My name is Robert Markowitz. Today is April 24, 2012. I am conducting an addendum to an interview with Mick Jackson for the Directors Guild of America’s Visual History Program. We are at the DGA in Los Angeles, California.

INT: So, as a Director who’s had a great deal of experience on working on both sides of the pond [Atlantic Ocean], having started with the British films and--what, how is your experience different between working with the British Actors and the American Actors? And as a result of those differences, have you had to make different accommodations?
MJ: Good question. Let me start by being a little discursive and I’ll bring it back to your question. [INT: Okay.] Every Director comes from a different background; they find their different paths to being a Director, sitting in that chair or, in my case, not sitting in that chair. Mine was a documentarian. I started at the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation] in London in factual programs, documentary programs, which did not use drama, did not use Actors. And I spent, I suppose, the first 15 years of my career doing those. It was a kind of very swashbuckling time in television in the early 1960s. And in a bureaucracy like the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation], there are a lot of kind of robber barons trying to establish mini-empires and therefore, squirreling away in corners, little empire-building sums of money and resources to aggrandize or, kind of, conquer new territory in their factual departments. I was in the department that made documentaries about science, basically, but there're other departments that made documentaries about arts, and music, and general things and politics, and so on. So that’s how I got to use Actors. From time to time, you would be able to draw on these little sums of money, not to make a film about an Actor, but to make a film, a documentary film, a factually based film about a subject, about a story. And much in the way that Errol Morris does documentaries, you know, it forces you to be very resourceful and to pull on things like, you know, found material and other documentary images and industrial films and bits of specially staged drama with Actors. That’s not what the movie is about. It’s a part of the movie, so my attitude to Actors in the beginning was they weren’t the kind of center of everything from which everything else flows, but they were part of the story that I’m telling. I was--the first time I worked with Actors on the Sakharov film [SAKHAROV], very much influenced by Tarkovsky [Andrei Tarkovsky]. I just watched STALKER, his wonderful film, and MIRROR [THE MIRROR]. And I wanted to make this film with Actors in much the way that he does. I mean, in Tarkovsky [Andrei Tarkovsky] films, part of the story is taken by just images of the wind blowing through bushes or water dripping, or the voice of him, the Director, reading his father’s poetry on the soundtrack--all kinds of stuff that isn’t actually a dramatic image, but it sort of colors the mood of the film, it conveys ideas, and the Actors are a part of that. So, in the SAKHAROV film, I, which I talked about a little in the past; it was made like a Soviet film. You’re using these images that weren’t with Actors and the Actors were part of that and how you felt about the Actors was part of, not necessarily their performance, but it enriched their performance by the kind of thing that you created around them. When I got to more fully funded movies where you could use the full resources of drama, then I began interacting rather more with the Actors as the central focus of things. And things like THE DOUBLE HELIX [THE RACE FOR THE DOUBLE HELIX] film and NOSENKO [YURI NOSENKO, KGB] and THREADS to some extent, though not so much in that because that was more documentary than acting.

