By Jerry Roberts

Director Agnieszka Holland

This story was immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song, a novelization of Gilmore's life and times that won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Mailer then adapted the book for the 1982 Lawrence Schiller-directed movie for television of the same name, which starred Tommy Lee Jones in the Emmy Award-winning role of Gilmore, and Rosanna Arquette as his wild girlfriend, Nicole Baker.

To revisit the same territory with another movie for television might seem unwise; they did the proverbial pretty good job the first time. Agnieszka Holland doesn't care about that.

She has a brand-new story, a fresh slant, and an insider's look at Gilmore's final days via the memoir Shot in the Heart, written in 1994 by Gilmore's brother, Mikal Gilmore, a Rolling Stone writer and former rock critic for the long-defunct Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. The autobiography won the National Book Critics Circle Award for best biography or autobiography of 1994. Holland's movie, Shot in the Heart, which debuts in October on HBO, details the legacy of familial violence in several Gilmore generations.

"I am the brother of a man who murdered innocent men," Mikal wrote in the book, words preserved by teleplay writer Frank Pugliese and Holland, who, uncredited, rewrote portions of the script. "His name was Gary Gilmore, and he would end up as one of modern America's more epochal criminal figures. After the killings and Gary's death sentence, I felt grief and anger, and deep and painful humiliation. I told myself for years I didn't love Gary anymore. And I believe he told himself the same thing about me. And then, in that last week, when we began to find each other, we both recognized all the love we had let go to waste and that we were both now about to lose, within hours, for eternity."

"I read the script and I thought, it's a fiction," recalled Holland in an interview over a huge wooden table in her kitchen. "I really liked it. And then, I started to search what the story was about and discovered it's the same story as The Executioner's Song. Then I read Mikal's book, which I liked a lot. I think it's a wonderful book, very powerful, not only as a story and not only as a statement of human life or destiny, but also as a piece of art, as a piece of literature.

"It's the story of the two brothers and it had for me this Biblical quality of the Cain and Abel story. It was more than the In Cold Blood kind of anatomy of a crime. It's much more a search of what happens inside of a family and especially between brothers. How much you can understand somebody else's fate and mystery and how much you can really change somebody's life by loving them. It's a very personal story. And I liked that it's not the journalistic kind of a statement about the death penalty, but that it's a kind of deep American tragedy."

Holland knows about deep tragedy. Most of those who would have constituted her family were killed in April and May of 1943 when the Nazis razed the Warsaw ghetto in the Second World War.

She was born in 1948, three years after the war, when her father had returned to Poland from the Soviet Union and became editor of the leftist newspaper, The Fight of the Young. He was murdered, pushed out of a tall building, when she was 13.

She attended Prague Film School in the late 1960s. Students in the arts had been celebrating the liberal brand of reform government in Prague under Alexander Dubcek during the so-called "Czech Spring" behind the Iron Curtain when, on August 20, Warsaw Pact armies, spearheaded by Soviet tanks, rolled into Prague to put down the "rebellion." Also in the school at the time were Guild members, directors and celebrated cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs. Guild members Milos Forman and Ivan Passer had also studied there.

Holland's "little Kafka story," as she calls it, occurred in 1970, when she was followed for several months, finally arrested without a charge, put in solitary confinement for two weeks, interrogated for seven straight hours and returned to solitary for another month before she was released. By the time she was back in Warsaw in 1971 she had developed what critic David Thomson has called "a remarkable talent for stories about displacement."

She came to prominence in the Polish cinema by writing screenplays for films directed by the great Andrzej Wajda, including Without Anesthesia (1978), Man of Iron (1981), Danton (1982) and A Love in Germany (1983). Her directorial debut, Provincial Actors (1979), in which she focused on a stage company's travails as a microcosm of European society at large, won the International Critics prize in a tie with Alain Resnais' Mon Oncle d'Amerique at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival.

