Episode 670 - Todd Haynes / Sarah Silverman
Marc:Lock the gates!
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you, what the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucksters?
Marc:Mark Maron, this is WTF.
Marc:Welcome to the show.
Marc:Thanks for listening.
Marc:Very excited about this show today.
Marc:Todd Haynes, the director of many great movies, currently the director of Carol, but some of you may know his filmography.
Marc:He got very...
Marc:Famous in some circles with Superstar, the Karen Carpenter story, which was actually very difficult to find for years.
Marc:For years, it was hard to find.
Marc:Still hard to find for very specific reasons that I'll talk to him about.
Marc:But if you were like me, you somehow managed to procure a VHS of it and cherish it for years.
Marc:Also, man, holy shit.
Marc:Can I just thank all of you folks for...
Marc:for for for watching Marin on Netflix all three seasons are there but the feedback that we're getting for season three is amazing uh I didn't get a lot of feedback when it ran initially on IFC I don't know why doesn't matter but once it goes on on Netflix it's just a a full-on tidal wave of of really good feedback and it's uh
Marc:It's exciting because sometimes you think you work in a vacuum, and it's just great that you're watching it, that you're digging it, and it gives me a lot of good momentum, sort of happy momentum leading into the new season.
Marc:We just finished tabling...
Marc:The last of 12 scripts, I have to finish writing the finale and the stories are great.
Marc:It's going to be a completely different show this season, really.
Marc:Those of you who know how season three left off know that Mark needs to the character of Mark, the character of Marin needs a little help.
Marc:So we're going to get in that.
Marc:So don't worry.
Marc:Don't freak out about what happened at the end of season three there.
Marc:But again, thanks for watching it.
Marc:I appreciate the feedback.
Marc:Oh, what I want to do also is clear up something.
Marc:It seems that there are many new listeners to the show.
Marc:And some of you may be baffled.
Marc:by my closing scream, which is Boomer Lives.
Marc:I got a couple of emails recently from people who were like, I don't know.
Marc:What is that story?
Marc:Well, you can listen to all the episodes or I can explain it to you.
Marc:Years ago,
Marc:I had a cat called Boomer, who was an outdoor cat, lived in the back, and I had him a long time, and I loved that guy.
Marc:And right around the first or second day of shooting my first season of Marin, Boomer disappeared and did not return.
Marc:And I have no real idea what happened to him.
Marc:I can speculate for better or for worse.
Marc:But instead of doing that, I honor him by screaming Boomer Lives at the end.
Marc:It's become sort of a mythology, a mythological figure.
Marc:I feel that Boomer watches over me at times.
Marc:I named my production company Boomer Lives Productions.
Marc:So that's that story.
Marc:That's the story of Boomer.
Marc:Now, look.
Marc:You know, sometimes I talk to my comedian friends, you know, for short phone conversations.
Marc:And I wanted to talk to Sarah Silverman.
Marc:Sarah Silverman is in a film that you can watch called I Smile Back.
Marc:OK, it's a serious role.
Marc:It's a heavy role.
Marc:It's a dark role.
Marc:And it was it was fucking deep, folks.
Marc:It's available on iTunes and video on demand.
Marc:And the thing is, is that Sarah is nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Female Lead Performance.
Marc:And I wanted to call her up and talk to her about the experience of doing.
Marc:I'd never seen her in a serious role.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:I'm not sure.
Marc:Maybe she did one other one.
Marc:I'm not sure.
Marc:But this one is.
Marc:it's heavy man.
Marc:And it's weird when you're a comic, like I would never consider myself an actor per se.
Marc:Like I can show up, but I got to bring all of me with me.
Marc:I don't have a lot of craft in place.
Marc:Sometimes it works.
Marc:Sometimes it works better than others.
Marc:Usually I do.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:But this, this performance that Sarah did was like really emotional and, and pretty disturbing.
Marc:And I know for me,
Marc:When you have to show up emotionally for a role and you don't have a lot of acting craft like me as a comic and you've got to get emotional, you know, it's really you getting emotional.
Marc:You don't have any real distance.
Marc:There's no sort of like snapping out of it.
Marc:I'm going to talk to her a little bit about that and about what her plans are in terms of doing these type of roles.
Marc:But but let's let's talk to her now.
Marc:I'm going to call Sarah Silverman.
Guest:Hello?
Marc:Sarah, can you hear me?
Guest:I've never used my home phone.
Marc:Very exciting.
Marc:I'm glad to be part of this exciting moment with you.
Marc:You didn't even know you had a home phone?
Marc:How could you not know?
Guest:I just have never used it.
Guest:And I did know, I've noticed I have like a little phone in my kitchen, but the ringer isn't on and I've never used it.
Guest:And so I just was like, I guess this phone works.
Guest:And I looked up my own number on my phone.
Guest:cell phone, and it was listed.
Marc:Alright, well, look, you know, I love you, first of all.
Marc:And I, you.
Marc:And second of all, I watched your movie because I wanted to talk to you about it, and, um,
Marc:it's it's usually really i did the movie i smile back all right so it's usually like i'll watch movies with people i know like you know our friend louie or whoever todd and sometimes i don't know if you have this experience where you see you know these guys you've known all your life and you see them trying to do a part and you're like oh that's that's just todd doing a part i get lost in todd barry's work are you talking did you say todd
Marc:Well, no, I do, too.
Marc:I mean, he's great.
Marc:He's great.
Marc:He is so good.
Marc:But we also know each other as people, you know.
Marc:But, like, I'm watching you, and I'm like, holy fuck, this is serious.
Marc:You took some, like, serious fucking emotional risks, and, you know, it was disturbing, and I felt I had to, you know, check myself to realize that, you know, you were okay as Sarah, and this was a movie.
Marc:I mean, did you feel that when you were doing this movie where, you know, because he held the camera on you a lot, just kind of emoting.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know what I've found is almost everything I've rolled my eyes at that actors say in interviews has become true for me.
Guest:I couldn't shake it.
Guest:It felt like a low-grade flu for about three weeks after we finished shooting.
Guest:You know what it is?
Guest:I'm not experienced enough...
Guest:In this kind of acting, to be able to just access my emotions and then put them back.
Guest:And I don't have easy access to my emotions.
Guest:And Lainey is... See, I'm saying my character's name like it's another person.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Lainey is... She feels so much and then she covers it expertly.
Guest:So I had to get it all out...
Guest:From their tightly compacted compartments inside me.
Guest:And then I couldn't just put them back easily.
Guest:Like you always hear like Tom Hanks can be the life of the party on the set and then they call action and he's like Captain Phillips.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:I don't have those skills yet, you know, so I just kind of sat with them on my lap.
Guest:It wasn't, you know, I had convinced myself it would still be fun, even though it's bleak, because, you know, we'll have inside jokes, and in between shooting it will be fun, but I'm so glad I didn't know ahead of time that that would not be the case.
Marc:It wasn't?
Marc:There was not a lot of fun on the set?
Guest:Well, everyone was wonderful.
Guest:I mean, it was something that was...
Guest:other than fun that was worthwhile.
Guest:It was exhilarating, but I just, I'm a fun slut.
Guest:Like, if I knew it wouldn't be fun, ahead of time, I would have weaseled out of it, 100%.
Guest:You know me, I like lunch with friends and belly laughs every day, and I'm terrified of the thought that that
Guest:isn't going to happen, you know, for a month.
Marc:Well, something must have been, like, challenging because, like, you know, I know I'm not a great actor, but I do try when I do my show to access feelings, you know, and I've done some fairly disturbing things.
Marc:So whether we're good actors or not, and I think you were great.
Guest:I think you're a beautiful actor.
Marc:Oh, you're so sweet.
Marc:And I thought you were beautiful in this movie, but, like, for you to access those kind of emotions, like, there are several points in this movie, which is, it's bleak, but there's something...
Marc:very real about it like you know it's a story about that you never you don't ever really see on screen in this way where i think you're totally a sympathetic character sort of lost in a pretty hopeless um um you know the grip of of addiction and and and personal problems and and and playing that up against you know a nice family it must have just been sort of heartbreaking but i assume outside of having a
Marc:a good time on set.
Marc:You must've been like, you know, I, I'm, I, you're, you challenged yourself to go to those places.
Guest:And, and it is heartbreaking.
Guest:It is heartbreaking.
Guest:And she's, but also she doesn't know she's in a drama necessarily.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:She's just living her life, but her life is, is pretty heartbreaking.
Guest:And,
Guest:It was a lot of feelings.
Guest:I found myself acting out on set.
Guest:I'd be like, how is there no coffee?
Guest:It's free.
Guest:It's water and coffee.
Guest:I'd be like, who is this person?
Guest:I realized I was like a toddler who didn't know what to do with her feelings.
Marc:Well, you play your cards pretty close to your chest, feelings-wise.
Marc:You're always pretty chipper and fun to be around.
Marc:And I've never seen you lose your shit or cry.
Guest:Yeah, it's not like me, really.
Marc:So how did this happen?
Marc:I know, like I saw Brian Koppelman is in it.
Marc:Now, his wife wrote this thing?
Guest:Yeah, she wrote it.
Guest:It was a novel novel.
Guest:And she adapted it into a screenplay with her writing partner, Paige Dillon.
Guest:Her name is Amy Koppelman, and...
Guest:Yeah, she heard me on Stern and just decided that it was me.
Guest:Like, I just, it was just, I got real lucky.
Marc:It's weird because, I mean, you don't, you know, obviously we are among our peers who are childless, and you really had to step up and behave like a mother, but I guess you've got so many nieces and nephews that, you know, that you have that instinct in you.
Guest:Yeah, and I, you know, I'm 45 and I...
Guest:Don't have kids.
Guest:And, you know, when you're a woman, I'm finding out.
Guest:It's like, I mean, you get so much pressure.
Guest:I got two emails within the span of a week, two weeks ago, from...
Guest:from people in my life who I don't necessarily know really well, who just out of nowhere just said, you should really have kids, and I've been thinking about you, and it's such an odd thing to put on someone, and it's a sadness for me because I love kids.
Guest:I ache for kids, but I don't...
Guest:But I love my life more.
Guest:You can't have it all.
Guest:You really can't.
Guest:Unless you're like a fun dad married to a woman who wants to have kids and understands you're on the road and then you come home and everyone's like, Dad!
Guest:And you can give your best self.
Guest:I could be a fun dad.
Guest:I feel totally prepared for that.
Guest:But I don't have the lifestyle that is conducive to having kids the way I would want to have kids.
Guest:And I've just made that choice.
Guest:But it doesn't mean that
Guest:I'm happy that that choice is like easy.
