INT: My name is Robert Markowitz. Today is November 10, 2009. I’m conducting an interview with Mick Jackson for the Directors Guild of America Visual History Program. And we are in the DGA in Los Angeles, California.

INT: We were talking about pilots and I know that the pilots actually came later than this point in your career, ‘cause we’re now about ’90 [1990], 1994, but this might be a good moment--you--one of the outstanding qualities of your career is that you were able to move through all the mediums. You had a very successful career in movies for television; you did episodes; you later did pilots with a wonderful track record of those pilots, which you should comment on; and then you were able to be in the feature world. And there was a period when Directors saw the system as a ladder of stepping-stones, where you would do episodic, then you would do movies for television and then the big payoff was doing feature movies. You moved seemingly effortlessly back and forth between them. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?
MJ: Well, the effortlessness with which I moved back was of course between television and features was not through any facility on my part for doing that, but just force of circumstance. After I did THE BODYGUARD, there were rumors circulating that there had been an unhappy shoot--that I could be a difficult Director I think was the way it was phrased in other quarters. So, I spent several years trying to get a featured project, feature project, any feature project off the ground with some difficulties because this kind of thing was there and was addressed sometimes in meetings and I did my best to be honest about it, but I had to work in the meantime. And the HBO movie, THE INDICTMENT: THE MARTIN TRIAL [INDICTMENT: THE MCMARTIN TRIAL] movie came up and was an immediate go. And I said, “Yes. I’ll take that.” And that kind of kept the wolf from the door for a bit. But it was several years after THE BODYGUARD that I got my next feature movie, which is actually CLEAN SLATE. It was a movie for MGM [Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer]. And I tried to not just go backwards and forth between television and features, but between genres. I think you keep yourself alert and alive if you have the terror of doing something you've never done before. So, if you come from a thriller or a musical, romance or something, then leap into something that’s completely different. In this case, slightly absurdist, nostalgic comedy was what presented itself. I thought it was beautifully written by Robert King. Similar premise to GROUNDHOG DAY I think, though I didn’t think that at the time, which is a private detective with amnesia who wakes up and every day, rather like in MEMENTO later, the movie, finds a tape recorder by the bed, a little Dictaphone with post-it notes saying, “Remember these things,” and, “press this button,” and the tape recorder tells him what he ought to know about life and he bumbles through, and each day, he falls asleep and it’s all gone and so on. I’ve had a kind of love story with L.A. [Los Angeles] since I’ve lived here. I think many of the movies, not just for the convenience of living here and sleeping in my own bed, I’ve found different sides of L.A. [Los Angeles] to try and illustrate. THE BODYGUARD was the music industry in L.A. [Los Angeles]. LA STORY, obviously, was the city itself and its magic. But other things like CLEAN SLATE was set in L. A. [Los Angeles] and some of the pilots I did like NUMBERS was set here. THE HANDLER was set here. I thought this was an opportunity for me to go back and revisit one of my great loves in movies, which was the movies that were made here in L.A. [Los Angeles] in the ‘30s [1930] and ‘40s [1940s]--the Raymond Chandler kind of era. You might call it the film noir era, but this was a comedy and it was light comedy. It was set in Venice, Venice Beach. And I thought, “I wonder if it’s possible to do a noir comedy with Venice, but without the Venetian blinds,” you know, the shadows. And so the movie, I quite liked it. It was full of homages to THE BIG SLEEP and THE MALTESE FALCON and THE THIRD MAN--and blink and you’ll miss them, but they’re all there--and Hitchcock [Alfred Hitchcock] movies and so on. And it was shot in a kind of retro camera style, you know, Dutch angles. And I tried to accentuate those parts of L.A. [Los Angeles], which are unchanged since, you know, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett: the apartment buildings, the Art Deco architecture of civic Santa Monica, the pier. And, you know, the fashion for retro: double breasted men’s suits. And there’s a fashion show in which the models are wearing clothes from the ‘30s [1930s] and so on. So I thought it was a really gentle movie and very wittily written. When it came to the casting there was a problem about the casting, which was should you cast in this thing an Actor who could kind of embrace this period feel or someone with a reputation as a comedian. And we went back and forth with the Producers. One idea they had was, “Well, if we’re gonna do that, maybe Kevin Costner.” I said, “Maybe. Is there any other names that you have on your list?” The idea of Dana Carvey came up. Now, Dana Carvey is a very kind of post-modern comedian. And in the end, because he’s running out of names, I went along with that. And I thought it would be an interesting experiment to see if somebody who starred at comedy was very much kind of self referential, involving the third wall of the audience and kind of--I thought his talent for mimicry could actually work in this movie, where he pretends to be different people ‘cause he doesn’t know who he is. In fact, it turned out not to be the best fit. And I think when the movie was finished, you know, the two sides of it, his comedic acting, which was wonderful, and what I was trying to do with this kind of slightly more gentle homage to a vanished L.A. [Los Angeles] and detective stories, didn’t quite mesh. The other thing that was an unhappy accident was that as the movie was finished, MGM [Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer] was changing hands from Alan Ladd [Alan Ladd, Jr.] to Frank Mancuso. And this movie just disappeared in the gap in between. And I didn’t--I’m not quite sure why that happened. I remember, you know, the first day the new administration came, we screened the movie for them and they thought, “Oh my God, this is wonderful. It is so funny. It’s so groundbreaking. It’s so original.” And they said to me, “How wonderful it is to walk into a studio and the first thing you see is gonna be a great success.” When the movie opened, it made about a million dollars and that’s it. And I think that’s because they had second thoughts about--everybody does. You know, you walk in to some else’s territory, you want to make your own stamp. This was something very much associated with the previous administration. Alan Ladd, Jr. had liked it and, you know, they had liked it when they first saw it, but I think they had second thoughts and thought, “Well, maybe there’s other things that we’ve got upcoming that we want to promote,” so the film just died. And that was a sad, ‘cause I was looking it up on IMDb, on the web the other day, and surprised to find how many people actually love it and find it funny, and that Dana Carvey in it was something so refreshingly different from WAYNE’S WORLD and all that stuff, so that’s sad. It was a comedy and it steered me away from comedy for quite a while, I think.

