Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
As much as Jon Quixote enjoyed interviewing Geoff Johns, that is but a fraction of the thrill that our own Mr. Beaks recently took in meeting his hero, David Mamet. Beaks is a theater geek, having worked his ass off in New York before making his deal with Satan and moving to Los Angeles. I’ll give you an idea how excited he was to do this interview... when the e-mail showed up today in my inbox, it was wet.
I understand, of course. Mamet’s a bit of a god here at the Labs as well. First thing I directed in college was from SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO. I am in permanent awe of his scripts for THE UNTOUCHABLES and THE VERDICT. I think he’s made one perfect film as a director, one armor-piercing bullet called HOMICIDE. His plays AMERICAN BUFFALO and GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS... holy shit. This guy long ago earned the title of “legend,” and I’m always glad to see him trying something new. Beaks assures me that SPARTAN is a damn good Mamet film, and I’m eager to check it out. For now, I’ll content myself with this interview...
The experience of meeting David Mamet was, for me, terrifying enough. As a guy with a perfectly useless BFA in Theater, I’d like to say that AMERICAN BUFFALO or SEXUAL PERVERSITY IN CHICAGO served as my introduction to the man, but it was actually his brilliant screenplay for THE VERDICT that came first. In fact, it wasn’t until De Palma’s THE UNTOUCHABLES that I began to take notice of the name, and after the religious experience I underwent with that film (you can read about it in one of my De Palma-rama pieces buried somewhere on this site), I promptly checked out every play with his name on it from my local public library. And when I exhausted Mamet’s oeuvre, I segued into Pinter, which then led to Beckett. I think I may be the only theater major to fall in love with the stage as a result of a Brian De Palma film, and for that I am perversely proud.
Had I been granted a one-on-one interview, the following probably would’ve been lots of stammering on my part. Transcribing this piece, I thought of a thousand follow-ups, and countless other avenues of discussion left untraversed, but I still think that we did a pretty good job getting the often terse Mamet to expound on his craft. I would, however, like to warn you that he does venture into spoiler territory on SPARTAN, the fantastic film that occasioned this press junket. He doesn’t give it all away, but, as with Mamet’s best con jobs, this is a picture best appreciated with as little info as possible. In any event, you have been warned.
Do actors usually get the rhythm of your dialogue, or is it something you have to coach them on?
Well, they get it. I kind of write it to be spoken, and I think that almost all actors appreciate that.
How many passes does it take to create the perfect dialogue?
Passes?
Yeah.
That’s a very good question. That’s a really good question. I’m not sure if I know the answer. I do it fairly spontaneously, and then sometimes, for various reasons, it has to be re-crafted. And that gets a little more (difficult.) I used to be really good at that, but that gets more difficult as I get older just because my brain is failing. I have less brain cells because long before any of you guys were born there was something called the sixties, and… that’s where the brain cells went, okay?
(Laughter.)
What is your writing regimen, like when you’re really hunkered down and writing?
I think I’m going to just start writing and keep writing until they throw me in jail. Other than that, I set aside all day, every day for writing, and break it up with going home to see my family, and having lunch, and getting a haircut. I hate to do that stuff.
What’s more challenging for you: a film like this, or then going back and writing a play? It’s so constrictive. You can do almost anything on film.
Well, it would seem that you can do almost anything on film, but that’s part of the wonderful fascination with filmmaking. You say, “Well, okay, you can do anything you want. Now, what are you going to do?” That’s the wonderful challenge of film. Theoretically, I can do anything I want limited only by my ability to express it in terms of a shot list. So, that’s a fascinating challenge. I don’t find it any more freeing, or anymore constrictive than writing plays. They each have their own strictures, and the wisdom of how to understand those strictures fascinate me.
What are the strictures of playwriting?
Well, Aristotle said it’s got to be about… one character doing one thing in the space of three days in one place, such that every aspect of the play is a journey of the character toward recognition of the situation. And at the end, the recognizing of the situation, he or she understands… recognizes the situation, undergoes a transformation, and the high becomes low, and, in comedy, sometimes the low becomes high. That’s the strictures of playwriting.
How did you approach this individual project from a writing standpoint and a directing standpoint?
I started writing it and kept writing it, and it evolved. It’s like filling in a crossword puzzle. Now, you know that word has to be “abracadabra”, right? Because there’s no other word it can be. Until you get halfway through and you see that the word down in the middle has a “p” in the middle of “abracadabra” and there is no “p”. So, therefore, one of them has to be wrong; they can’t both be right. The same thing is true about structuring a drama: you go along and do the best you can, and say, “I know this has got to happen at the end of the second act”, until you spend two years trying to get there and it doesn’t work. So, something’s wrong. Either the first and third act are wrong, or the second act is wrong. How am I going to fix it? Structure is the whole thing. It’s getting the movie to eat up fifteen lines on one side of a sheet of paper, so you can go home and write it.