Holland's other films as a director include Angry Harvest (1985) with Armin Meuller-Stahl, To Kill a Priest (1989) with Ed Harris, Europa, Europa (1991), Olivier, Olivier (1992), The Secret Garden (1993), Total Eclipse (1995) with Leonardo DiCaprio, Washington Square (1997) with Jennifer Jason Leigh and The Third Miracle (1999) with Harris. Angry Harvest received an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film, and Europa, Europa won the Golden Globe for best foreign film. Some of the pictures she wrote for others --Korczak (1990) for Wajda, for instance, as well as Angry Harvest and Europa, Europa-- correspond to a common theme in her films "about the manner in which individuals responded to Hitler and the Nazi scourge," critic Rob Edelman wrote.

Response to violence is also at the center of Shot in the Heart. The bulk of the film takes place in the confines of a meeting room at Draper Prison, near Salt Lake City, where Mikal and Gary and a passive third brother, Frank Jr., spend portions of Gary's final week. Holland's past gave her a certain understanding of confines.

"The challenge for the director and what attracted me to this movie is that maybe 70 percent or maybe even more of the movie is two guys sitting in one room and talking," Holland said. "You have to find a cinematic way to tell it and find the tension and development of the relationship between the character through cinematic ideas. I worked closely with [cinematographer] Jacek Petrycki to find out how to be very minimalistic and at the same time as rich as possible in terms of what's happening on the screen.

"It helped that Jacek is actually my oldest cinematographer friend. I did three of my first Polish movies with him and then I did Europa, Europa with him. Two years ago, I did the Jewish play The Dybbuk for Polish television and he shot it as well.

"Making it cinematic was one thing, another difficult thing is when you do a movie like this, you have to, in some way, enter this world and to become a part of a very painful, very tragic and very haunting story," Holland said. "I remember I was reading the book, and I was sleepless, like, for three weeks or so. I could not read it in one sitting. I had to stop. I realized that the book was so sincere and so painful that I knew I had to, in some way, make it part of myself. This is also a similar kind of experience for actors. It's why some actors just cannot do the parts like that because they are too painful for them. They prefer romantic comedies so that they don't feel so drained."

Holland sets up a shot on
the set of Shot In The Heart

"I wrote a lot, actually," she explained. "I also knew that when we'd rehearse with the actors we'd make more changes then. After that, we did some changes during the editing, of course. Editing, for me, is like the last stage of the writing in some ways, especially with a piece like this when it's not obvious action, where the narration is built up by the tension between the characters, more than by the exterior environs.

"I also wanted Frank on the set. He was there most of the time during shooting and was very helpful. He's a very good writer and very smart guy. I mostly invite writers to the set and mostly it has been very good for both of us. It means I was lucky, probably, you know, I didn't work with the assholes or egomaniacs."

With all the input and rewriting on the screenplay for Shot in the Heart, Holland didn't seek a writing credit. "For this one, no, I cannot take the [writing] credits," she said. "For some of my previous work, when I was the director, sometimes my collaboration was very big. I think that sometimes, I deserve some [writing] credit, but, you know, when you are working for American studios, it's so rare that it's one writer on a project. Mostly, [in studio movies] it is rewrites and rewrites and nobody is ever credited by the end of the day. But I was lucky, you know. Mostly the writers I worked with on the movies I did--which weren't from my own screenplays--were very open-minded and very generous in the collaboration. They really wanted to please me in terms that they understood that the movie has to go through my body and soul. And my sensitivity will be always a bit different from their own and they have been collaborative in that."

Giovanni Ribisi plays the gaunt Mikal, perpetually hugging himself against the Utah autumn. The rangy Elias Koteas plays the agonized, multifaceted and psychotic Gary. Holland's complex film contains many flashbacks to the boys' upbringings near Provo, Utah, in the 1950s, and to their mother's childhood too, in 1929. The boys' parents are played by Sam Shepard and Amy Madigan.

Holland said that she was secretly glad when stars passed on the Mikal role and it reverted to Ribisi who had played the medic in Saving Private Ryan.

