INT: So, before we go on to LIVE FROM BAGHDAD, I neglected to get you to talk about this being Jack Lemmon’s last movie--We’re talking about TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE.
MJ: When we were casting TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE and the main character of Morrie [Morrie Schwartz], there were lots of names discussed, you know, many, many, many, many, names. Everybody said, you know, “If you can have any Actor in the world to play this, who would you?” And agents were making submissions the whole time and we kept getting word that Jack [Jack Lemmon] would really be quite interested in playing this. Jack would really, really be quite interested in playing this, and, you know, that was one of the names we seriously considered. And, you know, it eventually became obvious that’s the way that we were gonna go and I didn’t think anymore about it except that during the shoot, Jack [Jack Lemmon] is a wonderful cheerleader on the set. He had a grand piano brought to the set and he would play show tunes in between numbers. He had his favorite, very big poodle who would sit very patiently at his feet in this wonderful carved leather chair that was his chair. And the other thing he’d do was to play for the members of the crew who weren’t involved in that shot, scenes from his old movies, going way, way, way back. [INT: He’d play music from it or play the scene?] Play the scenes. He’d play videos of all the movies he’s been in. And that, you know, they would laugh at the jokes and be moved by it and I’d say, “Jack [Jack Lemmon], we need you back on the set.” “Okay. Okay, buddy. I’m coming.” But it occurred to me, you know, maybe, you know, that’s a kind of way of--what he’s doing is reviewing his life as he’s doing this. And then I didn’t find out until much, much later that he was ill and that he must have known that this was gonna be his last movie. He didn’t say anything about it to anybody, but I think it was something important for him to do, for him to learn the lesson of his own playing in that role, how a person should die, coming to peace with themselves. [INT: How--He died how long after that?] Not long afterwards. I can’t remember, really quite soon afterwards. [INT: I mean within a year?] Yeah. Yeah.

INT: So, how did LIVE FROM BAGHDAD find you?
MJ: LIVE FROM BAGHDAD: I found it, lost it, found it. It was originally a feature script written in part by Robert Wiener, the character that Michael Keaton ends up playing in the movie. It was written like a movie script that kind of feels free to play fast and loose with the facts because it’s a movie and you can do anything in a movie and relationships were written up to make them, you know, romantic, dramatic. And, you know, I was gonna do it and make it as a movie, and somehow the timing didn’t work out, and I drifted away to do something else ‘cause we didn’t get a green light on it. [INT: This was still at HBO?] No, this was not at HBO. This was at Paramount [Paramount Pictures]. [INT: So, it was gonna be a feature?] Gonna be a feature. And, you know, I was in discussion with people about it and looking at the script and so on. And then, you know, it didn’t work out; the way things don’t work out. The timing isn’t right, the movie isn’t ready, you’re going on to something else and maybe you’ll be ready when that’s finished and, you know. It sort of went into hibernation and then HBO picked it up. And at the time they started the movie, the Gulf War [Persian Gulf War] was, you know, part of history. There was no suggestion that there was gonna be an Iraq War, another confrontation with Saddam Hussein. That just wasn’t on anybody’s radar. And HBO wanted to do it principally because of papers they’ve been reading by John Bert and Peter Jay, two English intellectuals. John Bert ended up running and ruining the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation], which is another story--as director general. But he wrote this paper about the bias against understanding, that news coverage was so obsessed with sound bites and the visual image that it didn’t give you a context in which you would understand that, that bigger picture. And he thought there was a mission to explain that should be part of TV news. And I could see in the script also of Robert Wiener and his team who go to Baghdad, knowing that war is maybe coming and able to see they’re quite isolated because it’s before cell phones widely used--they’re isolated except by the, you know, the phone you kind of can get through on, or you maybe can’t get through on--that they were increasingly the conduit through which the American government and Saddam Hussein were talking to each other. And what they could see was they were missing each other. Each side was talking at the other, but not hearing what that side was saying. And it seemed to them, in that period, crucially, before war was declared, that they might have a role in trying to interview Saddam [Saddam Hussein] and let George Bush, George H. W. Bush, hear that what the Iraqis were saying was, “Treat us with respect. You’re treating us like a second rate nation. We have a great history and pride in it. And we have due claims to this oil in Kuwait. Listen to that and do us the courtesy of having a debate about it.” And the Bush Administration, you know, being kind of scared by the accusations of being a wimp and all that, wanted to show how masterfully they could deal with this and, you know, use American mind, power. And in it the end, it turned out they were unsuccessful. But that was part of the genesis of what the script is about. I was attracted to it because I remember those broadcasts by CNN for one image--the only image you got, which was a card that they put up. It was a map of Baghdad and three little head and shoulder images of the three reporters who were in a hotel room describing, sound only, what was happening outside their hotel. That seemed to be the perfect way into a movie. That’s where we’ll end up. We’ll end up behind that card, looking out of the window and seeing not through vast shots of the whole city, you know, as you got in shock and awe, but through that window, what they saw and what they talked about would be, yeah, physically present--the journey to that. I was very much about, you know, the, what I call the romance of journalism, which is very much in the feature script. I don’t know if you can see this with your camera, [holds up copy of the book LIVE FROM BAGHDAD] this is the cover of the book, Robert Weiner’s LIVE FROM BAGHDAD and having lived in this way in my own life--all the documentary projects I did for the BBC--it’s immensely romantic. There’s a bottle of vodka, cigarette filled ashtray, the camera, air tickets, passports, you know, all the things you associate with being in a hotel room and being in danger and all those things. Those are part of the story, an essential part of the story--the fact that you are in close quarters with your colleagues almost like a warzone if you’re in danger and sometimes in a warzone in danger, the romantic kind of tensions that that brings, and the fact they were trying to do something essentially noble and not being necessarily noble themselves--trying to fight the accusations from other networks that they were pariahs, they were giving access to media to Saddam Hussein. And, you know, in a key incident in the movie where Saddam Hussein is filmed, you know, with this little English boy hostage and is stroking him and the boy is like terrified like this, it was Weiner [Robert Weiner] who saw that you don’t need to put a commentary on it. If Saddam [Saddam Hussein] is trying to use this as a photo opportunity--the benevolent Saddam asking this little boy if he’s getting his cornflakes and his milk. And everybody could see the little boy shivering like that and that’s actually sending out an image that can’t be censored because you’re not actually making commentary on it and I thought it was great.