Guest:I have no regrets or no sadnesses about it.
Guest:And so in a way it was kind of perfect because I have this,
Guest:sadness and this desperation around children that I feel like worked well for this part because she has so much anxiety about loving her kids and not wanting to fuck them up and you know and living in anxiety where she's
Guest:constantly saying, I'm going to fuck them up, I'm going to ruin them, I'm going to abandon them, I'm going to, there's no room for anything else, you know, and it's energy, and kids feel that, you know, it's real, it's science, it's matter, you know, just like crystals and shit.
Marc:Yeah, it's also the struggle, I think, of a self-centered parent.
Marc:Totally.
Marc:And everything you're saying to me about the reasons you have for not wanting kids, which are reasonable, is primarily because, like you said, you're fundamentally like your life the way it is.
Marc:So it's smart.
Marc:I don't have kids either because I'm a selfish, anxiety-ridden mess.
Marc:Absolutely.
Guest:Yeah, and is that selfish?
Guest:Because we're not having the kids.
Marc:No, no, no, no.
Guest:There are plenty of people like us that do.
Guest:I can't.
Guest:It blows my mind how easily people make the decision to have kids.
Guest:I'm totally paralyzed by it.
Marc:Yeah, me too.
Marc:Me too.
Marc:But I'm not saying that we're selfish for not having kids.
Marc:I'm saying that that we identify our selfishness in that we just you know, we don't want to we don't necessarily have the emotional time or the desire completely to make that choice with our life.
Marc:But a lot of people who are like that still have the kids like my parents, for instance.
Guest:But you're glad that they did.
Guest:I'm glad that they did.
Marc:Oh, thank you.
Marc:But I thought that that element of your personality, of being very hard on yourself, you know, because you don't want to be, you don't want to fuck the kids up.
Marc:And this character is fundamentally selfish because she's consumed with her own problems.
Guest:Well, that's exactly right.
Guest:There's no room for anything else.
Guest:She's so, you know, people, you know, and it's funny because there have been parallels to this part with, like, stuff I've...
Guest:thought about in comedy, and of course it's so totally different than comedy, but, you know, just the idea that people think that this self-hatred is modesty, and it's the opposite.
Guest:It's total self-obsession.
Guest:There's no room for anything else.
Guest:So she might be consumed with, I'm going to ruin my kids, I'm going to what if, what if, what if, like that living in that anxiety state.
Guest:It is totally self-
Guest:Consumption.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:You're completely self-consumed because you're not really, like the character is not necessarily capable of nurturing.
Marc:Like all those parts where you're just looking at your kids, looking at your daughter, and you feel this distance there, but you're completely panicked, but you're sort of unable to reach out properly.
Marc:I mean, Jesus Christ, Sarah, that scene where you're fucked up and you go into your daughter's bedroom, that scene with that teddy bear was crazy.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, like, I've been on sets before.
Marc:Was that one of those situations where the director's like, all right, can we clear the set, please?
Guest:Well, there's nothing really to clear because the crew was so bare bones anyway every day.
Guest:You know, it's a $400,000 movie, so there wasn't... Right.
Marc:really excess people on the set at any given time but were they saying things did he say things like you know you know give her space do you need space to sort of figure out and get into this it's really kind of intense when you you're put in a position to have those kind of emotions you know on camera and you're sort of like all right uh action and it's like it's really fucking heavy was it did you feel that when you were doing some of this stuff yeah i just um
Guest:I think I just got to a place where I was so inside that head and it just, everything felt...
Guest:You know, like, you'd think that would be, like, the hardest, like, scene or something, but it wasn't because it was so exhilarating and challenging, and there was so much energy behind it that, you know, it was kind of... Yeah.
Guest:I mean, fun isn't the word, but it was, you know, like, exhilarating.
Marc:Yeah, because you were in it.
Marc:You were totally immersed in it.
Guest:Yeah, I was immersed in it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it is true.
Guest:It was like...
Guest:I don't have my 10,000 hours in of that kind of stuff to snap out of it or to access it easy and then put it back.
Guest:So it was pretty intense.
Marc:But you were willing.
Marc:You were willing to go there, and you showed up for it emotionally.
Marc:I don't know how real people with 10,000 hours of acting or whatever or years of training.
Marc:I do know something about comics, though, is we know how to be fucking present.
Marc:And, you know, when necessary, we can really, you know, be present.
Marc:And you just sort of like you pulled it off.
Marc:And the supporting cast was great, too.
Marc:Josh Charles was great.
Marc:The kids were great.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:So delicious.
Marc:Right?
Marc:They were so good.
Marc:And like at the end, like I emailed you after I saw it, like I just couldn't like at the end of it, you know, I watched it on New Year's Eve and we had to watch something else after because we didn't want to fuck up our New Year's Eve with the intent.
Guest:I can't believe you watched that New Year's Eve.
Guest:I guess there's no good time to watch it.
Guest:I mean.
Marc:Go watch it.
Marc:Well, I don't think there's no good time to watch it, but it is like a very human story and it's a dark story.
Marc:And it's not tragic in the sense that, you know, people die or anything, but it's tragic in its struggle.
Marc:And like I wrote you in the email, like, I want to believe that she's going to be okay.
Marc:You know, like there, and that story comes from a place where, you know, because I'm a recovery guy, I'm like, she can still, you know, pull it together, that woman.
Guest:Everything's going to be all right for her.
Guest:She just has a really, really low bottom.
Right.
Guest:yes and we didn't see it yet but but you know that's the thing that I the thing that I love about this movie is that it interests me about it is that it's there isn't anyone who isn't
Guest:or hasn't been on one side of this depression or addiction in their life.
Guest:And so what you think of her, whether you have empathy or total disdain or you fucking hate her guts or your heart breaks for her, it has only everything to do with your...
Guest:life experience that you're walking into the theater or into your living room with.
Marc:Yeah, absolutely.
Marc:So what happens now?
Marc:I'm very excited that you're nominated for a SAG Award for Best Female Actress.
Marc:That's fucking amazing.
Marc:Isn't that crazy?
Marc:It's exciting.
Marc:Do you want to do more of this type of acting, though, Sarah?
Marc:I don't think I... Yes, yes.
Guest:But I...
Guest:I don't think I can I don't I don't know that I would ever want to do anything this bleak again because it really
Guest:I'm so glad I did.
Guest:I definitely am interested in acting.
Guest:I always have been.
Guest:I just got this chance and got real lucky.
Guest:But also, it's funny, and you know this probably, well, unless you have better stamina than me, but when you shoot your show, you're probably not out doing sets at night.
Marc:No, just on the weekend.
Marc:Yeah, it's really hard.
Guest:I can't even believe you could do that.
Guest:But when I do acting stuff, it takes me away from stand-up.
Guest:And so then when I am done and I can go back to stand-up, I'm like three steps behind where I left off.
Guest:And it's a kind of sisyphysical thing where I can't...
Guest:I'm not – like, I don't have an hour to headline on the road and actually make a living, you know, because I'm – you know, I make no money in acting.
Guest:Right.
Guest:No, no, that makes sense.
Guest:I'm low-rung, you know, which is fine.
Guest:But to make a living, we're comics, and also it's who I am, you know, and it's – you know, I'm envious of people like Todd or Tig who –
Guest:If they have only 15 minutes of new material, they can still go on the road because they can just do crowd work until they have, you know, they're brilliant without material.
Guest:And I don't, like, trust myself enough for that, you know.
Guest:So I feel, I get so deficient in stand-up.
Guest:It's kind of the one thing I can count on, so you feel kind of free-fall-y.
Guest:But I do, you know, I like doing all those things.
Guest:I like doing odd jobs.
Marc:I understand.
Guest:Have you not done stand-up for a month?
Marc:No, I can't remember.
Guest:It's terrifying.
Marc:It's horrible because you go back and you're, like, scared again, and it's fucking ridiculous.
Guest:Yeah, it's just like the gym, you know what I mean?
Guest:Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Guest:Because it's your whole life.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:No, but it was great, and I'm excited for you.
Marc:And I think that ultimately one of the great things is that now that you know you're able to push yourself this far out emotionally, that anything in between your comedy and this type of emotional work is open game now.
Marc:It seems like you could probably handle any role within the parameters of who you are, which is great.
Guest:That's beautiful.
Marc:Aw, thank you.
Guest:That's inspiring.
Marc:I'm glad I said something inspiring.
Guest:You always do.
Marc:Well, I love you, and I hope you win the thing, and I hope I see you soon.
Guest:Me too.
Guest:I love you too.
Marc:Thanks, Sarah.
Bye.
Marc:That was my friend Sarah.
Marc:Sarah Silverman.
Marc:Hope she wins.
Marc:It's very exciting that she was nominated.
Marc:Proud of her.
Marc:I've known her since she was a kid.
Marc:Really.
Marc:I've known her since she went to college and she started stand-up shortly after that.
Marc:I think she wasn't even 20 yet.
Marc:So Todd Haynes.
Marc:Todd Haynes.
Marc:I was thrilled to get the opportunity to talk to Todd Haynes.
Marc:I've been sort of mildly obsessed with his work for years.
Marc:As I began to say at the beginning of the show, I had a VHS of the superstar, the Karen Carpenter story.
Marc:I happened upon the film Poison.
Marc:which actually is three films in one.
Marc:In my recollection, when I was living in San Francisco in the early 90s, it was part of the Gay Film Festival.
Marc:I think it was at the Castro.
Marc:I believe I went to the premiere, and I couldn't wrap my brain around what Todd was trying to say with this film.
Marc:He's a real artist, Todd.
Marc:And I've always been sort of fascinated with him and fascinated with his movies, especially because they confounded me.
Marc:I followed his his career.
Marc:I went to see safe safe.
Marc:Are you kidding me?
Marc:When that movie came out, I don't even know where I was.
Marc:I must have been in New York.
Marc:I remember going to see it.
Marc:I saw it with a friend of mine and I walked out just thinking like, I have no fucking idea what that was about.
Marc:But man, was that compelling?
Marc:It always struck me that Todd Haynes had a vision.
Marc:Like, he made movies, especially the movies he wrote and directed, where he had the freedom to do what he wanted to do, and he had a true artistic vision.
Marc:And the movie Safe never left me.
Marc:Like, there's very few movies that do that.
Marc:There are some big movies that, you know, obviously we all know that you can't get out of your head, but Safe...
Marc:It is a difficult film, and it's sort of cryptic, but it never left my mind.
Marc:When I think about it, it still has an effect on me.
Marc:Velvet Goldmine, that was another one about Bowie and Iggy Pop, fictionalized, but that movie was fucking great.
Marc:What a great period piece.
