So many interviews across the years; so little time to dive through all the publications and venues. How helpful then that University Press of Mississippi has developed its "Conversations With Filmmakers" series (Peter Brunette, general editor) featuring "collected interviews with notable modern filmmakers." According to a list of directors included in the series — ranging alphabetically from Robert Altman to Zhang Yimou — "modern," happily, is not defined by dates. John Ford directed his first film in 1917.
The interviews, presented chronologically, give us glimpses of development; of how early the directors might indicate traits we later came to know, and of how, with bigger canvasses or more expensive paints, they changed. Or didn't.
"[W]e took the opening reel in a penitentiary," Ford explained about making Marked Man (1920), and said, "In everything I want realism." This is from an article in the Cleveland News (January 27, 1920) that opens "John Ford: Interviews." The comments were "meat and potatoes" stuff, editor Gerald Peary warns in his excellent introduction. By 1936, after winning the first Academy Award ever given for direction, with The Informer (1935), Ford "was accruing a volatile reputation for sarcasm on the set and discouraging honesty when being queried."
Some of the Q&A pieces are crisp and succinct. Asked in 1966 what he thought of the remake of his classic, Stagecoach (1939), Ford answered, "It's disgusting." Ford's final interview, done with Walter Wanger in 1973, is the last chapter here. It puts more flesh on the legend, tells us that Ford's favorite Ford was Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), and that Frank Capra, George Cukor, George Stevens and George Sidney were the guys he considered "artists." When told that he was called the greatest poet of the Western saga, Ford replied, "I am not a poet, and I don't know what a Western saga is ... I'm just a hard-working, run-of-the-mill director."
Things get a little more self-reflective in Spike Lee: Interviews. But, like Ford, Lee "has not always been comfortable speaking about his creative and thought processes," as editor Cynthia Fuchs puts it. And "early interviews are harder to come by." The earliest here is from Film Comment 22 (September/October 1986), as the then 29-year-old Lee tastes the success of She's Gotta Have It (1986) — which cost $175,000 and grossed more than $8.5 million. This is the one to encourage struggling indie souls: She's Gotta Have It was shot in 12 days and "we raised the money," Lee says, "at the same time we were shooting."
In a 1999 Independent Film Channel interview, Lee discusses several films — his own and others — with actor Delroy Lindo (Crooklyn, 1994; Clockers, 1995). A high note is their chat about music, particularly the use of Aaron Coplands' works in He Got Game (1998). Michael Sragow, in his piece, "Black Like Spike" from Salon.com (26 October, 2000), describes Lee as having a "provocative public blend of cockiness and earnestness. Yet he has displayed new sides to his creative personality."
For another look at the independent film scene and the diminishing lines between it and the mainstream, there is Steven Soderbergh: Interviews. Soderbergh's debut feature, sex, lies, and videotape (1989) won the Palm d'Or at Cannes (in an "upset" over Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, 1989), and would become, as editor Anthony Kaufman writes, "an important figurehead of an industry often called Indiewood." The "collection of interviews," he says, "could easily be subtitled, 'The Rise and Fall and Rise of an American Director.'"
Dennis Lim, writing in the Village Voice (January 9, 2001), looks at the roller coaster: "Talk of impossible expectations, squandered promise, and even self-sabotage swirled around the defiantly ambitious Kafka (1991), the Depression-era-coming-of-age tale King of the Hill (1993) and The Underneath (1995), obscuring the fact that the films were never without merit and collectively represented a thoughtful, questing attempt to stay independent." Fast forward to the simultaneous double hits of Erin Brokovich (2000) and Traffic (2000), for which Soderbergh won a Best Director Oscar. You feel at book's end that he is still, as he once told Sheila Johnston in Sight and Sound (November, 1999), standing with "one foot in and one foot out of Hollywood."
There isn't much that's more fun to read than Billy Wilder: Interviews. Even if you've heard a lot of Wilder's anecdotes and tart opinions before in documentaries and read them in biographies, they wear well. Especially as they are supported here by the master raconteur's sensible observations on his art and craft. "Aside from the bons mots," editor Robert Horton says, "these interviews provide a surfeit of filmmaking know-how and a delicious whiff of old-Hollywood atmosphere."
In Burt Prelutsky's lively Q&A piece from Michigan Quarterly Review (Winter, 1996), we learn from Wilder that "I constantly rewrite my movies in my mind. But with The Apartment (1960), not so much as with some of the others." (Wilder considered The Apartment his "picture with the least mistakes.")
A transcript from the American Film Institute's 1976 dialogue with Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, his co-screenwriter on such classics as Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment, really shines. These two bright minds spurring each other on yield great riffs on, say, the curse of the "busy camera." And when Diamond admitted that he had no ambition to direct, Wilder said that his partner was "a very elegant man, and just does not want to get that close to actors. I have to get into the cage..."
If, as Joe E. Brown says to Jack Lemmon at the end of Some Like It Hot, "Nobody's perfect," at least Billy Wilder can come pretty close.
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