Episode 933 - Gus Van Sant
Marc:All right, let's do this.
Marc:How are you?
Marc:What the fuckers?
Marc:What the fuck buddies?
Marc:What the fucking ears?
Marc:What the fuck faces?
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:Yeah, threw a new one in there.
Marc:Someone just sent it to me.
Marc:I'm sure I've had it on the list before.
Marc:What the fuck faces?
Marc:Who wants to be that?
Marc:Who are?
Marc:Did I just speak to someone out there?
Marc:Did someone just think I'm a fuck face?
Marc:But now I threw one in there.
Marc:So how's it going?
Marc:You all right?
Marc:I'm Mark Maron.
Marc:This is my show, WTF.
Marc:It's a podcast.
Marc:You've got it plugged into your head.
Marc:How's it going in there?
Marc:Got a good show today.
Marc:Gus Van Zandt is here.
Marc:He's on the show.
Marc:He's not here right now as I speak to you, but he's on the show.
Marc:How good is watermelon?
Marc:That's just a non sequitur.
Marc:But in the summertime, man, I've been eating so much fucking watermelon.
Marc:I think it's good.
Marc:I hope it's not making me pre-diabetic.
Marc:It's part of this dumb diet I'm on, kind of.
Marc:You know when they say you can eat things that have any amount of sugar in a totally non-sugar situation?
Marc:You eat a lot.
Marc:I'm going through a couple melons a week.
Marc:It's a bad habit.
Marc:I got a watermelon habit.
Marc:I got a melon on my back.
Marc:Oh, man, I can't wait for summer to be over so I can stop just carrying around watermelons.
Marc:It's bad, man, when you get itchy and you get kind of squirrely and you got to run out to Whole Foods or Vons or Ralph's or wherever the fuck you can get a melon.
Marc:Oh, geez.
Marc:But it's good.
Marc:Put a little salt on it.
Marc:Awesome.
Marc:That's it.
Marc:It's just that's my summertime tip.
Marc:Salt your melon.
Marc:All right.
Marc:That's how's that?
Marc:Before I forget, let me tell you what's happening.
Marc:I'm going to be at the Ice House this week, the 19th, 20th and 21st doing shows working on that hour.
Marc:I'm going to be at Wise Guys in Salt Lake City on the 3rd and 4th.
Marc:of August I'll be in Chicago I think that show sold out at the Thalia Theater I believe is where I'm playing August 30th through September 1st I'll be in Bloomington at the Comedy Attic and September 6th through 8th I'll be in Minneapolis at Acme and September 21 and 22 I'll be at Denver at the Comedy Works doing some club work I'll provide links for that on my site that's what's happening
Marc:I don't think I've talked to you guys since Glow got nominated for all these Emmy Awards.
Marc:They got nominated for a bunch of Emmy Awards.
Marc:No, I did not get one.
Marc:And no, I did not get robbed.
Marc:And no, I did not.
Marc:It's like the sort of imposed competition thing.
Marc:is a little disturbing in some ways.
Marc:I'm glad that a lot of you thought that I should have got one.
Marc:But the fact is, it's all gravy for me, folks.
Marc:Everything is going fine.
Marc:I'm not a big award-winning guy for whatever reason.
Marc:There were times towards the beginning, the first couple years of this podcast, where I really was upset that we didn't get a Peabody, and I think it was because the word fuck is in the title of the show, or there was some fuck at the Peabody's who didn't want to...
Marc:Give us the fucking satisfaction of getting one of those things.
Marc:And what does it really mean in the long run?
Marc:The fact of the matter is that people enjoy what we're putting out there.
Marc:They enjoy what I'm putting out there.
Marc:I'm making an honest living out of it.
Marc:And I'm thrilled.
Marc:The show got nominated for a best comedy series production design for narrative program.
Marc:That was also nominated casting for a comedy series.
Marc:Jen Houston and her crew.
Marc:That's great.
Marc:Cinematography.
Marc:for a single camera series nomination great directing for a comedy series great hairstyling for a single camera series nice congratulations ladies uh an outstanding main title sequence that is amazing it's all amazing makeup for a single camera series awesome stunt coordination for a comedy series a variety program awesome and then and then betty gilpin
Marc:Fucking Betty Gilpin gets nominated for Best Supporting.
Marc:That is spectacular.
Marc:Betty is such a force, man.
Marc:I didn't know Betty at all before we started doing it, but she is a complete sort of questing oddball.
Marc:She's a real risk taker with what she does.
Marc:No matter what she does in terms of how she's approaching a character, she's going to push it and it's something to watch.
Marc:I love working with all these people.
Marc:I love working with those women.
Marc:And again, this imposed competition thing is annoying.
Marc:Look, I know we're all competitive.
Marc:I think that by nature, people are competitive.
Marc:Maybe you kind of have to be to survive.
Marc:Let's assume that your genetics have gotten you here.
Marc:So there was some natural competition along the way in the last couple of thousand years.
Marc:And remind me to tell you about genetics because I got my genetic breakdown back.
Marc:And boy, what a surprise.
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:You guys are going to be really surprised.
Marc:I waited weeks for this.
Marc:And I was supposed to do that show where they do the sort of like this is your life genetic show.
Marc:And they never got back to me.
Marc:And now I know why.
Marc:Now I know why.
Marc:My genes have persisted, but they stop with me.
Marc:In my particular line, they stop with me.
Marc:I have no children.
Marc:My brother has kids, but they stopped with him, too, because his kids are all adopted.
Marc:But, you know, that's great.
Marc:You know, kids are kids.
Marc:But, you know, I don't know if it was if it was part of our innate desire to not propel the sort of legacy of what we come from.
Marc:Obviously, it's not malignant.
Marc:It's not horrible.
Marc:It's a little needy, a bit a bit erratic, somewhat self-involved and maybe at times depressive and anxious.
Marc:But look, I got my 23andMe back, and I was excited about it.
Marc:I went all in.
Marc:Give me the whole breakdown.
Marc:Tell me what I'm going to get.
Marc:Tell me what I'm destined to die of, the whole business.
Marc:And drumroll, please, because my Ancestry reports, my Ancestry composition reports,
Marc:is Jew.
Marc:I don't know if that's unique to me, but it just says Jew.
Marc:Basically, it says 99.5% Ashkenazi Jewish.
Marc:so i guess no surprises no viking i was hoping for a little bit of viking i was hoping for a little bit of something there's a 0.4 percent of broadly european but it all looks right around that russian poland that whole the green spot on the big global map is in the area that i kind of knew but i was really hoping that somewhere back there my great great great great grandmother may have consensually fucked a viking so i get a little of that but uh
Marc:But no, no, that's not there.
Marc:But now I know.
Marc:Now I know.
Marc:I'm a full-on Jew with about 4% of Broadway European that is also probably Jewish.
Marc:So there you go.
Marc:Now we all know.
Marc:Hey, a couple of things.
Marc:Just in the climate we live in, anytime you're thinking they can't, they can.
Marc:Anytime you're thinking they wouldn't, they would.
Marc:Every time you think they won't, they will.
Marc:And there doesn't seem to be anything holding them back.
Marc:So I'm going at this early.
Marc:I'll bring it up occasionally to your friends who are detached from the process, who feel that they don't have a place in the political world or that may not have an effect on their lives.
Marc:Please start planting the seeds for them to vote in November and to spread the word.
Marc:They can, they will, they do.
Marc:Everything you imagine.
Marc:It's so profoundly amazing how quickly and easily people in this country and people in power shamelessly slip into complete moral depravity and moral bankruptness.
Marc:It's a human thing.
Marc:It's nothing unique.
Marc:Everybody's got that slippery slope.
Marc:It's just a, you know, all you need is an opportunity and you could find yourself in some deep shit.
Marc:Well, a lot of people have found that opportunity and power and we're all in some deep shit because of complete, shameless, personal and moral corruption.
Marc:It's really quite astounding.
Marc:They will, they can, they do.
Marc:Dig it.
Marc:Also, another thing, I get emails occasionally.
Marc:When I have a big actor in here, specifically recently, maybe Josh Brolin and Paul Rudd, and I seem slightly condescending to superhero movies, and you think that's rude, I want to tell you this honestly and from my heart.
Marc:I will continue doing it.
Marc:I will continue to condescend to grown-ups who defend almost maniacally the integrity and need and greatness of superhero movies.
Marc:Look, I'm all for entertainment.
Marc:I'm glad you enjoy it.
Marc:I don't go.
Marc:I'm not even saying that I wouldn't enjoy it.
Marc:What I'm saying is the consolidation...
Marc:and leveling of the culture's taste to infantile intent and product is something that's been coming for a long time.
Marc:It's great for movie companies.
Marc:They can just, you know, guaranteed to make millions on franchises that were fundamentally designed for children.
Marc:So the fact that you're a grown-ass fucking person and you've kind of justified it in your periphery and your fucking worldview that these are great and you just can't get enough of them...
Marc:Great.
Marc:That's good for you.
Marc:But the truth of the matter is it pushes away and it pushes aside real dialogue and real human stories that now you got to go to Siberia.
Marc:I got to go to the Lambly to see a movie that is grown up themed and is actually provocative and proactive in terms of making you think and making you move forward with your life and seeing things differently.
Marc:Now I have to go.
Marc:I got to go find those.
Marc:I got to I got to watch those in my living room because the audience isn't big enough to justify the release of these films that were once known as grown up movies, thrillers like Michael Clayton is a good example.
Marc:But you can keep coming at me about my tone around Marvel movies or.
Marc:any of the superhero movies.
Marc:I'm going to remain condescending as a grown person who questions them.
Marc:And usually when I'm talking to an actor, it's slightly condescending, but it's really ribbing.
Marc:I'm just busting balls.
