Interview with Bruce Dern

FC: Okay. We will do a couple of warm up questions first.

BD: Okay.

FC: Archibald MacLeish was one of our poet laureates as you will know better than I do.

BD: This is true.

FC: And his, perhaps, most famous poem was Ars Poetica. And it ends with the couplet, ‘a poem should not mean but be’. Can you relate that at all to film making, a film ‘meaning’ versus a film ‘being’, just simply being?

BD: Well, I think the less films can ‘mean’ the better the film can ‘be’. I think a film is dangerous when you leave it to the filmmakers themselves to start pontificating or making points. We have a little film company Harry Rose Productions, Wendy and Ashley and I and Ashley is the writer in it, and she has written a couple of screen plays. But the one she has written for my daughter Laura and I is, it’s got a lot of things in it that belong in a movie, but aren’t necessarily specifically meaning things, but will mean a great deal to an audience. But they are not things that are educationally forthcoming so you can say ‘God I got a lot of meaning out of that scene’ or ‘I got a lot of meaning out of this’. It’s about what ...

FC: Okay. We will do a couple of warm up questions first.

BD: Okay.

FC: Archibald MacLeish was one of our poet laureates as you will know better than I do.

BD: This is true.

FC: And his, perhaps, most famous poem was Ars Poetica. And it ends with the couplet, ‘a poem should not mean but be’. Can you relate that at all to film making, a film ‘meaning’ versus a film ‘being’, just simply being?

BD: Well, I think the less films can ‘mean’ the better the film can ‘be’. I think a film is dangerous when you leave it to the filmmakers themselves to start pontificating or making points. We have a little film company Harry Rose Productions, Wendy and Ashley and I and Ashley is the writer in it, and she has written a couple of screen plays. But the one she has written for my daughter Laura and I is, it’s got a lot of things in it that belong in a movie, but aren’t necessarily specifically meaning things, but will mean a great deal to an audience. But they are not things that are educationally forthcoming so you can say ‘God I got a lot of meaning out of that scene’ or ‘I got a lot of meaning out of this’. It’s about what is and what’s going on, and what happens if people connect or don’t connect. And I have always enjoyed films like that myself. I think that, you know, you got to just kind of let it be and if it’s on the page, you have a chance of having a movie. If it’s not on a page, you ain’t going to get there. And I have been to lot of movies that aren’t on the page and are left to us, not just those of us in front of the camera, but these guys behind the camera too, to make it be a really good movie. I think Archie for example---my favorite title of all his poems is ‘The Music Crept By Me On The Waters’. To me that’s basically just saying, ‘I missed it. It went by and I missed it’, that’s being. You know, I was there, I had a shot at it and I didn’t see it. What the fuck is wrong with me? You know, what I mean? I think the best films are films that give you a chance to relate to them from your point of view. I have always felt the best movie I ever saw was “Lawrence of Arabia” because it’s close to perfect in more departments than any movie I have ever seen. Starting with the script, the original idea, the man himself and going right through to, you know, what we have today, 48 years after they made it. And that’s because David Lean had the expertise and the passion to the let it be, to let it be the story of once upon a time there was a guy named Colonel T.E. Lawrence who wrote a pretty good book. No one can get through it, but I mean, it’s not called the seller of ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ for nothing. I mean, it’s like, what an adventure! And he is really just talking about three years in time, but extraordinary stuff. And that’s what I always liked about Dickens, that’s what I like about Carl Sandburg and you look at Robert Frost and the poems here. They are not looking for you to say what’s the meaning in the poems. You know, it’s the lines from the poems that just make the poems what they are, good fences make good neighbors. Well the meaning in that is, however you want it to mean, that’s the thing. I think if you build a fence, things are going to be what that fence is going to make them be. So I am not sure the ‘being’ and ‘meaning’ aren’t really the same thing---make the same sense sometime.

FC: Anything more you want to say about uncle Archie?