INT: But you said, you said that Dana Carvey turned out not to be a good idea. Did you say that?
MJ: That’s my feeling. And I know that he didn’t like the movie when it was finished. I think his style of comedy is very, very personal. He makes me laugh. But in the movie career that he had up to that point, nobody had found really a way of using that talent. The WAYNE’S WORLD movies are probably the best use of that, but I think he did another movie which didn’t turn so well. And I think it was a constant battle to try and get the tone right, see if you underplayed it more than was his natural tendency to play it, I think, then maybe you lost some essential character of him, so it was a constant kind of balancing act. And I thought, in the best way he was being Dana Carvey--he was pretending to be someone else because he’d just taken an identity out of the air, that was great. But for the romantic bits, the sad and pathetic bits, I thought there were certain skills that, you know, weren’t as well honed as his comedic skills. [INT: Like the variants in Robin Williams’ movies.] Yeah. Yeah.

INT: But let me, but let’s just go back to the process for a minute. Did you, when you were filming, did you feel during the filming that this was not the right casting or are you saying that wasn’t afterwards and you finished the film and then you realized it?
MJ: There was some tension during the making of the film. You know, my films aren’t--tend to be neither, not in the middle at all. They’re wonderful experiences or they’re clouded experiences; this was slightly clouded. I think when I’m watching an Actor and I’m not beside the camera, my normal place is at a monitor, where I can see the Actor, I can see the camera. But at the monitor, I can see what the camera is doing at the same time and monitor the performance from there. And that tends to be out of vision of the Actor, usually, though I can see him or her. But I’m a kind of psychic cheerleader for that performance. You know, I’m rooting for the Actor. I’m there, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” doing all these weird things, which if anybody saw them would look ridiculous. And when they’re going for something and I’m hoping for something else and it doesn’t happen, I go, “Oh!” to myself. I would never do that in front of the Actor. Dana’s [Dana Carvey] brother was behind the duvetyn watching me and I didn’t realize. And watching me go through this absurd pantomime I do for myself, you know, coaching him, willing him to get this like that. And saw me go, “Oh!" [puts head in hands] and relayed that back to Dana [Dana Carvey]. Now, it didn’t mean I didn’t like his performance. I just though there was something within reach there and I kind of psychically was willing him to go for that and he didn’t quite and then we talked about it and we went for it in the next take. But, you know, I think that sent a signal that I wasn’t happy with his performance, and I think that made matters worse.

INT: Well, the reason I wanna stay on this is because it’s a good story about process, which we don’t get to talk about a lot. First of all, refresh my memory ‘cause, about video assist. So you do use video assist. [MJ: I do.] I mean that’s where you are at video assist?
MJ: Since I’ve started using two cameras, which is most of my career here, you know, I like to see what coverage I’m getting as well as monitor the performance from two angles or whatever the other camera’s getting, so it seems to be a more useful place for me to be to see how it’s actually reading on film.

INT: And you balance that against the fact that you’re not standing there as you say, you’re like a cheerleader with the Actor, but the Actor now can’t see you, right?
MJ: Right. And I think that’s good. [INT: You think that’s good?] Because part of my process is to, you know, I’m there like an angel behind them, willing the performance and playing it myself in my head. And if the Actor sees that, you know, I’m occupying the same space that he’s occupying. And I’ve had that unfortunate experience before where I thought I was invisible and through a chink in the curtains or something, the Actor could see me. And I’m doing the same things. It’s like seeing yourself in the mirror only the mirror isn’t doing what you’re doing, so… [INT: Right. So you’ve always had this animation during, when the camera is- MJ: I can’t help it. It’s just my kind of bubbling enthusiasm for what’s happening. [INT: I see. I see.]

INT: Okay. So, last question about that, ‘cause I’m sure it applies to other films. ‘Cause I heard this question asked to Kazan [Elia Kazan], it was a very interesting question, which was what do you do when you know when you are filming that you’ve made a casting mistake, the key casting mistake? How do you live with that?
MJ: You don’t. I made a key-casting mistake on the same movie [CLEAN SLATE]. There’s a character who’s supposed to be Dana Carvey’s character, his doctor, his personal doctor, who turns out to be a villain. And the Actor I’d cast I’d worked with before on LA STORY. And I knew from the moment we were on the set and we started doing the first scene that this was a big error on my part. Not that he wasn’t a great Actor, or a very comic Actor, but just the styling which I was doing the movie was completely at odds with his own persona and character. And I just said, “Look, I’m terribly sorry. This is my mistake entirely. I do apologize to you. I have made a mistake, and I think, you know, it will be hard for both of us to carry on with this. And I’m gonna recast that part.” And we did it within the day. [INT: But you don’t get to do that on television.] I think not.

INT: So have you had that experience on television, too, where you’ve cast wrong? I'm just--what I’m getting at is how does a Director, yourself, deal with the fact that in television sometimes the bad casting is imposed on you, and yet you still have to have that enthusiasm? How do you--
MJ: Well, that’s part of choosing whether you take the movie or not. "Here is a movie with Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston. Are you going take it? No, I don’t like the casting much." You’re not gonna say that. I mean, if you can’t get enthusiastic about, you know, the movie, including the casting, then you shouldn’t take it. But, you know…This wasn’t imposed casting. Dana Carvey was, you know, arrived at by a consensus between me and the Producers and the studio. And I think I went along with it despite some misgivings, but it turns out the way it turns out. [INT: Yes.]

