Interview with Miguel Arteta

FC:   Why did you pick “The Piano Teacher” as one of your favorite films?

MA: My friend Mike White, who wrote “Chuck & Buck” and “The Good Girl”, recommended it and said it blew his mind.  I went to see it and I just loved the story telling in it.  I feel like it’s a movie where I want to know what’s going to happen in every cut and I never know where it’s going to go.  It’s completely unpredictable and I feel like it’s a very disturbing, but very honest portrayal of a sexual relationship between two very odd people.  You know, I love movies that present characters that are very damaged, but yet make them very relatable and I think using that criteria this movie is right at the top of the list.  Here’s a woman that’s sleeping with her mother, who can not relate to anybody, who is very malicious and who has all sorts of sexual perversions, yet she remains completely relatable to me throughout the film.

FC:   Your second film was “On Dangerous Ground.”

MA:  Yeah, “On Dangerous Ground” is a movie that Nicholas Ray made in the 1950’s and he is one of my favorite directors because he also is somebody who advocates for people who are emotionally damaged.  He usually made movies about young people who ...

FC:   Why did you pick “The Piano Teacher” as one of your favorite films?

MA: My friend Mike White, who wrote “Chuck & Buck” and “The Good Girl”, recommended it and said it blew his mind.  I went to see it and I just loved the story telling in it.  I feel like it’s a movie where I want to know what’s going to happen in every cut and I never know where it’s going to go.  It’s completely unpredictable and I feel like it’s a very disturbing, but very honest portrayal of a sexual relationship between two very odd people.  You know, I love movies that present characters that are very damaged, but yet make them very relatable and I think using that criteria this movie is right at the top of the list.  Here’s a woman that’s sleeping with her mother, who can not relate to anybody, who is very malicious and who has all sorts of sexual perversions, yet she remains completely relatable to me throughout the film.

FC:   Your second film was “On Dangerous Ground.”

MA:  Yeah, “On Dangerous Ground” is a movie that Nicholas Ray made in the 1950’s and he is one of my favorite directors because he also is somebody who advocates for people who are emotionally damaged.  He usually made movies about young people who don’t fit in----who don’t know how to fit into the world.  “On Dangerous Ground” is a very beautiful movie about a policeman, played by Robert Ryan, who is too violent to really be working in the city world that he lives in and he gets sent to the country to help solve a murder trial.  And there he comes across a blind woman, played by Ida Lupino, that sort of is able to get him in touch with his inner damage self in a way that opens him up kind of beautifully.  It’s totally unexpected for the movies around the 50s in Hollywood, but to me it’s the sort of movie that was the beginning of independent cinema in some ways.

FC:   The third film was “Advise & Consent.”

MA:  Yeah, “Advise & Consent” was a movie that Otto Preminger made in 1962, from my bad book I hear.  He likes to make movies from bad bestsellers.  He felt that a bad book could be turned into a good movie, but he made this movie because he wanted to talk about the dangers of corruption in our political system and it’s a movie that used this film as a way of explaining how democracy is very vulnerable to corruption and to lives.  And it seems like it will always be relevant for the society that I would live in and is beautifully, beautifully acted by Charles Laughton in his last film performance.  It’s a movie that tried to advocate having more honesty in films.  It was also a big triumph in American culture, I think because he got the cooperation of the senate and of President Kennedy and all the congressmen to allow him to portray this movie, and not ban it, in which a senator is being very corrupt and forcing people to lie in order to spin the truth to suit him and I wish, you know, we will get back to that.  That’s a beautiful time in American history where film and politics were together in this goal.

FC:  Your fourth film is a “Something Wild.”

MA:  “Something Wild” is a movie that Jonathan Demme made in the 80s with Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith and it introduced Ray Liotta---who is a great actor.  It’s the seminal movie that I saw and it made me think I’ve got to be a filmmaker.  I was so excited and fell so in love with movies watching that movie.  It was the point of no return for me.  If movies can make you feel this way, I got to go see it.  It’s a very challenging and strange movie because it feels like it’s a comedy and then it takes a very sharp turn at the end into a very disturbing and serious movie---something that studios now-a-days do not, absolutely do not, allow--because it makes a movie hard to market if you can't call it a comedy or a drama.  But Jonathan got away with it and it’s a very underrated movie.  It’s a strange movie, but it’s a movie about a sort of normal guy who takes a chance letting himself go and getting to know his darker side and, you know, it’s full of love and life and enthusiasm for film so I put it there because that made me want to be a filmmaker.

