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Rachel Weisz
Q:
Did you always want to be a femme fatale?
Weisz: What girl
didn't want to be a femme fatale? Course! Yeah! I love noir as
a style. Just getting to play in that style is just fun. It's heightened
fantasy world, it's not a naturalistic real world. Everyone is extra fabulous,
and extra mean, and extra glamorous. It's fun. It's escapism.
Q: Do you have a
favorite femme fatale?
Weisz: The person
I was kind of studying for Lily--for this character--was Gloria Grahame.
I thought Gloria had the right--she was bad. At a time where the
other girls, like Jean Harlowe, weren't being quite so sexy, she was being
really sexy and bad. I didn't think she was the greatest actress, but
she just had--she was bad!
Q: You're in good
company in Confidence. It's a great cast.
Weisz: Yeah. It's
amazing. When I read the script, it was just James Foley and Ed Burns
attached, and I wanted to work with both of them. Then Dustin Hoffman
came on board. I was like, "Oh my god." Andy Garcia, and Luis Guzman,
and Paul Giamatti. All these amazing actors.
Rachel
Weisz
in Confidence.
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Q: Do you get nervous
meeting people like that?
Weisz: Of course.
Terrified. Dustin--he's so disarming. He disarms you within a second,
and I'm just putty in his hand.
Q: Is this film more
of an acting exercise than something like The Mummy? Or are they
equally as challenging?
Weisz: This would
be much more of an acting exercise.
Q: I would think
going against blue screens or green screens would be really tough to act
against.
Weisz: Yeah… it's
tough in a different way. Hm. The Mummy is more cartoon-like, I
would say. It's fun. But you're more tested opposite Dustin than a blue
screen.
Q: You seem to have
largely become a film actress. Have you given up theater for the time
being?
Weisz: No… I did
a play with Neil LaBute, The Shape of Things, and we made a movie
of it that's coming out in May.
Q: And you produced
it?
Weisz: The film,
yes. Co-produced it with other people. It's a black comedy--a very black
comedy--I suppose you could call it a romantic comedy--I don't know if
you know Neil LaBute's work. It's a black comedy set on a student campus.
I play a student that's kind of like a punky, anarchic, angry arts student
who falls in love with Paul Rudd. It's about how couples try to change
each other.
Q: You're in a million
great movies coming up. Runaway Jury--
Weisz: Well, we'll
see if they're great!
Q: Who do you play
in Runaway Jury?
Weisz: The female
lead. Marlee, she's called. I play opposite John Cusack. It's another
Grifters kind of thing. We're going up against Hoffman and Hackman.
Hoffman is the good guy in this, he's the benevolent attorney, he's idealistic.
Hackman plays the evil jury selector. I had to go toe-to-toe with them.
It was terrifying.
Q: You're getting
a lot of opportunities right now. How are you choosing them?
Weisz: With great
discretion! I don't know. I just read, and read, and read. How I choose…you
just read something and think, this is a world I want to enter into, this
is a character I want to play, and this is a story I want to tell. You
have to really want to do that, because it's three or four months. It's
a big commitment. You follow the passion. Where you have passion, you
go.
Q: Marlowe,
with Jude Law--what's that?
Weisz: That keeps
cropping up. That's not happening. That's on the imdb or something.
Q: What about the
Barry Levinson movie?
Weisz: Yeah, that
I did after Confidence. That will be the next out after Shape
of Things. That's a comedy. It's a very broad comedy. I play opposite
Ben Stiller. We're married. It's set in the Valley, in LA, and Jack Black
is in it, and Christopher Walken, and Amy Poeller from Saturday Night
Live. She's married to Jack Black. Amy and Jack are married, me and
Ben are married, we're best friends, we each have two point five children.
And…uh… [sighs] I'm so crap at pitching. Basically Jack's a dreamer,
and he's always dreaming up inventions, and he dreams up this invention
of a spray can that you spray on dog shit, and the dog shit disappears.
It's called Va-Poo-Rize. So he's always dreaming up stuff, and he says
to Ben, his best friend, "Invest. Give me two grand." And Ben's like,
"No," and I'm saying, "Honey, invest! It's a great idea!" And he won't
invest. And so [Black and Poeller] become gazillionairres. They don't
move out of the neighborhood. They knock down the little house and build
a huge palace. It's called Envy, so you get the idea. It's a bit
of a fable. It's really fun. It's pure fun.
Q: Are you done with
The Mummy movies? Would you do another one?
Weisz: Sure, get
the family together again! Nobody's talked about it. Steve Sommers is
doing another movie now, with the great Australian actor Hugh Jackman--Van
Helsing.
Q: Okay, so you're
doing broad comedies, and you're doing more sophisticated comedies like
About a Boy, and you're doing big special effects movies, and Confidence.
Where are you most comfortable as an actor and what do you find most challenging?
Weisz: I'm probably
most comfortable when I'm most challenged. I like to be challenged. I
love doing comedy. It's one of the greatest joys in life. It can be very
hard, but I love to do it. I don't know, I feel very lucky that I haven't
had to choose. After Envy I went into very serious Grisham courtroom
thing. It means I never get bored. I'm really lucky.
Q: What's your favorite
scene in Confidence?