INT: Last try at this question. [MJ: Alright.] Okay. What I’m asking is a psychological thing. You’re there; there’s part of your brain that knows this Actor has a limited--this is where you want it to be, this Actor has this limitation, and you’re doing this for four or eight weeks, whatever the shoot is, how--and you’re looking at the dailies--what is it you tell yourself or what is it you do, so that you can get to that set everyday and be as enthusiastic as you normally are? I mean, how do you--
MJ: I think you have to take drugs. [laughs] There have been, particularly with line readings, you know, some Actors have a very off kilter line reading skill, where they look for the unexpected stress in a line. Jeff Goldblum does it and is wonderful and you would never have expected that, that line reading. There are other Actors who seem not to understand what the line means and put the stress on a word that doesn’t mean anything like “it,” or “the.” And I try and go with that as much as possible and hope that on take three they’ll get it or take four. Eventually you have to try and address the fact that they’re not getting it. And you say, “Look, here’s what I think the line means,” and you give them a line reading when you’ve exhausted every other avenue, where you’ve explained what the line is about without giving them a line reading. And then you give them a line reading. I mean with Dennis Hopper on CHATTAHOOCHEE, there was one line he just couldn’t get. And I said, “You almost got it in take five.” He said, “Man, I have no idea what I did on take five. I had no idea." So I eventually had to use the word out of take five and put it into another later take. You know, go through it that way. There was an Actor I was working with on VOLCANO who just could not get the line reading and it was really, really bothering me and I said, ”We’ll get it eventually, we’ll get it.” We never got it and I think my asking for it constantly when he said, “But I’m giving you that.” I said, “No. Not quite. It doesn’t mean that the way you’re saying it.” I think it pissed him off to the extent that when we were in the dubbing theatre and we needed to get a new reading of the line, he was on location with another movie. He was so pissed off that he did the reading down the line while eating a sandwich, making it virtually unusable, which is interesting.

INT: Well, here’s--as long as we’re talking about performances, it doesn’t matter what movie it is. I mean, young Directors are always, always asking the same question, which is well, how do you get a performance? You know, they think there’s a magic pill that you, if you only could get Actors to take it. How--do you work, when you’re preparing for a shoot and trying to think about the performances, do you start with a--are you a Director who has a fairly clear idea, sort of a preconception of what you want in a characterization, that you could actually run it in your head and if you can get that, you would be happy? Or are you at the other school where, where you have, you know, you have an understanding of the characterization, but you’re really there to be surprised by the Actor, you know, and so you have a completely opened mind as to--
MJ: No. I never have a completely open mind, but I do have an open mind. It’s a combination of the two. Whenever I’m involved crucially in the casting, I believe that great Actors acquire a persona, which is the sort of sum total of all the parts that they’ve played and those parts that they’ve played the best are because they touch some nerve deep within the person that is the Actor. And that is something which I’m hoping to get out of that, that Actor when I cast them as that character. But in terms of knowing what the character is gonna say, I can hear it in my head when I read the script. Of course, then that’s my interpretation. And I try and see if that is a valid interpretation by seeing what the Actor will do. What I like to do is just have a table reading first or rehearse, or whatever, and don’t give any direction at all and just say, “See what comes out,” and then make course adjustments and corrections. And that seems to me is as important as giving positive directions, is to be totally at one with the Actor and what he’s doing and saying--even if you think it’s wrong, if you can’t say, “Well, I think it should go this way,” or even if you can, don’t say that at first. Say, “You really think this is the way of doing it? Okay.” And I think then with all the commitment that you can muster, you would do a couple of takes that way. Let’s see where it leads. And then you’ve got those and you’ve got enough cover for them. It’s worth taking that time. And then say, “I’m not sure that works and would you do it this other way for me, so I have an option in the post production?” And usually when we do it that way, they will come around to see, “Yes. Yes.” I mean, I had that happen with Actors and Dennis Hopper said to me on CHATTAHOOCHEE, “I can’t say this! This is shit, this is--the character wouldn’t say that.” And then afterwards he came and said, “You know, you’re quite right. That’s great. Thank you for that direction.”

INT: Where do you find, again, off the script now, before you hear the Actors, part of your preparation, how do you find the characterization? I mean, how do you discover it yourself? Do you feel that you’re using an Actor’s sensibilities as you’re reading it? Do you try to get inside the head of the character or are you basically looking at it as keeping the narrative going and the need for the character to be advancing the story? How do you find the character?
MJ: That’s an interesting question. I think always, always you’re never the one thing, if that’s a grammatically permissible as a sentence. You’re never the one thing. You can’t say, “I will only concentrate on the Actor.” Yes, for this moment, I will, but at the back of my head, all these other strands of music are running, like, “What is the narrative effect of this, of this decision with the Actor?” I’m always open to whatever the Actor brings. That’s why I love new people coming in to read for you. And they say, as they sit down in the Casting Director’s office, “Anything you want to tell me before we start?” And I always say, “No. I just wanna hear what your gut reaction is to the sides or the script that you’ve been sent.” And a lot of that will really tell you what kind of performance you’re gonna get. And if you can’t rely on that kind of welling up naturally out of the Actor, I don’t know anything that you can do apart from using a strong arm, literally, behind them, will get it for you. So, I wanted to talk about Jack Lemmon in TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE, which is something we haven’t come around to yet, but Jack Lemmon, veteran actor, has been many things, all of which come out of him deeply and they’ve made us laugh and moved us and, and I knew those things were in Jack Lemmon when we cast him to play Morrie [Morrie Schwartz). And I wanted some of them not to come bubbling up. Not the GRUMPY OLD MEN, and not the comedies he’s done in his past. I wanted the harder, more raw Jack Lemmon of things like MISSING, SAVE THE TIGER to come out. And that was a kind of interesting kind of coarse corrections that we went through to try and weed out the things that were bubbling up that he had used before in terms of, you know, techniques and delivering the lines and so on. It was great for him. I think he knew this had to be a great performance. And it had to be done with great stillness ‘cause he’s an expressive Actor, physically. And that stillness was actually part of the characterization. This is a character who had acquired stillness of his own emotional acceptance, but also had this terrible disease, Lou Gehrig disease, that meant he was physically unable to use parts of his body, just had no nerve control over it anymore.

