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Mark Rydell
By Craig Modderno
Photos by Doug Hyun/courtesy TNT
Director Mark Rydell goes over a scene with his
James Dean star James Franco.
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There's a scene in director John Ford's Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where a wise editor informs his idealistic reporter that, "When the legend becomes myth, print the legend." Director Mark Rydell may have been tempted to do the same thing when he made his biopic for TNT network about 1950's teen idol--turned-icon James Dean.
But Rydell had worked as an actor with and became friends with Dean at the famed Actors Studio and was determined to do justice to his friend.
Rydell segued into a directing career by helming episodes of shows like Gunsmoke and The Fugitive and made his feature film debut with The Fox.
The brash filmmaker became known as an actor's director for his ability to get unique performances out of many established stars like Steve McQueen in the The Reivers, John Wayne in The Cowboys and Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn in Rydell's most acclaimed film, On Golden Pond.
DGA Magazine spoke with Rydell about his friendship with Dean, his methods and his latest movie for television.
How did you get involved in the James Dean project?
I was fortunate to be called by Bill Gerber, who took the project from Warner Bros. when he left Warner Bros. Israel Horovitz had written maybe six or seven versions of it. Marvin Worth originally was a producer. That's why he still has a credit and got a memorial credit. Somehow Bill knew that I was a good, really close friend of Jimmy's and grew up with him in the business in the '50s. We were in the Actors Studio together, 19-, 20-year-old kids. I wanted so much to deal with Jimmy because I felt there'd been some rather uncomfortable pictures that had been made and nothing had ever done him justice. I thought he was a miracle; we needed to understand him more.
I thought that this was a perfect opportunity for me to make a psychological profile on Jimmy. I wanted to reveal the true nature of what carved his personality because I knew things about Jimmy. I knew about his early childhood. I knew about the agonies of his youth: his mother's death, his father's rejection of him and how it scarred him and how it had shaped his personality. With my particular kind of psychological orientation, which comes from years of psychoanalysis, I thought I would be perfect to expose the tortured boy that was James Dean.
You said there were six or seven drafts of the screenplay before you came aboard. Did it change much after you came aboard?
Extensively, but with a writer like Israel Horovitz, the changes were magnificently achieved.
How many drafts were written after you became involved?
It was a continual process of refinement. New pages were happening all the time while I was working. Israel and I worked on approximately five more drafts.
Were your suggestions based on the personal knowledge you had of James Dean?
Of course, I had a close friendship with James. It's hard to reflect now, because we worked on that over a year ago, but I'm sure that much of the rewrites had to do with my understanding Jimmy on a more personal level than was possible for Israel who had never met him.
That must have been very valuable for him.
I think so. We had a very, very good, close collaboration and we've become very fast friends. I just got back from New York where we had a screening of the film. He was there and we long to do some more work together.
Do you always work closely with writers?
Always, very closely. Often I'm involved with the original idea or choosing a piece of material to adapt. So I try to function as closely as possible with the writer without inhibiting him or her. I do prefer, in most cases, to work with just one writer.
You once acted in an Omnibus special on television with Dean and then had an incident with him where you were walking down Madison Avenue, that made you believe that he wouldn't survive.
In the '50s there was a class television show, the live television show hosted by Alistair Cooke called Omnibus. They might have a ballet company or a poet might speak for various segments on the show. I was fortunate enough to be cast with Jimmy and Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy in William Inge's first teleplay called Glory and the Flower. We played young, troubled boys.
We finished the live show on a Sunday afternoon and we're walking down Madison Avenue, which in the '50s had no stores on it. We were walking down the street and he was talking to me about bullfighting. He loved bullfighting, as he loved any wild, dangerous sport or activity, all of which was very much a part of his persona, always testing the limits. He wanted to prove that he could survive in spite of the fact that his mother's death and his father's subsequent abandonment almost killed him. He didn't see his father again until he was 18. As a matter of fact, his father sent him back to Indiana with the casket of his mother promising to be at the funeral and then he never showed up again.
Those psychological factors, I believe, were extremely formative in the carving of his personality. The information he got from those events was that he was worthless. Nobody cared enough about him. So he spent the rest of his life trying to counteract that information.
Did director Elia Kazan use Dean's relationship with his father when they made East of Eden?
Dean used his ability to take the father-and-son problem and put it into focus as an artist in every one of his films. If you look at them carefully, at the root of all of them there is a father/son conflict. Kazan knew immediately, because he's a psychologically oriented man, he knew of this tormented relationship with his father, which we dramatized in the interview that Dean has with Kazan when he tries to get the part in East of Eden.