MJ: I loved doing this movie. It was a real love project of going to Morocco and shooting in the dust and the streets of Casablanca, which doubled for Baghdad and also in the south, southern part of the country, in Ouarzazat, which doubled for Kuwait and various other things and then the desert. Wonderful. And then came back and shot the rest of the movie in Culver City. So, and, you know, Casablanca and Culver City is the two main locations of the movie. In Culver City, we built the CNN newsroom in Atlanta in full scale and that was a great, great set--huge set.

INT: What was it like shooting in Casablanca?
MJ: It was very emotional for me. And I was lucky enough to win the Directors Guild Award for this movie, and I said in my acceptance speech, “I accept this for the people of Morocco,” because in our minds making this movie, we were--the drumbeat was starting to sound as we were making the movie. And in our heads, you know, the bit part players, who were actually Moroccan, stood in for the ordinary people of Iraq, be they taxi drivers or waiters or whoever, that our heroes encounter. And that kind of humanity, that common humanity of those things I think are one of the essential parts of the movie, and those faces, you know, replaced my non-existent images of the people of Iraq as we came up to the start of the Iraq War and that was very, kind of, compelling for me. And I hoped that the climax of our movie, which is the bombing of Baghdad, wouldn’t be repeated. And several weeks after LIVE FROM BAGHDAD went out and we were always trying to jiggle that airdate, you know, are they going to declare war before the movie is finished? Are we gonna be too soon? We were marginally too soon, we went out in 2002, I think, right at the end of it. Anyway, a few weeks after the movie had gone out, I was on another project, THE HANDLER, shooting a pilot in Los Angeles and I was driving to location on set and I had the radio on and I could hear the soundtrack, I could hear the planes whistling and the anti-aircraft fire and the guns exploding. You could have been playing the soundtrack for that scene from LIVE FROM BAGHDAD and it’s for real, Shock and Awe. And I felt very, very sad.

INT: And you were also in Ouarzazat, right? [MJ: Yeah.] And was that, you shot the battle scenes around there--is that outside of Ouarzazat?
MJ: Ouarzazat is essentially sand. It’s the northern part of the Sahara Desert, so scenes where they’re driving to Kuwait through the desert were shot there. Scenes of the American army waiting kind of off stage to invade were shot there, you know--wonderful shooting in Morocco. The king is very film friendly, or was then. And there’s this office that you went to and they had a kind of catalog, like a Sears Roebuck [Sears Roebuck and Co.] catalog, you know, “Okay. How many planes would you like?” “I’d like a C-130.” “Okay. C-130. And what sort of tanks? Well, we have some Chinese tanks, some French tanks.” “I’d like three of those and five of those.” Wonderful, I mean, I loved the scale of doing that, you know, using all the tricks that I could to make it look like an even bigger scale.

INT: So, talk about working with the Actors on BAGHDAD [LIVE FROM BAGHDAD], LIVE FROM BAGHDAD.
MJ: I had to coax both Actors into doing the role. Michael Keaton was very much afraid that if we shot it in this grittier fashion, as I said I was gonna shoot it, he would, as he put it, “Never get laid again.” You know, he was gonna look gaunt and tired and stubbly and he, I mean, he was half joking. And I said, “Oh, you’ll get laid, Michael [Michael Keaton]. This is a very deeply heroic and romantic role for you to take.” And I think he accepted that and went with it and it’s a great performance, I think, you know, totally without vanity. Helena Bonham Carter was the companion of Tim Burton. And to get her to take part in the movie, I flew to Reno, where Tim Burton’s mother was in the hospital. And they’d taken the high roller suite in the top floor of a hotel. And I cannot begin to describe the suite except that it was like a Tim Burton movie. There was a full-scale stuffed African elephant in the room, in the rooms, in the suite. There was a full-scale rhinoceros. There was this huge hot tub stroke bath with statues of Nubian maidens and urns of water. [INT: The elephant was life size?] Life size, yes. Fully life sized. So was the rhino, so were all the other stuffed animals in the room. It was huge. Above this kind of bath, there was a ceiling with stars, and you could change the color of the ceiling and make the stars twinkle, and it was absurd. I essentially said, “Look, I don’t think I can think of Baghdad in the midst of all this. Let’s go down to the casino.” And then we had an even more surreal encounter, where it was, in the place where all the slot machines and one-arm bandits are. And I talked for several hours about, you know, “You’re the only person who can do this. You can bring something to this that no one else could.” And eventually, I persuaded her to do it. But it was a very strange and very surreal encounter. She brought a great quality to it, quality of tough woman, no nonsense and--[INT: Her reluctance was?] Any Actor’s reluctance, you know. They just need to be talked into it and told that they’re the only person who can play this.

INT: So, as long as these two things are fairly close together--I’m just picking these things arbitrarily, you describe working with Lemmon [Jack Lemmon], so describe working with Keaton [Michael Keaton]. How, how was that different? As a Director, how was that different?
MJ: With any star, I think you look for their core persona and you ask yourself in a rather self-serving and completely ruthless way, “What is there about this Actor that I can use, that will perfectly fit this role?” And there was a certain about of, won’t say hubris, won’t say arrogance, but, you know, Michael Keaton was a big star, still is a big star with BATMAN, all that stuff, had a great comedic sense, you know, from BEETLEJUICE and things like that. And in the character that he portrays, there’s a certain amount of braggadocio. You know, Robert Weiner was a kind of larger than life Producer, and I tried to use that, that quality in Michael [Michael Keaton]; the swaggering through some scenes, where I might have with another Actor said, “You take that down a bit.” But it was his natural kind of gait in those scenes, and I think it gave something to the character. He was very starry, and Jack [Jack Lemmon] on TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE was not at all starry. He was just kind of an ordinary guy making fun for the crew in between takes. And Michael [Michael Keaton], you know, was somewhat more secluded from the set and you came out when it was his turn to be in the shot and then went back into either his jet or his trailer. [INT: Jack [Jack Lemmon]--his jet?] Yes, to get him safely--there was a lot of paranoia at the time because, you know, people were worried about terrorist attacks on the crew. You know, very visible American target in an Arab country like Morocco. And so, he being a well-known international star was more worried than most that he might be kidnapped, so he had, you know, certain amount of security. [INT: So, Lemmon [Jack Lemmon], just so I understand this--] I don’t think anybody was gonna kidnap Jack Lemmon particularly. [INT: No, no, no, no. No, but Jack Lemmon was not in, did not go into his motor home in between--He was, as you say, he was out most of the time.] Mixing it with the set, with the crew on the set. [INT: He just liked to hang around.] Yeah. He liked to be where it was at. [INT: Right. And Keaton [Michael Keaton] was more traditional--] Michael liked to be getting himself prepared for what he was gonna be doing and then come out fully prepared and do it, not be part of the mechanics.

