaries have come out. It has been inevitable that somebody
eventually is going to say, “Wait a minute.” All this stuff
is lying around.
And this certainly gets back to my central thesis about the mainstream
media. How come this is not what is being talked about on the 7 o'clock
news every night? How come most Americans don't know this? Michael
Moore didn't do any big detective work. He just picked up on
information that had been lying around for a long time. He got lucky
with a little of the footage. And he just said, “Let's look at
this. What's going on here?” And he made some connections.
Where does Silver City fit into the corpus of work that you've produced?
Like some of our movies, it is about parallel communities. That we
don't quite have a melting pot in this country. A lot of people are
here together. They're not always moving in the same direction. They
often have very, very different wants and needs, so they're going to
butt heads now and then. And there are things that separate them and
things that connect them.
Language can separate them, class can separate them, economics,
religion, whatever, can separate them. And then eventually there are
those things that do connect them. People don't always know what they
have in common with somebody else, because some of those other things,
usually their own prejudices about each other, do get in the way.
So I think that that's similar to movies like Lone Star that we've
made, or City of Hope. I do think that the new thing in it is that I've
never really dealt with electoral politics before.
Here's what you see out front and here's what’s going on behind
it. Here is really politics on a statewide level. I certainly didn't
have the money, because I'm a low-budget filmmaker, to make it on a
national level and get involved in foreign policy and things like that.
But this is a step up from City of Hope, which was about a small, dying
Eastern urban kind of environment where the factory had closed years
ago and the ethnic groups were fighting over the scraps of what was
left. Silver City is about what's going on in a state. And media is a
major player in it. And I really haven't dealt with media as a major
player before.
When you say low-budget what kind of money are you're talking about?
Casa de los Babys, my last one, was about $1.1 million. This is about
$5.5 million, which for us is a pretty healthy budget. For a Hollywood
movie, being this ambitious with this many characters in it, with this
many locations, with this size and scope of story, it's pocket money.
So you have to be very efficient. You have to depend on the kindness of
strangers in many cases, actors whom you haven't worked with before,
and just write good parts and hope they will come and work for scale.
And we have a lot of really good ones in this movie. And you have to
give up a little bit of spontaneity. You can't just go there and say,
“Oh, I see a great new angle,” or, “Oh, wouldn't it
be nice if they could paint that barn,” or, “Oh, let's just
ad lib for a while.” You really have to do a lot of your work in
the planning.
Nation Books is publishing Dillinger in Hollywood, a collection of your short stories.
Like a lot of my stories and fiction, they're about all different kinds
of things. They go all over the place. “Dillinger in
Hollywood” is a story I wrote about a guy who is a former stunt
man in cowboy movies who is now working as an orderly in the old
actors' home in Hollywood. And one day he hears a bunch of guys
bragging about working with John Wayne or Randolph Scott. And one of
them says, “I used to be John Dillinger.” And they say,
“No, no. You were just a driver on the lot. You're getting
senile.” And he says, “No, I used to be John
Dillinger.” They say, “No, no. Lawrence Tierney played John
Dillinger.” And he says, “No, I used to be John
Dillinger.” And it's about, maybe he was, and the last days of
this guy who may have been John Dillinger, who then set somebody else
up to be killed at the Biograph Theater and went out to Hollywood just
because he liked the movies. They're very eclectic and they were
written over about a 20-year period, some of them as recently as a
couple months ago and some of them quite a long time ago. And what's
surprising to me is they don't really seem that dated to me, because
they are set so in their own worlds.
What films do you go to see?
I try to see a bit of everything. I'll go to see mainstream movies at
the mall if there is anything at all interesting about them. We have a
kind of an art theater about 20 miles from us, in Rhinebeck, New York.
I'll go there and see what they've got. It may be something that I've
never seen by that director before.
I just don't see as many movies as I used to. When I was first starting
out, being a writer and hospital worker and things like that, I would
see 200 movies a year. Now I might see 30 or something like that. And
then I see bits of things when I'm casting, because I say, “Well,
this is an interesting actor. What have they done recently?” And
I'll see three movies and fastforward to the parts that they're in.
What advice would you give to a young person who would like to do what you're doing?
The problem that I see with most independent films made by young people is that they have only gone to films in their life.
They've gone to films, then they went to film school, and then they
started making movies. And they have not done much out in the world.
They haven't had another job, they haven't lived more than one place in
their lives, they don't know what goes on in the world. So I would say
go out and do something else.
Learn a little bit about the world. And then think about it a little bit before you try to tell stories about it.