Marc:Far From Heaven was amazing.
Marc:His riff on a Douglas Sirk film.
Marc:I just have a lot of respect for the guy.
Marc:He takes chances, and he makes real art movies.
Marc:I'm not there.
Marc:Are you kidding?
Marc:The Bob Dylan movie?
Marc:I don't even know what that was.
Marc:But I was like, holy shit, I got to reckon with this.
Marc:And now this new one, Carol.
Marc:which he directed only, but the combination of this script and I guess this story, which is based on a book, and his sensibility, his auteur's vision,
Marc:It was like a perfect match.
Marc:I don't know if you've seen the film, Carol, but to me, it is one of the best love stories I've ever seen.
Marc:It was completely moving to me.
Marc:I've watched it three times and I'm just astounded by what he was able to do with that camera and also what he got out of those actors and the story itself.
Marc:Just spectacular.
Marc:So I was a little nervous here.
Marc:talking to Todd because those of you who've been with me long enough know that if I'm a real fan, I get a little excited.
Marc:But I was really... It's very exciting to talk to a director whose work that you are very familiar with.
Marc:And we had a great conversation.
Marc:And also, I might want to mention that his new movie, Carol, is in theaters now.
Marc:It's nominated for five Golden Globe Awards.
Marc:six independent spirit awards including best director for todd so this is my uh amazing conversation with todd haynes wait before we get into it i i just want to preface this with saying uh this is a this is a little filmy this is this is definitely a film fans conversation all right so here's uh todd haynes and myself talking
Marc:So I'm excited to meet you.
Marc:I had no idea what to expect.
Marc:Some of your movies have profoundly altered my brain.
Marc:No way.
Marc:No, seriously.
Guest:That's pretty cool.
Marc:I have got questions.
Marc:I've got questions.
Guest:I hope I have answers.
Marc:Well, you might not, but I think a guy who makes movies like you should have a couple answers.
Marc:We'll see.
Marc:I mean, just the early ones.
Marc:You've got to have a couple answers.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:No, I think I have.
Marc:You do?
Marc:We'll see where your questions are.
Marc:Well, I don't talk to directors too often, but we're about two years apart in age, so I feel like we've had some of the same influences, and you probably went to college with some friends of mine.
Marc:Where'd you grow up, though?
Marc:I grew up in L.A.
Marc:You grew up in Los Angeles.
Marc:I grew up in LA.
Marc:That's not disappointing.
Marc:That's okay.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like where?
Marc:No, it's good.
Marc:I grew up in the Valley.
Marc:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We were parents in show business?
Guest:Not my folks.
Guest:No?
Guest:My grandfather worked at Warner Brothers.
Guest:As what?
Guest:Worked up from messenger boy to union organizer to head of sec construction in 1940.
Guest:So he was a union sec guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was a union set guy.
Guest:At Warner.
Guest:At Warner's.
Guest:And got, you know, I don't know how much the culture of L.A.
Guest:and the people he was around sort of oriented his politics and his sort of progressive streak.
Guest:But definitely, yeah, they definitely formed while he was there.
Guest:And he left when the blacklist culture just became too, you know.
Guest:Out of disgust?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And his friends were getting blacklisted and he felt it.
Guest:It wasn't him, but it was people he knew and people he admired.
Marc:Within those departments, every department?
Guest:Well, I think he knew, you know, I think he knew writers and there was a warm fraternity in that place.
Guest:And I think he felt it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:There was a small community to movie making at that time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And did you know him well?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:He was a huge part of my life.
Guest:Did you go to set?
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:I didn't know him then.
Guest:Oh, after.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:That was the 30s, 40s.
Guest:But he started his own business.
Guest:He gave money for my film Poison.
Guest:Did he?
Guest:I mean, he helped put me through college.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I called him Bumpy.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And he was an amazing guy.
Guest:And his wife, my grandmother.
Marc:Bumpy.
Marc:Mana.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:Mana and Bumpy.
Guest:What kind of names are those?
Guest:Baby names.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Guest:That stuck.
Guest:That everybody followed.
Guest:All the grandkids followed suit.
Guest:Was that your mom's dad or your dad's dad?
Guest:That was my mom's mom and dad.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And they were pretty awesome people.
Marc:And they were from here?
Guest:They were from ... They were born ... He was born in Portland, Oregon.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Moved when he was a kid.
Guest:I live in Portland, Oregon now.
Marc:Is there any family connection there?
Guest:No, no.
Guest:It was like my sister sort of rediscovered Portland in the 90s, moved there.
Guest:It was always like Wendy's town.
Guest:And I moved after living in New York for 15 years.
Guest:Had enough.
Marc:Yeah, it had changed a lot.
Marc:It's where cultured people run, that Portland.
Marc:It is.
Marc:Yeah, you know?
Marc:It is.
Marc:I hope they know what to do.
Guest:Yeah, other people run to Florida.
Guest:Right?
Guest:But, I mean, they have amazing human resources in Portland, and I don't think Portland knows.
Guest:Like, what do you mean?
Guest:Well, just there's amazing people there.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And people go there to be in Portland.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Not because there's industry there, not because there's really jobs there, not because there's a university there.
Marc:Because it's Portland.
Marc:Because it's Portland.
Marc:I like it all right, but I've never been sort of like, I got to live here.
Marc:I mean, it's a little odd to me.
Marc:It's structurally, and the way it's laid out's a little peculiar.
Marc:It seems a little dark, which I usually like.
Marc:But I never quite got a handle on it.
Marc:I've had some good sandwiches.
Marc:There's some good food there.
Marc:There's some really good food there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, I left at a time that I needed to change, and maybe even more than I knew.
Guest:And I went away to write and get out of the city.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I met a lot of really cool people who were just not fully defining their lives by their careers and their ambitions.
Guest:Right.
Guest:People who were just living life.
Guest:Kind of living life, artists, writers.
Guest:And I think I was going through a little bit of a midlife crisis.
Guest:I started hanging out with people about 10 years younger than me.
Guest:That'll help.
Guest:and yeah either way and then they were at that point they were still unattached and there was that sense of fluidity and movement you know right and it reflected my life maybe a little more as a filmmaker and people my peers in right in new york and that and then of course the music stopped they all coupled up now they all have babies now i'm now they're all odd man out exactly what are we gonna do with todd yeah old geezer
Marc:He's hanging around again.
Marc:Wish you had some friends.
Marc:So, all right.
Marc:Well, let's go through it then.
Marc:So your interest in film started when?
Guest:Well, my interest in film, I think, started, you know, when I saw my first movie when I was three years old.
Marc:What was your first movie?
Marc:My actual first movie?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Do you remember?
Yeah.
Marc:Well, the one I remember, I remember going to Radio City with my grandmother to see something called The Red Tent, which was- Like a Disney thing?
Marc:No, no.
Marc:It was this horrible ice survival movie.
Marc:Scary.
Marc:Yeah, it was disturbing.
Marc:But we went to Radio City.
Marc:I think we were in the city.
Marc:She goes, I'd like to take you.
Marc:I don't think she put my research into it.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But I feel like that was one of the first ones I really remember seeing.
Marc:And you remember the show, the Radio City show before?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I remember the Rockettes a bit.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But I just remember a guy that went to die in a hole of ice.
Marc:Like, he had given up.
Marc:Yikes.
Marc:I just remember.
Marc:Yeah, he dug a hole in the ice, and they just left him.
Marc:It was traumatizing.
Marc:And then my other grandparents, when I was like eight or nine, accidentally took me to Deliverance.
Marc:What?
Marc:Yeah, my early movie-going experience, I don't think they knew what we were getting into.
Marc:Look, I just watched that recently, and I did not remember it being as graphic as it was.
Marc:You were a kid when you went to see Deliverance.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Mark, I think that explains a lot.
Guest:Does it?
Marc:I think that might.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Well, what was yours?
Guest:I hope it was better.
Guest:No, mine was, I guess, past the code.
Guest:It was Mary Poppins.
Guest:That was three.
Guest:1964.
Guest:It had some kind of seismic effect on my brain.
Guest:It provoked a kind of intense, almost obsessive, creative reaction to the movie.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Where I had to reproduce it, draw pictures of Mary Poppins constantly, act out scenes from Mary Poppins constantly.
Guest:some psychosis really that in you loved it i loved it and it it touched some crazy nerve and i'm and i'm sure the the maternal figure had some part in that and uh you know the spectacle of that movie with its animation and its live action and it's you know the music sure how are things at home though generally
Guest:They were good.
Guest:They were stable.
Guest:Yeah, that's good.
Guest:Parents fought, but they sort of fought it out.
Guest:They stayed together.
Guest:Did they?
Guest:They did.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, I mean, there's also that escape thing, because I watched your film today.
Marc:I watched Carol, which is like, what a great love story.
Marc:Well, yeah.
Marc:That's why I sort of wanted to do it.
Marc:I mean, it's a real love story in a very deep way.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And there were points where I didn't even know why I was experiencing emotion.
Marc:Right.
Guest:That's cool.
Marc:Well, yeah.
Marc:I don't know if you're getting it, but I don't know what the fuck is wrong with me.
Marc:I cry about everything now.
Marc:I just get weepy at shit.
Marc:Did you lose a parent recently?
Marc:No, I didn't lose anybody.
Marc:I think I'm just watching my life go away.
Guest:I lost my mom in 2010, and that produces surprising moments of sentimental affect.
Guest:Like, whoa, I just walked past a flower patch and, you know, I'm crumbled.
Marc:Yeah, and mine usually has to do with story.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like, I haven't had the kind of, like, just flowers or anything.
Marc:Right, Proustian.
Marc:No, not quite like that.
Marc:But, like, you know, it turns in stories and moments and things that are loaded up.
Marc:But we can get to Carol later.
Marc:I did love it, though.
Marc:Like, I love the way it looked.
Marc:It was tight.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Took a lot of work to make it look like that.
Marc:It did.
Guest:We didn't have a lot of money, and we didn't have a lot of time.
Marc:I don't even know how you managed that.
Marc:It's very hard to make that effective in the tone of that time.
Marc:What was that, the 40s?
Guest:Early 50s.
Marc:Early 50s.
Guest:But you're right.
Guest:It wasn't the full-on 50s yet.
Guest:It really felt like the end of the 40s, 52 into 53.
Guest:But Eisenhower had not yet taken office.
Guest:He had been elected, and you see his inaugural address toward the end of the movie.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But it really wasn't that Eisenhower gloss.
Right.
Marc:Because I think I've seen all of your movies except for the shorts.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And I did see the Karen Carpenter story.
Marc:You did?
Marc:Yeah, I had it on videotape.