Marc:And every time I've done it, they knew exactly what I was doing and they have it within them too.
Marc:But money is money.
Marc:Entertainment is entertainment.
Marc:But it was not supposed to be that every movie has to be like a fucking amusement park ride.
Marc:It wasn't supposed to be that, you know, oh, why are they talking?
Marc:What am I listening to?
Marc:How come someone's not flying?
Marc:Where's the blowing up?
Marc:And maybe I sound like an old man, but you're a grown person.
Marc:You know, just lighten up.
Marc:I can have my point of view and I'll remain condescending because I feel like that's the place to be on this one.
Marc:And I'm sorry.
Marc:I'm sorry for your feelings and you're mad that I don't like the flying man.
Marc:I'm sorry.
Marc:You want some ice cream?
Marc:You want some ice cream?
Marc:Or do you want a beer?
Marc:You're old enough to have beer.
Marc:You're old enough to have had too much beer.
Marc:Don't cry because I made fun of the caped guy.
Marc:I saw that Triplets movie, that documentary.
Marc:That was kind of mind-bending.
Marc:Very provocative.
Marc:Really kind of amazing, actually.
Marc:I've been seeing a lot of movies.
Marc:I saw Daveed Diggs' movie, Blindspotting.
Marc:I'm going to talk to him on Thursday.
Marc:And that was...
Marc:That was a great sort of real, personal, heartfelt Oakland movie that had some interesting sort of emotional and cultural twists in it from a very kind of grounded and human place.
Marc:It was great to see.
Marc:I'll talk to him about that on Thursday.
Marc:I talked today to Gus Van Zandt about his movie Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, which, again, is a very human story.
Marc:It deals with recovery.
Marc:It deals with grief.
Marc:It deals with...
Marc:There's some beautiful stuff in this movie.
Marc:And Joaquin Phoenix is pretty fucking amazing, man.
Marc:You know, it's weird that, you know, as I talk to actors and I work with actors, you can see how they, you know, where they come from with their acting.
Marc:You know, it's a very interesting part of my life to kind of see how stories are told and how people construct characters and do things.
Marc:It's, I don't know.
Marc:I'm enjoying it as the world burns, if you don't mind.
Marc:So obviously Gus Van Zandt has done a lot of films, Good Will Hunting, Elephant, To Die For, Drugstore Cowboy, he remade Psycho.
Marc:I mean, there's a lot of films this man has done, a lot of different types of movies, and a lot of which I've seen and enjoyed and found to be very provocative.
Marc:Some of his smaller movies, Elephant and, what was that one, Last Days, I think it was called?
Marc:Very...
Marc:Very poetic and very challenging and great.
Marc:And it was sort of like I was a little nervous to talk to him, but I like talking to directors, especially ones that kind of do a lot of different things, that take chances, that take risks.
Marc:There's nothing better than talking to creative people who are willing to take risks, willing to fail, willing to keep pushing to find a truth in a way that hasn't been explored yet.
Marc:So this was an honor for me.
Marc:And this is me and Gus Van Zandt.
Marc:And the movie I mentioned, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, is now playing.
Marc:So this is me and Gus.
Guest:How long you played for?
Guest:A long time, like 30 years.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, that's what I did, too.
Marc:Like, you just play by yourself.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You play along with records and stuff?
Guest:Yeah, I play along with all kinds of records.
Guest:Yeah, like what?
Guest:In my history.
Guest:I used to play with Charlie Christian...
Marc:Oh, so you can really do it?
Guest:Yeah, I can do that.
Guest:Really?
Guest:And it's mimicking, you know, because I don't know what I'm doing.
Guest:I can't say, oh, that's an A, that's a C, that's an E. And even now, I'm like, I should have learned this kind of thing.
Marc:Well, you can't, though.
Marc:I don't read music, but you can identify chords.
Guest:Yeah, I can do chords, like the major chords.
Guest:I can't go into like minor sevenths everywhere on the fretboard, but I can learn them, you know.
Marc:But you can sort of noodle around with Charlie Christian?
Marc:That's pretty good.
Marc:Like you do T-Bone Walker too?
Guest:I can probably do anybody or like play along with the record where they're playing.
Guest:I can kind of like, so the people that I've emulated are like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton,
Marc:Right, yeah, I mean, definitely.
Guest:They're easy.
Guest:I mean, Hendrix is easy if you've got a Strat.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, it's like, if you just get into a thing, you can be him, sort of.
Marc:You can kind of sound like him, sort of.
Guest:Sure, yeah.
Guest:And I don't even know the right chords.
Guest:If you learn the Hendrix chords, then you can really sound like him.
Marc:No, yeah, I mean, I used to do that all the time.
Marc:I had a Strat out in my old place, and yeah, it's the tone.
Marc:It sounds like him.
Marc:So you're like a real player then.
Marc:I didn't play with people for years.
Marc:It's sort of a meditative thing.
Guest:Feels good, right?
Guest:Yeah, I'm just sort of daydreaming.
Guest:Yeah, on the couch.
Guest:Yeah, everywhere I've always got it there.
Guest:So how long have you lived in Los Feliz?
Guest:I think officially for a year.
Guest:Like I sold my last place in Oregon and I live here and Palm Springs.
Marc:Oh, okay.
Marc:Well, that's nice.
Marc:So I'm not stuck here.
Guest:Right.
Marc:You can go to a hotter place when it gets hot here in LA.
Guest:Although even 120 in Palm Springs isn't like the weather we're having here.
Guest:94 here is hotter.
Marc:What do you make of that?
Marc:Why is that, you think?
Marc:Because of the air?
Marc:The humidity, I think.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Guest:So there's just no humidity over there, so you can kind of like... Dry.
Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you walk outside and it feels good until you realize you have no liquid in your body.
Marc:Exactly.
Guest:You have to drink.
Marc:You have to drink.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So do you miss, I mean, it's a big shift, but Portland is very specific.
Guest:Do you miss that?
Guest:Well, I'd been there for so long that I think at this point I don't miss it.
Guest:I probably would miss it or will miss it in a few years.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I'll just go.
Guest:I should really just get back there.
Marc:How long did you live there?
Marc:You didn't grow up there though, right?
Guest:I moved there when I was 17 in 1970 or 16.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:and went to two years of high school, and then I went to college in Rhode Island, and then moved back to- At RISD?
Guest:RISD, yeah.
Guest:You did?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:What years?
Marc:Where's that?
Guest:75 to, no, I mean 71 to 75.
Guest:Who was there?
Guest:Who do we know?
Guest:Famous talking heads were there.
Guest:The heads were there?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, Charlie Rocket was there.
Guest:Do you remember him?
Guest:He was on Saturday Night Live.
Guest:I do.
Guest:He killed himself, didn't he?
Guest:Yes, he did.
Guest:He was there.
Guest:He was one of my big influences, actually.
Guest:Really?
Guest:As just a person.
Marc:I said that so glibly.
Marc:He killed himself.
Marc:That's a point of reference.
Marc:It's sad.
Guest:I know.
Guest:How was he an influence?
Guest:He and one of the film students, I was in the film department, were...
Guest:they would go out and do this thing that Charlie was already doing called Meet the Stars.
Guest:Charlie would go out on his own dressed up to just meet Alice Cooper, see if he could get backstage.
Guest:It was really like, can we get backstage without any credentials?
Guest:Were they shooting it?
Guest:And then with Scott Sorensen, he started shooting it.
Guest:This was like for class projects, I think.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And which they did later on Saturday Night Live a little bit.
Guest:Um, and it just was, I saw it in a class and thought it was super funny and joined them a couple of times and screwed up the sound.
Guest:Um, are you the sound guy?
Guest:I was the sound guy.
Guest:And, um,
Guest:It was just, they were just, he was just also a singer, lead singer of the Motels.
Guest:Charlie Rock it was?
Guest:Yeah, not the LA version, the punk rock band, but the Providence, Rhode Island Motels.
Marc:Oh, I didn't know that.
Guest:There were two.
Guest:The Fabulous Motels.
Guest:There were two.
Marc:Oh, now I know that.
Guest:That's great.
Guest:And the Fabulous Motels in Providence, I think, is kind of forgotten, lesser known, but it was, in Providence, it was like the biggest thing we had.
Marc:What kind of music was it?
Marc:It was art rock for sure.
Guest:It was a band that would come out playing as one band called like Iron Grandmother or something like that.
Guest:Funny, it was comedy rock.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And like the tubes.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:And would play as Iron Grandmother for like six or seven songs.
Guest:Then they would go backstage and change into the motels or electric driveway or some other...
Guest:So, they all went to RISD?
Guest:And they all were RISD students.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And they started really from Martin Mull.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Martin Mull had a band called Soup.
Guest:And that evolved into- He was at RISD as well?
Guest:He was at RISD.
Guest:He was a painter.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:He's a painter again, I believe.
Guest:And he's a painter again.
Guest:So, comedy rock.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or in his case, jazz.
Guest:Comedy jazz.
Guest:And I saw him play at the Roxy.
Yeah.
Guest:But he sort of, in the mid-60s, had a band, and then Tim Duffy took over, and there was a band called Snake and the Snatch, and that sort of engendered a few other bands, and eventually the Motels.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:A real legacy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's wild, man.
Guest:I've studied it.
Guest:You have?
Marc:Yeah, I tried to.
Guest:And the talking heads were, like David Byrne would do some things along with the band, I think performance pieces in between sets and things.
Guest:So he was sort of in there.
Marc:Yeah, so you were there in the 70s?
Marc:Early 70s to mid-70s.
Marc:So at that time, post-60s, I mean, that's when all that performance art, everything was really blowing up at that time.
Guest:It was the 60s were kind of hanging over into the 70s.
