Interview with Kenneth Lonergan

FC:  Okay, we’ll start of with your favorite indy films.  The first one on your list is “When We Were Kings”.  Can you tell me why you picked it?

KL:  Well, I have seen “When We Were Kings” three or four times and I think it’s one of those----every time it comes on television I watch it.  I heard someone say the definition of a great movie is one when you’re flipping channels on television and you stop on the channel and watch the movie no matter how many times you’ve seen it.  So in order to say what’s so great about----I don’t know, I think it’s a beautiful movie.  I wish it was three times longer, it just fascinates me the entire time.  I really do wish it was three times longer, but I can't exactly say why I like it so much.

FC:  What about Sexy Beast?

KL:  Sexy Beast.  The first time I saw it I was particularly drawn by Ben Kingsley’s performance in it and obviously I had never seen him do anything like that.  I don’t think anybody had, and I had always liked him, but it was such an incredibly colorful, funny, horrible performance in the way that they prepare for his character by how terrified everyone is of him.  Just this embarrassed, unmanning fear that ...

FC:  Okay, we’ll start of with your favorite indy films.  The first one on your list is “When We Were Kings”.  Can you tell me why you picked it?

KL:  Well, I have seen “When We Were Kings” three or four times and I think it’s one of those----every time it comes on television I watch it.  I heard someone say the definition of a great movie is one when you’re flipping channels on television and you stop on the channel and watch the movie no matter how many times you’ve seen it.  So in order to say what’s so great about----I don’t know, I think it’s a beautiful movie.  I wish it was three times longer, it just fascinates me the entire time.  I really do wish it was three times longer, but I can't exactly say why I like it so much.

FC:  What about Sexy Beast?

KL:  Sexy Beast.  The first time I saw it I was particularly drawn by Ben Kingsley’s performance in it and obviously I had never seen him do anything like that.  I don’t think anybody had, and I had always liked him, but it was such an incredibly colorful, funny, horrible performance in the way that they prepare for his character by how terrified everyone is of him.  Just this embarrassed, unmanning fear that they all have about the guy who is coming to see them.  And then as soon as he was killed, the first time I saw it, my interest in the film plummeted and then the second time I saw that, that didn’t happen anymore and I can appreciate all the rest of the aspects of the movie.  I don’t generally like the tremendous amount of stylization.  Especially if it is not grounded in anything.  But in that film I felt the stylization was beautifully suited to the material and the performances were all wonderful.  Ray Winstone is incredible in that as well.  And there was something about that teeny little guy terrorizing everybody with the sheer force of his personality and how far he is willing to go that made me very envious. 
But I just thought, it is also a very original movie.  Usually a crime movie like that is about someone who is drawn back in because he wants one more shot.  And he thinks he has got out of the business and he comes back and thinks he is going to make one big score and then retire.  And this guy just doesn’t want to go back at all.  He is simply dragged in and it’s very original and very nicely done.  There is this shot of Ben Kingsley with his--I guess it’s pretty famous--with his back to the camera at a high angle shot and his bald head and his little back and his military posture.  And I also like very much when he says “talk to me Gill, I am a good listener”, he says he is a good listener then he kills him anyway.

FC:  How about “All About My Mother.”

KL:  There is so much about it.  When Almodovar is at his best I don’t think there is anybody better than him working now.  I think that there may be, you can be as good as that, but I don’t think you can be better than that.  And there is something about that.  It’s just such a beautiful movie and one thing I like about his movies a lot is that most of the time the main characters do not know each other previously.  And the way the people form friendships in his films---form very close connections on screen.  At the moment I can’t think of any film that doesn’t have that kind of a new relationship at the center of it.  And his view of life is so vivid.  His view of life blossoms so beautifully on screen and just all the different twists and turns in relationships in that movie and the tragic sense coming from everybody.  It’s so---it’s just wonderful and so it’s hard to say.  When he is really going at his best, Almodovar, you feel like he can't, you just have no idea what’s going to happen or where anything is going to go and it could go anywhere.  And also, of course, there is the beautiful scenic design and the way the films look.  He nowhere becomes self-conscious.  He just gets into fear and fear and more and more seems to have his stride more and more as he goes along.  As oppose to, I think sometimes, American filmmakers.  When they become successful, they become more and more self-conscious because of the amount of attention that’s heaped on them here.  They suddenly seem to lose track of their own private interests, their own personal view of life.  And he seems to simply grow into his.  And I love “Talk to Her” also, which is just the simultaneous awareness of how tragic life is and how closely people can attach to each other.  I just think it’s wonderful in him.