Marc:I don't know where the hell I got it, but I had it.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:And I used to show people it.
Marc:I'm like, I can't watch this anywhere else.
Marc:I got a copy.
Marc:Awesome.
Marc:But that felt like a feature, wasn't it?
Guest:That was like 47 minutes, like a weirdly length, too long for a short, too short for a feature.
Marc:And I believe I saw the premiere of Poison at the Castro Theater.
Guest:Oh my God, no way.
Marc:At the Castro Theater.
Marc:Did it premiere at the Castro Theater?
Marc:It probably premiered.
Marc:During the Gay Film Fest?
Marc:Because I was living in, basically in San Francisco in 92.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Would that have been about right?
Guest:That would be about right.
Guest:That would be exactly right.
Marc:And I bit some pieces of that movie lodged in my head, mostly the horror part.
Marc:I know there was three- The black and white part.
Marc:The black and white part.
Guest:Yeah, with the pus coming out of the guy.
Marc:It drips into his hot dog while he's eating his food.
Marc:Yeah, that kind of stuff kind of stuck with me.
Marc:The psychotronic kind of- The red tent thing.
Marc:Black and white.
Marc:Yeah, that went home.
Marc:Carnival of souls.
Marc:Safe I never recovered from because I've never been so-
Marc:like enraptured by a movie that I did not fucking understand.
Marc:It's a long movie, I remember.
Marc:I remember I went with people, it's like two and a half hours or something.
Marc:No, it's not that long, but it probably feels that long.
Marc:Okay, so that was intentional?
Guest:Well, it has a pace all of its own.
Guest:And it has that whole final chapter in this crazy new age camp.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:I remember being like, is that guy evil or is he good?
Guest:Well, because he's described as an amazing leader with AIDS.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that was a MacGuffin.
Guest:That was a misleader on my part because I wanted everybody to think, oh, wow, he's got to be a good guy.
Marc:He's got AIDS.
Marc:But he's still one of those guys that runs a place like that.
Guest:And he basically is there to tell you that you're responsible for your own illness.
Guest:The way people were telling a lot of people with HIV at the time, like Louise Hay, the New Age guru, you know, writer.
Guest:That, you know, your immoral lifestyle.
Guest:Well, not even that.
Guest:That you...
Guest:If you learn how to love yourself, you'll get rid of your HIV.
Guest:So it comes from a place of love, right?
Guest:But that entraps the sufferer.
Marc:Right, and that's 11 years in.
Marc:That's like 95, so people are really dying.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:But I remember I was with people and they were like, what?
Marc:And I'm like, I don't know what, but it meant something.
Marc:There's something to that thing.
Marc:It was very powerful and I love her.
Marc:She's amazing.
Guest:And that was a really crazy role.
Guest:That was like an impossible role.
Marc:Well, we can talk about it essentially what it was.
Marc:The Velvet Gold Mine I saw because I love all those guys.
Marc:I think we have some similar heroes.
Marc:Far From Heaven.
Marc:I loved it.
Marc:The look of that thing.
Marc:But we're going to go backwards.
Marc:I'm not there.
Marc:I saw.
Marc:Found it difficult.
Marc:It was difficult.
Marc:Mm-hmm.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:Are you a Dylan fan?
Marc:Yeah, I'm a big Dylan fan.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But once we got to the sort of weird Western town with Calexico and those guys.
Marc:But Carol.
Marc:Okay, so let's start there.
Marc:So it's taken from a short story or a novel.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:It's taken from Patricia Highsmith's second novel.
Guest:She wrote Strangers on a Train first, her first outing.
Guest:The Hitchcock.
Guest:That she sold to Alfred Hitchcock.
Guest:Okay, so this is an old novel.
Guest:In her early 20s.
Guest:And I don't know what the date of Strangers on a Train was, but she wrote The Price of Salt, which is what Carol's based on, and was published in 52.
Guest:How did you come to that subject matter?
Guest:This came to me.
Guest:This is the only film I've made so far that I didn't originate and write and sort of struggle to get into being on my own.
Guest:You were hired as a director.
Guest:I was brought in.
Guest:I mean, basically, the person who'd been shepherding at last is Elizabeth Carlson, who's an English producer, who I've known for years.
Guest:She's an old, old, old friend.
Guest:And Kate was attached to play Carol and Sandy Powell was attached, the costume designer who I'd worked with.
Guest:This is my third time with Sandy.
Guest:So I'd heard about it.
Guest:And I think they were moving from director to director or something.
Guest:And my fall opened up in 2013 and they came to me with the project.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And who wrote the script?
Guest:Phyllis Nagy, this woman who'd been with the project the longest.
Guest:She'd probably been with Carol for almost 15 years, believe it or not.
Marc:Because it sort of functions thematically as a companion piece to Far From Heaven in a way.
Guest:People have definitely talked about it in that context.
Guest:To me, they're really different in style and in tone.
Guest:Definitely.
Guest:But yeah, they both deal with homosexuality in the 1950s.
Guest:Secret.
Guest:Secretive lives or lives of people discovering things about themselves.
Marc:And horrible and desire kind of like pounding its way through societal norms and personal repression.
Guest:But in Far From Heaven, I really wanted to put you in this
Guest:slightly strange position where you're aligned with the wife who basically has to stand by the family institution while the husband in secret is dealing with his feelings and his homosexuality.
Guest:But we're aligned with the wife.
Guest:We don't really have access to what he's doing and where he goes.
Guest:I mean, we get little glimpses of it.
Guest:But we're really in her story, which is the more passive side of the story.
Marc:But once established that the husband's leading this secret gay life, the emotional story is more with her, even if it's passive.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:Because she's got to struggle with her feelings.
Guest:She's got to struggle with her feelings and an outlet for them, which she finds unexpectedly with the character that Dennis Haysbert plays, the gardener, the African-American gardener.
Marc:Which is loaded on a couple levels.
Marc:Totally.
Guest:So you have sort of race and gender and sexuality in this little crazy knot.
Marc:And to frame it in an homage almost perfectly to Douglas Sirk, what was it about those films that compelled you to use that as a framework, as a context?
Guest:I first encountered Sirk in college.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And they're the most fascinating films.
Guest:I mean, they're not easy films.
Guest:I think a lot of people encounter them first on late night TV, watching Written on the Wind or- Right.
Guest:And your first reaction is like, look at that color.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Look at that color and how sexist.
Guest:And-
Guest:And then there's something about those movies that feel like they cut through to some level of truth almost more powerfully than if they were done in a kind of documentary style.
Guest:There's something about the artificial worlds that they inhabit.
Guest:And these impossible interiors that seem to be crowding in on the characters in the movies.
Guest:They're like little dolls in dollhouses where the walls are slowly crushing these people.
Guest:Dolls come up in this film.
Guest:Dolls come up in this film.
Guest:Dolls have been sort of trailing me from the beginning.
Guest:What is it about dolls?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:What did you study in college?
Guest:I studied film, but I studied art, but when I went to Brown, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And when I went to Brown, there was this new program within the English department called semiotics.
Guest:You know, it was like the post-Freudian, post-feminist, post-structuralist.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:There was a couple of guys I knew who were studying film at BU, and I felt fascinated with it, but I couldn't wrap my brain around it.
Marc:Right.
Yeah.
Marc:So you were in it.
Guest:I was in it, and I didn't know what it was either.
Guest:Did anybody?
Guest:Well, yeah.
Guest:I think I started to understand exactly what it was about when I went to one of my first semiotics courses.
Guest:And it was about sound theory in movies.
Guest:And they were talking about the classic Hollywood text.
Guest:And they said, and this film ends with the obligatory heterosexual closure.
Yeah.
Guest:And I went, whoa.
Marc:And you were out and gay.
Guest:Well, I was out and gay, but I was like, you just said the unsayable.
Guest:You just said the thing that we're all supposed to think is natural, is unspoken, is expected in movies, in resolutions of movies and stories.
Guest:And you just outed it.
Guest:right yeah and all of a sudden i was like okay i get what this is it's talking about the language of our society that we don't notice as constructed as intentional and confining and confining and putting everybody in their places even when they don't even know it even when we all salute it sure it's the it's the the big ever uh pervasive cock of patriarchy totally
Guest:Well, that's exactly it.
Guest:That was a, that was a big word.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Patriarchy too.
Guest:Uh huh.
Guest:Uh, but, uh, no, it was, that to me was like, you know, I know I get this, but I didn't really know what, it was like a parallel language to things I think I was already starting to feel and think and.
Marc:But that was almost like the hermeneutics of American cinema.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:And all cultural production.
Guest:It was sort of saying, look, there are all of these languages that keep people in place, that conform us.
Guest:to a sort of set of terms.
Guest:It's why I think the whole idea of identity as something that is somewhat of a straitjacket that most of us like to think of as something natural and innate that we just find and go, yeah, that's who I am.
Marc:Without realizing it's a mind fuck.
Guest:It's a mind fuck and it keeps you straight jacketed to something or other.
Marc:But like some of us might not have the courage in a way to sort of start.
Marc:Most people are constructing their sense of self.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Totally.
Marc:If they were lucky, they were properly parented on some level and given the freedom to do that with a certain amount of autonomy, but with some parental guidance that enabled a safe place for them to do that.
Marc:But most people come from chaos and bullshit.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So the struggle for self becomes- A struggle for stability or some sense of normalcy, I guess.
Marc:The idea of identity being a construct, you can have a lot of people losing their mind every day.
Marc:Except in movies.
Guest:Except in movies, but except, or like, let's talk, you know, like in Glamrock.
Guest:Like all of a sudden, these teenage kids who are in a state of constant instability, uncertainty,
Guest:Have this image of a bisexual space alien up on stage prancing around Bowie or Iggy Pop.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Who was also dealing with gender.
Guest:A little lower than space.
Guest:A little lower than space, way down at the bottom, but playing with notions of masochism, sadism.
Marc:Without knowing it, I think, on Iggy's part.
Marc:I think you captured that in Velvet Goldmine.
Marc:The Bowie character was so aware of the drama and the theatrics.
Marc:And Iggy is just like a grunting animal.
Guest:He was, but they knew that they were challenging the kind of dictum of the 60s.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:The Velvet Underground and the Stooges and even the Doors.
Guest:There was something they were attacking about a kind of holistic idea of peace and love that they wanted to kind of undermine.
Marc:Yeah, the idea of sex and love was, again, contextual and limited.
Guest:And started to feel oppressive.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And started to feel like, you know, my brother's back at home with his Beatles and his Stones.
Guest:And that's it.
Guest:But all the young dudes are doing something else.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:And so it felt like a new era.