Weisz: I love the
scene between Dustin and Ed where Dustin's messing with him, when he says
to him, "Too much style can get you in trouble." When he starts coming
onto him, he starts flirting with him. Ed's this macho cool guy, and Dustin
makes him so uncomfortable. You can just feel Ed blushing. I love that
scene.
Q: You said you wanted
to work with James Foley. What were your reasons for that?
Weisz: Yeah. I loved
Glengarry Glen Ross, and I particularly loved At Close Range.
I just thought that was just a phenomenal movie. I love how he casts characters,
and I think he has a really great sense of style. It's always very stylish,
but there's raw emotion. And I think that's a great cocktail, to have
style and raw emotion underneath.
Q: Any unrealized
ambitions?
Weisz: Yeah! Millions!
Andy Garcia
Q:
Why did you make Confidence?
Garcia: Well, I like
the script a lot. Like Dustin, my character as written was later changed.
It's hard for me to say because it spoils the movie. Basically my character
did not function in the way it ends in the movie. He is a federal agent.
He was always a federal agent. But in terms of how he functions with the
other people in the story, that was not there. To me, there was a flaw
in the storytelling, because it didn't hold up. So, I suggested what you
saw, and they liked it, and then I worked with the writer on some of the
scenes. It wasn't a complicated thing, but you have to make the leap of
faith to say, "Okay let's change it." Once I did that, I said, "Okay I'll
do it." What struck me about the guy, really, that excited me, was just
the fact that he was from Tampa. I grew up going to Tampa, I had family
there, and I knew characters from Tampa that were like this guy. I just
wanted to get into those cheap seersucker suits and cheap cigars. I said,
"I know who this guy is. I know he's got a racing form in his pocket,
and ashes in his breast pocket of his coat because he puts the cigar in
sometimes backwards, and he doesn't shave." You know, that whole thing.
That excited me. I'd like to play him again actually. If we do well, maybe
we could do another one.
Q: Oceans 11
was also a con game movie. Is this a genre that you like?
Garcia: Yeah, when
they're well written, they're great. They're a lot of fun.
Q: Do you have some
favorite films in that genre?
Garcia: Topkapi,
Rififi, Ocean's 11. [laughter] The Soderbergh version. The
other one, it was fun to see those guys, but it doesn't hold up very well
as a story.
Q: Confidence
was your second movie with Dustin Hoffman.
Garcia: I didn't
work with him on this movie. I mean, we're in the same movie together,
but I put it in my contract that I didn't want to see him ever. We never
crossed paths on the set. I see him enough in real life that I can't--no,
I'm just kidding. There is nobody that I would like to spend more time
with than Dustin. I have a great admiration for him and he just--I don't
know, he makes me laugh. Too much.
Q: How did you first
meet him?
Garcia: I met him
in a movie, I mean, we did a movie together [Hero]. I met him as
a fan first, you know, as a young actor being inspired by his work. The
Graduate, and then Midnight Cowboy, I thought that was one
of the most extraordinary one-two punches in the history of film.
Q: Is there somebody
else that you admire as much as Dustin Hoffman?
Garcia: Gandhi.
Q: I missed his last
movie.
Garcia: I remember
one time we were going into the Golden Globes, and I was there with my
little daughter. I was presenting an award there. I'm going in, and someone
grabs me and says, "Would you talk with Joan Rivers a moment?" Ugh. And
that politeness thing comes into play, and you say, "Okay." Then I go,
and she says, "Hi, is this your beautiful daughter?" and then she says,
"Who made your dress?" to my little daughter. She was twelve years old.
My daughter says, "Emilia." Seamstress, you know. And then she turns to
me and says, "Who would you like to meet tonight?" And I said, "Is Gandhi
here?" She looked at me and went [muttering], "Gandhi, er, Gandhi…
what award is he up for?"
Q: There are stories
that they're thinking of doing a Godfather 4. Have you heard
anything from Coppola about that?
Garcia: No. I have
not heard-- You know, there was a moment there where Francis did want
to have Mario write a script. I'll take responsibility for suggesting
to my agent, who also represents Leonardo--because I knew Francis had
this story that he and Mario had worked out, to do a parallel story of
a piece of the book that has never been told, which is the Thirties. In
the Thirties, Sonny Corleone was married. Maybe Leo in his early twenties
could play him, and then he would do a parallel story with my character
in the future, you know, running amok, demented, in a… bathrobe. I don't
know. So I said to my agent, "Maybe Leo would be interested, and if so,
I know Francis wants to have Mario write a script." Anyway, it accelerated.
This was a very interesting movie because Bob De Niro could have played
the Godfather, and Leo DiCaprio could play Sonny, and you could get another
couple young people to play Michael and Fredo, and Tom, Bobby Duvall's
character. On the one side of the movie, you have the demographic they're
looking for, you know, young kids, and then on the other side you have
a demented guy doing whatever he has to do. And you can actually bring
Al back because he died a very old guy, so you could have him do a couple
scenes with me. But Mario passed away.
Q: Do you think Francis
would ever do it with somebody else?