INT: Okay. Let’s stay with TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE, we’ll go back to the other one. So, let’s talk about this one. [MJ: TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE.] Well, let me ask you about Jack Lemmon. [MJ: Okay.] Okay. Go ahead. Did you, there was something? [MJ: No, no, no.] I wanted to stay with Jack Lemmon for a minute as a way into this, TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE. [MJ: Right.] Because the obvious question here is you working with a legend. [MJ: Yes.] Right. And how, first of all, where were you psychologically knowing you were going to do that, did you think about how you were going to approach him? You’ve already talked a little bit about what you want and didn’t want, but let’s back up a little bit in terms of arriving at that. And not only that, you had, on a practical side, you had a legendary Producer, Oprah Winfrey, a very large figure. And I’d like you to talk about what her role was in this, in both positive and whether or not any of that was inhibiting.
MJ: Rather like the larger than life Producer figure I had on THE MCMARTIN TRIAL [INDICTMENT: THE MCMARTIN TRIAL], Oliver Stone. I met Oliver [Oliver Stone] before we started shooting. I met him at the end of the, at the wrap party. And that was my contact with Oliver [Oliver Stone], much the same with Oprah [Oprah Winfrey]. She was not a day-to-day figure there on the set. I met her, you know, through the open window of her limousine. We shook hands at the beginning, as we were about to shoot and we watched the premier go out in television in her apartment in Chicago. Between those two, I didn’t have any contact with her. I had her reactions fed back to dailies she’d been seeing. Jack [Jack Lemmon], I just sat down with at the commissary the first day we met and I said, “Look, this is a character who is trying to teach a tutorial about dying in terms of his own life and what it’s been and the lessons he’s learned. And you’ve played so many parts that in your career that have touched us so deeply, I want to draw on those. I want you to be a teacher in this movie and draw on whatever you draw on for these lessons.” And he said, “Okay.” He’s a very, very easy man to work with. No kind of vanity at all. Just say, “Tell me whatever you want, guy. I’ll do it for you.” So, I think a lot of it was just reminding him, you know, “Remember at this stage, this how far the disease has progressed. This is what you can and what you can’t do.” And I think the most important thing I said to him was, “You are not just a mentor to this other Actor, Hank Azaria, but you are a like a therapist. You are listening. I want you to watch him like a hawk because you’re saying things that are completely alien to the way he’s living his life. He’s living his life as a kind of displacement activity is what we call it in animals. When animals are stressed, they do kind of some displacement activity like scratching or whatever. And he’s confusing motion with actually living. And I want you to be saying things and just watch for the effect. Watch how they land like you would do if you were therapist. The other thing you gotta do is seduce him. You got to woo him out of his life of constant motion, believing that the momentum is life and it isn’t, into seeing in himself what you see in yourself.” And I think that was a very kind of interesting thing to set up. And I set up with Hank Azaria. I said, “Look, you’re gonna hear these things landing. Try and create a shell around yourself that denies them. Try not to let them effect you and to be as affable as you can and as witty as you can and as easy as you can, so it doesn’t look like a brush off. You know, do what you would normally do, anybody in this industry does. If you hear something you don’t want to hear, you make a joke about it, a pleasantry or whatever. And we want to see those things landing. It’s going to require very, very subtle acting on your part.” I mean, we shot the movie, not quite in sequence, but more than one would normally. And we got to the end scene where, you know, all through the movie, Jack Lemmon’s character has been saying to Hank’s [Hank Azaria] character, “I’m gonna make you cry. I’m gonna get you in the end. I’m gonna make you feel emotion.” And we had the last scene where Morrie [Morrie Schwartz] is dying and Hank’s [Hank Azaria] character is there, and we said, “How we gonna do this?” We said to Hank [Hank Azaria], “Do you think you’re gonna be able to cry?” He said, “I’m not sure.” I said, “Would it help you if I said we’re gonna shoot the coverage and you don’t cry? And then at the point where you tell me you can, there won’t be any kind of inhibition on you. We’re not gonna get the scene. We’re not gonna get the scene if I break down and cry and there’s gonna be snot running down my nose and we won’t get the lines,” I said, “You will have that safety. You’ll know that we filmed it without crying. And you will tell me when that moment is,” and he did. And we went for it and I went just slightly closer. And it was the most beautiful, natural, heartbreaking performance I think. The problem with TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE--it's a very well known story--is the problem of separating out the sentiment from the sentimentality. I saw this as a potential chasm of sentimentality opening in front of me. And that’s because I’m in the movie business where we deal in sentimentality and we also deal in avoiding emotion. We try and be very professional and for a lot of people and for myself, and I realize in these interviews with you, when I’m talking about generating momentum on the set or putting energy into a movie, I’m myself guilty of what Mitch Albom, in the movie, does, which is confusing a momentum with living day by day. You just actually put off some parts of yourself for later, you know, death is for later. Now is for living, for making a career for myself. I remembered that Terence Davies, the great English Director who did DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES, memorably described sentimentality as unearned emotion. And I thought, “I will do whatever I can in this movie to earn all the sentiment and make it genuine emotion.” And I think that kind of setting up of the that kind of pull of Jack Lemmon and the kind of resisting tendency of Hank [Hank Azaria] really worked for us through the movie. And Hank [Hank Azaria] is a brilliant comic Actor and could use these sardonic and witty things that this beautiful script by Thom Rickman [Thomas Rickman] had provided him with as a way of kind of dancing around the fact that he was being drawn into confronting mortality. I sent a copy of the movie when it was finished to my dad, who’s in his eighties, dying in England, and he told me that it had comforted him in a way that someone sitting down telling him, “This is how it’s gonna be when you die and maybe you should think of it,” but to see that by being able to observe someone else telling someone else was like you were peering in through an open window at your own death and how you should behave. And he said it gave him a sense of what was the proper way to relinquish this life and to come to terms with what he’d done in it and who he was and that, you know, made me feel very satisfied. [INT: Wonderful.]