INT: And what about Bonham Carter [Helena Bonham Carter]?
MJ: Well, she was in many cases the opposite. She--like many English Actors, have reserves of a different kind of discipline, which comes from acting in all kinds of circumstances, not just in movies, but in stage plays and on television and so on. The quality of make-do in men sometimes: this is the situation we’re in; this is what we’ve got; we’ll somehow make it work for us. And so when I sometimes had difficulty with a line that Michael [Michael Keaton] thought didn’t show his character in a strong a light as he would like, Helena [Helena Bonham Carter] kind of joined me in that discussion and we would argue together, “No, no. It’s actually making you feel stronger--making you look stronger as a character for the audience because you admit that you are uncertain in this scene.” And that was a great help.

INT: What about--What was your relationship with HBO as far as LIVE FROM BAGHDAD was concerned?
MJ: It’s kind of a truism, if you talk about HBO, people will have a certain look that comes over their faces and they say, “Oh, god. The notes, the notes.” And yes, they do give notes. And the longer--it’s like one of Parkinson’s laws, you know, the work expands to fill the time available. The notes expand to fill the time available. My luck on THE MCMARTIN TRIAL [INDICTMENT: THE MCMARTIN TRIAL] was that there was an airdate and it was soon. And with BAGHDAD [LIVE FROM BAGHDAD], there was a war and it was soon. And so, there wasn’t a lot of time for fiddling around with notes and they had to be really good notes. And the thing I have found with HBO, always, is they note you to death. They will note you even while the movie’s on the air, “Couldn’t we change the ending? Wouldn’t it be great to--” That’s exaggerating for the sake of effect, but they are good notes. And it’s a real dilemma when you keep getting these notes and they’re good notes, and they’re not from some alien source that doesn’t believe in what, in the movie that you’re making--they want to make the movie that you’re making better. Sometimes, it’s not so, and that’s kind of a larger discussion about how you deal with studio notes. But in my experience with HBO, the longer the time goes on between the finishing of the production and the actual airdate, the more space there is for more notes to come out of the woodwork. And for those good notes to be in some cases diluted by notes from--I can’t say it without feeling a chill in my heart--the creative team--the memo that comes from the creative team. And all the notes are given equal, all the bullet points are given equal emphasis and you don’t know who they came from in the room, whether they came from the head of the studio or a new, newly arrived member, some fairly junior level, and you’re supposed to take them all equally. [INT: Right.] That happened a little bit on my last movie. I’ll talk about it when we get there. [INT: When we get there. Yeah.]

INT: But were you making it for the same executives--LIVE FROM BAGHDAD and MCMARTIN [INDICTMENT: THE MCMARTIN TRIAL]--were they the--
MJ: No, no, no. The executives on MCMARTIN [INDICTMENT: THE MCMARTIN TRIAL] were Robert Cooter, Cooper [Bob Cooper], who essentially ran HBO at that point. And it was Colin Callender, LIVE FROM BAGHDAD. [INT: What was the difference?] I think they’re both men of considerable vision and I think Colin [Colin Callender] was English, which meant I thought that when he gave me notes, there was sometimes a spin on them that I would understand, because they’ve been couched in the argot of English slang and I would understand in a way that that wouldn’t make sense to anybody else hearing, you know. I can’t think of any expressions now, but there’s a certain way you describe things vividly, and you use the resources of the English language--sometimes the Scottish language--and the vividness is very much expressed in the choice of words and you know exactly what he means. He was very supportive of the movie from the moment when the dailies started to come back. He just loved the scale of what I was doing in Morocco and really got behind the movie--showed it to the Council on Foreign Relations before it was aired and got their input. Showed it to the CNN reporters. CNN reporters, you know, Bernie Shaw [Bernard Shaw] and everybody turned up on the set, this enormous set that we’d done. I won’t say tears ran down their faces, but it was seeing the old Atlanta newsroom the way it had been and it was pretty convincing and very good to get that reaction from them. And Eason Jordan sat, you know, on the set--the guy who ran the news division, making notes, you know, what he could see that was right, you know. [INT: So, yes, but what about Cooper [Bob Cooper]?] I had less to do with Bob Cooper on THE MCMARTIN TRIAL [INDICTMENT: THE MCMARTIN TRIAL] than I had to do with Colin Callender on LIVE FROM BAGHDAD, so it’s not a fair comparison, but very decisive, both men very decisive. Very clear idea of what they wanted from the movie and not afraid to express it. And as I said before when we were talking, Bob Cooper sent me a script from MCMARTIN [INDICTMENT: THE MCMARTIN TRIAL] and said, “You’re on the train, are you not? This is the day when the train leaves the station. Do we do it with you or do we do it without you?” I love that kind of directness, which is something you never get from a feature studio. HBO does stuff that, yes, they are sometimes a pain in the butt to work with because of their meticulous wanting to manage everything, which gives it the HBO stamp, but they’re good notes. And I would take that pain in the butt because of the things that get done there that don’t get done elsewhere and certainly don’t get done in the places I came from anymore, like at the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation]. You don’t get the same kind of commitment to doing something and the originality of something. Occasional things come through, yes, but by and large--[INT: Yes. The word commitment is probably the key word, isn’t it?] Yeah.