Garcia: Well, Francis
could write it. Part of that first part has been written already. I know
there are scenes that have been written because even when we were doing
Godfather 3, there were things that they had worked out. That
did move forward. There was apparently an interest, and then when Mario
died, that sort of fell by the wayside, and then after that I've never
really heard anything more about it. I've asked Francis about it, and
his attitude is, "Yeah, you know, we can do it, but they have to hire
me, I can't hire them." The curious thing about Godfather 4
is that every single person that I encounter, every day, I get people
asking me, "When's Godfather 4 coming?" The fascination to
me is, with all the movies that Paramount makes and takes risks on, they
have this franchise that people are desperate to see, and I wonder why
they don't want to do this movie. It doesn't have to be a 200 million
dollar movie. It can be a normal film. I notice such an appetite for it,
and there's so much potential commerce surrounding it. It's really curious
why they haven't taken a proactive initiative to say, "C'mon, Francis
let's do it."
Q: What about Ocean's 12?
George Clooney says he's dying to do that.
Garcia: I haven't
got a call. I don't know if I'm still gonna be chasing those guys.
Q: It seems like
they left it kinda open.
Garcia: You know,
that's the only note I had when I read the script. I said, "Steven, I
wouldn't let George go if it's not for a specific reason." I'm not just
gonna say, "Okay, it was you, or it wasn't you. See you later." I let
him go because he's gonna lead me to the money. So that's why he wrote
those two guys, my two goons, to follow him. George knows they're being
followed, and that's fine, but at least you can justify why I let them
go. But whether the other movie is me following them all around Europe
taking them out one by one, I don't know. I remember we did a press junket
in Rome and Steven's eyes came out of his head. He'd never been to Rome.
He said, "I could do another one here."
Q: Where are you
with your personal project, The Lost City?
Garcia: I'm doing
it at Lions Gate, and we have pre-production in the fall, shooting in
the winter. The first week of January is the target right now.
Q: What's it about?
Garcia: It's about
Havana and the turn of the revolution, the microcosm of a family, a story
of impossible love. [laughter]
Q: Who else is in
it with you?
Garcia: Assuming
they're all available when we go, Bobby Duvall plays one of the main antagonists
in the movie--one of the Batista police--and Dustin Hoffman is going to
play Meyer Lansky. Benjamin Bratt, Javier Bardem, Benicio del Toro are
going to be in it.
Q: Che Guevara, Castro--are
you going to show them?
Garcia: Che Guevara
is in the movie. Castro is in the movie. Batista. All the usual suspects.
Q: How long have
you been developing this?
Garcia: Since I left
[Cuba] in 1961. I was turned on to the writings of G. Cabrera Infante
probably in the late Seventies. His books, Three Trapped Tigers, View
of Dawn in the Topics, and Infante's Inferno, they all deal
with life in Havana, especially cabaret life in Three Trapped Tigers.
That was the inspiration for it, as a parallel to movies like Casablanca
and Doctor Zhivago and Cabaret, where you have the scenario
of what happens to a family in a time of political change.
Q: What is the Cuba
of the future that you see?
Garcia: Well, a democratic
Cuba.
Q: Do you think it
could happen?
Garcia: Sure. It
will happen.
Q: But you don't
see a free Cuba with Castro, though. It's going to take Castro dying.
Garcia: That's a
physical impossibility. There's no freedom while he's there. He won't
go, but eventually every dog has his day.
Q: But is it true
that your film casts a very honest light on Batista's regime? It doesn't
build it up and whitewash it the way some films have and made him the
hero, as opposed to Castro the devil. They're both kind of devils in their
own right.
Garcia: Well, no,
Batista had a very brutal totalitarian dictatorship. Ironically, the country
economically was flourishing. They had the third largest per capita income
in the Americas. But, the problem was that basically-- When Batista came
into in '52, it was a coup, and he abolished the constitution, and became
a dictator. Immediately civil protests broke out, which led to, eventually,
after seven years, he fled. But the whole point of the revolution was
to restore the constitution and the democracy. Little did we know that
a year later, Castro declared himself-- You know if you look at the newsreels,
it's very fascinating. Castro, time and time again, even at the United
Nations, said, "I am not a communist. I am not a communist. I am not a
communist." And then one day he says, "I am a communist." Personally I
don't believe he's a communist. He's a Fidelista. Communism or Marxist-Leninism
is the façade which he had to operate under in order to get help from
Russia and do what he needs to do. But the movie [is] told as a love story,
which is, you come together, and then you're torn apart because of political
ideologies.
Q: Where are you
going to film this?
Garcia: In Florida
and in the Caribbean.
Q: How long have
you been working on this?
Garcia: Oh, over
ten years, over fifteen years, maybe. I've been excited about this for
many many years.
Dustin
Hoffman
in Confidence.
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Edward Burns
in Confidence.
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Edward Burns
Q:
Did you know from the beginning that this was something you wanted to
do? Did Foley bring this to you?
Burns: He didn't. My agents gave
it to me. Read the script, loved it. Two things jumped out--great dialogue,
and no one ever casts me to play these kind of guys. So I jumped on a
plane, came out here to meet with Foley. We worked our whole New York
Irish thing, and he gave me the part.
Q: Rachel Weisz said she is intimated
when she meets people like Dustin Hoffman or Gene Hackman. Do you ever
have that anymore?
Burns: Without a doubt. Dustin--when
I was [in] film school, The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy
are two of the films that made me want to make movies. So Dustin has been
a real hero for a long time. So the night before the rehearsal--I'd never
met him before that--you're nervous, knowing you're going to go out the
next day and play one on one with Michael Jordan. You're going to lose.