INT: One more question about Lemmon’s [Jack Lemmon] character, Morrie [Morrie Schwartz]. It was wonderful the way you described the two characters and what their interplay was. Did you, was the question ever raised about why Morrie [Morrie Schwartz], why Lemmon’s wanted, wanted what he wanted in regard to the other character? I mean, why--
MJ: He had been a teacher. I mean, that was set up in the script. He’d been a very loved professor who’d always given life lessons of a kind in teaching his course at Brandeis University and Morrie [Morrie Schwartz] had been, Mitch Albom had been a fondly admired student, so I think the wonderful insight he had when he was told that he was gonna be dying shortly of Lou Gehrig Disease was, “Well, I’m not gonna stop being a teacher. I’m gonna teach it. And here’s my pupil come out of the past and I will give him a tutorial in dying while I’m still able to.” There are some projects that you do that are love projects where you know that everybody on the set, every member of the crew, every member of the cast wants to do justice to this project, so…We had this wonderful script by Thom Rickman [Thomas Rickman], which I thought was superb. Michael Riva [J. Michael Riva], who's a personal friend of mine ‘cause our kids go to the same school, who’s a well known Production Designer, did all the LETHAL WEAPON movies and so on. I said, “There’s virtually no budget for this. It’s a television movie. Will you design it?” He said, “Yeah. I won’t have an art department. I’ll do it all myself.” And he brought in furniture and props from his own house and furnished the set. The look of the movie was great. I worked with Theo van de Sande whose a Dutch DP [Director of Photography] I’d worked with before and we decided we would build the inside of Morrie’s [Morrie Schwartz] house and we would light it like sunlight coming in through the windows and we wouldn’t light inside the rooms at all. So, the whole movie has this feeling of being in tune with the natural world as he comes to grips with his own mortality; the movie, in this house, moves from spring, summer to autumn to winter. We shot in Pasadena, so we had to color all the leaves on the trees for autumn and we had to create snow for winter and so on. But it was one of the series of marking the passage of a man’s life, devices that we use. The other was contrast, contrast between the stillness of Morrie [Morrie Schwartz] and the frantic energy of Mitch [Mitch Albom] and that was kind of very much reflected in the camera styles--emotion vs. avoidance of emotion. It was a very satisfying movie to make. And also in Morrie’s [Morrie Schwartz] own life, the use of flashbacks, he was in brightly lit sunlight in his room in the present tense, a man at peace with himself. But he was anything but that in the flashbacks to his youth. It was a very unhappy youth and filled with now the regret for the unhappiness he caused his own father. And this was shot in the style of you know Jacob Riis, the famous photographer of New York tenements in the end of the 19th century, and I tried to go for that style. We shot on a back lot with tenements fronts, facades of tenements. The previous production had done a winter musical on those streets and they had silk across the top. And I asked them to leave it there at some cost to us and not let the sun shine in, so you had this kind of even natural light. And we studied the old photographs and realized there was this big exposure difference between the foreground and background, so we put big sheets of duvetyn horizontally above the axis, so they were darker than the background and then exposed for them. And the soft light in the background kind of almost bleached that out. It gave it a very period quality, which I was pleased with. [INT: Is Michael Riva [J. Michael Riva] Marlene Dietrich’s son?] Yes. [J. Michael Riva is Marlene Dietrich’s grandson.] Yes, he often [J. Michael Riva] talked about her fondly.

MJ: So, at the end of the movie, everybody was very, very please with it, there’s a wonderful score from Marco Beltrami, which perfectly complemented, you know, Morrie [Morrie Schwartz] loved to listen to Italian opera, and so I used the very fullness and richness of Traviata [La Traviata], Puccini [Giacomo Puccini] to really kind of counterpoint the dourness of Mitch [Mitch Albom] against the fullness of the emotion that he was feeling and trying to convey to Mitch [Mitch Albom]. Anyway, the movie was finished. Very kindly, Oprah [Oprah Winfrey] paid for everybody’s airfare, the Writer, me, various other Actors, to go to her huge apartment in a tower block in Chicago and we would watch the movie go out there, which was great. And halfway, well, a little way into the movie, I realized it was about five frames out of sync. I said, “This may be just the local radio station, but it’s out of sync.” She said, “They’ll never notice, will they?” “Five frames out of sync, they’ll notice. I mean, everything is gonna be kind of fuzzy, not sharp.” “Oh, I’ll ring Bob Iger [Robert A. Iger]. He’ll fix it,” which is a measure of her influence and power. I restrained her from picking up the telephone and saying, “I think we can do it another way.” But as we were there, talking, I looked passed her, out of the window and it’s quite a high floor that she lives on. And you see the lake and you see all the other apartments, and I realized, you know, here we’re standing by the TV in her apartment, one of the many TV's in her apartment and the shots are changing, the lighting is changing on our faces and you look out of the window and across the city, you can see that same pattern of lights changing in all these windows, which means they are watching your movie. That was the first time I’d ever seen that. You can be in a preview theatre and if it’s a movie, you can see a preview audience, but on television, it’s difficult to do that. You could see the city watching the shot changes, wonderful; people are being influenced by this. And they were. You know, I heard a lot of people saying afterwards it made them cry. I got a lot of adverse criticism. One reviewer said, “This movie does everything it can to make you cry short of poking you in the eye with a sharp stick,” which is kind of a Monty Python image. But I think that in itself is a kind of defense mechanism on our part. We don’t like to think of death or to cry or to think of ourselves crying over our own deaths and we sort of push it away and say, well, that’s sentimentality. There may have been some sentimentality in the movie, I tried to avoid it and tried to make that emotion as genuine as I possibly could. [INT: Wonderful.]