INT: Any more you wanna say about LIVE FROM BAGHDAD?
MJ: It became increasingly clear to us, as we were finishing the shooting of LIVE FROM BAGHDAD, that something was brewing again in the Persian Gulf and that this might all end badly. And so the ending of the movie was crucial. One of the things that pleased me most about the movie was the relationship between Michael Keaton’s character, Robert Wiener, and the man in charge of the Ministry of Information at the, in the Iraqi government, Naji Al-Hadithi. And the two men obviously had a really strong chemical bond with each other, respected each other. The two Actors respected each other despite their different acting styles. It was clear that the last scene of the movie ought to involve on the day after the bombardment, after the, you know, the best efforts had failed, some key dialogue between the two. And we were shooting out in the desert here in California. There’s an abandoned steel works, which stood in for the ruins of Baghdad. And we couldn’t agree on how the movie--should they embrace? Should they, you know, be cold towards each other? I was rewriting that end scene the day before we shot it on the cell phone in my car with Colin Callender and the Writer Tim Sexton [Timothy J. Sexton]. And that conversation went on for hours and hours and hours, we drove around, as I drove around the streets of L.A. [Los Angeles]. And it finished up with me and the Writer working through the night at the Broadway Deli in Santa Monica--getting that scene right. And then we phoned Colin Callender and we read the scene to him down the phone and he said, “Right. Go shoot it tomorrow. That’s the end of our movie.” And it was the two men saying, you know, “We’ve become friends and I will see you when this war is over.” [INT: You know, it’s a wonderful scene. And what was it before that?] Oh, I can’t remember. You have--I have a way of flushing things that don’t work out of my head and it was something other than that. But I wanted it to reflect not that the men were enemies, but they were kind of both in this failure mode because of what they tried to do prevent, to prevent what was all around them, you know, people carrying away bodies and things.

INT: In that kind of pressure cooker situation, you finally, knowing all the tension and drama it takes to get to that point and you finally got the scene, then when you presented it with the, to the Actors, did you have to then build all of that, generate all of that energy over again to sell it to them or were they, they just went there?
MJ: No. The difficulty I had with Michael [Michael Keaton] was that he, there’s one exchange between David Suchet and him in that scene where David Suchet says to Keaton [Michael Keaton], “Well, you got your ending,” meaning, you got your story, you got your story. And Keaton [Michael Keaton] looks around and says, “Not the one I wanted,” and Naji [Naji Al-Hadithi] says, “Wasn’t it?” And Michael [Michael Keaton] didn’t like being put on the spot with that line as if he had been in some way, as his character was in some way torn between wanting to prevent the war, but knowing that if the war did happen, where he was would make a great, great story and that Naji [Naji Al-Hadithi] alluded to that. And I said, you know, “Let’s play the scene anyway and you’ll do what you do.” And I wouldn’t let David Suchet lose eye contact with him for that moment. He made him react to it and acknowledge it and it was great.

INT: But--I mean it was great. But isn’t--let’s just say that was Jack Lemmon doing that, okay, at that moment--you, maybe this is not fair, but I’ll say it anyway, because it’s indicative of I think of how Actors have changed and that is you wouldn’t have got such a vanity objection--
MJ: Not a vanity, not a vanity objection. [INT: You don’t think?] But I think sometimes you, you can be too close to the material not to see the narrative, not to see until afterwards when you see the thing in context how right that is. And I’m sure that when he saw it at the end, he was, you know, satisfied that that had been the right decision, but you may not always feel it in your gut in the moment until, you know, the camera’s rolling and it’s forced on you. And I had that sense I think from his reaction of being forced into something he didn’t want to confront as a character.

INT: Okay. Well, let me--let’s take the names of the Actors out of this. Would you, do you feel that this is true in your experience and that is, is that there are really two kinds of Actors: those who wanna go anywhere to tell a good story and be what is needed as the character; and then there are the others and this is in William Goldman’s book, by the way, the others who are really worried about their persona and very often get into a conflict with a part that that where they feel that their, their persona is at risk.
MJ: Yes. Dermot Mulroney, I just worked with on THE MEMORY KEEPER’S DAUGHTER. I went to have lunch with him before we started and I said, “Look, we’re gonna shoot very fast on the set. It’s a small budget. I happen to think that working fast is a factor that Producers can be unexpected on the set and you rely more on your gut reactions than overthinking something and I find that an energizing thing. And I’m gonna ask you to do that.” He said, “Thank god! The thing I hate is all that time on the set to sit around and think about what you’re gonna do and then try and remember what you’re gonna do when the camera’s rolling. And you throw it at me as hard as you like, as rapidly as you like, and I’ll do it. And tell me what you want.” And I thought he was great. It was very gratifying exchange. Other Actors, you know, Michael [Michael Keaton] is one, Kevin [Kevin Costner] is another; they do have a core persona, which reflects who they are, not just the parts they played and, you know, that’s why you choose them. That charisma comes from something within themselves and that sometimes narrow, sometimes very broad range. I thought everything that Michael [Michael Keaton] did was entirely consistent with him and the character he was playing. [INT: Right.]