But the good thing is, you show up, and you're not playing against him,
you're playing with him. Dustin really is that kind of actor. He's all
about working together and especially this part--Dustin's part was originally
written for a 250-pound New York Mafioso who owned a boxing gym. The whole
dynamic between our characters was that he was a physically intimidating
guy. So when Dustin came on board, you still needed to have that physical
threat, but he couldn't do it by sheer size. In that rehearsal process,
with Jamie, Doug Jung the screenwriter, me and Dustin, we'd rehearse the
scenes as written, but then Dustin would ad lib or improvise to try to
find how he was going to be a physically ominous character.
Q: Is that how he came up with the
homoerotic thing?
Burns: There was one line in the
original script that kind of insinuated something, and he latched on to
that. I think it was when he said, "Let me read your palm." During the
rehearsal I got really uncomfortable with him touching me in such a tender
way. [Laughter]
Q: It almost doesn't matter whether
The King is actually gay or bi. Being the con man that he is--that's how
he was going to get to you.
Burns: At no point in the script
is it ever said. I think Dustin's approach was he didn't even want to
know. He was just going to play it. There was a scene where he's touching
Rachel, 'feel my heart,' all that stuff. There was a line that got cut
out afterwards where he sort of asks that question. "Which one of you
two do you think I'm attracted to?" It ended up getting cut out because,
again, they didn't want to say. Why even address it? Leaving his ambiguity
ambiguous with the audience serves the film better.
Q: Did you have a lot of freedom
with your character, like Dustin did?
Burns: Being a writer myself, I like
to stay true to what the author has written. I'll play with it a little
bit, change a line of dialogue here and there. The only thing that changed
was that the script was originally set in New York and for budgetary reasons
moved to LA. At the time I wanted to stay in New York and shoot there,
since that's where I live, but when it came to LA my character changed
considerably from being a jeans/leather jacket New York grifter to this
slick, dapper LA incarnation. For me as an actor, it was a good thing
to get out of that whole New York thing. The other thing with that character
was that in the past, even the parts I've written for myself, even Private
Ryan, I have been able to draw from my personality. This character,
I couldn't do that at all. I had to create this guy from scratch.
Q: Did you get nervous when Steven
Spielberg called you for Saving Private Ryan?
Burns: Spielberg I didn't even get
to meet until the day before shooting. So that was also another terrifying
experience. And the De Niro one as well. First rehearsal [for Fifteen
Minutes], I walk in; I've got a knapsack with me; I got my cup
of coffee. He's there; I'm a little late because of traffic. You never
want to be late for Bobby D, or Dusty, or any of these guys. So he goes
to shake my hand, so I switch my coffee, and as I'm shaking it, the coffee
spills out onto my shirt. Just not a very cool move in meeting Bob for
the first time.
Q: What did he say?
Burns: The thing is, they're not
Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman after the first five minutes. They're
Dusty and Bob--guys that you work with, and guys who are not aggressive.
They're guys who want you to do good work. I think if you're a young actor
and you show a lot of interest in trying to get better, and feed off their
energy and their craft--they get off on that. They want to do good work.
They want you to do good work. Especially with Dustin, since so much of
that character had to be created in those rehearsals, for me to get to
be a part of his process, as he shaped another one of those very cool
Dustin Hoffman characters--that is the dream.
Q: Are you still working on A
Sound of Thunder?
Burns: That's done. We finished shooting,
but they've got a year worth of special effects. The whole movie was blue
screen. It's a Ray Bradbury short story science fiction time travel film
with Ben Kingsley.
Q: Who do you play?
Burns: I play the scientist/hunter.
[Laughter] In 2040, you'll see, we can travel back in time. I lead
very wealthy people on safaris hunting dinosaurs. Ben Kingsley plays sort
of the evil, you know, big corporation CEO guy.
Q: How did you raise money for your
first movie [The Brothers McMullen]?
Burns: I raised ten [thousand] from
my dad, five from a friend of his. This was the only person we knew who
had five thousand to invest. When the film ended up making money, this
guy just could not believe that this cash was coming his way from the
investment. And the others--since we made the film over the course of
a year and a half, I put in about fifteen hundred of my own money, and
then it was five hundred here, three hundred from my sister--
Q: How did you ask people?
Burns: First we put together a limited
partnership. We were gonna try to raise fifty thousand dollars with five
thousand dollar shares. The only guy we got was this one friend of my
dad's. So we had five thousand dollars. My dad said, "Okay, I'll put in
five." I said, "All right, we don't have a limited partnership, but we
do have ten thousand dollars. I'll go shoot a couple scenes, and then
we'll use a little trailer to raise the rest of the money." But I knew
based on my super-low budget films in film school, "I'm just going to
try and shoot as much of this movie as I can for ten grand. See how far
I can get. Not going to worry about it looking good." Because I knew if
I went with the trailer, and tried to make it look pretty or slick, I'd
get a scene done for ten thousand. So I got almost half of the script
shot for ten grand. Then once we were there, I convinced my dad for another
five. I basically got us near the end, and then there were like, two or
three days left for fifteen hundred or three thousand.
Q: How do you think you've changed?
Was it better back then or better now, for you?