INT: Let me ask you some practical questions about that. Do you remember generally what your shooting schedule was, your, you know, pre-production, how much time you had to shoot, what the budget was?
MJ: No. I don’t remember any of that stuff. I have a facility for washing it out of my head. All I can remember is the feeling at the time that there’s never enough money and there’s never enough time. And that’s a kind of function of every movie I make because however big the budget, however small the budget, your ambition is that you want to do something more than people are willing to give you in terms of time and money. I do remember that I needed a Steadicam for one shot and the Production Manager came up to me and said, “I’m sorry, you can’t have it. You’ve used all your Steadicam days.” I said, “But I must have it. That’s the way I want to do the shot.” He said, “Sorry. Can you find some other way of doing it?” I said, “Yes.” I took out my checkbook and wrote, “To Oprah Winfrey, how much is it? Seventeen hundred dollars a day including everything?” “Yeah.” “One Thousand Seven Hundred dollars, Mick Jackson,” tore it out and gave it to him. And we had the Steadicam. They got it off the truck. We did the shot. [INT: And you paid for it?] I paid for it. As a measure of my commitment to, you know, needing it and therefore I would, you know, put my own money up there, put my money where my mouth was as it were. [INT: Had you done that, have you done that on another--] I’ve threatened to and been prepared to. [INT: But you never had--isn’t it ironic, though, that it was an Oprah Winfrey show?] It came back to me eventually. [INT: It did?] Yes. I didn’t ask for it to come back. [INT: I had a similar experience once.]

INT: So, so, let’s go back to VOLCANO because the contrasts, even though VOLCANO preceded it, let’s just start with VOLCANO and then I’m gonna ask you to make a comparison between the two experiences largely as a Director and your feelings about it. Let’s talk about VOLCANO, how that all happened and what happened.
MJ: The actual genesis of the movie VOLCANO was that Jerome [Jerome Armstrong], the writer, the original writer, and his last name has gone from my head for this moment, was standing at a pedestrian crossing in L.A. [Los Angeles] and listening to two guys next to him talking. And one was saying, “Ah, this city, you know, it’s had earthquakes, it’s had fires, it’s had mudslides, it’s had riots, I just don’t think, there’s nothing else that could happen to the city.” And before he got to the other side of the crossing he thought, “What would happen if a volcano erupted in the middle of this? Everything thing we know as the stupidity, the wonder, the vanity of L.A. [Los Angeles], what would a volcano do?” Doesn’t matter that, you know, as a scientist I knew that this was actually physically impossible. You needed a special kind of geology, a subduction zone. Forget that. Movies have been made on lesser false premises than that. But I thought it would be fun to try and bring in some of L.A. STORY to that movie--that’s one thing. To put some of the craziness of L.A. [Los Angeles], you know, the train driver is reading a pocket book on how to write screenplays, the boulevard where the geysers erupt, first of all, has a big billboard of Angelyne, which crashes and almost kills people beneath it--that came from L.A. STORY, too, Angelyne and L.A. STORY. But also you take this absurd premise, but actually shoot it like a documentary, shoot it like you would if you were a news crew shooting it. And it did, I involved about 30, 40, 50 local news reporters, television reporters, radio reporters, even Warren Olney at one point, commenting on this as if they were reporting on it. I figured the media would be part of my storytelling, but also an essential part of what was happening. There were news helicopters everywhere and reporters everywhere, getting in the way, but trying to tell the story. I was doing other things at Fox [20th Century Fox]. I had a couple of projects in development that were going nowhere. And at that point, Fox [20th Century Fox] decided that although there was another volcano project, DANTE’S PEAK, that it had already started and was well on their way to going into full production, that they had such a good script that they would go in to competition with it. And they thought, god knows why, that we could come up from behind them because we were so smart and so fast and so efficient, we’d overtake them and get into theaters beforehand. Well, I happened to be, you know, a Director who was just standing outside the office, so they said, “Him. He’ll do it. Would you do this hundred million dollar movie?” It wasn’t a hundred million dollars at the time, but I think that's--it went that way. And I couldn’t resist it. I mean, there are movies you do for love, and there are movies you do just for the experience of doing something. The scale was enormous. It was immense. It was the biggest set I have ever been on. You had to drive from one end to the other of the main fire set, which was that stretch of Wilshire Blvd. between, where Fairfax goes across and the other end of the La Brea Tar Pits. And most of that was constructed, I think, 80, 90% scale by Jackson De Govia, brilliant designer--the May Company, the Peterson Automotive Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Tar Pits [La Brea Tar Pits], everything. And the whole thing was built like a machine that could swallow fire trucks whole on ramps. There were propane pipes all over it, to windows, to palm trees, to everything. And every night there were 30 or 40 fire trucks. The firemen of Los Angeles treated this as kind of a thing they did as a hobby, to turn up on the VOLCANO set and be part of it at night. It was a huge set. There were many, many hundreds of people there every night. The experience of dealing with these immense forces, like a General almost was great for me. I loved it. It was just an ego boost. But it was in the days of very limited computer generated imagery. That was, you know, in both movies, DANTE’S PEAK and VOLCANO, CGI [Computer-generated imagery] was just starting to come on line, nothing like now for things like, you know, TRANSFORMERS and things, so most of the effects were physical. So we really had huge amounts of flame. Lava had never been done since, I think, KRAKATOA: EAST OF JAVA. And that was very unsatisfactory, so we decided to try and concentrate on that. And I know that DANTE’S PEAK concentrated on pyroclastic dust clouds. And those were our two kind of different looks. The lava was a brilliant solution by Mat Beck, our effects designer, which is basically to take the stuff that makes milkshakes thick, it’s called methyl cellulose, it’s goopy stuff, and mix it with flouricine, which meant that when you shown ultraviolet light on it, it would glow; to take every shot that we did in a movie of an intersection of a street and construct that in miniature as a model, you know, the corner was there, the road leads off here, with like walls, and put that whole thing on a rotating gimbal, so you could move it this way and this way. And put all the lights, so they would rotate as well, on the camera, so that would rotate as well, on that gimbal and just light with the fluorescent light for the lava. So wherever you wanted the lava to go, you tilted this board and the lava went that way. And you’d put ash and stuff on the top of it so it was gritty and it looked like crust forming on the surface--wonderful, simple visual effect, physical effect.