Guest:So everyone that was... The older students like Charlie Clavery or Charlie Rocket or even Martin Malt, they were the senior frontiersmen that had invented certain things and continued...
Guest:And we were newbies and sort of learning from them like, oh, you don't have to do architecture.
Guest:You can do rock music or pottery or whatever you want.
Guest:Something different than what you already do.
Guest:And what did you start out doing?
Guest:I think a lot of people were painters.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I know the talking heads were all painters.
Guest:And I was a painter, but I majored in film.
Guest:You did?
Guest:Do you still paint?
Guest:And I still paint, yes.
Guest:You do?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And do you show your paintings and everything?
Guest:Sometimes.
Guest:When I'm lucky, I show my paintings.
Guest:Figurative?
Guest:Abstract?
Guest:What do you- A little bit figurative and a little bit abstract.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Marc:But you like doing it.
Marc:Not unlike guitar.
Marc:It's something that you enjoy doing, but you don't feel pressured to do.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:It's yours.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Well, you do that with film, too.
Marc:But I mean, but like with those things, it's like you don't have to tell anybody.
Marc:You don't have to do it for anybody.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It's nice.
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:Yeah, it's nice.
Marc:So out of RISD, because it seems to me that the 70s, like after the 60s, like once the hippie got drained out of the 70s and it just became, you know, drugs and sex and it had a little more edge to it.
Marc:That seemed to be sort of the Petri dish of where you started to develop your sensibility.
Guest:Yeah, I think I was influenced, I think, by all the things that happened in the 60s were kind of culminating in 71 is when I ended up there in making art in this case because we were in art school.
Marc:How much of it was a reaction to Vietnam?
Guest:As much as you were involved in Vietnam already, I think everyone was, but it was partly that or a reaction to the reactions to Vietnam.
Guest:Some people had been in Vietnam.
Guest:One of my classmates had a nervous breakdown in a submarine in the Pacific, yeah, who was a painter.
Guest:So there were people with you that had been in combat.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:I mean, just the whole thing that was happening in the 60s, whatever you could call it, was still happening in the 70s.
Guest:And by mid-70s, I think it was sort of changing.
Marc:So you finished RISD?
Marc:You go all four?
Guest:I went all four years.
Guest:I tried to leave after my first year, and then I was talked back into it by my parents, of course.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Guest:They were supportive, though.
Guest:That's a good sign.
Guest:They were supportive.
Guest:And then I graduated in 75 and came via Europe.
Guest:I went to Europe for a little while and then came to L.A.
Marc:What did you do?
Marc:What were you doing in Europe, just hanging around?
Guest:I went on a student...
Guest:group, a film group, and we were visiting, in Rome, we were visiting filmmakers.
Guest:Who'd you talk to?
Guest:So we talked to Fellini.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yes.
Marc:How many people were with you?
Guest:There were about eight.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:And there were about 16 in total, but that particular visit was about eight students.
Guest:We went to the set of Casanova.
Guest:We went to the set of Seven Beauties by Lena Wertmuller.
Marc:Oh my God.
Guest:We went to talk to Pasolini.
Guest:Really?
Guest:In his house, but it was just a couple months before he died.
Guest:Tinto Brass was a filmmaker.
Guest:He was making Salon Kitty, which was sort of a semi-porno entertainment.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Did it have an impact on you?
Guest:I think it was just amazing.
Guest:I mean, we were amazed.
Marc:Was it the first time you were on sets?
Marc:Yes, exactly.
Marc:So you're on Fellini's set.
Marc:Fellini's set.
Marc:Did anything impact you about how he worked or anything?
Guest:Well, it was night and it was late at night.
Guest:I think we ended up getting there about 11.
Guest:Because they were shooting all night.
Guest:And they shot until, say, 2 o'clock.
Guest:And when we got there, there was a cauldron.
Guest:It was at a farmhouse.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So the fire was lighting up the set, and there was some extra lights sort of, like, flashing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And in the middle of, there was a group of 25 people in folding director's chairs in a square, five by five.
Guest:In the middle of them was the tallest woman in the world who was in the film in costume.
Guest:She was in an extra large chair.
Guest:So it was kind of this weird graphic of 25 people.
Guest:And we were told like in whispers that Fellini and Donald Sutherland weren't getting along and like they're discussing the scene and they've been discussing it for an hour and we're all just sitting here waiting.
Guest:And I said, well, who are all these people in the chairs?
Guest:And they're like, well, there are people that insist that without them, Fellini cannot make a movie.
Guest:Each one of them.
Guest:His entourage.
Guest:Really?
Guest:That's what I was told.
Guest:As I was 21.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:Gotcha.
Guest:I thought in my head I was thinking bullshit.
Marc:Or it's better than thinking, like, make note, need 25 people to travel with me at all times and sit in a square.
Guest:Or, as I realize, in Italy, when you go to a film festival, there will be a lot of people around.
Guest:Like, they'll invite the cardinal and the bishop.
Guest:And they'll invite people from the military.
Guest:They invite people that they kind of need to invite.
Guest:And so they end up not necessarily needing to be there, but they're there.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So they might have been the same with Fellini's group.
Marc:Did you eventually get to see him direct?
Yeah.
Guest:No, I think they discussed the whole time the tallest woman in the world got up to go to the bathroom, which was funny because when she rose up, everyone kind of cowered because she was so tall.
Guest:And she went to the bathroom, came back.
Guest:I don't think I remembered seeing any sort of filming.
Guest:Did he talk to you guys?
No.
Guest:And then on the way back from the set, when we broke, he's talked to us as we walked.
Guest:And I wasn't one of the lead, like there were two of my fellow students were on either side.
Guest:So I was listening to them talk rather than talking directly.
Guest:And did work Miller make an impact?
Guest:We had lunch with them.
Guest:I mean, we knew, I knew her work.
Guest:Is she still around?
Guest:I think she, yeah, I think she is.
Marc:She was a bit of a character, I remember.
Marc:I remember when... I was young when Seven Beauties came out, but I remember it being... She had a very powerful presence.
Marc:Yeah, in her white glasses.
Marc:Yeah, in the white glasses, yeah.
Guest:So she...
Guest:she was having, we were having lunch and Giancarlo Giannini was there at lunch with us and we just were kind of like part of the lunch.
Guest:I don't remember speaking directly to her either.
Guest:Um, but, um, yeah, it was interesting.
Guest:And Pasolini was old.
Guest:Pasolini was, it was more like eight students talking to him and like,
Guest:you know, hearing him talk.
Guest:And so we each were talking directly to him one by one.
Guest:He wanted to ask us, like, what we wanted to do in cinema.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So each of us, like, had our moment.
Guest:How did you use yours?
Guest:And my moment was kind of awkward because I sort of...
Guest:I wanted cinema to be a little more malleable like the novel and like a given novel.
Guest:Because in a novel, you can start off one place and, you know, space into like another time period and come back to where you were very easily.
Guest:Whereas in cinema, you can do that, but it's like difficult for the audience.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They seem to need more linear storytelling.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I said I wanted to translate literature into film, which is how I put it, and he didn't understand that.
Guest:He was like, why would you do that?
Guest:Why would you bother?
Guest:And so I just let it slide.
Guest:That was it?
Guest:There was a translator, so I was like, it's okay.
Guest:Okay, yeah, okay.
Guest:I was nervous.
Guest:But yeah, two months later, he was gone.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:One of the last people.
Marc:Well, that sounds exciting.
Marc:That's an exciting thing to do after college.
Guest:And then I went to London to visit some friends that were there, tried to find work, which wasn't really happening.
Guest:And I decided, by then I had been in Europe for three months, was starting to feel homesick and decided, I was listening to Joni Mitchell's Blue and she was singing about California over and over again.
Guest:And I thought, I should just hang it up, go to California, go to L.A.
Guest:What were you looking for work?
Marc:Just on a set?
Marc:Anything?
Guest:Yeah, anything.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there just wasn't a lot of work in general.
Guest:Right.
Guest:In 1975 in London.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:So you go to L.A.
Guest:So it just ended up here.
Marc:The first foray into L.A.?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And living on Argyle Street in Franklin.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Back then, what was that like?
Guest:That was nice.
Guest:I mean, it's like it is now.
Guest:It's the same, actually.
Guest:And there was an apartment that some friends of mine had that I lived with them.
Guest:And they were bouncers at the Roxy.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:In the mid-70s?
Guest:In the mid-70s.
Guest:So they would let me in the back door and I could go see the shows.
Guest:What was going on then?
Guest:I remember seeing John Prime.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:He's great.
Marc:I just saw him recently.
Marc:Still at it.
Guest:He just had a new record at him.
Guest:He was back at, yeah.
Guest:I saw Patti Smith.
Guest:Ah.
Guest:In her heyday.
Guest:Like her first L.A.
Guest:performance.
Guest:That's great.
Guest:I would see people also I didn't know who they were.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:I would end up in the backstage.
Guest:But was it crazy on Sunset Boulevard?
Guest:It was pretty crazy, yeah.
Guest:And the rainbow next door and the parking lot in between, there was a lot of sort of dressed up people and craziness.
Guest:I saw Martin Mall there.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Marc:Were you guys friends at that point?
Guest:And I didn't know him, but I said hi to him in the parking lot.
Guest:And then I was a RISD student.
Guest:How did he respond?
Guest:He was like, great, fine.
Guest:But I was a kid.
Guest:I felt like a fan.
Guest:Did you get a job?
Guest:Yes, I got a job.
Guest:Within about six months, I got this really great job.
Guest:I...
Guest:And as you're looking for work in Hollywood as a young filmmaker, you're given pointers as you're doing it by the people that you're meeting.
Guest:And somebody said, you know, you can call people up.
Guest:You can call John Cassavetes up.