Burns: Well, it's funny. I was just
talking to my brother on the phone. He asked where the junket was. I said,
"The Four Seasons." He said, "Well where are you staying?" I said, "Oh,
at the Hotel Bel Air." He said, "Why are you staying there?" I said, "Oh,
because we got the dog with us, and it's better for the dog." He goes,
"Do you realize how sick your life is?" You know, traveling with your
dog--on planes, not on a road trip to the Jersey shore! That's just weird.
Then he asked how much the rooms were--fortunately I'm not paying for
them, Lions Gate is--and I told him, and we both thought about our first
apartments. He lived in DC and I lived in New York. And we [thought about]
how many months we could live in our apartments for what one night costs.
I've got something here for five days. We could almost live a year in
that studio apartment in DC for what a five day stay at the Bel Air costs.
Man, life has gotten strange. But then we said, "You know what the sickest
thing is? I wouldn't say I'm happier now or happier then." It really doesn't
change. Certainly I'm glad I can stay in a nice room, but as my brother
said, "Hotel valet--you know when that's cool? When you're living in that
shitty little apartment in DC. That's when it would really be like, 'Wow!
Check this out!'"
Q: How do you pass that first brush
with stardom without losing your mind? It seems that you came out fine.
Burns: Umm…I was 27. That's the difference.
I think if I was 21, I would have gone crazy like some other guys. But
I had already done my thing like that, and fortunately there weren't cameras
all around.
Q: Do you hate the intrusion on your
personal life?
Burns: Well, I worked as a production
assistant on Entertainment Tonight for four years. So I think maybe
I have a more realistic outlook on that whole side of the business. It
sucks; it's never fun. However, you get into this business, that is part
of the deal. It might be unfair of me to comment on it because I don't
get followed by paparazzi. I don't have the Leonardo DiCaprio or Ben/J
Lo experience, ever.
Q: But certainly you and [supermodel]
Christy [Turlington] is a high profile relationship.
Burns: Not in the same way. Maybe
the fact that we live in New York is a slightly different deal, but that
being said, I'm just thankful I don't have to deal with it on that level.
There's some people that just can't make a move without cameras around.
It's a drag, but it is part of the business. The upside of what we get
to do--well, first of all, I assume that 99 percent of the people in this
business love what they do. You fight so hard and for so long, you spend
all your parents' savings to make a movie just because you love it, and
now the reward is that you get to continue to do what you do. I get to
get up in the morning, write a screenplay, and unlike the first five years
of trying to get into this business, where you don't even know if you
can get someone to read it, I'm guaranteed to get someone to read it.
Let's say maybe eight times out of ten, I'm going to get maybe two and
a half million dollars to make the movie, and that's better than not making
the movie. So with all that comes this other little bit of garbage. I'm
willing to do it.
Q: So are you planning on tying the
knot this year? It's off and on, allegedly--
Burns: Yeah, you know, I read page
six of The New York Post religiously. However, you can't trust
them. We're happy, we're together, it's all good. She's at the Bel Air
with the dog. But there's no--
Q: You have her walking the dog?
What kind of dog is this?
Burns: Seriously, he's the most handsome
dog in the word. He's a Boston Terrier named Mickey.
Q: But you're not getting married?
Burns: No.
Q: What happened to Ash Wednesday?
Did we miss it?
Burns: Yeah. Yeah, you did.
Q: Did it not get released?
Burns: No, it--I'll give you the
whole deal on that. It was released New York and LA in October. A one-week
release. We got a fantastic review in the LA Times. Got some other
reviews that were less than fantastic in the New York papers--hometown
papers were doing the right thing by me yet again. [Laughter] Anyhow,
it was a big turning point in my career as an independent low-budget filmmaker.
Ash Wednesday was the fifth film that I wrote and directed. I've
done five now for a combined budget of eleven million dollars. We did
Sidewalks [of New York] for a million and shot in seventeen days.
The reason for me that Sidewalks works is, we embraced the fact
that we only had a million dollars. It was supposed to not look great.
It was handheld and choppy. We never tried to hide the fact that we didn't
have a lot of money. That's my advice any time I go to a film school or
do a Q & A after a screening. Everyone says, "What's the advice you give
to a young filmmaker?" I always say, "Don't try to compete with Hollywood.
Take your lack of resources and make it work for you. Especially with
DV [Digital Video]. You're never going to make DV look like film. It's
never going to look like a Hollywood production. So don't even try. Take
DV and use what's cool about it to your advantage.
Q: What's cool about it?
Burns: The fact that it's so mobile.
It's so tiny. You can get three cameras and shoot all sorts of crazy coverage.
You don't need permits anywhere because you can stick the thing under
your coat, and pull it out, and get access to locations than I can't get
with a big 35-millimeter camera and a steadycam. You can cut it on your
laptop in your hotel. You can't do that with 35 millimeter. Or actually
you can, but it costs a lot more. The fact that you can bang out seventy-five
takes if you want, and it costs nada compared to processing all that film
stock. McMullen, Clerks, El Mariachi, Metropolitan, Blair
Witch--the list is endless of films that look like crap, because
what they focused on was the acting, and the story, and the style, and
never tried to compete with Hollywood production value. So that was the
advice I used to give, and then I don't listen to it on Ash Wednesday.