Marc:So when you were sitting in that semiotics class, part of you realizing you hear this, they're saying the unspoken, and you're like, well, I'm going to just break that up.
Marc:Like, that's my challenge.
Guest:Yeah, or at least like, you know, the thing is, is that what I dig is that those codes of expectation where we expect a movie to resolve a certain way.
Guest:Those aren't things to just throw away.
Guest:They're things to actually use, you know, right?
Guest:Like a spectator is a participant.
Guest:And they have expectations and they want to enter a story and they want it to move a certain way and they want it to move back another way.
Guest:And they're anticipating how it moves.
Guest:Like that's a powerful thing.
Guest:So it's cool to like use.
Guest:I think it's exciting to see the powers of the imagination of the spectator and stoke them along, but then put up little boundaries or little obstacles.
Marc:Well, that's sort of like it.
Marc:So that that's sort of a French new wave trick in a way that you had to sort of like, you know, kind of kick them in the head and make them realize that they're watching a movie.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And that, you know, still provide pleasure.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And desire and excitement, you know, and still use the fact that they're investing themselves.
Marc:But your last two big movies.
Marc:Far From Heaven and Carol, well, I'm not there, is in the middle, but these two movies are standard structure.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Really.
Guest:I mean, I think, you know, it's like, I think there was a place where the idea that, you know, a school girl could get a crush on her teacher.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Was not completely outside of our, yeah, yeah.
Guest:You know, I think what's interesting is we always think, oh, things were way more repressive in the past and we've just moved forward.
Guest:You know, as a culture and everything's more permissive today.
Marc:But you forget that there were humans.
Guest:There were humans and there were all kinds of weird accidental, you know, little places of potential space or little accidents.
Guest:And glam rock is a big accident.
Guest:That was one reason why I wanted to explore it.
Guest:But like when you see Carol take Therese out to lunch or the two women check into a motel together in 1953, you realize, oh, wow, if they were a heterosexual unmarried couple, it would be scandalous.
Guest:But an older woman and a younger woman checking into a motel, no problem.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So there are these little places of movement.
Guest:This novel has been distinguished by a lot of lesbian fiction that preceded it for having a non-punishing ending.
Guest:where the lesbians didn't end up in one of them in a sanitarium or the other off the edge.
Marc:Is that why you like the project?
Guest:No, I didn't really know much about the novel before I came to it.
Guest:It came to me kind of, I didn't know about The Price of Salt and its sort of legacy.
Guest:My lesbian friends were quick to remind me how uninformed I was.
Marc:And were they quick to remind you during the process of like, don't fuck this up, Todd?
Guest:Don't fuck this up, dude.
Guest:You're the mascot.
Guest:But no, I wasn't interested in making a Things Are So Much Better Now movie.
Guest:I really loved how much it reminded me of being in the dark, falling in love with somebody for the first time, being young in a dad.
Marc:At a movie theater or just in life?
Guest:No, in life.
Guest:When I was a kid.
Marc:When it consumes you?
Marc:When it consumes you.
Guest:And you are like absolutely sort of shut out of the world.
Guest:And you are reading every sign that they offer you.
Guest:Every signal.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it all, your fate rests in, what did that gesture mean?
Guest:What did that word mean?
Guest:What did that look mean?
Guest:Where's it going?
Guest:Do they like me?
Guest:And how, in a way, how pathological that is.
Guest:Or how, you know, like what I love about Patricia Highsmith's, what she does in the novel is that all her other novels are about the criminal mind.
Guest:And you're locked inside that festering mental state.
Guest:And this is about the amorous mind, but it's a similarly festering state.
Guest:For both of them.
Guest:For both of them, but particularly the one who's in the more powerless position.
Marc:And I was like, so as you look at that script and as you visualize it as a film, obviously, you know, from looking at it, you said to yourself, somehow we have to capture this time perfectly.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:And in a really different way than Far From Heaven, which was really all filtered through that kind of highly artificial and specific language that comes out of- We used that old Technicolor, didn't you?
Guest:Well, we didn't.
Guest:That was the one thing we wished we could have done, have a real Technicolor-
Marc:But you felt like you saturated pretty good.
Guest:We did it all non-digitally.
Guest:It was all done on film, and we didn't even finish it on a DI the way people do now, a digital intermediate.
Guest:There was no... We did all non-digital color timing and something like that.
Guest:Optical.
Marc:Because you wanted to have your hands on the cellular.
Guest:And you still could then.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there were people who could do all the work optically, not digitally.
Marc:And do you think it made a difference?
Guest:I think it did.
Guest:I think it really did.
Marc:And I learned so much about the process by doing it that way.
Marc:Makes a difference in your choices.
Marc:Because you don't have a million takes.
Marc:No, exactly.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Well, all the choices are curtailed in a period, are informed by the period, by the details, by what you see in the frame, because you only have so much money and you got to be able to afford it.
Marc:Right.
Guest:You know, that was true for Carol as well.
Marc:What struck me about Carol, though, is it would have been fine in black and white.
Marc:Yeah, it would have made sense in black and white as well.
Marc:But you were so tight with the period and also with the sort of muted colors that outside of the drive, I think you would have lost a lot in black and white, but it felt like a period film.
Guest:Well, it's sort of desaturated, like the color photography process that we were looking at from the early 50s.
Marc:Now, was that just impulsive, or did you see with your semiotic brain that that had meaning?
Marc:When we opened the film on a subway grate, did you have a plan for that, or was that just impulsive?
Guest:Well, subways and trains were sort of a theme in the film, the little toy train that Rooney- And that was in the script?
Guest:That was in the book and the script.
Guest:It's described very intensely in the book from the source material.
Marc:Does it have thematic meaning to you?
Guest:Well, what's interesting is it's not just an example of Therese not following the sort of conventional choices of loving dolls and she likes boy toys more.
Marc:She works at a department store.
Marc:She works at a department store.
Marc:The doll department.
Guest:And she offers Carol that maybe your kid would like a toy train instead of a doll.
Guest:Your daughter.
Guest:Your daughter.
Guest:But the train is described by Highsmith as a kind of almost having a madness of captivity.
Guest:Like it's like spinning around on its tracks and it's maybe going to fall off.
Marc:And then, okay, so there you have the grate beneath it, the madness of captivity.
Guest:And that Therese is sort of in a state of potential captivity in this job.
Guest:Almost paralysis.
Guest:And paralysis.
Yeah.
Guest:And there's a character that is in the figures in the novel that we actually did shoot in the story and we ended up cutting out to trim it down.
Guest:Ruby Robichek was a sort of career shop woman who Therese sort of sees as a potential future for where she, you know, scary idea of where she might end up.
Marc:Well, you kind of got that feeling with the overbearing manager.
Marc:The manager.
Marc:That read as like, well, that's where you end up.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So thematically, what do you feel as a poet who makes movies was the kind of message of this movie?
Guest:The message of the movie, I don't know if I have a single message.
Guest:I think I wanted to explore the love story.
Guest:I felt like I'd never really done that per se in a film before.
Marc:So that's what it was.
Guest:And so it made me look at love stories and made me look at how point of view functions so interestingly in love stories, where you're on the side of the weaker party.
Guest:And in war, it's the object that gets conquered.
Guest:And in love, it's the subject that gets conquered.
Guest:So we're on the side of the vulnerable.
Marc:It kind of rocked a little bit.
Marc:And that changes in the course of the movie.
Guest:It starts where Therese is that person.
Guest:And by the end, and a lot of it, all the shots through windows and through glass and reflections and all that stuff.
Guest:sort of makes you aware, or I hoped it would, of who's looking at who, who's on this side of the lens and who's on that side.
Guest:And Therese is an aspiring photojournalist herself and is learning how to frame the world.
Guest:Her first subject becomes Carol.
Guest:But toward the end of the movie, when things change,
Guest:It's Carol who's in the cab seeing Therese cross the street, assuming her role in the world, kind of looking more like Carol than she ever has.
Marc:Yeah, it was a beautiful movie.
Marc:And there was one scene there where they're in the car, and you're shooting outside of Therese's window, and she takes a hit off her cigarette.
Marc:It's a sort of tense scene, and she coughs.
Guest:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Marc:And I thought to myself, he must have been like, we've got to use the cough one, because that was a real cough.
Guest:It's like we had two takes.
Guest:Oh, that was it?
Guest:Something like that.
Guest:I mean, it was a tight one.
Marc:Doesn't look like a tight one.
Marc:All right, now let's move back to the Dylan movie.
Marc:And you have some explaining to do.
Marc:Because I saw the conceit.
Marc:It seemed very high-minded.
Marc:It seemed very art film to me that you're going to have a movie about Dylan that he signed off on, which of course he would.
Guest:uh i i can't like i've met jeff rosen once and i imagine like he took this like no bob's gonna love this right right did he is that what happened pretty much yeah it was like this is something alan ginsburg once said about dylan he's like a collection of archetypes is that so that was a cluster of that was what jeff said but was that my comment when he heard my concept but was that your concept
Guest:Not based on that.
Guest:No, but like, what was your concept going in?
Guest:My concept was just simply like, you know, I got back into Dylan at this sort of, you know, in the end of the 90s.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, we missed the beginning, really.
Marc:The 60s, right?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I mean, I was into him in high school.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he was a driving voice and kind of energy in my high school years.
Guest:But I sort of, I wasn't paying as much attention to his music during the 80s.
Marc:and just for some reason just felt this need for dylan in my life i think yeah you got a symptomatic thing visions of joanna looms large you know like you know that's how for for guys our age you're always going back to dylan and you can go back to whatever period you want exactly exactly but like in my mind it's like all the answers are in visions of joanna it's all in visions of joanna it's all in that
Guest:record yeah i mean really that that and i have you know i have you know amazing cuts from from so many periods of his life in the film you know the soundtrack got to use that fucking movie is crazy masterpiece yeah you got all those people to fucking do covers and then we got all the dylan stuff and we got some really rare and unreleased stuff like the song i'm not there so comes from uh that's a good song and didn't really amazing didn't uh who sonic youth cover that's a really cool really cool version
Guest:So, okay, so the plan was... So I just started to read biographies about Dylan for the first time when I was getting back into the music.
Guest:And it was around the time the bootleg series stuff was just starting to get released.
Guest:And that stuff kind of blew my mind.
Guest:I hadn't heard a lot of that material.
Guest:And it took me back to periods I loved.
Guest:But all the biographies described the same unbelievable shape-shifting guy during the 60s.
Guest:Where literally, you'd meet him in April of 64.
Guest:And he'd be channeling, well, it would be earlier if it was Woody Guthrie.
Guest:And he would be talking like Guthrie.