How did you cast the pivotal Dean role?
I told the network I would proceed with developing the picture but that if I couldn't find the actor, I would walk away. I saw literally hundreds of actors and was desolate because I thought it was impossible. As a matter of fact, Julie Harris said to someone when she heard I was doing it, "Tell him to get a dark-haired guy. Don't try to imitate Jimmy. There's no way you're going to be able to do that." So I saw every young actor, a lot of very talented actors, but nobody who had what I thought was the right equipment for the role, until James Franco walked in.
I don't like to read actors because I know a lot of actors who are facile and can read well but can't act. They're facile at actually reading material. And there are a lot of actors I know who are clumsy and dyslexic and can't read three sentences in a row but understand the craft of creating behavior, which is really what acting is about.
There's a scene in the movie that almost implies Dean was one of those people.
Yes, that's true. Kazan didn't read him for East of Eden. He just talked to him. Which is what I did with Jimmy [Franco] and what I did with most of the actors I met. If I thought somebody really had potential, I would spend time with them and have lunch with them. I'd walk around the block with them. I'd talk to them about their parents, which is probably the quickest way to find out about a person. All of a sudden they drop all of the affectations that actors bring with them into a room. When you talk about families and early childhood and actors start to talk about their parents, if you can get them to do that, they reveal themselves.
I hate to call it a technique. It's just an instinct that I have that if you want to find out about somebody, talk to him about his childhood, talk to him about his mother, talk to him about his father, talk to him about the difficulties that he had as a kid and everything quickly reveals itself. People, if they trust you and they don't think you're manipulating them, tend to reveal the absolute essence of who they are in conversations like that. It takes coaxing and it takes -- I hate to use the word -- manipulation.
Rydell (standing) as Jack Warner in a scene from James Dean.
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As a director you've gotten Franco's trust when you're shooting this movie. But then you as an actor play Jack Warner who has an adversarial relationship with Dean in the movie. How did you change as the director and the actor in relation to Franco?
I've never acted in a picture that I directed. I've acted a number of times in pictures like, The Long Goodbye, Punchline, Havana, various other pictures that I won't bother you with now. But this role was the perfect opportunity to be Dean's father because that's what Jack Warner was, a kind of a father who he could love and hate. As a matter of fact, those lines of, "I love you, I hate you." "I hate you, I hate you," says Jimmy in response to my affection, were the essence of his struggle with the father figures in his life, all of which are clearly delineated -- Kazan and directors Nick Ray [Rebel Without a Cause] and George Stevens [Giant].
All my life I have admired immensely those directors like Orson Welles or Woody Allen, any number of directors who were able to act in their own movies. I've always wondered how can you possibly do that? They seemed to be antithetical talents in this sense. A director has to use all of his judgmental faculties all the time. He's making an infinite number of judgments every second in every area.
To be an actor you must relinquish all of your judgmental faculties. You have to surrender to an experience and, in truth, if you're acting well, you don't know whether it's good or not. As a matter of fact, one of the most important moments in my life was the first shot I made in On Golden Pond when I was so intimidated by the fact that I was about to direct Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda. They did the first scene in front of the fireplace with the figures that fall off the fireplace, and at the end of the scene they both turned to me like 19-year-old actors with an open eagerness for my participation, for my approval because they didn't know whether they had done it well or not because they were so lost in the moment of behavior.
They had lost themselves so deeply in the material that they didn't know whether it was good or not. They needed my input, which of course relieved all my anxiety because I felt I was going to be a significant member of this equation.
So I had great trepidation, wondering can I act this part in this picture? Will I be able to relinquish all my judgmental faculties, just lose myself in the scene and in my relationship to Franco and connect with him and just trust that it was going to work? I didn't know whether I was able to turn off those creative judgmental aspects of my personality in order to act. And you must. You cannot act and judge yourself at the same time. To the extent that you are judging what you're doing, you're not acting. You have to create a character and then you put the character in the situation and let what happens happen and if you ever judge it, you're doomed.
I was terrified that I'd be unable to do it. I brought Barry Primus, who plays Nicholas Ray, and Jimmy DiStefano, who played Danny Mann's stage manager, in on the days that I was shooting because they are brilliant actors and and if I was going to surrender I wanted to make sure I wasn't doing anything that was cockeyed. I wanted people there who were smart enough to be able to tell whether or not I was fully involved in the situation. They were very helpful in that respect.
