By Ted Elrick

Director Robert Markowitz at the helm. (Photo: Philip Bosse/A&E 1999)

Growing up in Brooklyn, future director Robert Markowitz lived in the movie theaters seeing as many films as he could, but he says that it never really occurred to him that he'd be actually able to make films. Making films was something other people did. He did, however, become a writer at WBZ in Boston and eventually began doing documentaries for CBS News in New York. It was the Bicentennial, and Markowitz convinced CBS to let him try making short dramatic documentaries about the nation's history. He used then unknown actors Brad Davis and Tom Hulce as well as such mainstays of '70s television as Paul Winfield and Richard Kiley.

From there he moved into directing episodes of TV's Delvecchio and Serpico before finding his true niche, movies for television. His credits include such diverse films as The Deadliest Season, The Wall, Children of the Night, Decoration Day, The Tuskegee Airmen [nominated for a DGA Award in 1995], Into Thin Air: Death on Everest, David, Nicholas' Gift and Spenser: Small Vices. Markowitz is also very involved in the Guild. He is Chair of the Movies for Television Directors Committee and Co-chaired with Victoria Hochberg last summer's Creative Rights Teach-In. DGA Magazine spoke with Markowitz about his career and his latest film, The Great Gatsby, starring Mira Sorvino as Daisy, Paul Rudd as Nick and Tobey Stephens as Jay Gatsby. The film airs on A&E on January 14 and was shown in the Dallas Film Festival on January 8.

You do an incredible mix of films.

I've done that intentionally. There are several reasons. First, no one wants to be type cast in this business. Second, I find it really stimulating to go from one kind of film to another. It just really does keep you alive and interested. Finally, I decided I was going to try my best to only follow the quality, no matter what subject that was. The thing we don't talk about very often is the role of the agent and there are some agents who just get you jobs. But there are others - and they are few and far between today - who build a career for you. They're not looking just to get you your next job, but they're helping you make a selection to widen your opportunity. I was very, very fortunate when Steve Glick from William Morris came into my life, and he's been my agent ever since. That's helped a lot because you need an agent to convince people that you can do something that's not on your resume.

There seem to be so many action oriented films with no depth to the characters. It seems like the films I used to love are being made for television or as independents.

There's no question about itŠ. I'm still offered feature scripts but they're mostly thrillers and genre films. There's very little original material being done except by film directors who are our artists. You don't know what the next Scorsese film is going to be or the next Michael Mann or Jonathan Demme. You wait for David Lynch to make his next film. But in television, where the directors - as we've talked about so often - are not as well known, in some cases not well known at all, the material is the star and the subject matter is what drives the film. However, with the networks that's less true now. It wasn't long ago when between the three networks you could count on nine or ten significant original films a year. The number of good films continues to dwindle because the networks have abandoned any pretense to make films that say something. It's all about demographics. It's about shock value. And it is why we have so much reality programming. As the networks become absorbed by larger corporations there is a greater distance between those who make the films and those who decide what they are to be about. The greater that distance, the lesser the quality. Everything gets filtered down from the top. It's almost a miracle when you get a good result from that system.

Tobey Stephens (behind the wheel) with Mira Sorvino (shotgun). (Photo: J. D'Amour-Leger)

Yet it seems with cable, there are significantly more options than the old three networks. In the days of the big three, it seemed as if the movie was rarely shown more than once and if you missed seeing it, you were out of luck.

That's very true. Now you do have HBO, Showtime, FX, TNT, Lifetime, A&E making movies for television.

You even see them selling home videocassettes of the movies for television on their website.

Oh yes. The networks have abdicated. But the cable networks do continue to make the better films. It's not that the networks still don't order films. But it's no longer their passion.

Your new film, The Great Gatsby, is airing on A&E. You did a film for them before based on the Robert Parker Spenser mysteries with Joe Mantegna.

Small Vices, it was a fun project. I was going to do another A & E project after that. While it was in development I was having lunch with Allen Sabinson [Senior Vice President Programming at A&E] and he mentioned that he was doing The Great Gatsby. And I thought, "Oh, God, that's something I want to do."

Before I became a journalist I wanted to be a novelist. F. Scott Fitzgerald was someone I really, really admired and so I used to - trying to learn to write - sit down and copy over some of that book, never dreaming that we would be sitting here talking about what we're talking about. When Allen mentioned the project to me, all these lights went up and I said, "Oh, 'The Great Gatsby.'" He said, "Yes, but you, stick with the one you have."