INT: So, you wanted--there’s a story about Morocco.
MJ: About LIVE FROM BAGHDAD and filming in Morocco. You know, it was a reasonable budget. I’m not gonna say what it was, ‘cause I’m not that sure what it was, but you always wanna do more than you got in the budget. And the movie finishes--the big climax of the movie is the Americans attacking and bombing Baghdad. And I remember those images coming over on CNN, you know, with a night vision camera--sort of green with all these traces of things going up in the sky and these great bursts almost whited out that night camera image. I had this idea: if we could simulate the flash of the explosions, I mean, you didn’t have to see the explosions themselves. You’re in a city, so it’s always, you know, the other side of the building. So we had our physical effects designer do two things: one was to construct an anti-aircraft gun, which is essentially two long pipes with a valve that release gas backwards and forwards, so that they would light and sort of go, “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb,” and a great flash would come out at the end, which is great. And second thing was to create a bomb for the wide shots, which was essentially taking a central heating boiler, you know, one of those big copper huge things, turning it on its side, slicing it and filling it with magnesium, and then taking that to the far side of the city, somewhere, on a big wide shot and igniting it. And you got the most amazing flash, and you could see it in the movie, that lights up whole city blocks and you think there’s a huge explosion there. We did this before we started principle photography, the day before. So we were up on the roof of a hotel with our cameras and the day before to allay any fears of the people who manage the city of Casablanca, we had a demonstration for them in the football stadium. We said, “This is what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna let off this thing and lined all the bleachers. It was let off and it went “boom.” Great applause and cheering and wild whistling, said, “This is great, great, great, great. You go ahead.” So we went ahead. After the first couple of explosions, we got a crackling voice over the intercom, the radio from the visual effects crew saying, “We’re being stoned. We’re being stoned by an angry mob.” Nobody had thought to let the people who were the inhabitants of the blocks of apartments around where these things were being let off know what was gonna happen. And, you know, they were terrified out of their minds. Out of that terror came anger, and they attacked the only visible object of their anguish is the special effects crew and, you know, guys are going to hospital with head wounds from stones and things. Even more interesting is a little while afterwards, the real Ingrid Forminack who Helena Bonham Carter plays in the movie said that this rumor had spread through the intelligence community that there was an attempted coup in Morocco and it failed due to the intervention of the Palestinians, ‘cause one of the places, we didn’t know this, where we were lighting off one of these things was right next to the PLO [Palestinian Liberation Organization] headquarters in Casablanca, so that was quite fun. I mean, it was that convincing that people thought bombs were going off and everything. [INT: What a great story.]

INT: So, the next film is another feature, THE FIRST $20 MILLION IS ALWAYS THE HARDEST, which is 20th Century-Fox.
MJ: Never was a truer word said in a title. It’s based on a book by Po Bronson, who was one of the chroniclers of the Silicon Valley revolution, the dotcom revolution. And it was a very good idea to satirize Silicon Valley. Right at the beginning, I went with the Writer Gary Tieche and we went up to Palo Alto and other places, and it was like going to an alien planet. The excitement in the air was almost palpable. The money in the air was palpable. The talk in the air, the vision in the air. And it was so overblown and people were spending such vast amounts of money. People becoming billionaires overnight and still sleeping under their desks and going back to a tiny apartment with a bookshelf, not that they read books. It was made of construction blocks and a plank. And they were worth billions and billions and billions of dollars and these incubators things that we went to; the excitement in the air was kinda, it was like being in a crowded restaurant with teeming conversation, deafening conversation--people pitching ideas and other people saying, “We’re gonna get rich on this and that.” And we came back with a story saying, “This is a great story. Nobody’s has ever bothered to go and see this. Nobody’s ever told the story. It’s a great comedy. It’s a great satire. It’ll be a classic satire.” And I got a call saying, “The head of the studio has realized that you’re planning a satire and he says, ‘Satire is what dies on Saturday night and we don’t want a satire.’” I said, “But this is, this is--” so essentially, I had a conversation with I think it was the president of the studio on my cellphone in my car that lasted hours, and hours, and hours, and hours, and hours about what humor was and what satire was and what satire wasn’t all the way home. And I sat in my garage for several hours continuing this conversation ‘cause it had to be resolved, obviously. [INT: This, there was already a script at this point.] There was already a script--[INT: That you had overseen?] Yes. And very, very original and very funny. And the decision was taken that this wasn’t something they wanted to get into and that we had to rewrite and redevelop the script as something that would be more youth friendly and be the story rather like REVENGE OF THE NERDS, of this group of people coming out from under and the underdogs becoming triumphant at the end. We would have a really youth friendly score and we’d get someone as our music supervisor to do it. And I think, it may be my memory kinda inflating things, but I think we developed and developed, and developed, and developed this damn thing for damn near two years. And you do it because you think it’s just gonna take one more thing. I’ve invented [invested] this amount of my of my time in this damn project. One more thing, it’ll get green lit, I’ll get paid, and we can make some sort of movie out of it. But it went on and on and on and on and on. In that two years, the dotcom bubble had burst. There wasn’t a story there to tell anymore, except we had to incorporate that into the narrative in some way. It was the most disheartening movie. I mean, there was very little money put into it ‘cause nobody believed in it at the studio and it came and went in one theatre in New York, one theatre in L.A. [Los Angeles] for a week and made a total of two thousand five hundred dollars as a movie. [INT: Who was in it? Who was cast in it?] Adam Garcia, a charismatic, young Australian Actor; Jake Busey, son of Gary Busey; Ethan Suplee, a very classic full bodied obese kind of comic who's now gone on to great success; and Anjul Nigam, whose an Indian Actor. You know, we had a good time making it. There was virtually no money to do anything at all. It had a real cheesy look, which many people commented on, but it was a fundamental rule of that, you know. Development, as a whole, goes through a peak, just like a bell curve. It gets better, and better, and better, and better and then it stops getting better, but the more it goes on, the more it changes. It’s just different, it’s not better, it changes. And then it goes downhill and it gets worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. And always though there’s a magnetic lure that says, “You can’t go now. You’ve invested so much time in this project. You got to make a movie or it this will just be a total lose of your time, your money, your investment, everything.” You have to go walk on the beach and you have to take--the other part of the skill that’s a movie Director. Part of it is quick thinking. The other is slow thinking. And you have to take a measured walk on the beach and think, “Is this anywhere within striking distance of what I originally wanted to do?” And if it isn’t, you should walk away. And I didn’t and I wish my whole life that I had.