BD: He was a heavyweight guy. I mean, when I first got to New York he had a play running on Broadway---J.B., which won a won Pulitzer Prize. He won five Pulitzers. I did a play on Broadway about Sinclair Lewis in 1979 called ‘Strangers’, which was about the relationship between him and Dorothy Thompson, who was his wife for a short while, for about four years, and he won five consecutive Pulitzer prizes and turned everyone down, because he didn’t think an author should be credited for an individual piece of work, only a body of work, a collection of work. And on the sixth year that he would have won another Pulitzer, he won a Nobel Prize. He is the first American to win it for literature. And when he went to Oslo or Stockholm, wherever they give the Nobel Prize, he had to give a speech, because he did accept that and he accepted that because it was for a body of work, and he explained why he didn’t accept for the other things and everybody thought he would go on forever. He went on for two minutes and that was all. And in the two minutes, I remember, one of the things I had to do was give the speech each night in the play, but I think one of the things that he said, that said the most about the man to me, was that he said his hopes for the future of American literature were that the playwrites and the writers that sat at his dinner table three or four night a week would bring American literature out of its tea-table gentility, which was in the mid 20s that he was talking about, and then he said ‘I look forward to the future of American literature from’, and he mentioned these six guys that were at his table. Well they were Aaron Gold, Megan Faulkner, Hemingway and two other guys----six very, very prominent writers that were all tutored under him. He didn’t teach them, but he and his wife Dorothy Thompson during this time would have dinner parties, I mean there is no TV and they are sitting around the home fire, listening to the radio. So they would have dinner parties in which they would just assassinate each other all during dinner, you know, what was the brightness and the awareness in the literature. And that’s the kind of uncle Archie was in our family. He would come with slings and arrows. And I was very young when he was around, but we had a lot of people like that around my dinner table. And I have actually written a book that’s coming out on May the 4th and it tells a lot about all this stuff. But, neither Laura nor I talk about the family hardly at all and this is first time now people are looking up and saying ‘ah, your grandfather was this, and your uncle is Archibald MacLeish, and your family owned a department store at Carson Perry Scott and Company, and why don’t you ever talk about them’. Well, you know, they did their thing, I do my think and they are not necessarily connected, but we call come from a certain gene pool. I think he was a pot-stirrer, I love pot-stirrers. I really think pot-stirrers are important. Wendy’s friend, Ashley, she is an all time pot-stirrer, you know, she got a ladle about this long, and we love it. Wendy can stir a pot too … But I was very lucky. I was brought up in a town, in an area where really bad prejudice existed in terms of snobbery, and class and when I was cast as Buchanan in Gatsby I was cast perfectly, but a lot of people said God why would they cast some redneck yoko from the Delta and Mississippi to play Tom Buchanan? Because that’s what I have been asked to do up to that point, and then after that movie somebody said Jesus, I mean, those guys are real bastards. Those guys like that Tom Buchanan and Daisy Buchanan and all, so I always liked those people. I just, I like them, I am not terribly proud of what they stood for socially, and about the whole class structure, and the whole breeding idea and everything like that, but it’s just, there are certain sections of the country where that’s the norm. And to change it, it’s just not going to happen, except for a long, long time.

FC: Yeah, now let’s get on to some films. We have listed some of your favorite independent films.

BD: Right and I don’t really know I can tell you are they independent or aren’t they independent. I am sure they were made independent, but if a movie is made independent and then released by a company like a FOX or somebody like that, does that still make it an independent film? To me it does. I mean if you make it on somebody’s dime and that dime didn’t come from, you know, Columbia or whoever the company is, (well there is no Columbia but I mean whoever the companies are now) then it’s independent. Somebody else picks it up and it’s a pick up, you know, so I consider those independents. I think I have made far more independents than I have studio pictures. When I first began, my first movie was “Wild River” which was a studio picture. I can’t remember being in an independent film until I met Roger Corman, and from that time on I remember very few big studio pictures that I was in. I remember several, but now a days you got to be very lucky to be in a studio picture. Jack Nicholson made a couple in the early 60s, but very rare, you know, I mean, even Roger’s film is independent. AIP was not really independent---that was a studio, you know.

FC: Lets talk about “Breaker Morant”.