[Laughter] I got two and a half million dollars. I should have
made the movie for eight million. The actors' strike was coming up. I've
only directed one movie in four years, and I'm getting antsy. So I say,
"Screw it, I'm going to make this movie for two and a half." What I should
have done was gone to the Sidewalks style and gone hand held, or
even shot DV--made it grittier, more run and gun. Instead I stuck to the
original vision I had in my head when I was writing it. I wanted to go
for a Carol Reed, Third Man, Odd Man Out kind of look--only in
color--and that kind of pacing--almost like what Road
to Perdition did in making an art period gangster movie. So when
I look at the film, I'd say about sixty percent of it worked. Out of the
twenty days we shot, we got twelve days where we had enough time to get
the work done. We had eight days, though, where all I see when I watch
the movie is, not enough money, rushed, shooting into a corner, not enough
light, long lens because it's a period but we can't afford any period
cars or to dress the street--so the actors are in focus, [while] 2003
cars and buses are driving all over but they're out of focus so you can't
tell that it's not 1983.
Q: Are you writing anything now?
Burns: Finishing up a script now.
Can't really say what it's about, other than I heard someone describe
the movie recently as a conversational dramedy. I kind of like that. That's,
like, my favorite genre. [Laughter]
Q: Have you ever been mixed up with
another celebrity, or recognized as someone else?
Burns: Ah, my younger days, I got
Kevin Bacon, Matthew Modine.
Q: And what do you say when they
say that?
Burns: I sign their autograph.
Q: Did you research cons for the
movie?
Burns: We pulled a con. Brian Van
Holt, who plays Dutch in the movie, had done a lot of research, so he
wanted us all to get dressed up in our wardrobes, go out in LA and pull
a con. So we went to a used car dealership, and basically--Brian and Paul
Giamatti, really, orchestrated it--we were able to get a car off the lot
without a representative, with no money. We then went cruising. I think
we were on the 10, we got into an accident, ditched the car, ran, called
a cab, went back, didn't tell anyone about it--I'm kidding.
James
Foley
directs Confidence.
|
James Foley
Q:
You're dealing with a first-time feature film writer from NYU [Doug Jung].
How did the script for Confidence come to you?
Foley: Yeah. It came in a conventional
way; it came from CAA. That's my agency, and they sent me a pile of scripts
that are out there. It is, seriously, the worst part of the job--having
to plow through scripts, because there's a 99.9 percent probability that
they suck. It's painful to turn the page. Then came this one, which didn't
suck. I actually wanted to know what was on the next page. I had no idea
who Doug was, or anything about it, but I did get excited and called my
agent and said, "I want to jump onto this." I also think that, for me,
the script was as good as it was because Doug did it on his own. It wasn't
something that went through the development process at a studio with ten
thousand people having notes and input and stuff. I'm trying to get Doug
to write something else, but already he's getting lured into studios and
money and doing rewrites and stuff like that, so I keep on encouraging
him to go away on his own and just do whatever he wants.
Q: It was supposed to be set in New
York. How did it move to LA?
Foley: Yeah. Something I love about
movies is that sometimes the best creative results come from practical
necessities and chaos. It was set in New York. I accepted that, and first
thing Lions Gate says is, "Here's a ticket to Toronto." I did that once
before, and it's a dispiriting experience, because a big part of what
I like about directing is the visual sense of capturing a place in your
own way. Having to go to the streets of one city and make believe it's
another--you're just so limited, in trying to trick people into thinking
something. It's just a real turnoff. So I was depressed driving home,
and it happened to be sunset, and this red light was illuminating some
neon signs, and palm trees were swaying, and I said, "Whoa, that's interesting,
I've never shot a film in LA. The guys are nomadic, moving from city to
city, what if they came to LA?" Suddenly the whole idea of getting it
out of the environment of night and dark alleys and gritty, and changing
it into the opposite, to bright sunlight-- We changed every scene we possibly
could from night to day. The big impact of it was [on] one character,
which was one of the most unique and exotic and pleasurable experiences
I've had. Dustin Hoffman's part was written as a big 300-pound imposing
guy who owned a boxing gym in the gritty Lower East Side. That didn't
work for the LA vibe. Me and Doug were flailing around about what to do,
and that's why we weren't able to cast it, because how do you cast a part
that you don't know what the part is yet? Somehow Dustin became aware
of the script, and read it, and he was interested in the dynamics. He
said if we wanted to talk about it he'd be interested. So myself and Doug
met up with Dustin and had one of these great epiphanal six-hour things
where we just thought of every crazy idea, really wacko ideas. Dustin
starting working from the process of thinking, "Okay, what would the character
look like?" I happened to be all jazzed up and getting excited and being
kind of hyper, and I used to wear my reading glasses on a chain around
my neck, chewing gum all the time. And he asked me, "Can I borrow your
glasses? Do you have any more gum?" He started walking around and he looked
in the mirror, and he said, "I got it! I got the character." We had no
idea who the character was or where he came from, but he knew what the
character looked like and how he walked. We just worked from there. When
it came time to do Dustin's stuff, it was the most fun days of shooting
I've ever had. I like shooting but I wouldn't call it fun necessarily
every day. It was a unique experience because Dustin was there at the
birth of the character, so it was totally in synch with his own instincts.
Q: So was it Dustin's idea to come
up with the ambiguous homoerotic undercurrent?
Foley: Oh yeah, and what's interesting
is that didn't come up at first. It was just me and the writer and Dustin.