FC:   And the fifth film, “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”

MA: Yes, I love “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” by John Cameron Mitchell.  I love musicals in film and to me this is the best musical that has ever been made.  Once again, it’s a movie about somebody who has a lot of emotional, and in this case physical, wounds and he is able to bare his soul in a way with great bravery in a way that transcends the difficulties that he has.  It’s one of most revealing and bravest performances in film that I have ever seen.  Hedwig ends up naked at the end of the movie walking down that alley, absolutely exposed, both emotionally and physically to the world.  It is something that is so missing in our world---people having the bravery to really expose themselves to others.  I have to include it, and it’s a movie that every kind of person loves.  From every kind of culture, age, gender, sexual preference, everybody loves this movie.  John did such an amazing job at disarming everybody and connecting with something very primal with people and so I love that one.

FC:   According to my research you were born in San Juan in 1965 and you went to high school in Boston.

MA: I was born in Puerto Rico and I lived there for the first 13 years of my life.  I went to Spain a lot during that time.  My grandmother was Spanish and I spent a year in Spain and every summer.  So I wasn’t exactly Puerto Rican.  My parents were Peruvian and Spanish.  So I don’t have a culture exactly that I belong to.  And that’s probably a reason that I am a filmmaker.  I think I have always been on the outside looking in.  When I was 13 I moved to Costa Rica.  My father retired and wanted to get away from the world and go to the most isolated place possible.  And it wasn’t a great place for a teenager.  After two years there I got myself thrown out of high school as a way to escape the whole country.  There weren’t that many choices for me to go to school and I got thrown out for, the letter said, “having horizontal affection on campus premises”.  So I had an American girlfriend and it was almost too much for this very conservative Catholic culture to handle, but it was a way for me to get to the United States.  So at 16 I came to United States and repeated two years of high school.
As soon as I landed in United States at 16 I went to Boston.  I went to a very liberal prep school called The Cambridge School of Weston and I started to watch foreign movies----Kurosawa movies, Fellini movies, Bunuel movies and this made me fall in love with movies.  I remember I was 16 and thinking, “well can this be a way of life”---to sort of make your dreams come true literally.  It seemed to me like the right thing for me to pursue and I started making movies right away in high school.

FC:   In 1985 you left Harvard, is that right?

MA: Yes I did.  I dropped out of Harvard.  I went to Harvard basically because I was in love with a girl that lived in Boston.  I knew it was a bad match for me, but I wanted to stay in Boston and it was the only school I got in.  It didn’t work out with her, but it was a pretty good school, however the emphasis was on documentary making.  They had great documentary makers that were teaching me, but I wanted to be making musicals with singing and dancing.  I fell in love while I was at Harvard.  The one good thing that happened is that I fell in love with American movies from the golden era of Hollywood.  There is a small theater there called Barrow Street Theater.  It is a revival house that operates wonderfully.  They show two different old Hollywood movies every day and that became my education.  I dropped out of Harvard and I got a new girlfriend that would pay me $20 if I cooked breakfast for her and drove her to work.  Then I would go to the Barrow Street Theater and watch two old movies and sometimes I would watch three.  I would try to go to all other film series and I became completely intoxicated with all Hollywood movies.  I was watching two or three a day and I think that was my real education, so by the time I went back to Harvard after taking some time off they wanted me to make a documentary about the Boston Ballet.  And I wanted to make a musical about a transvestite, actually, and they sort of said this is not the right place for you and I left.  I went to Wesleyan University where I met Jeanine Basinger who is an expert on the American films from the golden years of Hollywood.  She has an archive that is immense, so it was like going to a candy store.  I had been in love with these kind of movies here I had gone to one of the biggest experts on that.  She was running this film program in Connecticut Wesleyan University.  She has an incredible archive in relationships.  She knew Nicholas Ray, who did “On Dangerous Ground” personally---was good friends with him.  She was very good friends with Frank Capra.  She was very good friends with Alia Kazan.  She had all these people’s archives that were donated to her, so we could go and pour over these people’s letters and works.  She had, John Sayles, John Waters, a whole range of very amazing people that she used to know.  And she showed all those films.  It was an incredible experience for me to have such a great mentor and teacher.  I made my musical while I was there.  I made a short musical called “Everyday Is a Beautiful Day” and the composer for it was some kid that was in a rock band there.  At that time his name was Stephen Schwartz and later he changed his name to take his boyfriend’s name to Stephen Trask and he is the guy who, 10 years later, did the music for “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”  So I was really lucky.  I got to work with Stephen on this short musical and that musical opened a lot of doors for me.  It still does.

FC:   Would it be fair to say you have some antipathy toward documentaries?