MJ: However, about the same time, there was another project, which was offered to me, which was JOHN ADAMS at HBO. I was taken on as the Director of that and took on my regular DP [Director of Photography], Ivan Strasburg, and we got heavily into pre-production and we traveled Europe and we scouted the French Chateaux’s and we scouted London and so on and we visited all the places in Virginia where these parts of cities were being built. They were building part of colonial Boston, part of colonial New York, John Adam’s house in the countryside--`based on David McCullough’s book, great book. [INT: So it was already in preproduction?] In preproduction. And the more I got into preproduction, the more I realized that what I had sold them as my vision of this series was impossible to do given the preconditions that I faced. My inside, or whatever you want it call it, but my take on it was the more I read David McCullough’s book about the eighteenth century and the start of this nation and what was to eventually lead to the presidency of John Adams, but went through the whole of the American Revolution was a period of such creative ferment, it recalled to me the ‘60s [1960s] and New Wave cinema, and I thought, “Everybody thinks of the eighteenth century as the past and thinks of that as costume drama, a period drama, and wouldn’t it be great to film it cinematically in the style of one of those movies of the New Wave, as if it was happening all around you.” ‘Cause the people in the eighteenth century didn’t realize they were in the past. They thought they were in the middle of their present tense and their present tense was very exciting: new ideas in science, new ideas in politics, new ideas about the way the world should be run and everything coming out of the wall. And the excitement of that and shooting in a hand held way and getting in and out of it and using all these detail that David McCullough has got in his book, I thought this is the way to tell the story. It’ll be stunning, it’ll be so exciting. They had decided early on, I think they were talked to by a very persuasive guy in visual effects that the way to do this movie would be to build facades of houses in like say a central square in Boston or a bit of colonial New York or London and just leave these big gaps. And they put up blue screens or green screens and wherever there was a gap, they would fill it in afterwards. And wherever there was snow, they’d put that in afterwards; wherever there was smoke, they’d put that in afterwards. And I said, “But, that’s in, even with, you know, the capabilities of CGI technology and blue screen, that’s imposing a great rigidity on the way the movie’s gonna look.” It means you can’t even take a shot like that because you’re gonna be going through a bit of green and you gotta fill in that bit of green with something. Couldn’t you just at least put up another façade in the gaps in between? Then I could shoot with all the rough and tumble and mise-en-scene of the--and no, they weren’t gonna do it that way. And, you know, it ended up an okay series, I think; great performances in it. Paul Giamatti was great, Laura Linney was great, everybody’s great. Tom Wilkinson and, you know. But it had the feel to me of a staid picture of the eighteenth century and the origins of this country and I think it could have been so much more exciting. And I called up Colin Callender and said, “I don’t believe I can do this in the way I want to do it. I believe it has been, to some extent, pre-directed and it’s not the way I want to direct it. And the way I want to direct it, I don’t think is, given these given qualities, one that I can.” And he said, “Well, I admire you for speaking up and walking away from it and I don’t think any less of you for that.” But that was a good decision, you know. The other one was a bad. When do you walk away? When don’t you walk away? THE HADES FACTOR [COVERT ONE: THE HADES FACTOR], CBS miniseries. I know you tried to look at it and couldn’t, I don’t blame you. It was done at the same time as the BOURNE movies [THE BOURNE IDENTITY, THE BOURNE SUPREMACY, THE BOURNE ULTIMATUM, THE BOURNE LEGACY] and obviously the same writer, Robert Ludlum, did those series; although, this wasn’t a specifically a Jason Bourne movie, but it was internationally intrigue. And the script wasn’t in a very good shape, but it was gonna go immediately and I though I could bring the scrip ‘round to where I could shoot it. And there were so many other production challenges. It was shot in Toronto. And part of the intrigue was, “Can you make Toronto look like Berlin? Can you make it look like Paris? Can you make it look like Washington? Can you make it look like the wilds of Pak-, not Pakistan, Afghanistan? And the answer to all those was, “Yes,” and we did brilliantly. There was no way you were not in Berlin, you were not in Afghanistan, you know. But, you know, every night we’d come out--production through the preproduction period, you know, faced with these enormous logistical things of all these scenes that need to be shot, shoot out in the metro in Paris and all kinds of stuff, we would spend every night, the Producer and the Writer, and I in shouting matches in our hotel rooms, you know, changing the script, arguing about the script, and always going and getting more and more disheartened about the fact that you would have pictures, but you wouldn’t have a story. And the Producer, I can see why, he thought this would be like the Bourne movies--the start of a big franchise, you’d get--TV Bourne movies or TV Jonathon Smith movies, based on this THE HADES FACTOR initially, then other stories that feature the same characters. And so anything that you could do to make it more intriguing, more unexplained would be, he thought, something that would drag the audience into wanting to have the story explained in the next episode and then the next episode. So, I believe you can bamboozle the audience with not knowing what’s going on for about a minute at the most, two minutes, maybe. And then you need to give them some bone that says, “This is what this is all about,” but you don’t just keep bringing in red herrings, red herrings, red herrings, however spectacular the photography is, you can’t do it for four hours and not tell them what’s--so, you know, I should have walked away from that. Couldn’t, had already signed up, was on board shooting it--would have let everybody down, so I think--it goes back to another thing, you know, at what point do you owe it to the production, as a Director, to just do the best job you can even though you know it’s gonna be, despite your best efforts, probably a disaster. Again, like CLEAN SLATE, it suffered from either a loss of confidence on the part of CBS, who were financing it, or an unfortunate concatenation of circumstances. It was a two part series: two hours and two hours. And the airdate, which had been promised as, you know, advertisements on bus benches, the sides of buses, the sides of buildings, you know real blitz on this as being TV’s answer to the Bourne movies disappeared, because in that period of time Les Moonves had decided that the future of CBS did not lie in long form and here on the day he was gonna announce that was a long form movie. And so, you know, the less that could be publicized, I think they felt the more it would draw attention to the fact that he was doing something he said he wasn’t gonna do, so that was an unfortunate consternation of circumstances, and the publicity that was promised disappeared, so essentially deeply unsatisfying.