The other major thing is I find that people coming out of film school,
the one big gap they have is that they haven't worked with actors. So I
would recommend doing some theater, direct some theater. It's a
different medium totally, but you're going to work with actors and
you're going to learn a lot.
You speak Spanish. What sparked your interest in the culture?
My mother's parents lived in Hollywood, Florida. They moved down there,
just north of Miami. And I used to go down as a kid every couple years
in the summer. So I was around Miami before, during, and after the
Cuban revolution and saw this incredible change in Miami, which at that
time was a dying old tourist town. And there was this incredible energy
and vitality when new money and new ideas and new languages of the
Cuban community came in, and really helped that city quite a bit, at
the same time that it was like a spaceship had just lifted half of a
city up and dropped it into Miami. And there were a lot of people who
were lost, some lost forever and others who were just lost for a couple
of years but being very resilient people.
Most of those who came in that first wave were people who had
money-saving skills and economic skills and were at least lower middle
class and on up. And so they fought their way up - and they got some
help after the Bay of Pigs invasion from banks that stopped red-lining
them and stuff like that - to having a kind of economically solid
community. So that started it.
Then I started living around the country and often my neighbors would
be people who spoke Spanish. On the West Coast I lived in a Mexican and
Mexican American neighborhood. I felt like these people are busting
their balls trying to learn English, I'll learn a few words, just to be
polite.
And then I started getting interested in so what's it like to be an
exile or to have come here and want to stay. Because in Little Havana
in Miami, the grandparents never unpacked their bags emotionally.
They're waiting to go back when the bearded guy dies. And then as the
generations move on, people say, “Hey, I'm an American. My
parents were Cubans.” You can get that far have away from it.
Who are your literary influences?
The first time I remember reading a book and saying, I could do
something like this, was Nelson Algren. He was an interesting,
complicated guy, who was a Chicago writer. Somebody in Boots was the
first one I read of his. “Man with a Golden Arm,”
“Walk on the Wild Side,” a lot of good short stories. He
led me to Eight Men Out. He wrote this long prose poem about the
Chicago Black Sox scandal and footnoted Eliot Asinof's book in it.
I was not a literature or an English major in college. I just liked
reading books. And when I went to college, I didn't go to many classes,
but I did go to the library. And I started in the As, and by the time I
graduated, I was to M or N. So I still have a lot of gaps. But Mark
Twain certainly was a big deal for me as were Hemingway and Norman
Mailer and Philip Roth. I read a lot of people just to see what you
could do with words. I have a woeful lack of knowledge of European,
Russian, Asian literature. I'm just catching up with that. And because
I can read in Spanish now, I'm catching up with Latin American
literature.
Do you read Eduardo Galeano?
He's terrific. I read his trilogy of history, and those are great, and
a couple of his other books. And I don't know if he still has it, but
he had a good column in one of the papers in Mexico City.
He's the celebrated Uraguayan
journalist and novelist. He has, actually, a regular column in The
Progressive magazine. But in terms of nonfiction, what do you read? The
New York Times?
I try to dip into a lot of things, so I'll look at the New York Post -
I wouldn't say you read the New York Post, but I'll look at it and see
what they're up to. I'll look at the Daily News. I'll look at The New
York Times. Sometimes there are good editorials.
Sometimes it's kind of interesting to see. The editorial page of The
New York Times is where they're working their problems out and who are
we going to be and how do we stand on this. So they will have a bent
for a while, and then they will revise that bent and let some other
people write for a while. And occasionally you actually see the
columnists themselves change their minds, but it's more like the
editors say, “Whoa, we've gone way too far on this side and we're
going to get caught out, so let's move over to this side.” I have
a real hard time, even if I'm in a dentist's office, reading Time or
Newsweek. There is just something about that style of journalism. So
I've caught up with Greg Palast and Joe Conason. Conason lived in east
Boston when I lived there, and he worked for something called the East
Boston Community News, which was always called the “East Boston
Communist News” by the people who didn't like it. I'll look at
The Nation. I do think that you have to really range pretty wide to get
a wide idea of what people are thinking and what's going on I've read a
couple of Howard Zinn's books. And the great thing about him is he's
like a springboard. He doesn't go that deeply in his A People's History
of the United States into any of the subjects. But as somebody who got
really interested in American history, it's great to go to Howard Zinn
and say, “Ooh, that's interesting. Let's learn more about
that.” And then you can go back to original sources or there are
other people who have gone into that particular area in more depth than
he has.