MJ: And I found that there is a kind of tradition in British Actors--it’s as much craft as it is, as it is art. And it doesn’t really flow from a sense of the Actor’s inner life, so much as how that inner life is brought to the surface of the movie, to the surface of the story. So an Actor in Britain, at that time, where the Meisner method [Meisner technique] was not kind of commonly used in preparing for a role and still isn’t that dominant. An Actor would see it as part of his professional duties to work as the Director did. The source of inspiration was the script, the text. And even before your first meeting, the Actor would’ve studied that text and arrived for that meeting where you talked about the script and what you’re gonna do with it, fully conversant with it. I mean, in some cases, memorizing the script, but having thought through, “How can I as an Actor use all my life experience, my craft, my trade to make this character come alive, and how can that serve the purpose of the story?” You asked me at an earlier stage of this interview, “Did I agree with the view that the Actor’s main role is to serve the narrative, to serve the story?” And I think I disagreed slightly with that and said, “I thought that was the Director’s role,” but as part of that, I think the role of the Director is to use the Actor and to encourage the Actor to tell the story through his performance, which means that you need a certain kind of Actor who is not just, “This is how I feel in the moment, at this moment,” which kinda was a surprise to me to find so prevalent here when I came to the States [United States], but an Actor who can actually engage with you in dialogue, intellectually and not just emotionally, about what are the themes of the story, what are the high points of this story, what do we want to do with this story, how do we convey this emotion? So you’re actually having---your first meeting with the Actor, a very high level of intensity of creative discussion, and before we started this interview, you--there was mention of Wim Wenders talking about the film he made about Pina Bausch and how Pina Bausch’s method of working with her dancers was to ask questions, but not allow them to answer with words, but answer with gestures or go and think about it. In many cases, working with some of the best English Actors, I have tried to do that, you know, we’ve talked generally about, you know, what is--what kind of person is this, where do they come from, but we don’t get into the Mike Leigh stuff of, you know, taking the characters back into their prehistory as children, their first marriage and so on and working very greatly in depth and layers. But really asking them questions: why does this character at this point say that? It’s a kind of detective work and you--I don’t want them to answer, or I didn’t want them to answer at that point, I just wanted them to go away and think about that and let that permeate their creative persona, so that when they came back what they did would be a kind of answer to that. And for that reason, I kind of tended to not put the focus on rehearsals that perhaps I should have and I know that’s very central to the way that the Actor is treated here in movies, you know. The Actor is that from which all flows is a kind of summarizing what I think is perhaps difference between acting here and acting in Britain, where I come from. I know--I taught for a while at the AFI [American Film Institute]--I taught directing. And before starting that course, I just sat down and read some of my predecessors’ course notes and looked at the syllabus and the curriculum and so on, and I was kind of surprised that all sorts of areas of the Director’s responsibility--the camerawork, the setting, the set dressing, the lighting, the props, were kind of grouped under a heading of, "How does this prop, how does this chair enable the Actor to feel so at home that he will give you the performance that you want?"

MJ: And I thought, well, that seems strange, because it’s all about the Actor and the sort of what you get is secondary to that. Well, I think of it as primary to that. That the responsibility of the Director is partly to make the Actor as comfortable as he needs to be to give the performance of which he is capable. Part of it is reaching beyond the Actor to the story and that may not necessarily touch the Actor in everything that you do as a Director. It may go past, but they’re all aiming at the same point, which is the audience. And that seems to me the focus of a Director’s energies and creative thought. "How do I get this story to the audience in a way that inside their brains it will explode with emotion and meaning?" And, so I was surprised here that many American Actors, it’s very difficult to have that conversation with them. It’s as if you are kind of farting in church. It’s sort of not done to have a talk with the Actor outside their character and say, “This is what I want to convey with this scene. This is the idea I think courses through this scene.” And I’ve had Actors say to me, “Well, don’t talk to me about that. You talk about that. I don’t wanna get into that, ‘cause that takes me out of the moment.” And ‘out of the moment’ is a kind of key phrase I keep hearing and I keep saying, “Well, I think, in my experience of life, there are very few points at which you are entirely in the moment without your brain being engaged in some way. It’s not just your emotions, you are thinking what you’re doing. I mean, every act you do, raising a finger, whatever, is part of your brain thinking, you know, what am I doing, as well as doing it, as well as feeling it.” So not being able to have that conversation with Actors, you know, because it was kind of a no-go territory--it will take me out of thinking and feeling this character more deeply--I found deeply frustrating and I’ve ended up doing stuff without, you know, talking to the Actor about it. In TEMPLE GRANDIN, which I think is the film, in my later years, I’m most proud of. I couldn’t really get Claire [Claire Danes] interested in the stuff I was doing with Temple Grandin’s visual images and the way she perceived the world. She knew that, but she didn’t want to be involved with it herself. And like the very best English Actors that I’ve worked with, she came totally prepared. She’d done her own homework, her own preparation that got her into that state, that the Director is apparently supposed to get a blank slate of an Actor into. And I could rely on that, I could rely on the fact that physically and vocally and in every other way, mentally, she was in the persona of Temple Grandin. And I did the other stuff. And I saw those two things as being very much complimentary to each other and when they came together, they made the most wonderful synthesis. She was surprised seeing the film at how much else I’d been doing, rather than, you know, admiring her performance, giving her little tweaks and so on. So sometimes it seems a pity, because the thing could be so much richer if you were--it’s a question of what you bring to the table. You and an Actor bring your sensibilities, as I say, your life experience to the table--you should be able to talk about them, you know, as ideas, as feelings, as anything in the sense that you are both collaborators in the same experience. You are both making this story for an audience to see. I know working with Gary Oldman who is very much into the Meisner method [Meisner technique] on CHATTAHOOCHEE, my first feature, there was one scene he was doing with Dennis Hopper and he was supposed to be digging a trench and talking about his difficulties with his wife and his marriage and everything. I couldn’t get him on camera. He was so internalizing his performance to feel that moment, that it made him camera shy, so I put two cameras on it, sort of like this.