Guest:You can get them on the phone.
Guest:They have offices.
Guest:You can call Alfred Hitchcock on the phone.
Guest:And I was like, okay.
Guest:And I just sort of filed that away.
Guest:Like, I can do this.
Guest:So Chevy Chase had come for his first visit to LA since he had become a star.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Saturday Night Live, which was brand new at that moment.
Guest:And they asked him in calendar section of the LA Times, what are you going to do when you're in LA?
Guest:And he said, I'm going to maybe visit a friend, Ken Shapiro.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:who's a video freak who lives in Beverly Hills.
Guest:And I was like, oh yeah, Ken Shapiro.
Guest:He made the groove tube.
Guest:Sure, man.
Guest:And I looked in the phone book and he was there.
Guest:It was Ken Shapiro.
Guest:And I thought, I can call him up.
Guest:That's the one you chose?
Guest:And that's the one I chose.
Guest:And I got a job with him.
Guest:Did he do Kentucky Fried Movie or just a Groove Tube?
Guest:He did the Groove Tube.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And then he did Modern Problems later.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:With Chevy.
Guest:With Chevy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he had a difficult time because he, the Groove Tube was like his homemade New York movie.
Marc:Right, Belzer's in it.
Guest:Belzer, Chevy Chase is in it.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:I remember, is that the one where Chevy does the bit where he's singing, I'm looking over, and then all of a sudden a guy playing on his head, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I remember, yeah.
Guest:And there's Brown 25, which is the advertisement for, like, Brown 25, which looks like shit coming from the spigot.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:There's a lot of great bits.
Guest:I mean, essentially, it is, if you look at it, it's Saturday Night Live.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:before Saturday Night Live.
Guest:And Lauren Michaels worked for Ken.
Guest:Like when I got there, Lauren had just left to do Saturday Night Live a couple months earlier, but he was in the office that we were in working as his writer.
Guest:And I thought, oh, so he just took Saturday Night Live and pitched it to NBC.
Guest:Or it was influenced by, I mean, it had the news, it had musical acts, it had bits, it had skits coming from TV shows.
Guest:It had all of it.
Guest:Not to take away from Lauren Michaels, but
Guest:So you were comedy focused a little.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I liked that film.
Guest:I liked Mel Brooks and I liked comedic filmmakers.
Guest:And working with Ken, I met a lot of the comedians of the period, like Tim Thomerson.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Pat Proft was a writer.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he had come from the Smothers Brothers.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:And he was Minneapolis, I think.
Guest:So, a lot of the Minneapolis guys were part of the writing.
Guest:He had these big writing groups who were writing Groove Tube No.
Guest:2.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:And which never happened.
Guest:And he had an office at Paramount.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:So, it was like- You're on the lot.
Guest:I was like on the lot.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, for me, that was really nice.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Big stuff.
Marc:And what did you learn from that experience that sent you?
Guest:I learned that I wasn't really able to pitch or think up comic situations because I tried a couple times with the professionals and I realized, oh, I'm completely dying.
Guest:So you realized, like, comedy's not for me?
Guest:Well, not that kind of comedy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I guess I liked, I appreciated it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I was, I sort of, you know, was...
Guest:friends fixed by it and i would go to open night open mic night which was free at the com at the comedy store like on mondays on mondays because it was a free place to go yeah and um that's crazy loved it but um that i could probably could never do stand-up comedy
Marc:It's interesting that you liked it so much, though.
Guest:But I liked it.
Guest:So I ended up basically rolling joints at the meetings.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:That was your job.
Guest:That was my main job.
Guest:And buying the cheese and crackers beforehand.
Marc:The joint kid.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's nice.
Marc:But so how do you move towards making your first film out of the Shapiro operation?
Guest:Well, then at that time, I sort of had plans.
Guest:I was...
Guest:um i had this short story written by william burroughs called the discipline of de which um i had read when i was in providence in a bookstore and i um had by the time i was working with shapiro or right about that same time i had also looked up william burroughs in the phone book in new york city at the bunker at the bunker he was in the phone book and i called him up
Guest:And I went over there basically to ask him in person for the rights.
Guest:And also because in the Jack Horek books, everyone always visited Burroughs.
Guest:Yeah, old Bull Lee.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Goodbye.
Guest:So I was going to go visit Bull Lee.
Guest:And our meeting was very cordial.
Guest:He was very nice.
Guest:And he had been to LA.
Guest:So he gave me addresses of people to look up in LA where I was headed.
Guest:And then I asked at the end of the meeting, would you give me the rights?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he was like, well, you have to call my agent, which I did.
Guest:And then they knew there was no money in short films.
Guest:So they allowed me to do it.
Guest:So eventually I made that short, which is about a seven-minute short.
Guest:And it's on YouTube.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:You can see it.
Guest:And it's comedic.
Guest:It's funny.
Guest:And Ken Shapiro did the voiceover for it.
Guest:And it's Burroughs' writing.
Guest:So it's kind of austere, very dry.
Guest:He's hilarious.
Guest:So funny.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He's really funny.
Marc:So you had a, you were into him since college.
Guest:Yeah, in college when I, from Naked Lunch and all the, you know, kids were reading Naked Lunch.
Marc:Yeah, it's a, it's a mind blower.
Marc:But you know, when you start to realize the way he, and I imagine you had a relationship with him.
Marc:because you used him in what two movies or one yeah two that you know he he had bits i mean he was almost you know vaudevillian in his commitment to stick exactly like he had characters he had a way of delivering it he was a real comic performer yeah amazing the first time i saw him was when he was on saturday night live in like what was 81 or something and i had no idea
Marc:who he was because I was just a freshman in college and I watched him read those sections from Naked Lunch and I'm like, what the fuck is this?
Marc:Who is that guy?
Guest:Mind blower.
Guest:I think that's how I've, besides meeting him, I did go to see one of those readings at NYU.
Guest:He would read there.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And was kind of explained, somebody explained he read it like a police report, like his book.
Guest:And I was like, wow, like a police report, like he's a police captain at the bench.
Guest:And he did.
Guest:That's how he delivered it.
Marc:Yeah, he definitely had a character that was what he was public with.
Marc:Were you guys friends?
Marc:Did you remain friends?
Guest:I was friends later.
Guest:I mean, that particular project happened.
Guest:I showed him a tape.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was like at that time there wasn't even VHS tape.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was like a reel-to-reel tape.
Guest:And then it wasn't until later when I was making Drugstore Cowboy that there was this character named Old Tom.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Who was an old junkie that our lead character, Bobby Hughes, knew when he was younger.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I sort of looked up to him.
Guest:The minister.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The minister.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, now Burroughs turned him into Tom the priest.
Guest:Oh.
Guest:But at the time, he was just old Tom, so I thought Burroughs would be the perfect guy to play this character.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so we sent him the script, and he was like, yeah, you know, like I...
Guest:I'd play it, but only if he had something more going.
Guest:This guy is like old Tom, a forgotten older person.
Guest:I want to be an older person that has something happening.
Guest:So we said, just whatever you want to do, go ahead.
Guest:You can do it.
Guest:Just so that you do it.
Guest:So he rewrote his whole part.
Guest:Made him a priest.
Guest:And Matt's part too.
Guest:He made all those scenes with them together.
Guest:Burroughs wrote, or his assistant, James wrote.
Guest:James Graholtz.
Guest:James Graholtz.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, you know, after that, and we shot him in one day, too, which was... They seemed very... Like, it seemed like the walk-in talks were improvised.
Guest:And those were just them talking, making stuff up.
Marc:Because he's a very good walk and talk narrator of what's happening.
Marc:I've seen him in documentaries do that.
Marc:But I could tell that Matt, in character, it was really happening.
Marc:Whatever was happening was really happening.
Guest:And he was going, what do I do?
Guest:And Burrell was just like,
Guest:I used to know an old croaker right there.
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:But you made one film before that, right?
Guest:Yeah, before that I made Malanoche, which was a small book by a poet named Walt Curtis who lived in Portland, which was my sort of, it was my first feature film.
Guest:I had made another sort of a feature in Hollywood when I was living in Hollywood.
Guest:that didn't really turn out that well like um what was it about it was called Alice in Hollywood about a girl who moves to Hollywood and sort of gets in trouble um it dramatically wasn't really like playing well so I cut it down it was a short film by the time I was done with it and then Malanoche was the was the film after that
Marc:I didn't see that one.
Marc:I want to.
Marc:It's a black and white film and it's about a, it seemed like a complicated relationship movie.
Guest:It's about a gay poet in Skid Row in Old Town of Portland and he falls in love with a Mexican migrant boy who's sort of there over the winter.
Guest:He's trying to survive the winter until the next growing season.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:With his friends.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they're kind of getting in trouble.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So the poet, like, becomes their friend and gives them rides in his car and tries to sort of seduce them, but it doesn't really work out.
Guest:Oh, the sad longing begins.
Guest:Which, yeah, it's on Filmstruck.
Guest:You can see that.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:in the Criterion Collection.
Guest:Criterion.
Guest:Oh, good, good.
Guest:So it exists.
Marc:So then, like, that sort of set a theme for you?
Marc:I mean, like, you know, the tone?
Guest:Yeah, because it was like a street story.
Guest:It was a poet's story.
Guest:He's sort of like a Ginsburg of... Walt Curtis is like sort of the Ginsburg of Portland.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Which Ginsburg would hate.
Guest:When Ginsburg would come to Portland, Walt would try to insinuate himself into the scene, and Ginsburg was like, get rid of him.
Guest:Because he was sort of copying his...
Guest:Did you know Alan?
Guest:Yeah, and I got to be friends with Alan through Burroughs and through also we shared a publisher.
Guest:We had photo books that we had met during this book signing.