I'm the worst actor in the world, but [Dustin] wants to work with somebody,
so I was Ed--I was a really bad Ed. But then we brought Ed in, and, you
know, Ed is a cutie pie, and Dustin started, you know, flirting with him
in that way, and that became part of the thing that evolved once Ed was
brought into the process. But I'm a big fan of that kind of acting where
it's just inspired by whatever unconsciously comes up, and just trying
to shape it. That erupted organically out of an interesting problem.
Q: Those stories about Dustin being
difficult to work with--where do those stories come from about actors?
Foley: Yeah, I finally figured it
out, and it's kind of simple. A lot of different directors are interested
in different things that cinema can be. For better or worse, a close-up
of a great actor in a great moment is the most exciting thing to me, the
thing I'm most turned on by. As a filmmaker, capturing that on your film,
looking through the lens and seeing that, really turns me on. What a great
actor can do that's unique to cinema is be saying one thing and feeling
something contradictory. You can see it--it's something you can't see
on stage--but if the lens is in the right place, you see it. So I keep
on trying to find films that are character driven, that are about the
interrelationships between people and the contradictory nature of things.
Obviously actors--great actors--that's what they're interested in the
most. If they're working with a director who's focusing on that, then
there's a synchronicity. But there's other movies--good movies--that are
big action movies where the subtle subtext of the interplay of the actors
is not the center of the thing. I'm always curious about asking actors
about their experience on other movies because I've never worked on any
movies except my own, so I have no idea what it's like, how other people
do it. It's very different. There are directors who really have nothing
to say to the actors, don't even get to know them--
Q: There are some directors who don't
like actors.
Foley: Oh absolutely. I happen to
like actors. One of my big things about rehearsing is that I always feel
like I want to get to know the actors before we start shooting. So much
of directing for me is a communication, which is about feelings or shared
jokes or something, or references to something like that. By the time
I get to shoot, I always have to feel like I have a familiarity with the
actor where their stardom, if it exists, goes away. I have this thing--it
sounds bizarre--but when I talk to them I touch them, or put my finger
in their ear or something, and there's no distance. Actors feel as if
the director is focusing on things that they think are the most important.
One of the best moments I've ever had--I start crying about it because
I get emotional--there's a scene in Glengarry
Glen Ross with Pacino, and I can't tell you the pleasure of--
You do a bunch of takes, and they're good, and then you do take six, and
all of the sudden it's the one. Something happens, and I can feel it,
and my heart starts beating, and I'm getting nervous--"Is the camera in
focus?"--and then you say, "Cut!" Every time you say cut in a movie, the
actor's eyes go right to you looking for a reaction. Pacino knew that
was the one; we both knew the same thing. You just feel so connected.
Then he's leaving, and he whispered to me, "I loved where your camera
was. It felt like it was in exactly the right place, and that's why it
was good." And you just feel like, "Wow." Life is nice when it happens.
Q: Do you feel that, because of Glengarry
Glen Ross, actors want to work with you?
Foley: Well, it certainly helps because
actors want to work in a movie that's about their acting--not about their
celebrity, but about what it is that they like to do. Clearly if you've
made some films that focus on that, there's a sense of trust that this
is a director who's interested in stuff that [they're] interested in.
In the realpolitik of Hollywood, [if] you work with stars, then
other stars feel as if you can do that. The studios think of it as, "Can
you handle the star?" which is a concept that seems ridiculous to me.
I really believe that the only trouble that happens with actors--and if
they're stars they have power to cause trouble--is if they feel the director
is just not interested. The way I happen to work, for better or worse,
is that I have no storyboards, I have no shot list, I just rehearse with
the actors in the mornings, see what they do on their own, then start
pushing then a little bit here, a little bit there. I find that if you
let the actors do what's instinctual to them in the beginning, then they're
very open to your direction, and your reaction to what they're doing,
and shaping it. Only then do I look at it and say, "Okay I've watched
this scene. What do I notice about it that interests me?" And then [I]
put the camera there. After a couple films you get confident about the
technical chess game you have to do in editing. That does drive the assistant
director crazy, because he'd love to know the shots for the whole day,
and I say, "Well I have no idea. You have to wait." As opposed to someone
like Sam Raimi--who has made some films I really like, Simple
Plan and Spider-Man--he
has every shot worked out before he starts shooting, in a book. Every
single shot, and every single angle, and every single movement of the
actor. There's different ways to skin the cat. But I know that the actors
I'm most interested in working with don't jibe well with all of a sudden
getting a book telling them, on this line you pick up a cigarette. It's
just a different way of working.
Q: Can you talk a little bit about
working with Sean Penn on At Close Range?
Foley: Looking back it was a profound
influence on me because it was only my second film. I had met Sean because
I was casting Reckless [Foley's first film]. I met a whole bunch
of guys who were unknown, including Tom Cruise, who I rejected for the
movie. Sean and I happened to become friends. It was he who had been approached
for the script for At Close Range, and he brought me on. I remember
he broke up with his girlfriend at the time and had no place to live,
so he was living on my living room couch during pre-production. So, I
had the experience of creatively going forward with something in a way
where you had a personal connection to the actor, and how effective that
was. Also I learned that the big struggle to creatively do what you want
to do, you've gotta deal with the realpolitik of the studio and
millions of dollars, and their wanting to control things, and have you
make things as inoffensive to anyone, which dampens the creative spirit.