And Noam Chomsky. The great thing is that they sell his books in the
supermarket now. I got involved with a group called ETAN, the East
Timor Action Network, which is mostly trying to inform Americans about
what was going on in East Timor. And that was my way into Noam Chomsky,
because he had written quite extensively about what had happened in
Timor and with our policy toward Indonesia. So gradually, when I get
into an area of history that I'm interested in, very often I'll say,
“I wonder if Noam Chomsky wrote anything about that.” And
I'll go backwards and kind of figure out what he's thinking about it.
Have you tried to incorporate in your
films what Zinn does in A People's History of looking at issues from
the perspective of those affected by them? So much of history is
written by the victors, the top dogs.
It's something that I think I was doing naturally all along. I was an
actor before I was a writer and a director. And one of the things you
do as an actor is you see the world through that character's eyes. And
to do that, you can't just go from the outside in and say, “He's
got a limp and he chews gum,” and those kind of things. You have
to really say, “Okay, where is this guy coming from? Was he
raised Catholic, was he raised by wolves? Is he educated, is he not
educated? Did he have a hard time growing up or did he have plenty to
eat?” All those kinds of things go into how you see the world.
Los Gusanos, my book that's set in Little Havana and in Cuba, is full
of characters that inhabit the same world, the same neighborhood,
sometimes even the same family. It's kind of like the Chamorro family
in Nicaragua - but they see the world in a different way. And so one of
the things I always try to do is think about, Okay, here's what the
king is saying. What's the guy holding the halberd next to him thinking
about? Is it, When’s lunch and my feet sure are sore, or, Oh, my
God. He's going to get us into another stupid war, and I'm going to get
killed or my brother is going to get killed, or whatever.
So many of our movies are movies with a lot of different characters and
a lot of parallel stories, and certainly my novels are total mosaics.
So it's kind of how I always saw the world.
My interest in storytelling starts with this basic thing of if this is
the way this person is acting, what can possibly be going through his
head, and trying to figure that out.
What's your sense of how the election is going to turn out?
It certainly is getting more interesting in the last couple days for
me. I actually got to be at the Republican convention for the first
day, which was interesting. I covered the one in 1980, where Reagan was
coronated the first time, and they're much more confident and much more
sure of themselves as “We're the party.” In 1980, the
people on the floor, the delegates, were still kind of -- they liked
Reagan but they weren't so sure about this Bush guy because he was a
Trilateralist. And there was a feeling that they're just paying lip
service to us, but they're not going to do the things that we want them
to do. In this one, they came in feeling like “It's our party.
We're the right wing of the Republican Party, and we run the party
now.” And Bush came out and he delivered a speech that came out
of the closet on gay marriage and came out of the closet on abortion.
He just about spelled it out, which is as close as any Republican
presidential candidate has come to really committing himself. So they
were very, very, very happy. And that was interesting.
Finally I was disappointed in both of the conventions in that there is
this unsaid thing about the war. And McCain's speech was the most
notable. He called Michael Moore a “disingenuous
filmmaker.” McCain's entire speech was disingenuous. First of
all, he was going back and attributing the decision to attack Iraq to
stuff that they figured out now. When they were going in, they weren't
saying any of the stuff he's saying as this is the reason we're
invading. But also, if you're talking about terrorism, the Middle East,
the war in Iraq, how can you not mention Israel or our major presence
in the Middle East over the years?
There is this myth that we were just over here minding our own business
enjoying our freedoms, and somebody came and murdered a lot of our
people. Somebody did come and murder a bunch of our own people, but we
weren't just hanging out here minding our own business. And this idea
that they're jealous of our freedom and that's why they want to destroy
us. If we were a dictatorship and our policy toward Israel was the same
and our presence in the Middle East was the same, we'd still have
terrorists coming after us. It's not the freedom part that they're
worried about; it's our presence in their countries. And that, to me,
is disingenuous, to make an entire speech about the war and the Middle
East and never mention Israel and never mention our presence in the
region.
I think that the people who joined Kerry's campaign recently have just
said, “Look, you're going to have to bite the bullet.” I
don't know him; I don't know how he really feels about these things.
But I think somebody said, “You're going to have to separate
yourself. You can't just say, ‘Well, I'd do kind of the same
things he's doing, but I'd do them better,’” which is what
he was sort of doing. “Oh, I would have gone over there, even
knowing what I know now,” and all this kind of stuff. And he's
really saying, “W. stands for wrong - wrong war, wrong
time,” whatever. And I think somebody said, “You have to
separate yourself.” And now Cheney has come out and said,
“If the Democrats win, it's going to be more dangerous for
Americans,” and all that. It had to happen sometime. And it
certainly will help Kerry keep the progressive people within the party
or even outside the party interested in him and working at least
against Bush if not for him.