Marc:I was just looking at his stuff yesterday because I was going through my books and all those old City Lights, the Small Pocket series.
Marc:No, it's really kind of amazing to just, even at a glance, any Allen Ginsberg poem is so uniquely his.
Marc:And so, like, there's so much movement in them, you know?
Marc:It's really invigorating just to read a page.
Marc:He was a nice guy.
Guest:Yeah, he was great.
Guest:I mean, Burroughs was the type of person that really, you know, there were certain things that he really liked to talk about.
Guest:He liked to talk about guns, knives, poisons, snakes.
Guest:Control.
Guest:Talk about drugs, or especially, yeah, government control, conspiracy theories, aliens.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Whereas, Ginsburg was a little more, like, he wanted to hear what you were thinking about.
Guest:He wanted to teach you about...
Guest:things that had been going on, you know, in the underground before, you know, like, um, I guess say like he would, he would explain to you how, um, during a, um, a protest, the feds would put like, um, troublemakers in the front of the protest to cause the riot.
Guest:Provocateurs.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He would just, he would just try and download information that wasn't, you weren't going to get from him.
Guest:Oh yeah.
Guest:Which was, I always thought was really interesting.
Marc:So, yeah, because you're younger than them.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you were sort of like, you know, listening to these old guys.
Marc:Did you ever get to the moment where you're like, all right, I think I've had enough.
Guest:No, never with either of them.
Guest:Oh, that's good.
Guest:No, I wanted to always listen to them.
Guest:I mean, I wasn't really with them like for weeks on end.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It was usually like one or two nights or something like that.
Guest:So I was always like all ears.
Guest:And they were... Yeah.
Yeah.
Guest:With Burroughs, my relationship was, I learned at the very end of our relationship before he died, that I looked like somebody he knew when he was younger.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:That there was this whole other thing going on that I wasn't really aware of.
Marc:No, who told you that?
Guest:He did.
Guest:Oh, he did?
Guest:And I was like, oh, that would, if I, it makes sense, you know, like that he would entertain you like longer because you were like actually this person.
Marc:Drugstore Cowboy was the first big one, right?
Marc:Like where everybody's like, what the fuck is this?
Marc:This guy's great.
Marc:I remember seeing it.
Marc:It was great.
Guest:After Malanoche, I was able to, with the small exposure I got at film festivals, and also the independent film scene was happening right about then.
Guest:mid 80s it was really it had been going for a while but it was there was a system in place so I kind of like hit it right at the right time and Avenue Pictures finance Drugstore Cowboy yeah which was a novel that a friend of mine had the manuscript for whose novel was it?
Guest:James Fogel who was a Northwest sort of
Guest:criminal uh-huh he was in he was in jail at the time uh-huh that uh that i was shopping it around he was in walla walla state penitentiary in washington and it was an unpublished novel it was an unpublished novel he had a few of them yeah there was one called satan sandbox and there was one called drugstore cowboy and there was a few others and um how'd you find that guy
Guest:I found him because a friend of mine was taking a course with a writer who was teaching in prisons.
Guest:And he also was teaching outside of prisons as well.
Guest:And he was hooking up the prisoners, the insiders, with the outsiders to basically get manuscripts sent around.
Guest:Oh, wow.
Guest:And my friend Dan Yost had two of these manuscripts.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I was starting to pitch it before I even wrote a script.
Guest:And eventually Avenue...
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Became interested in that one.
Marc:So the first film you did was in black and white and Drugstore Cowboy almost seemed like the color was like saturated or a little high contrast or something.
Marc:What was the choice on that?
Guest:Well, it was weird.
Guest:I mean, it was shot by Bob Yeoman, who shoots a lot of Wes Anderson movies.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:I think that what happened color wise was our art director David Brisbane who was an LA guy had chosen to use a lot of black and a lot of green because we really wanted to make a black and white film but we weren't really allowed to by our producers so he'd chosen to sort of like make it so that your mind saw it in black and white even though it was in color it also serviced Portland though too
Marc:Like, there's definitely a darkness.
Marc:There's a greenness.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And a blackness.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's true.
Marc:And then, like, with My Own Private Idaho, like, I remember... I still remember... There's one... I remember the weirdest part of that movie.
Marc:I guess it was one of the Johns who, you know, he's got an apartment...
Marc:where he just sits on a couch and starts rubbing his feet on that, like something that almost looks like this.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:What was that?
Marc:I mean, who was that guy?
Guest:The guy was our publicist, Mickey Cottrell.
Guest:And I had invited him to play this part because he would be the type of character, he was the correct type of character.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And...
Guest:he, um, had a lot more, you know, he had, he had written something on his own that was like 25 pages that he expected us to film.
Guest:Oh, right.
Guest:But, uh, when we ended up in the room where he was supposedly living, um,
Guest:David Brisbane, again, the production designer from Jack Store Cowboy, also did My Own Private Idaho, put in a new white rug that he said, wear these slippers.
Guest:I think that was probably ad-libbed because we had to wear slippers when we went in there because of the pristineness of the white rug.
Guest:So he had, in that case, when we were rehearsing, his shoes slipped on the carpet because it was so new.
Guest:And he had these new sort of dress shoes.
Guest:So he was pretending to do some kind of ballet.
Guest:And he claimed while he was doing it that he had done ballet when he was a child.
Guest:And it just looked so funny that we said, okay, we're shooting this.
Marc:He just seemed so excited, I remember.
Guest:Yeah, because he was excited.
Marc:Yeah, that movie, and then it becomes sort of more, you're dealing with these guys that are kind of on the margins.
Marc:It sort of became a place that you explored pretty well, but those two movies certainly.
Marc:Do you feel like that was due to where you were at at the time?
Marc:Because your curiosity certainly sort of ranged.
Guest:I think it probably was, I mean, my first film was more of like tried to be a comedy, Alice in Hollywood.
Guest:It was also about somebody that was dispossessed, losing her way in Hollywood, living on the streets eventually.
Guest:So I lived a block away from Hollywood Boulevard.
Guest:So I saw a lot of kids on the street.
Guest:I wasn't one of the kids.
Guest:I didn't really... I wasn't hanging out with them.
Guest:I wasn't smoking pot with them or anything.
Guest:You weren't Larry Clark.
Guest:No, definitely.
Guest:Although I admired that.
Guest:I just was sort of visualizing, seeing their lives and imagining...
Guest:what they were, or maybe reading John Reichy, reading about what was going on on my own street.
Guest:And what was going on was pretty heavy.
Guest:If you really did get involved, it was very heavy.
Marc:In my own private Idaho and in Drugstore Cowboy, as heavy as it was,
Marc:Somehow you tempered the tragedy that is Hollywood Boulevard at that time, I would imagine.
Guest:Yeah, I think both Malinoche was very funny as a book.
Guest:Drugstore Cowboy also was funny, even though you might read it and not really get the humor, but it was a little bit like Larry Clark.
Marc:Yeah, I think it was funny.
Guest:And then My Own Private Idaho was more surrealistic.
Guest:But funny.
Guest:There's funny moments.
Marc:It was funny moments as well.
Marc:Because River was a narcoleptic, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that was its own comedic thing.
Guest:Which came from George Eliot's Silas Marner.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:And it was just like this weird influence there and a little bit of Samuel Beckett and then a little bit of the reality and then Shakespeare.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They did Shakespeare, right?
Guest:They did.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it was a combination of all these things.
Marc:It's a fun movie.
Marc:It was a fun movie in that sense.
Marc:Do you know?
Marc:Well, I mean, you mixed it up, right?
Guest:Yeah, it was really like a collage of different things.
Marc:And then there was a shot where doesn't a house fall out of the sky?
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Or am I making that up?
Guest:No, it does.
Marc:Barn.
Guest:Barn, yeah.
Guest:But I think Burroughs' cut-up ideas were a little bit in play there.
Guest:So that's what you should have told Pasolini.
Marc:I'm going to do what Burroughs did with literature to movies.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, that's interesting.
Marc:Was it in play?
Marc:I mean, consciously, the cut-up method?
Guest:I had done it on my own.
Guest:He had tried it too.
Guest:I had written things by cutting them up and rewriting them like he was sort of explaining.
Guest:So having already done that, also I had done a lot of, because of Robert Rauschenberg when I was a student, high school student, we did collages that were things cut out of magazines and pasted together.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, I mean, I was used to cutting things up and putting them together.
Guest:Marshall McLuhan was an influence.
Guest:All these 60s things were an influence.
Marc:So, they're all there.
Marc:The beats through RISD, through the art, and then onto my own private idea.
Guest:I was really putting everything I had into that one.
Marc:And it did well, didn't it?
Marc:I mean, I remember it being great.
Marc:Yeah, New Line was very happy.
Marc:And, you know, you sort of changed Keanu's trajectory a bit, right?
Marc:Yeah, from Bill and Ted.
Marc:But, again, there was a lot of funny in that, and then there was a lot of fun.
Marc:To Die For is hilarious.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Dark satire.
Marc:And you work with Buck Henry.
Marc:Buck Henry.
Marc:And he's, like, going back again to Shapiro's world, almost.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Before it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He did that sort of thing.
Guest:The Graduate.
Guest:He did The Graduate.
Guest:And he was a prankster in the 50s.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He would go on talk shows as a character.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, an invented character that wanted to like put panties on horses, you know, because it was obscene.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:Did that script exist without you?
Guest:I mean, what was your relationship with Buck?
Guest:Buck and I had the same agent.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I can't remember where we met, unless it was through the agent.
Guest:Probably was through the agent.
Guest:And Buck was interested in working on something together.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So a producer had optioned the book called To Die For by Joyce Maynard.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Buck elected to be the screenwriter, and I elected to be the director of the project.
Guest:You work closely together then?