When you have a movie like this that sort of traffics in a thriller, at least vaguely, in a thriller blueprint, how do you approach it in terms of making it something distinctively your own, and not something that’s sort of a formulaic Hollywood movie?
You can’t help but make it distinctively your own. If you give yourself up to the form, it’s going to be distinctively your own. Because the form is going to tell you what’s needed. That’s one of the great things I find about working with drama: you’re always learning from the form; you’re always getting humbled by it. It’s exactly like… anybody ever analyze a dream – your own dream? You try to analyze your dream, you say, “Well, I know what that means. I know exactly what that means. Why am I still unsettled?” Right? “Well, let me look a little bit harder at this little thing over here. But that’s not important, that’s not important, that’s not important. The part where I kill the monster: that’s the important part. And I know that that means that my father *this* and blah, blah, blah.” But what about this little part over here about the bunny rabbit? Why is the bunny rabbit hopping across the thing? “Oh, that’s not important, that’s not important!” So, you find out as always, because making up a drama is almost exactly analogous to analyzing a dream, that understanding that you’re cleansed, just like the hero is cleansed, not from your ability to manipulate the material, but from your ability to understand the material. And it’s really humbling, just like when you finally have to look over at what that little bunny means. There’s a reason why your mind doesn’t want to see that, right? There’s a reason why you say, “Oh, that’s just interstitial material. Fuck that. That’s nothing,” because that’s always where the truth lies that’s going to tell you how to reformulate the puzzle.
What’s the bunny rabbit in SPARTAN?
What’s the bunny rabbit? That’s a good question? Part of the bunny rabbit in SPARTAN is: what does he do in the second act? Right? When he finds out that everything is screwed up, you know, and it’s not a question of manipulation. “Oh, I better get on my white horse and ride off in all directions.” The question is: “What am I going to do?” So, the first thing you do is… he goes and says, “I’m going to give everything to the First Lady because she’s the mommy. She’ll solve the problem.” And he finds out that he’s failed; he can’t even… he was so intent on trying to get to the mother of the victim that he overlooks the fact that he just got trapped by this woman who doesn’t look like a Secret Service agent, but she is, and then it turns out that that wisdom there leads him to… where does he go then? Someplace else.
He goes to the young girl.
Oh, yeah, yeah. First he goes to the young girl and says, “There was this store. Can you help me? Can you help me?” And what she says is: “All I’m going to tell you is what you told me in the first reel.” Right? He doesn’t like that, so he going to get out of it by going to the mother. Well, he goes to the mother first, and she says, “There’s nobody there but you. Everything you want to avail yourself of isn’t there. There is no government; the government is trying to kill you. There isn’t any unit cohesion; the unit’s trying to kill you. There isn’t any sense of patriotism; your country’s trying to kill you. Everybody wants you dead. You have to save her.” The woman says, “You have to save her because there’s nobody but you. It’s just your responsibility.” And then he goes back to his friend, Tia Texada, and says, “What am I going to do?” And she tells him the same thing: “There’s nobody there but you.” So he says, “Well, I’d better go do it. Let me go back and avail myself of one of my other allies. And the other ally says, “I’m not even going to help you. There’s nobody there but you.” He offers him an out, as we find that friends often do when we’re in the midst of a moral dilemma. We go talk to our friends, right? One of our friends always says, “Listen, I understand that you want to do what you think is the right thing, but that’s really not the right thing here. Let me tell you why. It does you a credit that you said that you want to do the right thing, but the really *righter* thing would be to do the wrong thing.” So, the question is, having had the problem restated to him, having understood what the problem is… he’s now given an out. What’s he going to do? And that’s the point at which he has to make a decision that starts at the end of the third act. And, so, as with any dramatic structure, the third act is really just a reiteration of the first act where the terms are clarified.
So personal responsibility is the bunny rabbit?
Yeah, maybe. Maybe that’s the bunny rabbit.
At the end of last year, I interviewed (William H.) Macy for THE COOLER, and he had just seen SPARTAN for the first time.
He liked it.
Said he was absolutely amazed by how you could keep the exposition down to a minimum, and get around all the names (and titles) and stuff. When you wrote this, what made you decide to go that way, and did you think it would be distracting to the audience?