It's difficult to do but I found it doable. Much of the key to it is rehearsal. I believe deeply in rehearsal. It's interesting because I just came off a picture with Woody Allen which presently he calls WASP 2001, which means Woody Allen's Spring Project. I suspect that it will eventually be called Hollywood Ending, but I'm not sure.
He plays a motion picture director and I play his best friend and agent. I knew that I had to turn off my natural directorial instincts if I was going to play this part. I didn't have to direct the picture. I never once thought of the camera during the entire picture I was just working with Woody as an actor. I never thought about lenses, I never looked at the camera, I just played the part. It's a kind of a relief to do that, by the way.
Woody doesn't rehearse. You learn the scene when you work with Woody. He shows you the blocking. And he says, "Let's roll camera," so that it's kind of like being in the theater. There's a sense of danger with Woody. I like to have that sense of danger but I like to do it with preparation, with rehearsal, rehearsal, rehearsal. Make selections and choices and then surrender.
What are your rehearsals like?
I keep the actors at the table because it's about values. Rehearsal for me is about the definition of the values of the scene, finding out what we're really going for in the scene, making sure everybody's in the same movie and that everybody understands what the scene is about. And I don't let the actors get up and act it because I want to have the freshness of the first experience but we do rehearse. We're at the table. We work for weeks. And rehearse every scene. Actors get to the point where they're around a table and they've rehearsed enough and they need to get up. They're like racehorses who are dying to run, you know? And that's what you want. You want to get them to the point where they're dying to run and then catch lightning in a bottle. You have to nurture them to the point where they're like a runner who puts his hands down and has his feet in the blocks and they say, "On your mark, get set," and the runner, every nerve, every muscle, every part of his body is ready for that leap. You want to get the actor to that point. Then shoot. Catch it right away. At least that's my way.
Do you encourage actors to improvise?
Yes.
How do the improvisations and rehearsals affect the script that you finally film?
During rehearsals we'll find different avenues of expressing so the writing goes on all the time.
Based on your background, would you recommend that directors try acting?
It is critical. Any director who doesn't try acting is foolish. Any director who doesn't go to acting class is foolish. It's like being a conductor and not knowing what the violin does. Silly. That's your equipment. That's your raw material, the actors. If you don't understand the nature of creating behavior under imaginary circumstances and how difficult it is to stand on a set and play an intimate scene with people putting tape in front of your nose and moving lights around you and there's 50, 60 people watching you, as you are doing something very intimate and concentrated, if you don't know how difficult that is, how can you possibly direct actors? I can't imagine how many young directors know nothing about acting. The whole MTV, modern, commercial generation -- which is about cutting and flash and dazzle -- rarely comprehends the nature of human behavior. You can see it in many films today that are big hits. Where the special effects are incredible but the behavior leaves something to be desired. Because the concentration is very rarely on the creation of the actor's life. I think that's the root of everything of value. I've been an actor for 40 years but I've been a director for 30 years. I've always loved actors. I'm the Executive Director and Artistic Director of Actors Studio West, along with Marty Landau. I've always been teaching acting. I'm always involved with actors. I believe that an actor has to be a very brave individual to expose his or her personal secrets in front of many people.
Recreating the behind-the-scenes from
George Steven's Giant for Mark Rydell's James Dean
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What do you think are the problems facing directors today that are of most concern to you?
I think that there needs to be more public information about what a director really does. Most people don't understand it at all. They don't know what he does. The truth, information and dissemination of information needs to be more available. We need to have more of a dialogue with writers. Writers need to understand what happens on a set. They're rarely present on a set unless the director insists on their presence. I try desperately to have the writer with me all the time. But when writers finish a screenplay, they're often off writing the next screenplay. They don't have the time to spend four months or so on a set and in the editing room for another six months to watch every frame of the film being put together. They don't do that. They're already making other pictures, writing other screenplays. That is very unfortunate.
How would you explain what you do to a person who thinks a director just takes a screenplay and does what it says?
Kazan said it properly -- a director turns psychology into behavior. A director takes the written page and has to bring it to life. Writing and directing are almost antithetical skills. What you get are pages with dialogue and minor descriptions. It's fundamentally the beginning process of bringing the story to life. All the decisions that are made in order to transfer a written page into a behavioral performance still need to be made. You cannot run a screenplay through a projector. It's impossible. The job of creating the life of the material is the essential job of the director.
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