Guest:Woody Guthrie and dressed like Woody Guthrie and singing.
Guest:And rambling Jack Elliot.
Guest:Yeah, and rambling Jack Elliot and completely channeling that tradition and encompassing it and creating so much work.
Guest:And then people would meet him literally three, four months later and he'd be a different guy.
Guest:He'd look different.
Guest:He'd speak different.
Guest:He was doing different music.
Guest:He'd rejected everything he'd done before.
Guest:And this would keep defining...
Guest:all of those remarkable outputs of music throughout the 60s, and culminating in really well-known moments, sort of like explosions, where he plugs in electric, or when he finds Jesus in the 70s.
Guest:Not bad records.
Guest:Amazing records.
Guest:I mean, Slow Train Coming is a fucking beautiful, perfect record.
Guest:Incredible.
Guest:Beautiful production, beautiful love songs, really.
Guest:Gorgeous love songs.
Guest:So I just thought, wow, the only way to really describe
Guest:This guy is in multiple, you know, is to show literally the fact.
Guest:And because each time a new guy would come into being, there would need to sort of be an assassination of the last one.
Guest:There was a way in which just to keep creating and keeping a little space where he could keep making stuff, which I think is sort of how he survives.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So he has to sort of do away with the expectations, the burdens, the pressures of what he did before, which had been so influential and attracted such a following each time.
Guest:So I think it was basically a practice for survival.
Guest:Right.
Guest:For an intensely creative individual.
Guest:But it also meant that each of the... You could demarcate these different people in these different moments.
Guest:And the 60s were so combustive and so concentrated.
Guest:And Blanchett was the 60s.
Guest:Blanchett was... Blanchett was 66.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Blanchett was the electric Dylan.
Marc:And who was right before?
Guest:Ben Whishaw was sort of the poet.
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:The kind of Art Rambeau-inspired Dylan who was sort of being interviewed.
Guest:The B-Nic inspired Dylan.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:When he had fully given up the sort of folk, you know.
Marc:And Ginsburg took hold of his brain.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:But he was also starting to speak in code David Cross.
Marc:You did, right.
Marc:He had Dave play against him.
Marc:That's right.
Guest:Yeah, and he did a pretty amazing job.
Guest:So great.
Guest:But yeah, he was starting to speak.
Guest:His interviews from that time were so remarkable, and they were like extensions of the lyrics that were starting to depart from a sort of socially conscious...
Guest:right you know populism yeah yeah the people's music exactly he was he's out there to disappoint pete seager totally totally break the rules and you know when he was in his high folk moment he had the answers just like when he was in his christian moment he had the answers and when he was when he rejected that he said there are no answers oh yeah and that screwed with people's minds and expectations
Guest:So, that was the spirit of it, but I also wanted it to be... I did want it to be fun.
Guest:I don't know if it was so fun for you.
Marc:No, it was fun, but there was like... It became like... What can I compare it to?
Marc:You know, when...
Marc:You're a great filmmaker and you're an auteur and you're a visionary filmmaker.
Marc:And when you trust somebody to be a great artist, you have to reckon with what they're doing.
Marc:So if it's not sitting with you, usually it's on me.
Marc:So I got to decode what the intention is here.
Marc:It's like watching the David O. Russell, I Heart Huckabees.
Marc:What is that?
Marc:It's a farce.
Marc:It's difficult.
Marc:It's bizarre.
Marc:It's like an Ionesco play.
Guest:You kind of can't look away.
Marc:Right, you're compelled.
Marc:And I felt that, but there were so many different styles that you were moving through because of the timeline you were doing it.
Marc:So I did not like the movie.
Marc:There was a couple of questions, like why Richard Gere at some point?
Marc:And there was part of me that felt like,
Marc:I like this Wild West Town thing with these hippies around.
Marc:Why can't we have a little more of that?
Marc:So part of me was like, that seems like a cool place to hang out.
Marc:And you kept moving.
Guest:It's almost like it should have been an HBO miniseries with many parts or something like that.
Marc:But you couldn't have visualized it like that, right?
Marc:I mean, that movie is a movie to you.
Guest:No, it really is a movie to me, and it needed to intercut.
Guest:I mean, Harvey Weinstein didn't care for the Western part either.
Yeah.
Guest:I liked it.
Guest:I dug it too.
Guest:And I thought it was a necessary outgrowth.
Guest:That was the Rolling Thunder part, right?
Guest:It was the Rolling Thunder part and it was the Woodstock.
Guest:It was like, get me out of this urban crazy life that really is only leading to disaster.
Guest:It was going to lead to a critical mass that was not going to be a healthy one for Dylan.
Guest:And the motorcycle crash was sort of the symbolic thing.
Marc:So, you know, you order as an artist who made a decision to make this film from your own fucking mind and heart was reckoning with these closures that Dylan with these obstacles and departures from self.
Marc:So this is an identity thing.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:It really was.
Guest:It was a multiplying of identity and a refusal of fixed identity.
Guest:with the artist who received probably more pressure to keep fulfilling expectations and supplying... From the record business.
Guest:From the record business, from the audiences, from an entire culture that he was inspiring, you know?
Guest:And that obviously was inspiring him as well.
Guest:And you love him for that.
Guest:Of course.
Guest:God.
Guest:It's fantastic.
Guest:I never met him.
Guest:You have no idea what he thought of the film?
Guest:He finally talked about the movie in a Rolling Stone interview that came out after a good year after the film came out.
Guest:And he praised the film.
Guest:And he dug, of course, he dug Kate.
Guest:He was sort of blown away by Kate.
Guest:He was like, I should have put Kate in Mastin Anonymous.
Guest:What the hell was I doing in that movie?
Guest:But there was a moment, I have to say, with Jeff Rosen, who really was our liaison through the whole process.
Marc:That's Dylan's personal assistant.
Marc:His guy.
Marc:His guy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the keeper of the gate, the guard of the gate of the Dylan...
Guest:He still got an office in New York over by Irving Plaza.
Guest:Yeah, crammed with all the stuff.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:As far as I know.
Guest:But there was a point where we had to extend the rights and I was doing more work on the script and doing more research and I was like talking to Jeff about it and I said, Jeff, you know,
Guest:I feel a burden, man.
Guest:You're giving me the rights to Dylan's life and music for the first time ever to make into a film.
Guest:I know he loves movies.
Guest:And I feel I have a responsibility to get it right.
Guest:And he said, and this is Dylan's manager.
Guest:This is Dylan's gatekeeper talking.
Guest:And he said, Todd, don't worry about that shit.
Guest:You just have to make your own weird story and your own interpretation of what this is about.
Guest:That's what you're doing.
Guest:And I'm like, Jesus, what?
Guest:Who gets to do this?
Guest:You know, I mean, I felt really it was almost like the freedom of artistic integrity that Dylan demands.
Guest:I was being handed out.
Marc:Well, he'd made a couple of forays into weirdo movies.
Guest:He absolutely had.
Guest:Renaldo and Clara.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Eat the Document, which is a fantastic film, which Dylan edited the first half hour of.
Guest:It's the color companion piece to Don't Look Back that Scorsese used a lot of footage from in No Direction Home.
Guest:But it's all that color stuff from the electric gear.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And Dylan cut it together in this crazy experimental documentary.
Guest:And Robbie Robertson, I think, finished the cut.
Guest:And so Dylan's never felt completely possessed.
Marc:And he was also acting.
Marc:He played Alias and Peckinpah's Billy the Kid.
Guest:Peckinpah and Billy the Kid.
Guest:And that was a reference to the Western part.
Guest:It's why it's Billy the Kid.
Guest:And the tone, the color was like Peckinpah.
Guest:It's like those hippie Westerns from the late 60s.
Guest:I love those.
Guest:Butch Cassidy and...
Marc:Oh, God, how great is that movie?
Marc:When was the last time you watched that?
Marc:Oh, it's so well done.
Marc:It's so beautifully shot.
Marc:I just love the pairing of those guys.
Marc:I know, right?
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:You wanted them to win.
Guest:But it had the tragic ending, which was also so romantic.
Marc:It was.
Marc:It was.
Guest:The freeze frame.
Guest:The freeze frame, the slow zoom out.
Guest:And it's just hearing the Spanish fire.
Guest:Firing, and then the slow score, I think, fades up or something.
Guest:Really awesome.
Marc:Are you a big Peckinpah fan?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Some of that shit's great.
Marc:Incredible.
Marc:Straw Dogs.
Marc:But Altman.
Marc:And The Wild Bunch.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Those two guys.
Marc:Altman, too.
Marc:Those two guys.
Marc:It's similar in a weird way to the freedom that you found in Safe.
Marc:McCabe and Mrs. Miller is a difficult movie.
Guest:It has a pace unto itself.
Marc:It has a pace unto itself, and you're not really sure what it's about.
Marc:It really turns out it's about corporate takeover.
Marc:It is.
Guest:Exactly.
Marc:It is.
Guest:And it's about the building of a town and the compromises that that brings upon the freedoms of this new frontier.
Marc:And you get this weird, almost comic character just befuddled.
Marc:Completely.
Guest:Under the thumb of the Julie Christie character.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:But even the way the camera is always searching through those long shots, those long, long lens shots.
Guest:Really long.
Guest:Where it's really blurry and everything's compressed and the camera's sort of locating the subject through the haze, you know.
Marc:Of whatever it is.
Guest:And you feel like the movie's doing that, you know.
Marc:And if it's inside, there's just chatter.
Marc:There's just like chatter everywhere.
Guest:All of the classic multiple Altman dialogues going on at the same time.
Marc:Do you have a favorite director that moved you the most?
Marc:Oh, God, it's really hard.
Guest:There's no one director.
Guest:It's a bad question.
Guest:It's a hard one.
Guest:You can answer it with some generalities, but I go back to Hitchcock.
Guest:Really?
Guest:He just blows me away.
Marc:See, that's so wild because I know that's true and I know that he has... You know what I mean?
Marc:But I don't have patience for thrillers.
Marc:And I know that he was so on top of it and the control that he executed and the ability to really be aware at all levels of story and cutting and sound and all that.
Marc:But I have a hard time sitting through this movie.
Marc:You know what they do, though?
Guest:They implicate you in the guilt of the subject.
Guest:So you are all... It's always about the innocent guy who somehow just manages to become...
Guest:a suspect right and who stumbles into a crime right unwittingly right and that is so amazing to me because that just puts a sense of imminent guilt in the hands of every viewer and it's psychologically menacing completely but we're all susceptible to that because we all feel guilty we all feel like you know criminals i never thought or a step away from that and so that's where you you're you're hooked
Marc:Right.