MJ: And he seemed to manage to not find either of the cameras. And that was kind of frustrating. I ended up putting three cameras at 60 degrees on him in the scene and it was very difficult to get an image of his emotional reaction on his face in any of them. I think he thought it was private. And we had a long conversation about, you know--“I understand what you’re doing. I understand you really need to feel this character’s back story and emotion, but, in the end, there has to be something on a piece of film that you can show to an audience.” It was working with Dennis Hopper, who watched this with a certain amount of amusement, my trying to get Gary’s [Gary Oldman] expression. And he was just not saying anything. At the end, he came up to me and said, “You know, in the third line of the fourth take, one of the extras passed in front of me. You may want to cover that line.” [INT: Who said that, Gary [Gary Oldman]?] Dennis Hopper. [INT: Dennis [Dennis Hopper]] That’s the other extreme--[INT: Yeah.]--that Dennis [Dennis Hopper] is a very instinctual anger--Actor--uses anger, Freudian slip, but also very much conscious of what he’s doing. He is an Actor on a set and I miss that, being here. And I think it’s lead me into kind of frustrating experiences, where you just want a friend, a companion, in this monumental task of making this movie, rather than a potential adversary, who will get upset if they’re not, I mean, this sounds very anti-Actor. I’ve had so many good experiences with American Actors who are not like that, who come fully prepared to the set. Jack Lemmon was wonderful in that respect. And the first kind of full drama that I did, apart from NOSENKO [YURI NOSENKO, KGB], which I’ve talked about, was the DOUBLE HELIX [THE RACE FOR THE DOUBLE HELIX] movie, where I actually sat down with, I think, four of the best Actors on the planet: Juliet Stevenson; Alan Howard, the terrific star of the Royal Shakespeare Company--masterful Coriolanus; Tim Pigott-Smith from THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN; and Jeff Goldblum from, at that time, Robert Altman’s movie about NASHVILLE. And I just sat down with them and talked about this story, which I knew very well--I had researched and gone to the original people. And I knew the dynamics of it and we talked and we talked and talked. And we rehearsed a couple of scenes in the rehearsal room, you know, reading them through, but basically, we didn’t do much more than that. And it was a process really of asking questions: Why didn’t she do that? What stopped her doing that? And by the time we got to the set, I got the most marvelous performances. I actually got rung up the day after the movie aired by Sydney Newman. You may not know this--the great kind of originator of television drama in England with his ITV [British TV network] series, ARMCHAIR THEATRE, and has been, much like Elia Kazan and other pioneers of television in America, he was the kind of god, and I never thought I’d get a call from him. He said, “How did you manage to work with Actors?” Well, by any definition of how you work with Actors here, I wasn’t. We weren’t, kind of, doing exercises or hypotheticals or creating scenes that wouldn’t appear in the movie, but it seemed to work. And Juliet Stevenson said to me at the end of the experience, you know, “You know, you’re one of the best Actor’s Directors I’ve worked with.” Jack Lemmon said the same thing. I was doing the same thing which should not be the kind of thing you do here, because it kind of short circuits that rehearsal process that I so hate, where things get fixed and you either get a good thing and you try to replicate it on the set or you leave something, some magic, some questions still reverberating in the Actor’s head and your head that is to be solved in the heat of that moment when the camera is running and the adrenaline is coursing through your veins.