But it's going to be a real test, because what have the American people
been fed for the last 12 years or whatever? It has not been a complex
situation. And Kerry's position, almost by definition, has to be
complex. And Bush's position, almost by definition, has to be
simplistic and about evildoers. Kerry could make a very good case of
how can Bush have the high ratings he does when not a single thing he's
done has turned out well. The economy is not in good shape. The
environment is in worse shape than it was before. And if their plans
for the war had gone the way that they hoped them to do, we would be in
Syria by now. That was their plan. We were going to have this,
Dingdong, the witch is dead in Iraq, and then we would move on down the
list. And Syria and Iran were next on the list. Well, we're not
anywhere near Syria. We're even conceding parts of Iraq right now. And
being critical of that is not the same thing as saying you're being
critical of your soldiers. And Kerry should be very adamant about that.
Are you worried about the direction the country is going?
The direction the country is going in? It's always been going in that
direction and it's been going in an opposite direction at the same
time. This is a complex country. I've written a script that's set at
the turn of the century, kind of the end of the populist progressive
movement. A lot of the movement was in the Midwest and in the South.
And in the South it was defeated.
Somebody played the race card. Poor whites, working-class whites, and
blacks were getting together and really taking back the South from the
old agricultural plantation owners. And the old boys didn't like it,
and they said, “What can we do? They're killing us at the
polls.” And they owned the newspapers, and they printed a lot of
stories, most of them fabricated, about white women being raped by
black men. That just tore the populist progressive movement apart.
So that at the same time that something may be progressive in
economics, it might be very reactionary culturally. This is a very
complex country. You've got religious stuff going on. You've got an
awful lot of people that think that capitalism and democracy are the
same word, and they've been encouraged to think that way.
And now you've got this media beast. It used to be you had the three
networks. There was some attempt by those networks to stay in the
middle of the road. There were a few journalistic kinds of principles
that they tried to live by, and you had some principled people working
within them and fighting the fight every day with their editors who
wanted to water things down.
And what you could usually see is an arc of them totally accepting the
official version, and then, as it became more and more embarrassingly
clear that that official version was not true, starting to turn. And
then you got Walter Cronkite kind of saying Vietnam is a mess. It took
a while. But he was not a soldier in Lyndon Johnson's army the way that
the people who run Fox News are soldiers in the army of the right-wing
Republicans. Now you've got dozens and dozens of these news outlets. So
the consumer, the voter may say, “Well, geez, I like the girls on
World Wrestling Federation, so I watch this network.” Well, you
also get their news to go with it. So this is a country that's going in
about 50 different directions at the same time.
There is a new documentary on Howard
Zinn. It's called You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train, which is also
the title of his memoir. Can you be neutral in a time like this? Can
you afford to just watch Bush and Kerry campaign and not bother to vote
on November 2?
No, I don't think you can. I've often had this argument with people who
have not liked either of the candidates. Since I started to vote, I've
usually not liked either of the candidates, and occasionally to the
point where in a more local election I feel like either of them is
going to be destructive, and I'll vote for some third-party candidate.
Usually on the presidential level you can boil it down to, okay, you
don't think much of either of them. Here’s an issue. I know some
people now who are working for this League of Pissed Off Voters. And
they will go into a club and they'll say, “Okay, one issue. Bush
is adamantly against a needle-sharing program and Kerry thinks it's a
good idea. On that one issue go to the polls. It's not going to cost
you.
Register, vote. Forget about the rest of what they're doing and whether
you even understand it or care about it.” You can usually find
five or six of those things that one of the guys is more to your
thinking than the other one. And you might as well do it. It doesn't
cost you anything. It costs you an hour, maybe, to get down there.
What's coming up for you?
A lot of publicity for Silver City. We’re coordinating with
getout- the-vote groups and some environmental groups doing kind of
First Friday things, where they can do fundraisers and kind of
rallying-cry get-togethers using the movie. And, quite honestly, when
we finish a movie, we very often don't know if we're going to get to
make another one. I've got a couple big historical epics that I've
written. I'd love to be able to raise the money to do those. It's been
impossible in the past. Maybe it will become more possible, for
whatever reason. And then there is always Plan B, which is to write
something very low-budget and be able to mostly finance it yourself or
get it from a source that has a little bit of money in their pocket. I
haven't figured out what that's going to be yet.
[Due to time constraints some portions of the interview were not
included in the national broadcast. Those portions are included in this
transcript.]
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