INT: So then what happened?
MJ: Sorry? [INT: So then what happened?] Then what happened? Well, you should never compete with another movie studio doing the same project. And I don’t know why it comes up in this town again and again and again. There was a period when at the time James Cameron was doing THE ABYSS, there was nothing but underwater movies. There were at one time many, many taking elephants on foot cross-country movies. I think it’s just the William Goldman thing, nobody knows anything. And most studios have tremendous banks of scripts that are never gonna get made until they hear that someone else is doing an elephant across-country movie or a volcano movie. What do they know that we don’t know? Maybe they’ve got some key into the zeitgeist. We should be doing that. Anyway, it became clear that we were not gonna overtake the other studio and I made an impassioned plea to the head of Fox [20th Century Fox]. I said, “Look, we’ve got two hundred plus visual effects shots here. You’re never--" because of the rendering time, “--you’re never gonna get a movie that has anything worth seeing in it if you try and beat the other movie.” And I prevailed. I’m sorry I did prevail in a way because I think we all knew deep down that being the second volcano movie in the year isn’t a good place to be. People don’t kind of grab their wife or husband and say, “Hey, there’s another volcano movie. Let’s go see that! This one’s got lava. It hasn’t got pyroclastic clouds.” So, it was the better movie of the two. I think it was the most original and the most ambitious and had more humor in it and, you know, essentially a big disaster movie as well as the overtone of living through viscerally and by proxy some great disaster as way of, you know, believing that you’re invulnerable, is essentially a quite mindless thrill. And, you know, tried to do that.

INT: Talk about the casting of that.
MJ: I said it in one of those press junkets at the time and regretted it 'cause it got back to Tommy [Tommy Lee Jones] in a way I hadn’t said it- that he is the volcano. I mean people took that as a reference to his volcanic temper. What I meant was he is a force of life like the volcano. You wanted someone who had this kind of immense charisma and forcefulness. Essentially, in terms of my movies being about loners or outsiders, he was someone within a clearly defined structure like the emergency management division of Los Angeles County. He was the man who had to lead the city out of ruin, to salvation and fight, you know, bureaucratic and all sorts of other obstacles as well as molten lava and falling rock and so on. And I thought he had tremendous, you know, credentials from fugitive movies, as somebody who could, you know, believably do that, and Anne Heche was someone I wanted to work with for a long time since I saw her in THE JUROR, I think. I thought she had great sexiness and I thought she would be a very nice foil, you know, brassy rather than a kind of wilting lily woman--a professional woman. And there would be some chemistry between the two of them, and I think there was.

INT: And, but talk about, you know, you went into great detail about dealing with Jack Lemmon on such a deeply emotional movie, and here you had two very fine Actors, one of whom really is a big star, and exactly the opposite situation. So how do you direct Actors in a film like that?
MJ: Anne Heche found it very inhibiting, that there was so much money on display in the same shot as her, you know, all these things exploding and buildings collapsing. She thought, “Oh god, if I fuck this up,” you know, “They gotta build all this up again and do it.” So much was hinging on her. I said, “No, no, no. You don’t have to worry about that.” I said, “It’s repeatable. Just worry about what you’re doing.” Tommy [Tommy Lee Jones], I think, was very sensible about it. He said, “Look, this is not a movie about complex emotions. This is a movie about, “Come on you guys, let’s go! Let’s get out of here,” and, “Let’s go for that!” Because in that way--through action is that character defined. He’s not, he’s not a contemplative man, except trying to figure out how to get out of this fix. And that kind of ingenuity and resilience is really what you love the character for. The studio tried to add other emotional lines in the movie like a problem between him and his rebellious teenage daughter. And she gets separated from him in the eruption, and he’s always trying to get back to her and never can because he’s doing his duty and he’s conflicted about, “I’ma save the city, but I’ma save my daughter.” And I think a different Writer was brought on. Billy Ray had written the main script that we shot, but to write this section of the movie, the strand of the movie, they brought on Barbara Benedek, this great Writer, and she wrote the rebellious child, and turned out the audiences at previews hated it. They hated this kind of sniveling, snotty nosed brat of a daughter and couldn’t sympathize with her anyway, so we--it wasn’t the performance. It was just, you know, it seemed very naturally at odds with the way you were watching the movie if you saw this brave guy trying to save the city. It was a very deeply unsympathetic role to play, was the teenage daughter who’s worried about herself, and calling on his energies when they should be directed elsewhere. [INT: So what happened. I mean--] It was taken down to much smaller levels than it had been.

INT: And so then the movie just opened and closed, did it?
MJ: People were making wild projections about how much it would make in the first weekend things like I think 25 million, maybe 50 million it might make. It made 15 and not a lot after that; more successful oversees than in the States [United States]. But, you know, it’s because it’s the second movie on the same subject that week, or that year.