No… that’s the fun of it. Anybody could write a script, and *has*, where it says, “Jim, how are things since you were elected Governor of Minnesota? How’s your albino daughter?” Right? “As, of course, you know Mr. Smith, your son has myopia… and it’s amazing that having that myopia that he was capable of winning the National Spelling Bee.” That’s easy, right? That’s not challenging. But the trick here is to take a story that might be kind of complex, and make it simple enough that people will want to catch up with it, rather than stopping them and explaining to them why they should be interested. Because then they might understand, but they won’t care. What makes them interested is to make them catch up. “What’s happening here? Who is this guy? What crime was committed? Who was taken? Why is she important? Why are all of these government people running around? What is that guy going to do to get her back?” You see, they want to see what he’s going to do next, which is all moviemaking comes down to: what happens next.
One of the elements that you see in here is how power just makes you lose all morality. I’m thinking in the case of the President (in this film); it’s all about, “Staying where I am, and how I would lose my moral fiber just to stay where I am.” Having worked and existed in Hollywood, do you have any idea why people get so drunk with power?
Did you ever have any?
No, see, so I don’t (know what it’s like). How did you not get completely lost with all of this power?
Well, that’s a very, very good question, and… I think what the answer is: you’ve got to have the specter in front of you all the time, but you have to be able to learn. I think I’m capable of doing this to a certain extent, and I would like to be able to do it to a greater extent, to say that you have to take pride in mastering your own impulses, rather than to take pleasure in gratifying them. There are a lot of really great models, and the military is one of them. This is a very pro-military, I think, movie in many ways. Here are people who are capable of subordinating their financial needs and their physical needs to an extraordinary regimen – a mental and physical regimen – in the cause of service. The question in the movie is: to what extent is that person capable of abiding by the precepts which he’s teaching others? There’s a great prison phrase: “I’d rather walk the yard a man than walk the streets a punk.” I got that from my early days in Chicago. And also the Stoics said, “Men respect power, and they respect no power more than that ever served.” That’s one of the lessons of the Val Kilmer character. I think his performance was very influenced by our technical advisor, a guy who spent about seventeen years in the Delta Force. A real great leader of men. A great teacher.
Could you talk a little about casting, about Val Kilmer, and what it was that you were looking for? And because you’re so brilliant as a writer and a screenwriter, do you find that actors don’t want to change your dialogue like a lot of time they’ll come up and say, “I can’t say that. My character wouldn’t say that”. Do you find that they don’t do that to you?
Yeah, they don’t do that to me for several reasons: one is that the dialogue is good, and the other reason is that the actor is good.
Your films and your works… there’s always a recurring theme of duty – doing one’s duty. Here, we have a man who is doing what’s asked of him, and is being misused. He’s being lied to. His valorous purpose is being perverted. I sense a real anger in this movie. Is that growing out of what’s going on today?
Everything is growing out of what’s going on today because everybody is affected by the environment in which they live. But I don’t know if the environment in which we live is worse than the environment in which we lived five years ago, or better. I think it’s about human nature. This is a movie about a guy who is faced with the choice of giving up absolutely everything in order to maintain the one thing which he says is the most important thing in the world. Basically, he has to die – in this case, spiritually, and risk death. You see, here’s a guy who’s willing to risk death, but the question is: “Yes, we knew that, but are you also willing to risk sorrow? Are you willing to change your belief system? What’s more important to you: to hold on to your feeling of purpose or to hold on to a sense of honor which transcends that?” So, of course he’s going to go kicking and screaming. Who wouldn’t?
As a director, have you ever deviated from your own script?
I haven’t deviated from it. I’ve certainly changed it.
In what circumstances would you do that?
Well, if something’s not working a lot of the time, you just say, “Oh, let’s try something else.” We always have a typewriter in the trailer… and you say, “Give me a moment, I’ll write a new scene.”
Is there anything on SPARTAN that changed?
Oh, there’s a lot of stuff. I remember while we were doing… and you get inspired, too. A lot of the time you get inspired. Something’s happening on the set, and you say, “Oh, my god, let’s do some more of that!” Or, “Now I understand what happens in scene forty-seven.” One of my favorite moments while we were doing STATE AND MAIN with Alec Baldwin, he has this scene where he’s playing this movie star who’s just gotten kicked out of town because he was sleeping with this fourteen year old girl, which he does all of the time. So, they lost their location, and the whole movie… has to go to this new location. So, he goes to this new location and he finds *another* fourteen year old girl, this time played by Julia Stiles, and they’re both drunk out of their minds. And he crashes a car. The car is upside down, and they’re both drunk, and he crawls out of the car, looks around, and says, “Well, *that* happened.” That was like an inspiration at four o’clock in the morning, and he said something else. And I said, “Oh, oh, oh, wait a second! Say *this*!”
So he invented that line or you did?