FC:  “Ghost World.”

KL:  “Ghost World” is another movie it’s hard for me to turn off when it comes on television.  It has got such a funny rhythm to it.  It has really got its own pace.  It’s got a peculiar world that those two girls form in that, I guess, suburb of Chicago that they live in.  I am not sure if that’s right, I imagine it is.  Anyway the comic book Ghost World, by Daniel Clowes, is wonderful.  And the movie is very faithful to it and my wife, J. Smith-Cameron, says "that’s somebody who should live in New York City” of that main character.  Because she is just---she is itchy around the edges in that town that she lives in and she has created her own eccentricity with her friend.  And there is something about somebody looking for a reflection of their own peculiarity in the world that they are not finding where they live.  And that’s what the main character finds in the Steve Buscemi character with his memorabilia and the old records and the old posters that he likes so much.  And Buscemi is fantastic in that.  He is another actor, I think, who started out very eccentric and unusually.  He started out very big and got more and more relaxed and kind of expanded his range into the range of quieter performances.  And he is, I think, remarkable in that movie.  I mean, everybody is.

FC:  “Mulholland Drive.”

KL  “Mulholland Drive”.  I pausing to wipe, I can sense a, I can feel an unflattering patina of perspiration on my head.  “Mulholland Drive”.  I am not quite sure what any of it means, but it’s absolutely hypnotic and you just can't take your eyes off it.  It’s like being sucked in.  It is very slow moving.  And you just can't and don’t want to get out of it.  And I like very much that the part of the movie that explains what’s happening is no more comprehensible to me than the mystery that precedes it.  It’s very inspiring and wonderful to see a film by anybody who is doing things their own way, at their own pace, in their own style, as fully as David Lynch does.  And he is really going to do it the way he wants to do it.  And it takes a lot of nerve to do that in this particular climate, in my opinion.  And it’s just got this, you know, it’s not just being odd for the sake of oddness.  He is very much following some kind of hidden buried railroad track that only he can follow.  But you go along with him because you can feel how very, how firmly he is, my God what a metaphor, but you can feel how firmly that he is, how closely he is following the route that he has laid down that even if you can’t actually see the route----and the performances are remarkable and it just makes no sense---it has underpinnings connected in someway that you don’t understand, but don’t need to.  At least I didn’t need to and it looks beautiful.  It’s very odd and you sort of think, “it must all make sense”, and then you think about other things in it that clearly don’t make any sense.  You feel the connection is somewhere off, off in another dimension.  And it doesn’t matter at all because you feel it.  That’s all I’ve got to say about Mulholland Drive.

FC:  “Topsy-Turvy”.

KL:  “Topsy-Turvy” is one of the only movies I have ever seen that’s just about putting on a show.  That’s the actual focus of it.  I am sure there are others that I can't think of at the moment, but the deep love it has for Gilbert and Sullivan and for the Mikado and for that period---for the late 19th century.  There is the rehearsal---it just goes into all the aspects of how it came into being.  And that’s what it’s about.  The  rehearsal sections---there is a long one---it’s all in one---a piano rehearsal with Sullivan and two of the singers.  I think may be more three of the singers.  Oh yeah, I am so blind, I can't see whether you said two or three, but yes and it’s such a long single take and they just do it over and over again just like you really do in rehearsal.  And the music is so wonderful---like the tag at the end which goes on to say that Sullivan wrote this or that.  And the live camera where it says he went on to write a serious opera. but it wasn’t as much fun as the Mikado.  And Jim Broadbent is so wonderful.  The breadth of his range is really astonishing. 
Allan Corduner, who plays Arthur Sullivan, was an actor who I met in London when I was an intern at the Royal Court Theatre at 22 years old.  He was in a reading of a play of mine called “Here Comes Everything”.  And he was this remarkable guy who could do any accent.  He was absolutely marvelous and I was very happy to see him many years later. I grew up going to light opera Manhattan performances in New York City at the Janus Theatre where they would do Gilbert and Sullivan every Sunday.