MA: No.  I like documentaries especially.  But now the line between fiction and documentaries is being blurred completely and so I am enjoying a lot of the documentaries now a days that come out and I think it’s a powerful tool.  But I do think that documentaries are more dishonest than fiction films or can be more dishonest than fiction films.  When you sit down to watch something that has been altered---it’s been manipulated for you to go on some sort of a ride.  A documentary takes a pretext of saying to you that you are watching the truth, but we know that’s not quite true.  At least the premise of a fiction film is that you sit down and say I want to be honest with you, you are not watching the truth.  You are watching something that has been manipulated and fabricated for you.  So I feel like at that level fiction films are a more honest way of expression.

FC:   While you were at Wesleyan you did form friendships Matthew Greenfield and Mike White?

MA:  Yeah, Matthew Greenfield became my best friend and the producer of the three films that I have done and he has been a tremendous force in independent film.  He worked at the Sundance filmmakers and writers lab, which is one of the most prestigious programs for American film artists who are trying to get ahead.  In essence, the only true film “colony” or sort of artist colony for filmmakers.  Matthew was selected to help pick the people who went there.  Now he is working with Fox Searchlight---which is one of the great distributors of independent films.  And yeah, I met him in the hallway of Wesleyan.  I didn’t know him, I just saw the way he was all hunched over and walking towards me and I said, “ you, I want you to help me make my movie” and we have been best friends since that day.  We share a philosophy.  We always say, “we’ve got to protect the magic of film at any cost”.  We have to have a feeling that there are no compromises when you are making a movie.  Now, it’s impossible, you know, filmmaking is so cumbersome.  It’s all the art of compromise and the art of a mission is really what cinema is.  But Matthew and I shared this belief that while you are doing that you need to retain a feeling that you are making no compromises at any cost.  So you’ve got to lie to yourself, convince yourself that you can do this in one way or another without having any compromises.  Anything is possible in order to maintain that feeling and I think that’s why we get along so well and that’s why he is such a great supporter of film.  Mike White I didn’t meet at Wesleyan.  He was there while I was there but I met him later in Hollywood.  Mike White is a great writer, a really exceptionally, original person.  So this guy Zak Penn who was a writer and who was working in the studio world hired Mike right out of college to come and work for Fox Studios to write a studio movie about moms in a mall.  A horror movie called “Mother’s Day”.  And so Mike came out of college into the studio system and I met Zak and so I met Mike through Zak.  He was so clearly an original person.  There is no one like him.  I wrote him into my first movie “Star Maps.”  I needed somebody to play a couple of TV writers and I thought of Mike and Zak.  I thought they were funny and they could do a good job.  They were the first people I ever wrote something for.  Mike helped me cast the movie “Star Maps”.  He would come into a casting session, we became friends, and after that we did the movie.  He showed me two spec scripts that become my movies “The Good Girl” and “Chuck & Buck.”

FC:  Have you met Jonathan Demme?

MA:  Jonathan Demme was my hero because of “Something Wild” and many of the others movies that he had done, but “Something Wild” especially.   I met him in 1990 before he had done “The Silence of the Lambs”.  Not a lot of people really knew his name then, but after I graduated from college I came to New York and I wanted to get into films.  So I was working as a location scout for Sidney Lumet in a movie called Q&A when I got a phone call from my car mechanic in Boston saying, “I saw your short musical and it’s great and I think Jonathan Demme should see it”.  And I was surprised that he would even know who Jonathan Demme was and I was like, “Jim that’s fantastic.  What are you talking about?”  Jim was kind of a crazy person, a wonderful man who would fix my car for free as long as I would sit there talking about Latin American politics with him.  And he watched my short film and loved it.  It turns out that his ex-wife is married to Jonathan Demme’s cousin, who was the subject of the documentary that Jonathan made call “Cousin Bobby”.  He is a very interesting guy, cousin Bobby.  So my mechanic said, “Listen, Jonathan is making a documentary about my ex-wife’s cousin, I mean, ex-wife's new husband, who is his cousin.  I have called and they want to meet you and you should show them this movie”.  I am eternally grateful to Jim, my mechanic, for making that connection.  I went down to Harland where Cousin Bobby had a congregation.  He was a pastor and a very politically minded person.  He and his wife Kate welcomed me because of Jim’s phone call and watched my movie and loved it.  And said, “You know, Jonathan has to see this.”  And when Jonathan showed up they shouted to him and they turned to me and said, “Do you want to work on this documentary?  Do you know how to load an Aaton camera?”  And I said, “Sure.”  And they all laughed because they knew I was lying.  And they said, “Alright, we will teach you”, and they took me on for a year as a production assistant on this documentary and I got to work next to my idol Jonathan Demme.  It was really such a lucky and wonderful thing.  Jonathan has been so generous to me.  They all have been so generous and they gave me letters of recommendation for school.  They gave me advice and they have been very encouraging.