Guest:No, because Buck sort of locks himself into his writing room and writes.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:He doesn't sort of spitball, at least with me.
Marc:But once it was written, that was it?
Guest:Well, it was so good that I didn't have any suggestions for changes.
Guest:Did he like the movie?
Guest:I think he was happy with the movie.
Guest:There was some things maybe that he doesn't like, but I mean, one of the things that he did when he wrote it, I can remember him saying that there was a lot of ways to cut this together because everything was like a bit, you know, one minute almost like joke.
Guest:So you could do it many different ways in the editing room.
Marc:It's very interesting that where Joaquin Phoenix was at at that time, I guess River had passed away.
Guest:Yeah, he had just died.
Marc:But his acting, because in the new movie, don't worry, he won't get far.
Marc:Like, you know, you can really see the arc within your films with that guy of, like, his craft just evolving to, like, this, like, he was all in on To Die For, but it was almost feral.
Marc:Like, he was almost, you know, kind of like an animal, but very raw.
Marc:And in the new movie, it's such a meticulous and controlled but, you know, very vulnerable performance.
Marc:It's kind of an amazing thing he did.
Mm-hmm.
Marc:But, like, how is your relationship?
Marc:Like, have you been in touch with him over the years?
Guest:Yeah, I had.
Guest:After To Die For, I was pretty much in touch with him.
Guest:We lived, we were neighbors in New York for a while, lived in New York City, and we had projects that we sort of imagined together that we never did.
Guest:And even then we all like Casey Affleck and Joaquin and myself found ourselves.
Guest:We were all neighbors in New York.
Guest:We found ourselves here in L.A.
Guest:living near each other.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:So continue like just our ongoing kind of dreaming together.
Guest:And so when this particular project, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, became available, it was something that I had worked on in the 90s, became available again without Robin Williams.
Guest:Robin Williams was one of the originators of the project.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:For the lead?
Guest:As the lead, yeah.
Guest:And he was developing it.
Guest:How long ago was that?
Guest:97.
Guest:Oh, a long time.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:After Robin and I worked together in Good Will Hunting, he had offered me this particular story to develop for him.
Guest:So I had developed a couple of scripts with Robin, and then it just sort of was one of those projects that he never got to.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And eventually when Robin had died, it surfaced again at Sony.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:They called me and they said, you know, what do we do with this book?
Marc:They still had it.
Marc:They were still curious about it because of the attention that Robin had given it.
Guest:Yeah, or else they just have a library that certain things have bigger price tags than others.
Guest:They either want to sell them or maybe do something with them.
Marc:Well, yeah, and with Robin on Good Will Hunting, I mean, you know, that was a huge turning point with him and for Matt Damon and for Ben.
Marc:I mean, and you were brought in by, how did you get involved with that project?
Guest:Good Will Hunting was an executive at Miramax.
Guest:Mark Tusk was his name.
Guest:He and I were talking about Boston.
Guest:We were talking about South Boston.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:And he mentioned the script.
Guest:He said, oh, we just bought Ben and Matt's script.
Guest:And I said, it's about South Boston.
Guest:He's like, well, it's about characters that live in South Boston.
Guest:He said, I'll send it to you.
Guest:So he sent it to me.
Guest:And that's how I got a hold of it.
Guest:And I originally had just called, I called Joaquin to find Casey's number and Casey's number to find Ben's number and got Ben.
Guest:And said, this is great.
Guest:You guys, like, I knew that you had a script.
Guest:I never thought to read it because it was sort of a legendary script written by two non-actors.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:I mean, non-writers.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It had been around for a few years.
Guest:And I, so finally I've read it and I was like...
Guest:I didn't realize it was so amazing.
Guest:It's like this amazing thing.
Guest:And if you need a director, I'd be interested, which was the beginning of sort of a long process of, you know, other directors considering it.
Guest:Me sort of standing in line before I could actually.
Guest:And you just what was it specifically about that story that made you want to do it?
Guest:I think it was not like the other stories that I had done.
Guest:I think it was more of a uplifting story, which I was a little scared of.
Guest:I didn't know whether I needed the down and dirty story to survive as an artist or a dramatist.
Marc:You mean just your fear for your personal integrity or what you could bring to it?
Guest:Or just whether I needed that kind of energy in order to actually make the dramatics work.
Guest:Just because I had never done it.
Guest:Everything I had done up until then was a little bit about antiheroes as opposed to heroes.
Marc:And then also with even Cowgirls Get the Blues, you kind of went big and weird.
Marc:You kind of did that.
Marc:It's interesting because it seems like from my own private Idaho too, the surrealness, you kind of even took it further and I guess it got a little unhinged.
Guest:I got burned out.
Guest:Going too high.
Guest:Too close to the sun.
Marc:So it was a risk for you, Good Will Hunting.
Guest:That's the way I felt.
Guest:Because I was saying, I'll do it.
Guest:And as I was saying those words, I was thinking, I wonder if I can.
Guest:I wonder if I need something like I've done before.
Marc:Can you make a sweet movie?
Guest:Yeah, because it was very sweet.
Guest:But there's some darkness in it.
Guest:But I did like the kind of hidden genius aspect that the janitor is solving the problems on the Harvard chalkboard in the hallway was very, you know, was very, I guess, dead poet society.
Guest:It just had this sort of warm and cuddly feeling about it.
Guest:Sure, sure.
Guest:Which I really was a fan of that kind of film.
Guest:I just never had done one.
Guest:So I sort of, when I did do that movie, I kind of tried to put everything that I was doing in the other movies away to try and do something that was more like the movie wanted to be, you know, in the script.
Guest:And you did it.
Marc:And it worked.
Marc:Yeah, it sure did.
Marc:Thank God.
Marc:Now, okay, so obviously I can't go through every movie, though.
Marc:I want to, but I need to ask this pressing question.
Marc:I mean, to remake Psycho frame by frame, that's an obsessive undertaking.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And what did you... There's a whole reason behind it, if you want to hear the reason.
Guest:Yeah, I do.
Marc:I want to hear the reason.
Marc:I want to hear what you learned from it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I think the process of doing it was the learning.
Guest:It wasn't necessarily the result.
Guest:And it wasn't really about learning about Hitchcock.
Guest:It was more that during the 90s, the joke about the executives was that they would rather make a sequel than they would an original piece.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because there was less risk.
Guest:So they would rather copy or continue a story that's already known in the public.
Guest:And they were really searching for some way to do that.
Guest:Now they've found out that comics is the way to do it.
Guest:Like it already exists in the public's mind.
Guest:But at the time they were sort of searching.
Guest:They hadn't found comic books yet.
Guest:And it's a universe.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Two, a never-ending series of characters.
Guest:It's never-ending.
Guest:I mean, they just hit what they wanted.
Guest:But back in the 90s, they hadn't found that yet.
Guest:But they were trying by doing TV shows as movies.
Guest:They did the Flintstones as a movie.
Guest:They did the Brady Bunch as a movie.
Guest:So when I did Drugstore Cowboy, I was all of a sudden meeting with the heads of studios because they knew that actors would work with me.
Guest:Therefore, if they got me on their movie, they could get the actor that they wanted.
Guest:So it was less about me than it was about the actors.
Guest:And so during one of the meetings, Casey Silver at Universal said he brought in all of his vice presidents.
Guest:One guy was the head of the library.
Guest:And he said, in the library, we have old films that you could remake.
Guest:We have scripts that haven't been made yet that you could make.
Guest:And it just reminded me of that thing that they wanted to do, which is remake something.
Guest:And I said, what you guys haven't done is try to take a hit and remake it exactly rather than like remake it and like put a new spin on it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just remake it for real.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because I'd never seen that done yet as an experiment.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And the whole thing seemed experimental to me anyway.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I thought, why not?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And they laughed.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:you know they were like they thought it was silly ridiculous absurd and they left and so they said well we won't be doing that and that continued every time i would meet with casey i would bring it back up because i would remind myself oh you're the guy and i locked in on psycho i'm not sure why psycho but it just seemed like the movie that would work the best yeah i would bring it up again and they would laugh again and
Guest:And then later when we did do Good Will Hunting and it did really well at the box office, before the Oscars, it also got nominated for like nine Oscars or something.
Guest:And the studios liked to get it.
Guest:It won a couple.
Guest:It won a couple of Oscars.
Guest:um robin won robin and matt and ben for writing yeah right but what they like to do right you know the night before or the week before the oscars happen they like to get new deals in place with the people that are nominated because as soon as you win they've got your movie going you know yeah right they've got they can just lean over to their buddies and say we've got that yeah we got that guy and i think that's why they do it and then they forget that they have it you know after the night's over
Guest:So they were trying to make a deal with me and I had a deal at Paramount and I had a deal at some other studio.
Guest:And then my agent was saying, universal really wants to do a deal with you.
Guest:What have you got anything for them?
Guest:And I was like, universal, universal.
Guest:Oh yeah.
Guest:Tell them psycho, uh, frame by frame, um, new cast in color.
Guest:And that's the idea.
Guest:And then my agent calls back and said, they think that's fantastic.
Yeah.
Guest:So all of a sudden they were in.
Marc:So money talks.
Marc:Yeah, after the Academy Awards.
Guest:After the box office.
Guest:It was really the box office.
Guest:The awards were also part of it.
Guest:So then I had to make the decision whether I really wanted to do it.
Guest:After they said yes, I was like, oh, geez.
Guest:And I was talking to Danny Elfman, who I wanted to do the score, because he was so good at doing Bernard Herrmann style scores.
Guest:And he said, you know, they'll kill you if you make this.
Guest:He knew.
Guest:And I was like, who will kill me?
Guest:He says, just everyone, like the critics, everybody that loves Psycho will kill you.