FC:  Could you say something about the treatment of Gilbert’s relationship with his wife?

KL:  Well, I liked very much the treatment of Gilbert’s relationship with his wife because it’s so entirely unsentimental.  And it just---the show was a big success, but their relationship remains grim and one sided and she remains stuck out in the cold.  It’s an amazing scene, the last scene when she tells her dream about the little babies waiting to be born who are going to be born.  And it’s a long, very garish dream that she has about how unhappy she is.  And at the end of it, he says, “well I don’t think Sullivan would like that”.  “I don’t think Sullivan would think much of that”, he says.  He is very embarrassed and then goes to bed.  It’s oh! --- it’s just wonderful. 

FC:  Our research indicates you were born in New York in 1962.

KL:  That’s right.

FC:  When you where in your high school in Europe, did the impulse to write come to you in high school?

KL:  Yeah I got interested in playwriting.  I think when I was in 9h grade.  I had been interested in fiction writing.  I was writing science fiction stories at the time when I think I just walked over to non-science fiction for the first time.  My grandmother showed me an advertisement for a one-act play contest in California where the bionic woman was living at the time.  I don’t know if people remember that show, but I enjoyed it very much.  She lived in California where this one-act play contest was and I wrote a one-act play called “Performance”  I had not heard of the Mick Jagger movie at the time and I actually have never seen it.  Not out of competitiveness, but I just never happened to have seen it.  And this was a blatant rip off of the movie “Network” which was out at that time and which I liked very much.  It was about a comedian----about 12 or 15 pages of me complaining about everything that I could think of that bothered me in the form of a 52-year-old comedian who we learn that this was his last performance before he killed himself.  Anyway so I one third prize for this play and I won a $100 from the Thatcher School.  I was very encouraged by that and so I got interested in writing plays.  And I had a wonderful theory teacher in my high school, in Walden High School, who switched me over from fiction to dramatic writing.

FC:  You also were in the playwriting program in the NYU?

KL:  Yeah, I went to NYU School of the Arts Dramatic Writing Program and studied playwriting there with a lot of very good, very nice teachers.  I went mostly because I thought the homework would be easy to do and because I wasn’t terribly interested in going to college at that time.  I had taken a year off and worked as a backstage doorman for the Shubert Organization.  And I daytime backstage doorman for “A Corus Line” in it’s last year.  And working six days a week as a backstage doorman, sitting there when you are 20 years old, 19 years old is a very good motivation to go back to school if you can afford it.  So I went back to NYU and wrote plays on my own and also did my homework.

FC:  That formal writing program ended up helping you, you think, when you were writing plays?

KL:  I think it’s very hard to teach writing in an academic setting, playwriting that is.  I don’t know about other kinds of writing.  I think anything that makes you practice is good.  I think in order to learn about playwriting and writing for actors, it’s good to have a very interactive program where you actually seeing and hearing actors read the material.  I think that most schools tend to be a little too loose about free flowing comments.  It’s not so much training for the real world, it’s just a horrible little preview of it because everyone you meet your whole life is going to tell you what they think about what you are writing.  And they should really be telling their friends and you should be listening to someone who could actually help you with it.  At a lot of playwriting schools and screenwriting schools I think everybody tends to jump in and start talking about the work before they ought to.  However, anything that gets you exposed to other writers and gets you meeting other people who are interested in what you are interested in is very good creatively and professionally, eventually, since show business is such a socially based profession.  I mean, maybe they all are, but I know show business is.  I know a lot of people I liked a lot at NYU and they think I was also very stubborn and self motivated.  I tended to use any school that I was in to complain about an objective, but that also gives you something to put your feet on and test your weight against I guess.

FC:  I see a lot of writing workshops that tends to be heavily influenced by what professors in that program think good writing is.  Is that kind of influence at NYU, and, if so, did it affect you?