MJ: I know a famous English Director, whose name I shall not say, was working with a star, an American star, and the star was very unhappy about the working relationship. And at the end of the movie or towards the end of the movie, he said to the Director, very dismissively, “You know, you’re not an Actor’s Director very much, are you? You’re not an Actor’s Director.” And the Director said, “No, I’m a movie Director and you are part of that movie. I will support you, I will help you in any way that I can, as you will help me in anyway that I can, to tell the movie. But, it’s a movie we’re making. It’s not a kind of personal experience that you will carry to your grave as the Actor. So that has been the reason I haven’t done too many movies here. You know, I try to make movies, because that’s my nature and my interest, where it’s not an Actor’s performance that you then decorate and embellish with visuals. The visuals, as in Tarkovsky [Andrei Tarkovsky], as in Kieslowski [Krzysztof Kieslowski], are part of the telling of the story and they carry an emotional--a huge emotional impact. I mean, if you think of those images in STALKER or you think of those images in a movie like BLUE, you know, just the sugar cube sucking up the coffee and what that says about the character’s state of mind in that movie--I love doing that stuff, as well as working with the Actors, which I find very fulfilling. But I think the opportunity of doing that kind of movie, which tends to be characterized as an art house movie or an indie movie here, are becoming less and less. And I think the area in which I think I probably did my best work here, TEMPLE GRANDIN, is not something, I think, is likely to be repeated, so I’ve sort of stopped doing it. I think my time came and went. You know, I think back on the--this sounds very grand, but it’s not meant to be self-serving. I worked, as I’ve said before, with the great Irishman called Adrian Malone, who was my mentor in all things, who made a documentary about Leonardo Da Vinci and his life. At the end of that movie, beautiful movie, very much like an Errol Morris movie with all kinds of images in it, he dealt with Leonardo [Leonardo Da Vinci] at the end of his career, when he was obsessed with images of tidal waves and torrents overwhelming things and asked the question: tell me if anything ever was done? Meaning, what does it all mean? So, I don’t compare myself to Leonardo [Leonardo Da Vinci], but I was inspired by that question and his powerful climax he built to the end of this film. And I thought, “What do I do that is so memorable? What have I done?” And they’re all really movies in which I’ve been in perfect sync with the Actor and the Actor has been in perfect sync with what I’m trying to do. And as I’ve talked about it often as being a piece of music--a musical score, all the parts of the score have played in harmony with each other. I think in Britain before I came here, THREADS, A VERY BRITISH COUP, not in any particular order, NOSENKO [YURI NOSENKO, KGB] and THE DOUBLE HELIX [THE RACE FOR THE DOUBLE HELIX] were the things I’m proudest of having done. Here, I think it’s L.A. STORY, THE MCMARTIN TRIAL [INDICTMENT: THE MCMARTIN TRIAL] for HBO, LIVE FROM BAGHDAD, TEMPLE GRANDIN, TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE. And everything else I think you can just, well, whatever. I won’t finish the sentence.