MJ: The forth one I mentioned, if you don’t mind me drawing all these together, THE MEMORY KEEPER’S DAUGHTER, a Lifetime movie---very small budget, but based on a best selling book by Kim Edwards. You know, it had been on the top of the New York Times bestseller list for god knows how long. The story of a doctor back in the ‘60s [1960s], just married, his wife is about to give birth to their first child in a snowstorm, in a blizzard. They drive to the emergency room. The nurse helps, the emergency room is too far away. They drive to his office, to his clinic and there the baby is born and it’s a mongrel--it’s a baby with Down syndrome. And his wife is under the anesthetic that they used at that time during childbirth. She’s very woozy, doesn’t understand what’s going on, and he gives it to the nurse and says, “I know a place you can take this child.” And meanwhile, there’s another child--it was twins. And a baby is born still while the wife is under the influence and it’s a perfect child and the family raise that perfect child. But in another city, the nurse who couldn’t bear to just abandon this baby raises that baby, that Down syndrome girl. Very compelling story. For budgetary reasons, two crucial decisions were made before I came on board I thought were disastrous, disastrous. THE MEMORY KEEPER’S DAUGHTER refers to a camera in the story--the camera is the memory keeper and the central metaphor is photography and how we fix the past as we wish it would be in our heads in still photographs. And the doctor’s hobby, which he practices by shutting himself away from all the rest of the family in a dark room, is photography. And there he records the growing up of the boy, the half of the twin, and in secret he’s keeping the Polaroids that the nurse is sending him of photographs of the daughter that he denies. I said, “But you can’t shoot it as you’re proposing on digital. It’s about photography; you must shoot it on film. All the things that you can do with those images on film, you cannot do with a digital camera.” I mean, this is early days of digital camera, but it’s not a battle-hardened technology. I was obliged by the tiny budget to shoot it hand held for the most part. And, you know, the machine is not designed for taking out into the wild weather of Nova Scotia. Here’s the second big bad decision, we will shoot this whether there were scenes that take place on a tropical beach in Aruba, the climactic scene, which is gonna be at the end of the shooting, takes place on Mother’s Day--the meeting of the two mothers--we will shoot it in Nova Scotia. And I said, “Is there any way of rethinking this decision about digital camera, ‘cause if you try and overexpose something, you get to a point where you don’t get an interestingly bleached out image, you get a white screen and there’s nothing there, there’s nothing to capture, to, for the imagination to grip onto.” “No, I’m sorry. The budget’s based on that.” "When are we going, ‘cause the later in the year we push this, the more we’re gonna be in bad weather and really shooting a beach scene in bikinis and it’s snowing, is gonna very difficult to do." In fact, it took the Producer a long time to get the finances together and I thought, “Shall I walk away?” And I didn’t ‘cause the story was so compelling. But as it got pushed further and further and further into the wild, wild weather of Nova Scotia, we did, indeed, although we started with that scene, we found ourselves below freezing point, on a beach--[INT: When were you shooting?] December in Nova Scotia, with Gretchen Mol in a bikini, lying on the sand, which is iced and one of the other Actors having to run along the sand in bare feet and him getting frostbite on the bottom of his feet and propane burners under the lenses to generate a heat haze and patently plastic palm trees and just try and overexpose and get a sensation of warmth and--awful. And then the climactic scene when we did it, it was snowing. It was meant to be Mother’s Day. We put artificial daffodils in all the bushes and just every silk we had to try and keep the snow off the Actors faces and, you know, trying to paint out some of that digitally afterwards, but… And the whole look of the movie, I hated, I hated the digital look of it. The only parts of it that were in any way creatively satisfying to me were the flashbacks the doctor had to his own unhappy childhood in which a child, his sister, had some sort of congenital disease and she died early in the pain and heartache and the ultimately the death of the mother that caused and he didn’t want to cause that to his wife. So I shot those in the style of Walker Evans, who documented that period in the Deep South, you know, the Depression era and you really degraded those images and made them kind of very crisp and grainy and very brief flashes--those, those were satisfying. That was an image I could use ‘cause it made it almost look like a photograph, even by adding artificial grain to it. But that was, I thought that was gonna be the worst of the disasters, but the greatest of the disasters was that Lifetime, bless their hearts, have a slot and the length of that slot is defined down to the frame, so many minutes, so many seconds, so many frames and that’s the length it will be. And they also have a penchant for driving things fast, because they believe that that makes it more like a movie if it has a pace to it. Well, you can do that to a certain extent and it has some energy, but I would’ve gone through happily and added 10 frames to every cut and then I would’ve had a movie. When they showed for preview audience, somebody, without even consulting me, had joined all the acts together and the acts spanned a 10 year period each time in the life of the characters and cut out the black, the fade to black and fadeout, so that sense of time having passed was gone. And it was like watching a movie gallop pass you as you watched like this. I should have walked away from that and I didn’t. But there are lessons there. You know, you have to choose the point at which you say, “Am I gonna, despite the fact I’m gonna let everybody down, despite the fact I’m gonna get a bad reputation for walking away from a project in the middle, am I still gonna be able to make a movie that I can be proud of at the end of it?" I don’t know. The performances, I think, were good. Emily Watson, Dermot Mulroney, Gretchen Mol did great performances. The little girl, Krystal Nausbaum [Krystal Hope Nausbaum], who played the girl with Down syndrome through many ages, you know, from being a little girl up to being an 18 year old was great, but I don’t know. It got nominated for an Emmy and--

INT: But you say you were glad you stayed?
MJ: Oh, I was glad I stayed because, you know, there was something left there. In--[INT: But you wouldn’t have--but knowing what you know now--] It was something, something I would say my career lives or dies by this movie. [INT: But you wouldn’t--going back all over it again, knowing what you know now, would you have taken it?] No because there was so little money. I mean, that’s why we ended up with plastic palm trees. Nobody was interested in the production value, just in getting the thing on film, it seemed to me, and I’m probably doing a disservice to people who were, you know, trying to do their hardest with no money. There were sets with no walls. I had to shoot in sets where I had to put up duvetyn and put bookshelves in the way to hide it and…it was awful.