INT: What is it, what is it feel like--I’m asking this question for other Directors--What does it feel like, I mean, I don’t know whether it was literally a hundred million dollar movie or--[MJ: The official budget is $94 million, but I think it went a little north of that.] Okay. Okay. And do you remember how long you spent on that film?
MJ: I spent every single day of a year--[INT: One year, okay.]--working on it through weekends, through holidays, through everything. [INT: Okay.] Mostly night shooting. [INT: And when it was--and was there a, when you finished it, delivered it, did it get released immediately?] Yeah. [INT: It did.] With this terrible slogan, terrible slogan that made great sense to the publicity people: ‘The Coast Is Toast.’ You see how they rejoiced in that, but, in fact, it gave exactly the wrong feel of the movie. I mean, it made you feel you were gonna see something like 2012, the Roland Emmerich movie, where you’re gonna see vast areas of destruction; this is much more intimate here. It was things that you associated with being in L.A. [Los Angeles], small scale things like the May Company [May Co.] building or the Peterson Automotive Museum or the Tail o’ the Pup hotdog stand being consumed with lava, that was the flavor of it, and not vast vistas of cities sinking into the ocean and things. But ‘The Coast Is Toast’ suggests that you will see that and be disappointed if that’s what you come to see.

INT: So, what was your own psychological state after it opened and it became clear it was unsuccessful; you spent a year of it and everyone knows who’s ever been on a set for more than a day that physically a picture that size is really--[MJ: It was tiring.] It was really debilitating, yeah. And then it came to--economically, I mean, it didn’t come to much. So what did that--how did you feel psychologically when this was all over and it was not gonna be a success? How did you deal with that?
MJ: I was not entirely surprised because of the race aspect of the two movies. And I think there are times in your career where you do take a love project that you think you’re gonna be able to put all your passion into it, all your energy into it, all your skill into it, and that’s great. And it turns out the way it turns out and the satisfaction of having done and done your best work is there. Sometimes it’s not there. It’s just you’re being offered a big movie and there’s nothing particularly personal about it. You can bring maybe some humor; some rye humor about L.A. [Los Angeles] to it, but it’s not something you invest in personally except as a professional. I am being paid to make this movie work. I will stay here and I will do everything I can to make it work. It’s not that it’s gonna give me satisfaction, but it’s gonna make a professional, polished, entertaining movie. And sometimes you just have to do that and separate out from yourself the limited satisfaction that that gives you from the ones that other movies that you make and will make, give you.

INT: And you were able to do that immediately afterwards. You’ve, I mean--
MJ: I doubt it. I think I probably went away to a corner and cried. I can’t remember. [INT: Well, I think it’s an interesting point, again, for other Directors looking at it ‘cause are the kinds of things we never get to talk about with each other. And you’re very articulate about these things, so I was just wondering...In retrospect, your summary in retrospect, makes very clear, but I was just wondering how you generated energy to move on? Was TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE sitting there waiting for you right after that?] Pretty well, yeah. [INT: Oh, so you had something to go basically--?] Yeah. I can’t remember the exact spacing, but quite close afterwards. [INT: So that must have been a real interesting contrast to go from something of that size--] It’s great. It’s why I love to do it. You know, that you do go from something enormous to something intimate, you go from something comedic to something deeply tragic, something with a lot of pace and energy and a thriller to something, I don’t know, a musical, whatever. It just keeps you fresh. And I keep saying this that I think fear is a great motivating factor to creativity. If you go into a project knowing, “Oh, I can do comedy. I can be Ivan Reitman. I can do any comedy that you throw at me and I can find something different to do about it,” then I think, for me, that would breed complacency, and a sense of ease, which I don’t think a Director should have. I wanna walk on to that set not knowing if I can do this movie, but not letting the cast and the crew know that, but just--that sense of “Oh my god, I’ve got to do this!” causes me to draw on vast, well not vast, moderate reserves of resilience and adrenaline and find a way of doing it--use those taste buds that are not use in eating other things.

INT: Could I go back for second? I just want to ask you one other question about video assist and--When you started, you didn’t have video assist, right? I mean your whole early career, I don’t think it was--
MJ: No, no, no. It wasn’t much of a feature in my British career. [INT: And what about the other part of your American career?] It’s been pretty common since I’ve been here. [INT: But was there a period when it wasn’t? I’m asking for this reason: I was wondering, ‘cause I’m visualizing your cheerleading along the side there and how you say you, it was not something you could do anything about, how you did that before video assist--you standing next to the camera? Was your directing style the same even then?] No, no. I would not do that in the presence of the Actors. I’ve once been balled out for doing that and rightly so when out of his peripheral vision an Actor said, “You’re occupying the same space that I’m in. And I’ve got to be there. There’s only one Actor.” And I never did that again. The thing I do object to is video village, which is that you are essentially a spectator sport directing and I hate that, ‘cause I have, as I’ve said before, a little voice in my head and I need to listen to it and say, “Is this right? Is this right? Is this right? Have you any reservations of doing it. Listen now, now is the time to say.” If there are people all around you looking at--you know, I push them somewhere else and try and create a little space of myself with just my own video monitor or two or three video monitors and be in that space. It is a very lonely and very private space to be in and I think in that space I can be with the Actor, even though I’m not beside the camera, I can be with the Actor and at the same time, I’m processing, “That was a really nice move and I can use that to get to here, and good stuff on the second camera.” So it’s multitasking.

INT: When you have one camera, do you ever have the video assist on the camera, so that you can be right by cam--
MJ: Oh, frequently, yeah, frequently. If it’s a moving shot, Steadicam or handheld shot, I’m right by the operator looking at the little on-board monitor, so I can actually--frequently do, if I feel that there isn’t enough foreground interest, if this is a bustling scene, I’ll do this in front of the lens [MJ repeatedly moves hands in front of face.] with my hands, and get a kind of blur, watching--[INT: And you were satisfied enough that, that the performance you’re seeing on video assist is, is you’re seeing everything you need to see in regard to performance--] Yeah.