Guest:And I said, yeah, but Danny, this is an experiment.
Guest:So this is not about who's going to get killed.
Guest:This is about just doing it.
Guest:And then I thought, it doesn't matter if they kill me.
Guest:And then later when I got killed, it hurt.
Marc:Because you put a lot of time into it.
Guest:Well, because you actually care whether your movie succeeds.
Guest:So it didn't work.
Guest:But the idea was whether or not you could actually remake something and it would repeat the box office.
Guest:Oh, that was the idea.
Guest:That was the sort of weird science experiment.
Marc:Sure.
Marc:But did you glean anything from the process as a filmmaker?
Guest:Nothing.
Guest:Not really.
Guest:I mean, it's the same process each time, pretty much.
Guest:You've got the model you're trying to make here.
Guest:Sure, but did you, like, I mean, that was one... It was easier because we could copy the shots.
Guest:We had a template.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But, like, you know, I mean, you know, Hitchcock was pretty good at editing, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, like, when you're, you know, kind of repeating his moves, it didn't leave any lasting impression on you.
Marc:We were just copying the moves pretty much.
Marc:At no point you said, like, oh, this is kind of clever what he did.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I kind of already had looked at it that way.
Guest:I could see what he had done.
Guest:So it wasn't in repeating it.
Guest:It didn't bring any new insight.
Guest:But it obviously didn't work.
Guest:But I think it lasted.
Guest:It's more important now, I think, because people like yourself will ask questions about it.
Guest:It's more alive now than it was back when it failed.
Guest:Sure, yeah.
Guest:Just with, I guess, the art world or...
Marc:Yeah, well, now they've come around and realized, like, it was an experiment.
Marc:It was an experiment.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I think that the other, you know, I'm going to skip around, but, like, Elephant and Last Days, I thought were beautiful, poetic masterpieces, both of them.
Marc:I loved them.
Marc:I didn't see Jerry.
Guest:I should.
Guest:Yeah, Jerry's the first one of the same sort of series of using very, you know...
Guest:long amounts of time, more as if they really are, in that case, the desert, or as if you really are in a high school.
Guest:What provoked you to do that?
Guest:What was the shift?
Guest:Jerry being the first one.
Guest:Jerry started as a project that we weren't, we were going to make a film without a screenplay.
Guest:And we were going to
Guest:We were going to keep records and improv and make scenes up, but we weren't going to write them down.
Guest:So in the process of actually doing what we did in forging the dramatics and in the things that Matt and Casey did in the desert...
Guest:I sort of was applying a style to it according to what they were up to and the way to tell the story.
Guest:And it came kind of from a lot of different sources, the main one being Bela Tarr's Satan Tango.
Guest:Bela Tarr is a Hungarian filmmaker.
Guest:Because what we were kind of up to in the desert was sort of going that way.
Guest:Because I originally had thought we were going to make a film like a John Cassavetes film with a lot of talking.
Guest:And they weren't really talking that much.
Guest:So I thought there's still a way to keep going on this project.
Guest:And after I did that, I really wanted to try it again.
Guest:And Elephant was the next time.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:And why did you choose that Columbine?
Guest:Jerry and Elephant and Last Days are all based on real incidents that kind of have a mystery in the middle of them that can't really be solved because the people that can solve them are dead.
Guest:right okay so that that was the so the first one was really uh the kurt cobain death which ended up to be the last movie made yeah the second one was columbine and the third one was jerry um columbine i had been working on trying to find a home for it and i had found one at hbo with colin calendar and he's the one that said um i can't do columbine but i can do elephant and i was like what's elephant he's like it's a movie by alan clark
Guest:And I was realizing, oh, that's Harmony Kareem's favorite movie.
Guest:It's like this movie that I hadn't seen.
Guest:And he referred to it as Elephant because it was in the middle of a crisis in England with Protestant Catholic violence.
Guest:He made this piece that went on BBC in the middle of it and commented in its way on the violence, on the senselessness of the violence.
Guest:So, Elephant was sort of a code name?
Guest:It was his name for it, and then we didn't have a title for it because he didn't want to call it Columbine.
Guest:So, we just ended up calling it Elephant, which we liked.
Marc:We liked the title.
Marc:I can't imagine what that set was like to be improvising and using non-acting kids.
Marc:There must have been days on that set where it was menacing.
Guest:No, no, they were very good.
Guest:I mean, the people that we cast were very good at making things up.
Guest:We had pre-worked with them and found the kids that were just really good at, you know, just imagining something.
Guest:And they were all quite young, you know, like 14, 15, and 16.
Guest:So they were adept enough to just pretend.
Marc:And those were the first movies you'd improvised like that?
Marc:The Jerry and Elephant?
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:Well, I mean, the other movies, we had gone off the page even back in Drugstore Cowboy.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:Like Matt Dillon would go off the page and make things up or use other texts instead of the ones that we had.
Guest:There were other times that I had kind of gone off the page.
Guest:This is the first time that we sort of made that the actual scene, like not really having something written down.
Marc:And as a director, you're excited?
Marc:Is it more exciting to do that?
Marc:Because an artist, as the thing reveals itself in real time?
Guest:Yes.
Guest:It's very exciting.
Guest:Because a lot of magic happens at that moment when things are being made up.
Guest:I think also all three stories were told as if...
Guest:the characters and what they talked about were really not the important thing.
Guest:They weren't really the story.
Guest:They were just sort of noises that the characters made between each other.
Guest:They weren't going to tell you anything or like the things that they said weren't going to inform you.
Marc:Right.
Marc:What was your experience with what you had shot?
Marc:Was there a clear difference between identifiably authentic moments and things that just kind of didn't work?
Guest:I think all three of those movies are pretty much one take movies.
Guest:They're one angle.
Guest:So whatever's going on, it's not edited.
Guest:It's just sort of one big long shot.
Guest:I can't remember.
Guest:I think that we arranged it so there wouldn't really ever be an incorrect thing unless somebody just said, stop, stop, stop.
Guest:I can't go on.
Guest:Did that happen?
Guest:That didn't happen.
Guest:They weren't unnerving.
Guest:They weren't hard.
Guest:They were fun.
Guest:As dark as they were.
Marc:Last days and Elephant and Jerry.
Guest:The kids could do whatever they wanted.
Guest:We wouldn't tell them what not to do or what to do.
Guest:They knew that we weren't going to be disappointed.
Guest:They felt free to do whatever they want.
Guest:And so long as sort of the actions... As long as they get there.
Guest:Or getting where you're supposed to be getting, which in the case of Elephant, they weren't really supposed to be getting anywhere.
Guest:They're just wandering down the halls, pretty much, or going to class.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:They're not trying to get anywhere.
Guest:The shooters are trying to shoot people.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Last Days, I mean, the character is trying to avoid people.
Guest:So he's doing that.
Marc:I thought that was really good.
Marc:He's an interesting actor, that guy.
Marc:I mean, I haven't seen him in a lot.
Marc:In Bully, I remember he was great in Bully.
Marc:And then you go from those three to Milk, which is like a biopic.
Marc:Yes, we had a biopic.
Marc:Tight, man.
Marc:What brought you to that project?
Guest:That was an Oliver Stone project.
Guest:Originally that he decided after JFK that he was not going to do another assassination movie.
Guest:And that he had developed it, actually, but with David Franzoni, there was like 12 screenplays.
Guest:And there were a couple of producers who had bought the book The Mayor of Castro Street, which is where the original novel about his life, about Harvey's life.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And...
Guest:that was my origin i worked on a couple of screenplays on that one and it never came about and eventually a different party yeah lance black came up with a um a screenplay about the same guy and the same you know uh rising to um to politics in his life in san francisco so i said well i know this very well so let's go make it yeah and then and you got an amazing cast
Guest:Yeah, we called Sean.
Marc:How was it for you working with him?
Guest:I had, during another incarnation of the script, I'd actually contacted him before and asked him to do this biopic about Harvey Milk.
Guest:and he was interested and then we sort of like the project didn't happen and I lost contact and like years went by like I think 10 years went by and then again we were back into it and Sean had gotten older he was more of the year age of the guy of Harvey yeah so um called him back up and I said so uh what do you think about um playing Harvey Milk he lived in San Francisco at the time
Guest:Sean did.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he's like, I'm interested.
Guest:I had never worked with him before.
Guest:I'd worked with lots of different people.
Guest:I think for him, we have a lot of things that we like that are similar.
Guest:We have similar tastes in things like styles.
Guest:So I think that without too much discussion, we seem to be in the same track of what we were up to.
Guest:I didn't really encumber him with a lot of details of things I needed, you know, like the way he held the pen in his hand or anything like that.
Guest:Because he'll do it.
Guest:And he likes to do it.
Guest:And I found this with a lot of actors.
Guest:You know, if you let them just do their thing, that's kind of their happy place.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:As opposed to being micromanaging, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so if they can do that, it gets them excited because then they're contributing.
Guest:They're inventing things for the camera.
Guest:So in his case, he was happy.
Guest:He said I was one of the only directors that he didn't feel like punching in the face at the end of the movie, which was a compliment.
Guest:I said, who was the other one?
Guest:He was like, Clint Eastwood.
Guest:That's nice.
Marc:And Brolin was great.
Marc:Brolin, yeah.
Marc:any sort of responsibility in that movie in terms of,
Guest:I mean, in every movie you feel a huge responsibility.
Guest:But to the gay community?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, it's huge.
Guest:I mean, you're very responsible to sort of, like, try and get things as right as you can.
Guest:I mean, it's elusive because I think the, you know, looking back on that movie, the one thing that we may have, like, left out a little bit was the joy, you know, the gaiety of, like,
Guest:the life on Castro.
Guest:Like, we were sort of so into the politics and the moment-to-moment things that I think we kind of didn't capture, like, the hilarity.