"I admired him for quite a long time and wanted to work with him before. Fortunately another two or three actors we approached were not available or willing to do it, and it came back to him," she said. "I first met him when I was doing readings of a script I was developing about eight years ago. He read one of the parts and I was blown away. He is so gifted.

"He was interesting in combination with Elias. They are very different actors in terms of their own technical approach. Elias uses more of the Actors Studio kind of approach--he'd be Gary Gilmore, you know. He really was, in some ways, difficult to be around on those days when he played the part. Giovanni is more, I think, intellectual. That means a lot of exterior details are interesting and important to him to build up the character; the way of walking and dress and haircut and stuff like that. But by the end of the day I think that they were really in synch.

"The main thing is the actors, which means their power and their truth and their soulfulness are what make the story real. Without actors of this kind, any filmmaking ideas that I have don't work."

The flashbacks in the film break up the intensity of the prison room. Parts of the story in 1929 and the '50s and '60s include a perceived Ouija board conjuring of supernatural haunting inside the family home. There are recurring themes of family violence that fathers visit on sons as well as the unspoken alcoholism of Frank Gilmore, Sr.

"I wanted this style of storytelling--especially now when everything is so linear and very few movies move back and forth in time and the audience is quite lazy about it," Holland said. "In the '60s and '70s the audience was much more open-minded in terms of the storytelling. Now it's like people are used to the television kind of narration where stories are linear. It's a nice challenge to play with that.

"But there are two tricky things with flashbacks. You have to keep the flashbacks working in a way so people are not confused about who is who and what is happening. That is not so difficult to accomplish. What is really difficult is to use the flashback and not lose the emotional tension you built up in the scene. Very often directors go to the flashback and it breaks the tension in some way. But, you know when you are with the editor, you can play with that a lot in post-production."

Holland prefers to keep the camera on an actor after he's done with his lines so residue emotions or a change of thought going through a character's mind can register.

"That is because dialogue is not, for me, the most important thing that happens between the human beings," she explained. "They talk, it's one thing. But what is underneath or what is after the lines is interesting or even more interesting, sometimes. I don't like this kind of editing where you cut on your line, my line, your line, my line. What I try to capture is what happens inside of someone's head more than what is outside. That's because probably the kind of the pieces I'm interested in are character-driven pieces, about people who are fighting with themselves to find the inner truth about themselves as well as the chemistry that happens between the characters-- when they are lying, when they are telling truth. This is the mystery of theater, the mystery of human relationships."

Shot mostly in Baltimore with the TV production team associated with Homicide: Life on the Street, and executive produced by Barry Levinson, Shot in the Heart is one of the occasional TV pieces that Holland has done.

"Of course, by the way we shot it, it will look great on the big screen. I hope that it will be possible to show it in some festivals or some place and also if somebody wants to buy it theatrically in Europe," she said. "But in terms of directing, my approach to movies for television is not such a big difference. Sometimes, movies for television give you more freedom in that you don't have to worry so much about box office. I have to tell you, I am following HBO. In the last two years or so, I think they are probably the most courageous studio in terms of material and having an edgy side. I'm talking about not only the movies, but also the TV series. You don't see things like The Sopranos or Sex and the City elsewhere. It is revolutionary for American entertainment, not only television. I think they are better now than most of the big studios. They are trying to do pieces that are more problematic and more grown up. That's the thing I enjoy. I think they are very courageous."

Holland directs actor Elias Koteas as Gilmore

"Kasia tried to escape it really, because her father (Laco Adamik) is a director in Poland and my sister is a director and my sister's husband is a director. There are really a lot of directors in the family," Holland said. "She was starting art school and wanted to be a comic artist. Then she started the storyboards and became quite a good storyboard artist for me, with Scott Hicks and others. Somewhere she started to be bored. I think she worked for some people who knew less about moviemaking than she did. So, when the occasion happened, she jumped on it and she did a very wonderful movie. I think it's a very original, nice piece."

Jerry Roberts is a freelance writer who frequently contributes to DGA Magazine.

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