Then that project fell apart. And Gatsby was now sitting there. Tom Thayer was executive producer. When Tom was at Universal I had made the first Kojak movie after the series had ended. It was called The Belarus File. It was a successful film with a wonderful cast that included Max Van Sydow. And so Tom and I had a relationship. When Gatsby's chances as a film were about to die for the lack of a star, Tom called Steve Glick at William Morris. The clock was ticking because this was to be a summer film and winter was approaching. They had a few weeks left to start and there was no director attached. They had made offers to a number of feature directors who were appropriate to the material. But none of them wanted to do such a high profile film under the budgetary and schedule restraints. That kind of situation is challenging and intriguing to me, and so I threw my hat in the ring. We were down to the last week. If they could not trigger that film that week with a piece of casting, they were going to cancel it until this year and maybe they would have shot it this spring.

Word came back to me that there were two actresses who were interested in playing Daisy. One was Mira Sorvino and the other was Ashley Judd and they were both with William Morris. Initially, Judd was not available and Mira was. So they said to me, "If you can get Mira Sorvino to do this film, you can direct it. Not only that, you've got about two or three days to do it."

She was in New York and I didn't know her. I got on a plane and had lunch with her at the Algonquin Hotel. The meeting went very well. She had seen my films and liked them. By the time the lunch was over she agreed to do it. That's how I got The Great Gatsby. No one sat in a room and said, "Oh, we have The Great Gatsby and we've got to get Robert Markowitz to direct it." That's not the way it happens. It really happens this way. There's a sudden vacuum, like the life of a firefly, and you either happen to be there at the right time under the right circumstance or not.

That's how people get breaks. You have to be prepared for them. I had to be ready to meet the challenge of making Gatsby. There were times, when I was younger, when I wasn't really ready. Those films fell short for me. I remember when I was hired to make John Hersey's The Wall. I had only made a few films until then and here I was going off to Poland to make a film about the Holocaust with an international crew and lots of young actors. The Polish government fell during the shoot and so the circumstances for me at that time were overwhelming. The film was well received but it's not Schindler's List. Several years later I got another shot at a large historical film. A Dangerous Life was a six-hour miniseries for HBO about the fall of Marcos in the Philippines. I was more prepared by experience and the film turned out better. Finally, a few years ago I directed David, a four-hour Biblical film I shot in Morocco. By that time I felt completely ready. I had the professional skills to make that movie, to tell a large story. Same thing with Gatsby. You just have to be ready when the opportunity presents itself.

Since you had to get started so quickly, was there any time to rehearse?

I got a week, which is usually enough. My rehearsal process is a little different. With actors I focus on character. I try to spend as much time with each individual actor - and sometimes it's only a couple of days, very often it's even before we get to the location. I started working with Mira long before we got there - sometimes by e-mail, sometimes by phone, sometimes in person. What I try to do when I sit with an actor is to be very precise about the character. I begin with the idea that each of us is always in a state of "wanting something" This is the driving force of any character. Reality programming like Survivor is a clear example of it. You can read their desires even when they are in repose. For an actor that is a "private moment." I work with each actor hoping to set that drive in motion, knowing of course that the other characters should be in conflict with each other. I read that Kazan often relied on something personal that an actor revealed in rehearsal. Sometimes I will seek that by sharing something personal about myself. It is not a technique I use indiscriminately. But I have it in my back pocket. And if you get to a place when you're shooting and the actor can't get to the reality of the character, then you can say something like, "Remember what you told me about the time your father abandoned you." Anyway, so I get that worked out.

Then we have a read-through, then rehearse some of the scenes. But if the actor is in character, then the script becomes the situation, becomes the circumstance, becomes the life they live. I'm not a director who wants predictable results. If the actor is doing exactly as I imagined, I'm usually bored because I don't want anybody on a film to be bound by the limits of my imagination. I think what every director wants is this great surprise that is still in context of the characterization of the story. It's very much like when you listen to a great jazz musician doing a riff. They're still on the notes of the song but they are personalizing it in a way that makes it really incredible.

If I have enough time to really work out the characters with the actors and we've done the read through with the writer present, I feel we're off to a good start. But there are the nightmare situations, and fortunately Gatsby was not one of them, where network executives want to approve every actor before casting and they will often hold up that process until shooting actually begins. The poor director never gets to meet the actor until they arrive on the set. That's when the real damage is done, when network interference is very debilitating to the process and continually lowers the level of quality.

A scene from The Great Gatsby with Paul Rudd (left), Sorvino (middle) and Stephens. (Photo: Philip Bosse/A&E 1999)

Isn't there some kind of protection against that in the Basic Agreement?