BD: Well I chose Breaker Morant simply because it was made in 70s era when people were making films studying Vietnam, and the results of Vietnam. I made one myself, Coming Home”. “Apocalypse” was made, “The Deer Hunter” was made. Those three films were all made the same year. Two of them came out the same year, the third one came out right after that year. It fascinated me that when you look back at Dickens and you look at the history of the young men that become young men in his books; David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, the boys in Great Expectations. When you look at those young men, and then along comes a guy like ‘Uriah Heep’, from David Copperfield, who is sent to a penal colony called Australia because he did wrong in the firm of Copperfield, to spend the rest of his life in prison, not prison but living in the open, but in Australia which is a penal colony. And less than 30 years later what might have been his son, is sent to Transvaal in South Africa to fight a war for the crown that they have nothing to do with. Similar to soldiers that were sent from here to many wars that they didn’t belong in and that we---yes or no, I can’t come down on either side of what happened in Vietnam--- but there was consensus that we didn’t belong there and we belonged in the world wars and to an extent, whether we belonged in Korea or not I don’t know. But in Vietnam it became obvious, towards the end of it, that we didn’t belong there. And yet people were still going. Well these transcript soldiers from Australia and New Zealand----you got to walk a long way from Auckland to get to the Transvaal. And to be sent there in place of British serving officers and British soldiers because the Brits didn’t want their soldiers to die in a war they knew they shouldn’t be in. So they sent the sons who at that time were first generation sons or grandsons maybe of people that had been sent to Australia to live or had chosen to go there to live. It always fascinated me----what really went on here? This was their Vietnam and when I first went to England to do Gatsby, I was fascinated at when I would have days off or stuff, we would go around and we would look at the old cathedrals and the walls of the cathedrals are like grave stones, and they say that bodies are buried in the walls of these old churches----but they look like grave stones along the walls embedded in the church and will say Frederick Matheson born 1712 in Litchfield, died 1741 or 1738 on the Zambezi river in the Transvaal, in what is now Rhodesia or some place like that, 28 years old. Well it’s a long way from 90 miles outside London to South Africa and this is 300 years ago. And what was going on? Well, then you suddenly realize, well the largest company in the world then and I have heard still now regardless of what IBM and Apple and these other people say, is still the East India Tea Company, which in fact is the crown. I mean, when you consider one of their holdings was India, that’s just a holding, you know, well yeah we have India and we have South Africa and we have Australia and New Zealand and Canada, and it was their responsibility to go in there and do whatever they did. Well “Breaker Morant” put that in such a perspective and Bruce Beresford I think was the director and gets magnificent performances from the actors-----as good a performance as I have ever seen by Jack Thompson, the guy who plays the lawyer. And puts the story in a way that the heroism of these guys---the way they stood up to it---the light horse grenadiers, who were like a very elite outfit of soldier because they could ride, they were expert rifle men, but they were cavalry officers at the same time. They were asked to do an impossible task---to distract these Afrikaners who were really trying to get rid of the tribal people of South Africa who the country belonged to and in this movie, Lord Kitchener and the British serving offices who were in charge of them were ruling these Australian conscripts or volunteer soldiers who were sent there couldn’t got out of it. And they did what they did and obviously to the British it was a mistake and so they had to pay for it. The soldiers had to pay for it, not the crown. They weren’t going to get punished for it--the British weren’t. So they had this trial, blamed it on the soldiers and executed them. These three guys turned out to be absolutely right. The guy who was pretending he was a minister and everything and just riveting bibles was disturbing rifles and grenades and you saw it. That was what’s great in the movie. They gave you three points of view from three different anlges and each one showed what ultimately really happened. And yet once push came to shove and Jack Thompson, who was their lawyer, asks Lord Kitchener to come to the trial and testify what these men were told to do ‘on duty’ at their job----he refused to come to the trial and they are hung. And I felt that it was a film that really greatly showed the injustices of war at home. And Coming Home showed the injustice of war at home in terms of society and what could happen. And “The Deer Hunter” did it well too. “Apocalypse” kind of stayed in the field, but “The Deer Hunter” brought it home, Coming Home brought at home and “Breaker Morant” even the brought it home. There is not a person who sees the movie, who doesn’t get the impact.

FC: Let’s go on to the second film. The Elephant Man.

BD: Well my daughter is in a movie that is out right now called Inland Empire, directed by David Lynch. Laura Dern is in every shot in the film. At 18 she was in Blue Velvet, so she has a done a few of his films and this is his latest attempt at David Lynch film making---which is all over the place in terms of film making. The man is in a class by himself as a filmmaker. It’s not that he makes great films every time. He risks great risks every time. For that we must support him by going to see what he is up to and that’s what I think about David Lynch. I’d be remis if I didn’t go see what he was up to. Even if Laura wasn’t in this movie, I’d catch up with it. And then you say to yourself, but wait a second, shouldn’t we also see a guy who made almost a perfect film? “The Elephant Man” is an almost perfect film. And why isn’t that a perfect film? Because it’s not “Lawrence of Arabia” and that’s a perfect film to me. And in “The Elephant Man” again you have a great piece of material, great performances, great direction, a beautiful script about a guy who would have never ever have had a film made about him had someone not stumbled on this particular project-----a caring soul---about the human condition----like a David Lynch who just really falls in love with damaged folks who get undersold. And so he takes a guy like John Merrick and develops his life and all you need to do is show a film clip from “Breaker Morant” or a film clip from “The Elephant Man” and people will say, “Oh! my God”. And if you just show the clip of this guy coming up from the underground with the gear over his head and those kids running to beat on him and him saying, “please, I am just a human being, I am a human being”, well then you decide. “Well I don’t need to see the movie”, some people will say “because I get it and that’s too awful for me to have to see”. You know, I didn’t want to see “Mondo Connie” the documentary because of what it was, it’s beautiful as it is and it is awful as it is. Well, this movie was fabulous, I mean, Anne Bancroft’s performance in that movie, John Hurt’s performance in the movie, everybody----it’s just the fact that that’s why you love David Lynch---because he made The Elephant Man. He chose to make it. He also chose to make Dune, but he makes movies he cares about and when somebody cares (and there again going back to the Archibald question at the beginning)----it shouldn’t be about meaning or the being. Well this was a movie that was about a being who wasn’t just let to be. People had to react to his being and it was uncomfortable and it’s uncomfortable to watch because of that and you walk away even though this is now, what? probably 100 years ago? We are saying to ourselves, “we didn’t really do that to people did we?” Excuse me, excuse me it’s 2007, and that’s why “The Elephant Man,”---and it’s magnificent film making and you might say old little bitty subject matter, to me it’s huge subject matter----it’s Hiroshima subject matter, I mean it’s like the human condition. I became an actor because I was interested in what makes us do what we do particularly in times of crisis and that was a movie about that and that’s what really got me excited about “The Elephant Man”.

More to come...