INT: Well, that’s a pretty powerful body, the names of the films you made. But it seems to me you’re saying a couple of things and then I have a question I wanna go to--is that it is the nature of most American Actors, the goal is to get to the level--I don’t mean this in any pejorative sense--but to get to the level of childhood in their performance, to recreate the innocence of immediacy and, so when an Actor says, “Don’t tell me about that,” that means you’re interrupting or intruding, invading the space that I’m trying desperately to get to. [MJ: Yes, yes.] Where an English Actor is, to be honest, is a grownup and is bringing the craft as well. And I didn’t say, “Serve the narrative.” I said, “Advance the narrative.” And as what you’ve described in your own process is that, that you see the Actor, I mean, this is what you pretty much said, as an element--a big element. [MJ: Yeah.] But an element of this film, not the reason for the film, which in America, unfortunately, ‘cause I happen to share your feeling it has become; it’s the reason for the film. Now, I’d like to go down one more level in the weeds, alright, in regard to these two styles. One of the things that struck me, and I want to know your feeling about this, is one of the huge advantages of, that I’ve found working with British Actors, is their Shakespearean training--having to do with language. So that when an English Actor came in who had Shakespearean background, it didn’t matter very often, even in the most mundane screenplay with dialogue, somehow through phrasing, they could, they could really lift it another two or three levels and electrify you just with the way Sinatra [Frank Sinatra] phrases songs in music. I was wondering whether, how--what your experience with that was.
MJ: It comes from a reverence for the text, for the words on the page, as you have a reverence for a Shakespeare play if you were performing Shakespeare. That’s the inspiration, the reason why you do this, the reason why you do KING LEAR is not some memory from your own childhood. It’s because of those words on the page. [INT: Right.] That’s the inspiration that the Director shares with the Actor, potentially, and makes that community of feeling, community of endeavor so powerful a bond between them. If you’re having to create that from raw cloth and say, “Well, no. Don’t bother me with the words here. I’ll get to the words eventually," then you’re kind of opting out of something that could make it so much richer. I take great care in reading scripts. I imagine them shot by shot, line by line, gesture by gesture. As I’m reading them, I take a great deal of time over each page. I expect the Actor to do that. It’s not the only way to take--to make movies. You know, I don’t make movies that are rich in the same ways Mike Leigh does or Ken Loach [Kenneth Loach] or any number of other people. I do it my own way, but that’s my way of doing it.

INT: But what I was talking--
MJ: But there is--it’s just the level of craft that--you can take a line and give it a spin by the way, the way you see the line. You’ve, in your own head, in your researches, in the private reaches of the night in trying to get to this character, wonder how he would say that line, not kind of arrive at that by sort of process of exercises with the Director, which I know many Directors find at the heart of their creative process. And good luck to them, they make much better movies than I do, but I kind of cleave to mine that something I want to be going around, that the brain of the Actor is still working at that to try and solve those problems. And you have that level of craft that someone like David Suchet has or Tim Pigott-Smith. They bring that automatically to their prep and they therefore bring something which surprises you on the set. And that’s what I love to have. If I’m surprised on the set, if I’m electrified on the set, then the camera is recording that and the film is the much richer and truer for it.

INT: To clarify something you said, which is about rehearsals, because your rehearsals have to do with a discussion with the Actors of the characters and the situations they’re going to be meeting and the narrative and all the other elements as opposed to nailing the text. But it, but--
MJ: Nailing the text is part of it, obviously--a huge part of it. David Suchet, an Actor that I worked with in LIVE FROM BAGHDAD, played Naji Al-Hadithi, the Italian--the Iraqi Minister of Information that Michael Keaton’s character, Robert Wiener, interacted with as a kind of, in many ways, a twosome of those two characters in the movie. I don’t think I had a single rehearsal with David [David Suchet]. I think we sat down at a very kind of amicable way when he was in Los Angeles. He’d read the script. He’d liked it and we talked about, you know, the character: where he came from; what his background was; what he could do; what were the techniques he used to get his own way; why did that give him a particular pleasure; what did he relish in Michael Keaton’s character when he encountered him? I did that to some extent with Michael [Michael Keaton] because that was part of his method, but much more time consuming. So, it was always a surprise to me to see what David [David Suchet] did on the first take on the set. Not because we hadn’t talked about, you know, that scene, but because he was still thinking about it in his head and trying to get deeper and deeper into that character before getting in his car that morning to come to the set. And that kind of energy of the day that he brought to the text certainly excited me when I heard those scenes read. You know, you step in and you say, “No, I think, you know, let’s do a little kind of course correction here.” But by and large, that was, that was good stuff, really good stuff to have a baseline to which, from which to work. And I know it inspired Michael Keaton, this level of--in the way that Jeff Goldblum inspired Tim Pigott-Smith and Alan Howard in their scenes in THE DOUBLE HELIX [THE RACE FOR THE DOUBLE HELIX]. They do not normally encounter this kind of level of--sorry, wrong way around. But Jeff Goldblum interacting with the British Actors in DOUBLE HELIX [THE RACE FOR THE DOUBLE HELIX] and Michael Keaton interacting with the British Actors like Helena Bonham Carter, another wonderful person to work with, and David Suchet. They’re kind of in awe of it and the words coming out and the fullness of this character and their rawness actually, as I said before in our interview, inspired the English Actors, because there were two different styles of acting and that gave you not another Actor in the scene with whom you were necessarily complicit in making the scene work, but you felt the difference between the two characters. And that space between them that had to be negotiated by those characters. [INT: Yeah.]