Marc:So that's like, because I don't get hooked on it, it's like I have an aversion to existential terror.
Marc:Maybe it touches a cord.
Marc:Of course it does.
Marc:Isn't it what we're all trying to get away from?
Guest:I don't want to immerse myself in it.
Guest:It's what makes the wrong man so amazing because he is innocent, but he goes through the system and he never comes out the same.
Guest:It completely destroys his marriage and his wife.
Guest:It's what makes like- North by Northwest.
Guest:North by Northwest, which is a lighter, more sort of-
Guest:fun you know yeah yeah yeah strangers on a train where just two guys and it has this strange sort of weirdly homo you know homosexual subtext yeah two guys knocking feet on a train and the bruno character implicates the guy haynes character just simply by the accident of running into him you know right and he's immediately susceptible now all of a sudden he has his hands are guilty his hands have the thing you know the ink of fingerprints on them and
Marc:So you like that sort of narrative tension at every turn.
Guest:Well, I just love that he can operate in a popular way and in the most socially critical way at the same time.
Marc:And also, like, meticulous filmmaker.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:Like, so in control of it.
Guest:Of course, he invented the language of the kind of movies he made, really.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:You know?
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:But they're corrupting.
Guest:They are corrupting and popular at the same time, and I just find that to be so genius.
Guest:Subversive?
Marc:Subversive is the word I'm looking for.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Totally.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So now let's deal with safe.
Marc:Let's deal with it, man.
Marc:We got to deal with it.
Marc:Let's tackle this thing.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:All right.
Marc:Because it's hung with me.
Marc:So you have this Julia Moore character who's a suburban housewife in sort of upper middle class trappings of that time, 1995, in my recollection.
Marc:Yep.
Marc:And she's just feeling ill all the time.
Guest:Yeah.
Yeah.
Marc:And then I remember the allergy test.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And then... And she's diagnosed with environmental illness.
Marc:Is that something you made up?
Marc:No, no.
Guest:God, no.
Guest:No.
Guest:It's a real thing.
Guest:I heard about it on the radio one day.
Guest:I was like...
Guest:Housewives are becoming ill with something called 20th century disease or environmental illness.
Guest:It's the illness people get who become susceptible to chemicals in common household products, all the chemicals that we use in our outgassing carpets.
Guest:Obviously, that was such an open metaphor for the way we live.
Guest:Right.
Marc:It was almost like it just reminded me immediately of the sort of in the 20s and 30s where women were being diagnosed with certain types of psychological illnesses.
Marc:Hysteria.
Marc:Hysteria.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's what Freud's whole career began with studying this whole idea of hysterical female subjects, Charcot in France and all those guys.
Guest:So there's a long history with women not fitting into social settings or having sort of unconscious rebellions, physical, physiological, symptomatic rebellions against their- That was in you when you were- Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And how we attribute that to something uniquely female, you know?
Guest:And how-
Guest:Yeah, I just thought that was too.
Guest:But this was still the AIDS era.
Guest:And I really was thinking a lot about, like a lot of us were, how people make sense of illness, how people sort of theorize illness.
Marc:And you were in it.
Marc:You were losing friends.
Guest:Losing friends left and right.
Guest:And seeing how patients suffering from HIV were drawn to these kind of new age issues.
Guest:They had no answers.
Guest:They had no answers.
Guest:So it gave them some sense that they could control an uncontrollable situation.
Guest:And I just found it so interesting that people, and there was a quote from a cancer patient.
Guest:I remember stumbling across it said, we humans would rather accept culpability than chaos.
Guest:And I thought, that's so true that we'd rather blame ourselves.
Guest:It's almost like little kids.
Guest:This was about cancer patients?
Guest:Yeah, it was about cancer patients, but it was about the whole idea of having no cure for your illness and going, yes, I made myself sick.
Guest:Yes, I didn't love myself enough.
Guest:Yes.
Guest:It's like the little kid whose parents are divorcing and they say, mommy, is it because of me?
Guest:And the parents like, no, what are you talking about?
Guest:Of course not.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Something between your father and I. Well, that's because, you know, kids have to think their parents are perfect.
Marc:So when something goes wrong, there's no one else to really blame.
Marc:You have to blame yourself.
Guest:But how often we do turn to ourselves and blame ourselves.
Guest:And in a weird way, that's sort of the free market sensibility.
Guest:It's like the individual is responsible for their conditions.
Guest:It makes conservatives feel like they're in control, but there's something blameful about it.
Guest:And it doesn't look at social systems as culprits.
Marc:Or democracy.
Marc:Or democracy.
Guest:Or capitalism or whatever.
Guest:It doesn't look at a social problem.
Guest:It's all on the individual.
Guest:Buck up.
Guest:Be self-reliant.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Take responsibility for your illness.
Marc:You made yourself sick.
Marc:We're going to destroy this place.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And in the name of money.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:So you're just going to have to, you know.
Guest:And basically, if you're poor, you chose to be poor.
Guest:If you're sick, you made yourself sick.
Guest:It's a weird, and it's just so funny how often we accept that and accept those terms.
Guest:I don't know, there's something about it that feels consistent, but I put it just in the context of the story about somebody getting sick with a mysterious illness, a housewife, who really doesn't have resources, a strong sense of self or character to question the world around her.
Marc:Yeah, that passive, sort of middle class.
Marc:Completely.
Guest:A complete product of her own environment.
Guest:And then she becomes the victim of that environment.
Marc:And of her own, the expectations that were manufactured for her.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:Because to me, when you get to a certain point or a certain age and you start to realize there aren't answers.
Marc:And doctors don't fucking know.
Marc:I know.
Marc:And there's part of me that thinks like, how complicated can the body be?
Marc:We go to space.
Marc:I know.
Marc:Why can't you fucking figure it out?
Guest:I know.
Guest:And how much we all love to say, oh, it all happened for a reason.
Guest:You know, everything happens for a reason.
Guest:Nope.
Guest:Actually.
Marc:most things probably happen for no good reason fucking random yeah who the hell knows you know plagues happen you can track things right yeah obviously environmentally there are issues right but i mean but but sometimes like shit happens and a lot of people die and it's horrible and you do but the fact was that there was the i think also the issue of of and i think you found it in her character more specifically uh in a way that that a more a broader public could understand that that
Marc:They were hung out to dry.
Marc:The gay population was not important enough.
Marc:Right, of course.
Marc:No, no, no.
Marc:And women have never been important enough.
Guest:Black Lives Matter, we were dealing at a time where it was gay and lesbian lives and African-American lives and drug users' lives who were dispensable in this society.
Sure.
Guest:You saw the machinery and the political culture and the mainstream culture sort of pull away.
Marc:So that was the sort of, the turn was that community.
Marc:Like I just remember the movie, I haven't seen it in a long time, but the Guru's House.
Guest:oh yeah right up on a hill it was one of the indicators you remember so well it's amazing that was one of the indicators that wait a minute maybe this guy isn't all right good right all trust to racket there's a racket here and you're and someone's falling for it but then julianne at the very end of the movie she follows the mantra and she looks in the mirror and she says i love you in her fucking love you in her hut in her sealed off safe house
Guest:And she's got a big kind of blemish on her head that keeps festering.
Guest:So something's not right here.
Guest:And yet what I was also doing at the same time was like disease movies of the week, which sort of give the subject, they don't always solve their cancer in those movies.
Guest:But there's some way in which they take possession of being a cancer patient.
Guest:and learning about what that means.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:And so this film sort of follows that narrative shape.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And she accepts the terms of what that illness means and what it asks of you.
Guest:But what I hope is that you also are left, it's sort of like a Cirquean happy ending, where you're left with all of, after it's completely criticized, the whole culture that you look at, and then the people have a happy ending, and you know, wait, you're like, wait a minute.
Guest:Something's not right here.
Marc:Is it really happy, though, given the circumstance?
Guest:Everything that's been revealed along the way shows us that it's anything but.
Marc:All right, so let's go back to... We're almost all the way back to birth.
Marc:So Poison, I remember, it was one of those movies for me because I was living in San Francisco.
Marc:I was a little...
Marc:uh, you know, uh, kind of, I was 95.
Marc:I was trying to say 91, right.
Marc:So I'm trying to stay sober, you know, uh, you know, I've been through a lot, you know, my sense of self is, is fairly expansive and, you know, open-minded in a way that I had no real choice over.
Marc:And, and, you know, uh, and I'm wandering around San Francisco, which in and of itself is this, I don't know what the fuck is going on there.
Marc:I don't know who's in charge.
Marc:It always felt ungrounded to me.
Marc:And I go see this movie that I'm not gay, but I'm at the theater.
Marc:I'm at the gay film festival.
Marc:And this is a movie that had themes in it that were relevant to that community and metaphoric filmically.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And did you know it had stirred up the far right?
Guest:Had you heard that whole thing?
Guest:I don't flap about the sort of culture wars.
Marc:Well, I don't know, but I knew there was three movies within it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And that in not unlike the Dylan movie or safe for that matter, that I had to reckon with what what it was you were trying to do.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And the three movies, I remember the horror movie.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And then what were the other two?
Guest:One was a sort of pseudo documentary about a suburban story of a little boy who had flown away.
Guest:And the mother is recounting the whole story.
Guest:And there was something a little off about this kid.
Guest:Basically, all three stories are about outsiders, about transgressors, and sort of followed these genres that usually address the outsider.
Guest:Oh, there's some horror film as the monster in the sort of tabloid documentary.
Guest:as a sort of outlier to suburban normalcy or something.
Guest:So this was the one- And the third was much more directly Jean Genet kind of prison love story.
Marc:Now, what was it about Genet?
Marc:You know, it's your normal run-of-the-mill kind of- Trilogy.
Marc:Yeah, it makes perfect sense.
Marc:But these were not conceived as shorts.
Marc:This was conceived as a film.
Guest:It was conceived as a feature for the three stories to interact.
Guest:I mean, the thing is that when I had done Superstar, the Barbie doll, Karen Carpenter story, I mean, that was sort of the beginning of my independent voice as a filmmaker.
Guest:And it kind of fell into a cultural awareness.
Guest:It was written about in The Village Voice by J.
Guest:and Barbara Kruger.
Marc:It was a fascinating film because you did a full narrative, a biopic of Karen Carpenter using only Barbie dolls and using the real music and sort of like somehow finding the mise-en-scene within these puppet shows that were loaded with emotion.
Marc:Right, exactly.
Marc:You at some point watching that film within 10 minutes or so, it didn't matter that they were dolls.
Guest:Right, you forget that they're dolls, and then you have to remember that you're watching dolls and what that means.