Oh, I did. But I was just looking at what was happening on set, and I said, “Wouldn’t that be funnier?”
Has an actor ever invented a line that you’ve then later heard how brilliant it was, and been able to take credit for yourself?
No, I would never take credit for something someone else said.
That’s not something that happens in the theater, is it? That you would change something once it’s written?
Well, the question is: when is it written? I just opened a play in San Francisco on Saturday, and I’m changing the play up until opening night. That’s the first production; I’ll probably change some things as I work on the manuscript before it gets published. But at a certain point, you’ve got to stop.
What has been the greatest frustration of letting other people direct your scripts?
Well, the greatest frustrations have been having the scripts directed other than the ways I thought they would’ve gone. Now, when I do a script for someone else to direct, I get paid for it. That’s one of the things you get paid for.
Something as well-regarded as GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, which you didn’t direct. What would you have changed about that?
I love that movie. I wouldn’t change anything. I love that movie. James Foley.
You said at a certain point you have to stop. I just always remember with Fitzgerald that he had to send his stuff to his editor or he would have never stopped. What’s the point when you realize, “I have to stop?” How good are you at letting go?
I’m pretty good because at a certain point you say, “I want to do something else.” Past a certain point, you say, “Well, it could be perhaps a little better with a lot more time,” but I try to get it as perfect as I can given the fallibility and the fact that I’m not going to live forever.
How do you approach something that is exclusively your own as opposed to something that is a for-hire project, especially since your dialogue and your plotting is so deliberate, and commercial movies are much less distinctive.
I don’t think I approach it any differently. I put my name on it. That’s the best I know.
Do you see your career in any kind of continuum? There’s a sense, like with Soderbergh, when he did FULL FRONTAL and he did SOLARIS, and SOLARIS didn’t happen and FULL FRONTAL was kind of mixed. Now, he’s back to OCEAN’S TWELVE because he’s looking at the mountain-scape of his career and the effect of money on it. Do you ever consider that in your career, or are you writing from your soul and working from there?
I don’t know. I’m just making it up as I go along.
Well, is it just—
Well, it’s always there. I think no matter what anyone says, you always make it up as you go along. It’s like they say when you have babies, you know, nobody gave you a how-to book. Nobody gave you a manual. The important things in life, whether it’s your career, whether it’s your marriage or whether it’s child rearing – you make it up as you go along. You try to have certain precepts and hold to them, but sometimes they even change.
Has directing become as natural to you as writing? Is making a shot list a similar artistic experience as sitting down to a typewriter?
Well, I enjoy it. I don’t know if it’s natural. There are certain things I can do naturally, but the people a lot of us admire – I’m sure with a lot of athletes that people admire – is that they’re working on their weaknesses all the time. So, I hope that’s what I’m doing at least some of the time. So, it’s not a question of someone saying, “Do you enjoy the thing that goes easy?” Sure, but there’s also a great enjoyment in doing the thing that comes with difficulty.
So, the writing is easier, and the directing is more of a challenge?
Certain aspects of writing are easier. You know, I write dialogue fairly easily. Plot is a big pain in the ass, but I work very, very hard at that. But I love directing.
Hollywood has tiptoed around setting any stories in the post-9/11 world. In your film, just at the very end, there’s that acknowledgment that, “World War III is going on out there. We could have lots of work for you now.” Would you ever do a film that addresses the whole post-9/11 scenario?
Yeah, I might. I was actually talking to some people today. I just did an episode of THE SHIELD with Shawn Ryan. He and I, and Eric Haney, who is my technical advisor on (SPARTAN), we were talking about maybe doing a television series about that very thing.
Are you going to do WHISTLE?
People keep telling me I am.
I saw it listed, and I thought… this film is your most elaborate, or most ambitious film visually. I thought maybe this was a warm-up to doing something that big.
Well, it’s really not that big. It takes place in a hospital. It’s the end of FROM HERE TO ETERNITY trilogy. People keep telling me I’m doing it.
Did you write the episode of THE SHIELD?
I directed it. I didn’t write it.
For further reading, I highly recommend the following:
THREE USES OF THE KNIFE: ON THE NATURE AND PURPOSE OF DRAMA
TRUE AND FALSE: HERESY AND COMMON SENSE FOR THE ACTOR
ON DIRECTING FILM
And if you haven’t already basked in it, see Mamet’s remarkable filmed adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s THE WINSLOW BOY. Let right be done, and see this movie immediately.
And, of course, see SPARTAN, which opens this Friday, March 12th.
Faithfully submitted,
Mr. Beaks
Awesome work, buddy. Thanks for sending it in!
"Moriarty" out.