Marc:Now let's just arrive at this, you know, obviously there's more films to talk about, but I watched...
Marc:The new one, the one that you're out talking about, don't worry, he won't get far on foot.
Marc:And I didn't know anything about that guy.
Marc:I didn't know that the book existed.
Marc:I didn't know anything about the movie.
Marc:And as a sober guy, which I am, on top of a lot of other things, I thought it was the most...
Marc:effective movie about sobriety that I had seen in a long time.
Marc:Maybe ever.
Marc:Because I've never seen anybody address the amends process.
Marc:And I think that that amends... That one, number nine.
Marc:Yeah, sought to make an amends of people if you could in person, face to face.
Marc:And that one scene with Jack and Black and Joaquin is, and you built the weight of it properly.
Marc:He was working his way towards that, yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And just like, how do you like, how do you address the guy who you didn't even know who was responsible for taking your your legs and arms away, basically, you know, but but like I'm getting ahead of myself.
Marc:I just I thought the movie was was amazing.
Marc:And he was amazing.
Marc:And and, you know, what were what attracted you to this one?
Guest:Sort of like the Harvey Milk story, it was something that although I knew John Callahan as a Portlander and he was a very visible person on the street in Portland because of his wheelchair and because of his bright red hair and the speed with which he was going down the street usually.
Guest:And by the time I got to know him, it was because of his cartoons.
Guest:Like, they were being printed in the weekly newspaper.
Guest:And he had written a book.
Guest:I was aware that there was a book.
Guest:I hadn't looked at it or read it.
Guest:But I kind of knew his story.
Guest:I knew one of the cartoons sort of explained his drinking and his, you know, attempts at sobriety were in some of the cartoons.
Guest:So, you kind of got the picture in his cartoon...
Marc:And he was a bad, like, he was like a low-bottom alcoholic, like a real, you know, hardcore alcoholic that just for people listening, that, you know, he wasn't a cartoonist when he lost his ability to walk and most of his ability to use his arms in a ridiculously dumb accident with another drunk guy.
Guest:He was an artist of sorts in high school.
Guest:And he was 21 when he had his accident.
Marc:Really, 21.
Marc:21.
Guest:So he was quite young.
Guest:And he was in Long Beach working.
Guest:And the party that he went to was in Long Beach.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the guy that he met, Dexter, was just the party guy in Long Beach.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And, yeah.
Guest:Is that guy a real guy?
Guest:It's based on a real guy.
Guest:I don't know his real name, but our movie studio is very worried about real names.
Guest:I don't think that he ever used any real names in his book.
Guest:John Callahan.
Guest:John Callahan.
Guest:But we changed a lot of them anyway.
Marc:I thought it was a fascinating decision on your part, which I assume it was on your part, of how you handled the actual accident.
Marc:It's almost fleeting, you know, what you see of it.
Mm-hmm.
Marc:You know, you see the car, you see them driving, but what actually changes the trajectory of this guy's wife is like, what, five seconds, right?
Guest:Yeah, it's very short.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was well known in Portland and I had met him because of just being on, you know, around town, like just socially.
Guest:And it was Robin Williams who had bought the book.
Guest:He and his wife who had a production company had bought,
Guest:The John Callahan book, Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot.
Guest:And they invited me to be the director and to develop a script with a writer.
Guest:So I found some writer friends of mine and we made a script.
Guest:uh sent it to sony and there just sort of wasn't any continuation and then a few years later we wrote a second script in 2002 again because they got interested in it again robin did i guess yeah and um again we wrote a script sent it in and there was just sort of like
Guest:you know silence yeah time went by so which could have meant they just didn't like the script yeah weren't sure or god forbid they tell you right and then you don't usually hear but also it could be you know the studio because the you know the idea is you're taking Robin and you're putting him into this like very real story and he's a quadriplegic he's a cartoonist he's like
Guest:going through a 12-step program.
Guest:And so I think by then there had been a number of recovery movies made that didn't make money.
Guest:So who knows what combination of those things.
Guest:So time just went by.
Guest:And it was just one of those projects that I guess was never going to get made.
Guest:And then John died in 2010.
Guest:And then Robin died after that.
Guest:And shortly after Robin had died, I think 2014, somebody called from Sony saying that they had this property.
Guest:That you wrote.
Guest:And that we had written scripts to, and I thought, do I want to revisit it?
Guest:So I started to work on a new script to see whether I could get what I wanted out of it.
Guest:Which was what?
Guest:Well, the other two scripts were a little bit, they were written for Robin.
Guest:Right.
Guest:To do Robin things.
Right.
Guest:And we kind of strayed a little bit from the book, which was a little darker, a little more austere.
Guest:And so I worked on something that I thought could work, which was closer to what I thought was his book.
Guest:And I also called Joaquin because I thought I should really have somebody in mind if I actually get involved.
Guest:So we did, on spec, wrote a screenplay.
Guest:Joaquin and I went into Sony and then they said no.
Yeah.
Guest:After all this.
Guest:But they did allow us to take it somewhere else.
Guest:And then who did it?
Guest:Amazon.
Guest:Amazon shot this.
Marc:I tell you, man, I can't imagine anyone else doing it but Joaquin in the form that it's in.
Marc:There's a certain, like his commitment to that character, whatever he did.
Marc:Because there's a weird thing that really bad alcoholics have in their demeanor.
Marc:You know, which is like the bottom line is they need to drink, you know, now.
Marc:Why am I not drinking?
Marc:And, you know, he was able to sort of get that.
Marc:It's a corruption of the soul in a way, you know, and you can see it in their disposition.
Marc:And he was able to do that somehow.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:You know, like that, that scene where, you know, he's, you know, after the accident and he still can't stop drinking and he's in his wheelchair and he's like knocking that half gallon of wine back in the park.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And those dudes come up to basically take, and he just gives them money to get their own.
Marc:Like, you know, like get away, get away, go get your own bottle.
Marc:I need all of this.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And I mean, it was just a stunning performance.
Marc:And I thought you just captured it all so well.
Marc:And the story is like incredibly moving.
Marc:How are you going to, you know, but it's really a recovery movie.
Marc:Did you see it that way?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, that was the thing that we didn't quite, we didn't go for in the earlier scripts because even though he did go into AA, we didn't see him going through sort of the whole process.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The first script was sort of written in 12 chapters, but they weren't specifically about steps.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I thought that I wanted to actually address as much as we could the steps, because we skip over a number of steps.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But it feels like you're kind of marching through the steps.
Guest:And that was the kind of thing that I was trying to bring about in this new draft.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, I've never seen it before.
Marc:Well, you know, AA is weird about that and historically about, you know, being represented.
Marc:But I've grown as somebody who's in recovery to just like, look, it helps people, period.
Marc:You know, I'm sorry if you're upset about the tradition, but...
Marc:But, you know, we're not representing AA here.
Marc:We're representing a guy's story, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, it's intertwined.
Guest:So, I mean, there were things about AA that I think were important for the characters to be paying attention to and to be wrapped up by.
Guest:And Donnie, you know, his character had to be sort of the authority.
Guest:Jonah?
Marc:That was an interesting character, because I don't know how much of that was in the book or what, because it was unorthodox.
Marc:I mean, the guy who sponsors a lot of people is definitely not unorthodox, but the sort of meetings that weren't essentially AA meetings.
Marc:That were at his house.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:These were things that John wrote about.
Guest:Yeah, they have those meetings.
Guest:He may have made that up.
Guest:There were certain things that it seemed like John did play with the reality of things.
Marc:Well, they definitely have private meetings with people, and it would make sense.
Marc:It's not that unusual, but it wasn't really an AA meeting.
Marc:It was just sort of a group therapy trip, right?
Marc:A little bit.
Guest:Mm-hmm.
Guest:But yeah, definitely Joaquin, one of the main things that he does is he gets right into the middle of his emotions concerning each scene.
Guest:Oh yeah?
Guest:Which is great for us, for the director and for the rest.
Guest:How do you mean?
Guest:Well, he's sort of in the middle, like when he's in the scene, he's just really in there.
Guest:So you can't really go wrong.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Or he can't.
Guest:And he makes it that way, fortunately.
Guest:And he's trying to do that, I'm assuming.
Guest:That's just his process?
Guest:That's his process.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just to get to that point.
Marc:And what was different from the Joaquin?
Marc:He would never say that.
Marc:Right.
Marc:What was different, did you notice, from working with him when he was a kid and working with him now?
Guest:The same.
Guest:It was really the same.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, he was way more experienced doing Don't Worry than To Die For.
Guest:I mean, To Die For, he hadn't acted in a while.
Guest:He had been in things when he was younger, like 14.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was in Parenthood.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And he had been in Space Camp, which he remembers fondly.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And he really immersed himself.
Guest:I think it's just his natural way to do it.
Guest:And he just becomes the character.
Guest:I think he, it's not like maybe the method.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But it's his own version of it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Where he's really like moving like the character.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And when you say cut, he's not still in character, but somehow he gets close enough to it that he can pop in and out.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:It was great.
Marc:And I hope it does well for you.
Marc:I hope so too.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And it was great talking to you.
Guest:Oh, thanks.
Marc:Thanks, Mark.
Marc:Thanks, man.
Marc:That was a lot of stuff I didn't know about him.
Marc:Why would I?
Marc:Yeah, man, that was the first time I talked to him.
Marc:How could I have known?
Marc:So, all right, so do we play guitar?
Marc:Do we?
Marc:I'll do it.
Marc:I'll do a little.
Marc:I like it.
Marc:I like the way this sounds.
Marc:I plugged the thing into a new hole, and I haven't changed the strings yet, and it keeps getting filthier.
Marc:.
Marc:Boomer lives!