INT: Well, let me ask you--we still have a few minutes here. Let me just ask you something else, which is part of Directors’ experiences. Well, let me just go back. I have, I have one more question about the Actors. Is--although you may have already answered--is that over the years, you had to change the way you approach--the way you directed Actors? I mean, or did you just find that you got less and less out of these Actors because there’s really only one way that you work?
MJ: No. God, I’d be the most awful prick if I came on to a set with that attitude, I think, and I hope I’m not. I take great care in the casting when I have a say in the casting, where it’s not already preordained--[INT: Right.]--to know the kind the Actor that I’ll be working with who will be responsive to the way I like to direct. But, you know, if you don’t have that or if you wanted a particular Actor for the thing that they bring as a person, their own life experience to this role, and that Actor may have more needs than you have thought you’d be called on to provide, then responding to that challenge is actually interesting too--forces you to reconsider your own basis of creativity and think, “Well, let’s go into that area.” It’s a question of who can help what happen inside the head of the other. Something an Actor says may completely ask a question of you that you can’t answer in the moment, but which you go home and you think about and you ponder over and you come back with an answer the next day or the next week or whenever it is. That sense of your being engaged in a joint creative venture, where you can fire questions, which aren’t easy to answer, at each other and you do need help from the other. You know, it’s wonderful when I can ask an Actor, “Please help me with this scene. Here’s what I want to do. How can you help me do that? How can you help me tell that facet?” And the Actor says, “Here’s what I want to do here. I would love to be able to have a moment just with stillness here where something is crossing here and that will kind of help me get into that moment, out of which I can burst with this next line.” That sort of dialogue is, I think, the living blood of the movie, for me. And as I say, all of this stuff is my own experience. I’ve made some lousy movies and I’ve made some quite good movies and all sort of stuff in between. But, you know, it’s the path I’ve chosen. And sometimes it works.

INT: Well, in that context, there’s a universal directive--Director’s experience, which I for shorthand call the “unborn child,” which is how much--you want to talk to about not in statistical terms, but just in general terms about the experience of being a Director, of how much of your professional life is spent on projects that don’t get made and what is that experience? What kind of toll, if anything, does it have on you or..?
MJ: I think it’s one of those things that hasten your desire to be at the end of your career. There’s a very good American writer called Judith Viorst who’s--one of whose poems is my favorite, “The Suburbs Are Great for the Children." [The Suburbs Are Good for the Children.] It’s about suburban life and the last line is, “But no place for grownups to be.” She has a poem about getting married, about all the time that you are dating someone, all the time that you’re engaged with someone, you are letting them use your closet, you’re waiting for the chance not to do that. I suppose I’ve been through the enormous expenditure of energy. Whether the project gets made or not, you still have the same emotional investment in it. You still sit there in the reaches of the night with your glass of whiskey or whatever thinking, “What is it I’m missing in this here?” You put everything into it. It doesn’t get made, you know, it leaves a hole. It is like a stillborn child. And I am feeling the weight of all those movies that could’ve been great, but were not made and kind of mourning as you mourn for a lost child. [INT: Yes. Somebody once said to me that when you were out here as a Director, you had to live in a state of suspended enthusiasm. And that’s not something that you could do?] You can do it, but, you know, the tolls are enormous. You feel exhausted, emotionally exhausted.

INT: Well, I think we covered it all--it was wonderful.
MJ: Thank you. Good to get the chance to say it.