KL:  No, I don’t think that it’s so much that teachers want you to write in their style and I don’t think---I don’t know what it’s like as I say in fiction writing---but people, the teachers of playwriting or screenwriting---the good ones are good teachers and as good teachers they have their own style and they tend to encourage you to do better at what you are trying to do.  The one problem with teaching, playwriting or screenwriting is that there tends to be---in playwriting---a great vague emphasis on finding your voice.  And in screenwriting there is a, I think, an over tendency to talk about structure in a way that’s very artificial.  And it’s sort of the opposite problem---that one is too mushy and vague and what you really should be learning about------you should be really trying to follow what story you are telling---and the other one blasts away what story you are telling by, I think, an over reliance on rules and structural points.  I think most of the screenwriting books that are out are very---I don’t think there is much to them myself.  I mean if you are helpful to people that’s great but I think that on the whole, what I think most of them are is descriptions of movies that already exist and why they may have turned out to be good rather than actual helpful guides to someone who is trying to write something.  It’s one thing to say you got to grab the audience in 10 seconds or they are going to rise up in the body against you and destroy you and your family and all of your work---and I don’t know that that’s true.  I think you can just go point by point in any screenwriting book and say what you don’t agree with, but a lot of the newer or younger writers that I talk to having read these books, they say, “oh! I know it’s not all good, but do you think it’s important to have a plot point in page 30?” and I think that’s insane.  Now it may turn out that every good screenplay ever written has a plot twist on page 30 but that’s not that helpful to me.  It doesn’t help you get where you are getting.  It imposes an artificial form you are supposed to confirm to and unless you have a special talent for doing that I don’t see what good it does to you.  And I think screenplays could benefit from a little of the free form they tend to encourage in playwriting schools and vice-versa.  Very often they tell you about finding your voice in playwriting classes and really they should be saying “write something that actress can actually act”.  It tends to not be performance oriented and really that’s what it’s all about.  The actress can make the scene.  If the scene is not actable, it’s no good.

FC: Alright was your first produced play “This is Our Youth?”

KL: “This is Our Youth” was the first play I had produced Off-Broadway as opposed to Off-Off Broadway.  And it was the first play that I had produced that got any mention.  This was one of those lucky career changing experiences.  I had been circulating in black box theater world for about eight years and suddenly all these theaters just----it got a lot of attention and I was suddenly playing to these not for profit theaters.  I thought “I don’t know any of these people, I should get around and meet them, I should know who is the artistic director of this theater and that theater”.  And within four months I did just because they all come into view as soon as you do well--they are ready to help you out.  Which is better than if they weren’t, I worked with Naked Angels, a theater group, for many years before---that was my home when I was 23 or 24 to 30 and then I was I shown into another area of the New York theater which I was happy to be in also.

FC:  Alright.  A little bit about your first produced screenplay ---“Analyze This.”

KL:  Yes my first produced screenplay was “Analyze This”, although I think of it more as my first sold screenplay.  Actually I don’t know if the, now classic, “Rocky and Bullwinkle” movie came out before after “Analyze This”.

FC: Just a little bit after.

KL: Just a little after, yeah “Analyze This” was a spec script I wrote.  I had been working at the Environmental Protection Agency as a speech writer and then I was doing commercial, industrial writing---writing speeches and presentations and little skits for sales meetings for corporations.  Fujifilm sales meeting I wrote skits about, you know, hilarious skits about the goings on behind the scenes at the Fujifilm annual corporate treat.  And I wrote speeches for a product launch---Lever Brothers I believe it was---it was low fat butter, something like that, there was some substance that they tried to come out with to replace margarine, it wasn’t margarine but it wasn’t butter, it was low fat butter and something happened to its components when you heated it so that the elements would separate and you could no longer use it as butter.  The chemical composition changed apparently and it didn’t really do very well but that was my first industrial job.  The guy who I was working for, an extremely nice man named Bob Cortez, was a very smart guy who thought of the slogan on our way to the meeting---then I wrote some copy.  I know it was Lever Brothers, but anyway, yeah, for a low fat butter---possibly people are aware that low fat butter did not become a big hit but that was not my fault I really did my best.