Guest:And it's sort of like how you feel when you're listening to that music, which is incredibly manipulative and sentimental, and yet somehow it creeps up inside you and grabs you at the same time.
Marc:And you got to the heart of it through her.
Guest:Through her and what I found, and yet it still kind of had these little pseudo-documentary passages and these sort of little experimental film-influenced moments in it.
Guest:And I just found that because it had reached a slightly bigger visibility than I ever really anticipated.
Guest:With no release.
Guest:With no release.
Guest:I mean, it did have little sprinklings of releases here and there.
Marc:I imagine the family was pissed off in the music.
Marc:You had to have the music in there.
Guest:I had a year of freedom with it before the legal stuff hit me.
Marc:And then you just had to get it on tape like I had.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:And then it got to be an underground bootleg movie.
Marc:Is it on YouTube?
Marc:It must be.
Guest:It's on YouTube, and then they yank it, and then it comes back.
Guest:It's sort of a back and forth.
Guest:But it's one of the Fuyu movies, you can say, is a banned film.
Guest:You know, Cocksucker Blues and maybe Superstar.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So there was a pressure on you to deliver.
Guest:Or what I thought was cool is that audiences who I didn't think were maybe the audiences I had conceived of for the movie.
Guest:A wider audience was seeing Superstar than I had expected.
Guest:And they could navigate between these different sort of tones.
Guest:And they could enter the movie and find interest in the film.
Guest:And it just made me think like, wow, audiences are sophisticated.
Guest:And so I just wanted to kind of keep riffing on that idea and take that a little further.
Guest:And Poison was really a sort of a film about the AIDS era and a way of sort of taking back some of the guilt and feeling of culpability that the gay community was sort of accepting from dominant society.
Marc:Victimhood.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And using Genet, who was like a...
Guest:a warrior, a poet warrior, basically.
Marc:I never got into him.
Marc:I always knew of him, but I didn't read him.
Marc:He was a prisoner and a writer.
Guest:He was a condemned thief, and I think he ultimately, after so many incarcerations, had life imprisonment.
Guest:and then wrote his first novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, while he was still in prison.
Guest:And it is a magnificent piece of writing and a crazy, what he sort of always said when he was like kind of named a thief and named a queer, that he kind of took those titles on and decided to fulfill them tenfold and say, fuck you.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:And then sort of invert the values of society and make perversity and transgression something of a religious expression.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And make that sacred.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And sort of invert the values of the society that had condemned him.
Guest:So it was an amazing kind of- Freedom in that.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then he became a real poet, once he was freed by all the collective poets of French society at the time, Cocteau and all those guys.
Yeah.
Guest:He later became involved with the Black Panther movement, the Palestinian movement.
Guest:I mean, he was a radical.
Guest:He maintained a radical position around political activity.
Marc:And you felt that drawing from the power of that in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, like 10 years in, that you would deliver a message.
Guest:That there was a way to say, we can stand up and say, screw you.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that our difference was really our power.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:And that's really changed the sort of assimilation, basically, of any minority culture as it gets accepted into mainstream society.
Guest:It loses some of those political edges.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But interesting, no matter how slow the pace of progress is, that the gay community weathered that fucking storm and came out stronger.
Guest:Well, that's undeniable.
Guest:And can't be stated strongly enough.
Guest:I mean, that's absolutely true.
Guest:It's incredible.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, just all of us who were kind of formed by that political activism of that time and watched the radical changes and that political organizing produced direct results.
Guest:And it really did.
Guest:It really changed the whole treatment and development of drugs and, you know, turned that epidemic completely around.
Guest:But then, you know, it's just ironic that then as gay lives became more accepted in mainstream society, the issues that were being fought over was gay marriage and gays in the military.
Marc:Right, right.
Guest:Like the most conformist sort of element.
Guest:But they're symbolic and they're meaningful.
Guest:And I get that.
Marc:There's a little bit of fuck you to it.
Marc:You know?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I think that there is – I never really thought about it until right now that to have the right doesn't necessarily mean you want it, but you deserve it.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Well, that is true.
Guest:That's absolutely built in.
Guest:I agree.
Guest:I agree with that.
Guest:But I think people then think that they're supposed to want it.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Maybe there's that.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:That's the confusion.
Guest:It's sort of like everybody's like, oh, well, now you're married, right?
Guest:Right.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Well, you know, it's just to be treated like an equal.
Marc:Of course.
Guest:Right?
Guest:And look, all of these things for every kid who's coming out today, this just creates an entirely different culture and world.
Guest:It's still hard to come out.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's still a transition for kids to kind of, and I think it maybe goes back to those issues we were talking about with the identity period, claiming identity, you know?
Marc:Well, you got to at some point.
Marc:You do.
Marc:Or else you end up sort of a lumpy and game swinger.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:Come on.
Marc:Bring it on.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I guess I like that.
Guest:But, I mean, it's a different world for those kids.
Guest:And that's really essential.
Guest:I mean, that's an uncontestable change.
Marc:They have support.
Marc:They have support.
Guest:They have examples in the world.
Marc:Exactly, yeah.
Marc:And they have a place to- Well, that's interesting because now here we are.
Marc:I'm 52.
Marc:You're what?
Guest:54.
Marc:So I do feel that there might be, along with these sort of nostalgic framings for films that you've done recently, there's a nostalgia for that fuck you, that fight.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Like what, what do we fight about?
Marc:What are we fighting for now?
Marc:Well, creatively, what do you creatively?
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Like what's the next film?
Guest:I mean, you were, I mean, you know, friendly, but what said something in that Scorsese documentary he made about her that I think about, she said, we didn't just lose an entire generation of artists to AIDS.
Guest:We lost audiences.
Guest:we lost reception to a certain quality or caliber of work.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:A kind of demand, you know, kind of, you know, intellectual and.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:That whole part, that whole New York in the seventies thing.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Like, yeah, that once that the, the, the sort of media outlets broke open and the consumer minded culture.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:One on the level of art in general.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That, you know, it just killed the intelligentsia.
Guest:It really,
Guest:It really did.
Guest:And I don't know if it's just AIDS.
Guest:I mean, I think it may be the Reagan era.
Marc:Well, I think within theater and within art, because it seems to me that New York in that time, in the late 70s, was the engine for all that shit.
Marc:And it lost a lot of people.
Marc:Definitely.
Marc:Because it used to be sexy and cool.
Marc:Like you'd see, you know, people like Fran Lebowitz on Letterman.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That shit is over, dude.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:No, I know.
Marc:Who are those people now?
Marc:Where are they?
Guest:There was a blending of counterculture and mainstream culture.
Guest:And now it's sort of like, what is counterculture?
Guest:Who the fuck knows?
Guest:There's nothing outside dominant culture.
Guest:Capitalism is one.
Marc:Well, dominant culture is become.
Guest:Capitalism is one out.
Guest:Of course they have.
Guest:I think that's the undeniable truth with Apple and all of it.
Marc:Right.
Marc:There's no context anymore.
Marc:So everything happens immediately at all times.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:And that you now have the whole compulsion is to create something viral enough to get people to it.
Marc:Totally.
Guest:And to attract corporate branding.
Guest:It's like that front line called Generation Like about young people and digital companies.
Marc:I'll tell you, there's a couple there's a couple weird little bits of hope, you know, you know, the political dialogue, I think, is evolving a bit that, you know, the what was once titled, you know, the the right wing.
Marc:If there was ever a majority, this is very much diminished in a way in real numbers.
Marc:I think I think a lot of people are are not necessarily progressive, but they're accepting as members of this community.
Marc:of this country and this democracy that, you know, things can change and tolerance is necessary.
Marc:I think that's going to win.
Marc:But also that, you know, I recently read an article that people are buying books again, that the Kindle thing, that reading on a tablet.
Marc:Right, no, I read that too.
Marc:That's cool.
Guest:It is kind of, right?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:That's what I love about, I have to say, Portland, Oregon, go to Powell's bookstore on a Sunday afternoon.
Sure.
Guest:And it's a circus.
Guest:Everybody's there.
Guest:Every age, every family, every old person, every kid with a tattoo is at Powell's reading books.
Marc:There's a tactile experience and a connection to historical context.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:maybe it's a reaction against sure all this right well well you know how can you not eventually you know i don't even know we don't even know what these phones are gonna do to our brains or what they do in general i know i know exactly and i mean i know we sound like old men but there is there is there i think there's no mooring to to the narrative of history and that that to me is is scary it is because what do you fall back on yeah
Guest:Well, I just think it separates us as human animals from each other.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just the way we used to.
Marc:We're isolated.
Guest:We are isolated.
Marc:Like that phone, that's your home.
Marc:It's your screen.
Guest:It's your bubble.
Guest:It's your divider.
Marc:What are you thinking for the next film?
Marc:You got something-
Guest:I have something we're trying to get off the ground, which is based on Brian Selznick wrote Hugo Cabret, which Scorsese made into the movie Hugo.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And this is his graphic novel that followed that.
Guest:So it's another, it's a film basically carried by young people for young people, which I've never done before.
Guest:So that should be cool.
Guest:Also a historical thing, kind of a love poem to New York City, the way Hugo was to Paris.
Marc:Okay.
Guest:So I'm excited.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:That's a departure.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You're just spreading it out.
Marc:I'm spreading it out.
Guest:I'm doing stuff more back to back too, which is weird.
Marc:He means you're working.
Marc:I guess so.
Marc:You're hireable.
Marc:I'm hireable.
Guest:There's money maybe somewhere.
Guest:I loved Carol.
Guest:I love all your shit.
Marc:Thank you so much.
Marc:It's a real pleasure.
Guest:Such a pleasure, Mark.
Guest:I really appreciate it.
Guest:Yeah, it's great talking to you.
Marc:Awesome to talk to you.
Guest:Thanks.
Guest:Thank you.
Marc:What an exciting conversation that was for me.
Marc:I hope you dug it.
Marc:That was Todd Haynes.
Marc:Go see the movie Carol.
Marc:See any of his movies.
Marc:See if you can get a hold of Superstar.
Marc:The Karen Carpenter story.
Marc:It's got to be around.
Marc:It's got to be out there.
Marc:It's got to be on the computer, right?
Marc:You can get it on the computer.
Marc:Also...
Marc:WTFpod.com.
Marc:You can get on the mailing list.
Marc:You can buy some posters.
Marc:You can get some justcoffee.coop.
Marc:You can go to WTFpod.com slash guide to see everyone who's been on this show.
Marc:And you can also be directed to howl.fm for the archives.
Marc:All that's available to you.
Marc:I know what you're wondering, but is Mark going to play guitar?
Marc:Maybe.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Guest:Boomer lives!