INT: And, you know, just to say parenthetically about the business of no money, particularly with you as a Director, had they come to you right from the beginning and said, “These are the number of dollars we have; you can do whatever you want with them as long as you don’t go beyond that,” do you think you would have had a better film? Had you been--
MJ: It was a combination of factors like the style in which the film was shot versus the medium in which it was shot, the time of year, and the location in which it was shot, those were all, you know, economic factors and they worked very much against the proper telling of that, that story, I think. You were having to make snow where there wasn’t snow, having to disguise snow where there was snow was a…it was silly. There was something left at the end of it. There was something moving about the story, but it's despite everything. And I’m always amazed when I go into IMDb [Internet Movie Database] and I look at, you know, it says, “81 responses,” and you click on it. And you see movies like THE FIRST $20 MILLION IS ALWAYS THE HARDEST, people loved it! I can’t think how many people saw it, but it must be, from the responses, the only people ever to have seen it that were in those two movie theatres, one in New York and one in Los Angeles, actually enjoyed and enjoyed its sweetness. People enjoyed the sweetness of CLEAN SLATE. People were alternatively outraged by the Bourne movie, the Ludlum Factor [COVERT ONE: THE HADES FACTOR], that it played so many tricks with the story that they were familiar with from the book. The same with the Kim Edwards novel, you know, there were lots--it was this long a novel and to reduce it down to 80 something minutes, an awful lot has to go, but, you know, there were equally people who found it very moving. So, there’s always something there, but is it enough to say, “I was the Director of that and I gave them something,” I don’t know.

INT: Let me go back to something else that I picked up from what you were saying that you may not even be aware of and that is how many times you got, you picked projects or they picked you, where history was a factor in the sense that the time you chose to make it, the time it got made, the events changed like--[MJ: Do you mean the events that were portrayed or the circumstances of the making of the movie?] Both. But largely the fact that the historical perspective changed. LIVE FROM BAGHDAD would be an example. THE FIRST $20 MILLION IS ALWAYS THE HARDEST is another example where the very thing that you were making the movie about had exploded, both literally and figuratively. And then as I heard you talk about JOHN ADAMS, right, which as you wisely pointed out, the people who lived through that were living in the present, not in the past, and it’s a prism of the past that we impose on it. But going back to your beginning as a documentarian, you know, which is certainly a form of journalism, historical and also historical journalism, had you ever thought about the fact that you chose things or allowed things to choose you that was so tied to, I won’t call them current events, but historical events and how they impacted on the very making of those films?
MJ: Something--I guess because of my background as a documentary filmmaker, I’ve always tried to have a quality in my films that takes the audience behind closed doors into a world in which they haven’t been before. Whether it’s the world of the eighteenth century or whether it’s the world of science in the 1950s or politics or the CIA or whatever, ‘cause I figure that that is one of the two elements that I look for in a movie, is the kind of groundswell against which the human drama is taking place that is in itself unfamiliar to the audience. And those tend to be things which are based in some factual situation, almost by definition. NOSENKO [YURI NOSENKO, KGB] was based in the famous kind of turning the CIA inside out in the 1960s ‘cause they thought they had a mole inside, so every decision had a mirror image and which one was right and which one was not. You had said earlier on in this interview that you thought I made movies about the outsider and was this related to my own somewhat lonely, solitary experience growing up and the answer is yes, of course. If you look through most of the, I mean, some of them are buddy movies, like LA STORY is sort of a romantic comedy, it’s not really about a loner. But I think, you know--Sakhorov, the story of a scientist who starts out in the very heart of the Soviet establishment as a winner of this, the Lenin Prize, the Stalin Prize, hero of socialist labor, ends up a dissident outside. And that’s a world that you go into and you see him interact in the world. Not so much--[INT: The Helix]--an outsider as a loner working inside a strange world, so that throws it into an even sharper contrast. Rosalind Franklin, in the DNA story [THE RACE FOR THE DOUBLE HELIX] was a lone heroine in a world dominated by men, post war England, very, very male dominated. And I think she felt that if she just continued working, she would get to the answer in the end, whereas the other guys were treating it as a race. And indeed in some unscrupulous interpretations of what they did, they stole her work. And she died and they got the Nobel Prize. Now that’s the kind of very intriguing story to tell and it’s also about human relations. Her particular brand of solitariness prevented her from bonding with Maurice Wilkins who was her coworker. The two of them could, together, could’ve got the secret of DNA. Watson [Jim Watson] and Crick [Francis Crick] bonded together and they did get it. Tommy Lee Jones, you know, in the world of the emergency control center of VOLCANO is battling against bureaucracy, interdepartmental rivalry and lava and fire and flames and ash and in that, you know, he reveals himself as a true hero, a tragic, you know, hero trying to do his best against these Shakespearean odds and that’s a hero. TEMPLE GRANDIN, the last movie, and we’ll come on to talk about that. But I think, you know, what I’m realizing as we come to the end of these conversations is the that for me it’s been like the Beckett [Samuel Beckett] play, Krapp’s Last Tape and you look back through your life and you replay these tapes of how optimistic you were earlier on and how you got disillusioned. And I realized that what probably I’ve been doing in my movies is playing out the battle between me, the loner, and the industry in which you’re essentially cast as a loner, and you have to kind of battle. Samuel Fuller said in a different sense, you know, the film is a battleground. He meant within the film itself are contained the emotions of war and battle. But the film is a battleground. Filming a film is a battleground between often the lone Director, the person with the vision that’s being very self serving and arrogant, maybe, and people who have a vision, but it’s not the complete one. If you’re a Director, you know every rivet and beam of the structure of your movie. You sat with it in pre-production, even before pre-production and casting and shooting it and post-production. You know where all the things join up. Someone looking for cuts goes through the script and says, “Well, maybe we don’t need that line.” And what they miss is the living texture of the movie that you know in your bones, in your--the deepest recesses of every axiom in your brain--that is the set up for this punch line here; that’s the payoff for this set up here; this thing is echoed by this thing here; this reaction is the mirror of this thing here. You know all those things are gonna be destroyed if you start pulling things out and rearranging them. So you go along with it to some extent because you have to because you’ve lost your first cut and it’s now someone else’s cut, but you have to, I think you have an obligation to be an irritant through that process, to fight and say, “Look, you may gonna, gonna throw me out of the door the next minute because I’m just kinda an asshole making your life miserable. And the longer the post-production goes on, the more miserable I’m making you, the more ornery I’m getting. I’m saying these things because I believe in them and I believe that if you change them or put in something else here, you will have a less good movie and you will not be happy with it.” And so far, I haven’t been thrown off a movie, but it is, you know, really pushing the limit sometimes. And I realize the I am that hero battling against the pyroclastic clouds of lava or whatever. [INT: Yes, yeah.] In a way--