I learned that Sean and I, him being the star of the movie, if we were
a team, then we could do whatever the hell we wanted, because they're
not going to shut down the movie and recast it. I was only recently out
of film school, so we simply did whatever the hell we wanted, and had
no sense of how the audience is going to react, or what if we fail, because
I'd never tasted failure. I learned an awful lot about how you have to
keep conservatism at bay. I see this in other directors. I love thinking
about the careers of directors and wondering why a whole bunch of people
like Bogdanovich and Friedkin and Coppola--those guys were just incredible--and
then what happened? At a young age it just--pffft. You get influenced
by success and failure. At that time I knew neither, so we just approached
the movie as if we were making a student film. We did some crazy things
because we felt like we could.
Q: Did he suggest you to Madonna
for Who's That Girl?
Foley: Oh yeah, a whole part of that
experience, too, was [that] I got my taste of being at the absolute epicenter
of that part of Hollywood and fame. Oh my god. It was intense. She would
come down and visit in Tennessee, and she's at the height of her thing,
and they had to close off part of the airport, and we had to deal [with]
shooting in the middle of nowhere in Tennessee with hundreds of paparazzi.
We had to keep them at bay. We had to hire extra people. But part of what
I'm interested in as a filmmaker-- I think there's a genre called the
Hollywood Movie that has glamour. My favorite movie of all time is A
Place in the Sun with Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. This
is a very serious, very dark, profound story. The actors are cast perfectly,
but the fact that they're two of the most beautiful creatures on the planet,
and it's shot in the most beautiful way, was right for that story. He
was pursuing glamour and money, and it was all embodied in the visual
of Elizabeth Taylor. I love when that comes together. That becomes a certain
genre that is a Hollywood Movie in the best sense of the word. The ideal
thing is to get a great actor who's perfect for the part who happens to
have that glamour and is a star. I think Glengarry is the most
successful thing I've done so far in that way. You could have made that
movie with a bunch of other people who were brilliant stage actors, but
to get people who were great actors and happened to be stars, it becomes
a different experience that I like. And so I met Madonna and was as seduced
by her as anyone. At Close Range when it came out hardly got distribution--it's
grown over the years thank god for DVDs and stuff--and all of a sudden
[I had] a big Warner Bros. expensive movie. I was sucked into that. It's
the one movie I made that I had no right making, because I have no feel
for making a comedy like that, but I don't regret it at all because it
was a blast. I was friends with her and remain friends with her, and the
only regret I had is that I felt like I let her down in terms of the movie
not working. But, her odyssey of movies is crazy.
Q: Do you think she's a good actress?
Foley: I think that I wouldn't [say]
in the traditional sense of how Al Pacino is a great actor-- But it has
always mystified me, because there's a thing she obviously has in videos
which is magnificent, a visual thing, and why someone can't translate
that-- I think Evita came closest. Desperately Seeking Susan
worked. But it's a real particular thing that some of the best minds--including
my own--have not been able to crack, and her husband obviously was not.
Q: How was it that you rejected Tom
Cruise, and could you call him again?
Foley: I feel like I've been very
lucky in Hollywood that I became very good friends with Sean and with
Tom Cruise. I still know Tom Cruise. We came close to doing something,
we actually traveled together to Moscow in 1987 right after Who's That
Girl investigating a true story about a Marine at the American Embassy
who was tried for treason ultimately. It was a blast going with Tom to
Russia--it was still the Soviet Union--and he was unbelievably famous
because of bootleg copies of Top Gun, oddly enough. But the reason
I feel lucky is because I'm always thinking, "Okay, what's the challenge
to making a good film?" You gotta be cognizant of the system, which involves
movie stars and money and relationships, and make it work toward what
you want to do. So to meet guys who are nobodies and them know them as
they became Somebodies--my relationship to them is a really good one,
a real creative one. I have absolutely no distance, and I make it a point
if I'm doing a movie and I don't know that person is to get to know them
to the point where their movie stardom disappears off the map. A funny
example of that was Pacino shooting Glengarry and we had one scene
which was an exterior in Brooklyn. I had known Al for a year before we
started shooting, and we were waiting for the [assistant directors] to
fix the cars in the streets. We're hanging out in his trailer, we're watching
probably E! channel. There's a knock on the door, okay, they're ready.
So we walk outside, and there's a crowd there behind barricades. We walk
out, and the crowd started going "ooo!" and for a good second and a half
I got excited, like, "Oo, something's going on! Somebody's here!" And
I wanted to see what it was. It took me a second and a half to realize
that it was Al. It's something funny to me, and a good thing to learn,
that fame doesn't exist. If you're sitting in a trailer with somebody
you know, there's no fame, because fame is only something that is reflected
by somebody who's responding to it.
Q: What are you going to do next?
Foley: Oh, I wish I had the answer
to that. One of my failings is that I just don't have the ability to think
ahead. If I'm involved with something for a year, it seems like there's
not enough minutes in a day to service that. It comes to this moment when
this is over. I'm going to go home and say, "Okay, now what? I'm unemployed,
I have no idea." And then I have to dredge through scripts and hope that
one of them catches my attention.
|
'm
working on a Sunday morning; I had to bend the laws of physics to get here;
I haven't had enough coffee; I am being denied Dustin Hoffman. The press junket
for Confidence, the new movie about con artistry from director James
Foley (
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