I think there's a minimum number of prep days and the contract says that we all have the right of consultation. The result is they can do what they want up until the last minute. And they do. Directors really have to be firm. I've been very lucky in that I've been able to work enough and worked with enough good actors that I can be firm. I couldn't when I started out. When someone hires me or directors who have a track record of good performances, you tell the [networks] up front, "I'm not going to compromise on casting at the eleventh hour. If you're going to do that, you're not going to have me as the director." You have to really spell that out. Sometimes it goes down very easily and sometimes on some films, my agent actually had to get on the phone and say, "Look, if you want that actor he has to bring a director with him because that wasn't part of the deal."

What needs to be done?

The truth of the matter is - and this is what we were trying to do with the Creative Rights Teach-in - is that directors have to exercise their rights. They must exercise their rights. When I was up at the recent DGA Directors Retreat, I was interviewing Mick Garris. A director got up and said, "What do you do when you have a storyboard and then you're on the set and you want to shoot something different and the producer is getting very nervous and is starting to complain?" We had to tell him that the producer has nothing to say in that matter. You put the camera where you want it and nobody can tell you where to put the camera. No one can tell you that you have to have a storyboard or stay with the storyboard or change the storyboard.

Another thing is that I don't use video assist. On Gatsby actually, one of the seven producers wanted to have video assist. I said, "Well, I don't have it on my set." The producer was not aware that the video assist is a director's tool. It doesn't belong to the producer. If the director doesn't want it on the set, it's not on the set. It's in the contract. But that caused a big to-do. He had to go back to his legal department and they had to call the Guild and had to look at the contract and realized that they were powerless in that.

Left to right: Rudd, Markowitz and Burt Harris during rehearsal. (Photo: Philip Bosse/A&E 1999)

And directors who worked with this producer before may not have known that the video assist was their tool and could have protested if they didn't want it on the set?

That's right. That's why directors have to stand up for their rights. It's not just for them, but also for those whom the producers may work with in the future.

Out of curiosity, what have you got against the video assist?

I don't feel I can see performances on video assist. I look through the camera on every shot and plan every setup with the DP. I love being beside the camera. The actor loves knowing the director is next to the camera so that after the "cut" comes, the actor can look immediately to the director for approval or more direction. There is an enclosed circle which includes the director, DP, script supervisor, focus puller and the actors. A lot of energy flows through that circle. The director is the centerpiece. Once the director moves even just ten or fifteen feet from that center, that intimacy is broken. The director is one place, the camera team in another, and the actors are off by themselves. Add to that the video village which is for the producers and everyone else. They made some pretty good films before video assist.

Wolfgang Peterson said that when he was doing The Perfect Storm, that distance you spoke of was the most frustrating part of it. He would be off and the actors would be on this boat in a big tank and he just really wanted to be near them.

Right. Oddly enough it was Francis Ford Coppola who carried the distance from the actors the furthest when he made One From the Heart and directed it from a trailer far removed from the set. Not one of his greatest innovations.

What was the toughest scene in Gatsby? The toughest scene was the climactic confrontation of the five characters in a hotel room. It was eight or nine pages and involved all of the principals. And all of their points of view were significant. Gatsby, Daisy, Tom, Nick and Jordan. All of the performances had to be a perfect pitch. The scene is constructed like a symphony and it was a real challenge. Much more difficult than Mabel's death because the auto accident is mostly an action scene. You can break down an action scene into components. But not a scene that is that long and is a conflict among five characters. Emotions can drive the complexities of directing such a scene exponentially.

I don't know how much was in the script, how much you added, but the way it builds... I think when Mira Sorvino says, "Can you open a window?" Then I think somebody says they're all open. And then there's a fan placed right in front of her. And you start to feel the heat that's gathering in the room, and it's really not so much the actual heat but it's the heat between the characters building toward this final confrontation.

That's right. I have to say the father of it all is Fitzgerald. And, of course, it's a wonderful screenplay by John McLaughlin, but it's all in the book. It's all there. The wind fan is in the book. The only thing we did that was really different from the book is that Gatsby does not appear until well into the book. However, he's talked about in the narration. The narration is very, very important even in the movie because it's Fitzgerald speaking and it's the eternal part of the film. But you don't see him. Because it was television and we suffer from another commercial perversion which is that it's harder to hold an audience, I was concerned with getting to see Gatsby and understanding what the story was about very early on. So I brought him forth in sort of admittedly a tease fashion at the beginning of the film to introduce him.

That's understandable. And after seeing how successfully you pulled off that hotel confrontation scene, I can see why you want to be as close as possible to the actors.

Yes, that is where it all happens.

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