INT: So, there’s always a secret going on. And it seems to me that in your films and we’ll get to TEMPLE GRANDIN because it’s there in spades, where someone or some people are aware of a secret or in pursuit of a secret including, especially TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE, which gets down to the secret of life, right? You know, and death. [MJ: Or death.] Right. So, it seems to me that that’s at the bottom of all of your stories, which is completely connected--symbiotic--with the outsider, you know, the outsider is the one, is the person who does not know the secret, right, and is determined to find it out, except you’re bringing the audience along with you.
MJ: Well, I want the audience to be the one that finds the secret and the hero or heroine of the movie is their kind of representative in the movie. I think that that’s true. I want to take them to a place where they’re not expecting to go. [INT: Even VOLCANO, by the way?] Well, I don’t know that there is a secret at the end of that except that under adversity people forget their differences. I was aware of that particularly during the L.A. Riots [Los Angeles] and the earthquakes and things that the city marvelously fractured, normally, did actually come together and people were, for a few brief seconds, actually friendly with and empathetic to each other. And I wanted to get a little of that sense, probably overdone, at the end of the movie, but yes. No, I think as you’re posing the question, I see that, you know, the two bookends are LIFE STORY or DOUBLE HELIX [THE RACE FOR THE DOUBLE HELIX], which is the search for the secret of life and TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE, which is the search for the secret of death. And those are two very nice bookends. Also, you know, IN A VERY BRITISH COUP, the dismantling of a nuclear warhead is the secret of the problem that’s posed in THREADS, which is exploding the nuclear warhead, so, yeah--happy just to buy that. [INT: Yeah.] But I think the other thing that complicates things is that early on in my career, I was making movies for production entities, including studios, that liked to make movies. And I think it was, I’m speaking a kind of cliché now and it’s a truism and everybody knows it, but the business is changing, has changed to the point where it is no longer as hospitable to the creative imagination as it was. Because of the uncertainties of the creative imagination, you are often, in making a movie, you have a very clear idea of what you’re doing, but you don’t know quite what you’re gonna get with it until you do it. And there is this process of discovery as you’re making a movie. And that may not be where someone else wanted it to go. And I think it’s been accepted that you will make so much money on big blockbusters that you can afford to spend some money on a dodgy prospect, a sketchy project, whatever you call it, something which is unusual, quirky, you don’t know where it’s gonna go, it may be a sleeper, but you can nurture that in the way that RKO [RKO Pictures] nurtured Orson Wells, because they knew he would do something. They knew something would come out of it. And if didn’t, well, it didn’t matter ‘cause the balance sheet was okay. But now with the corporate takeovers by bigger entities than just movie studios, I think there is an expectation that passes down and is very clearly felt that says, “Why can’t you always make a profit on a movie? What is wrong with you guys? Don’t you know your business?” And knowing the business is knowing that there is always this element of uncertainty in it and if you try and take out the the element of uncertainty, you just go for safe subjects; you start making remakes, you start making movies for kids, and you start making movies about toys. Now everybody wants to make a movie about the view master toy or the slinky or Play-Doh, whatever, because they’re familiar--the familiar is what gets done. The remake of a familiar movie, something that was a board game, that was a TV series, you make as a movie because you just can’t come up with new ideas reliably that would develop a profit and it saddens me enormously and makes me feel I’ve had the best years of my life in a better environment than this making movies.

INT: Well, you use--I wanna go back to the word nurture, because what leaped into mind--I’ll just put aside Directors for a minute--but you can talk about Actors, right? With all of the negatives about the studio system, right, they nurtured Actors, right? They brought them along. They didn’t all start out as stars; they didn’t all just burst on the scene. I mean, and all that’s gone now, right, as far as actors--
MJ: Well, it happens to some, some extent in that people make a mark in a long running sitcom and then, you know, they are so beloved by the audience that they’re given their own movie and sometimes it works and sometime it doesn’t, to star in. And that happens a lot, but… But yes, bringing people along, not just Actors, but, you know, Directors and ADs [Assistant Directors] and cameraman, you know, giving them a sense that they are learning their skill and that learned skill will be an advantage to the studio in the long run, they will make something which is, you know, like the love projects that I talk about where you just sense that the story that you’re telling is so important to everybody in the cast, everybody in the crew that they will give it their best work like Michael Riva [J. Michael Riva] on TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE just bringing his own furniture in to save money, just to get it done so… I’ve had the sense on many movies I’ve made that all that combined energy of people skills is being put in the best possible way. And people cut corners and trying to, you know, things that they weren’t asked to do, they weren’t paid for the doing, but they do it nonetheless ‘cause they want the movie to be good. And if you, as a Director, and I’ve talked about this before, are such a whirling Dervish [Sufi dance] of energy who so desperately wants it to be perfect, wants the story to be told, they’ll be gathered in the kinda maelstrom, in the slip string of that and they’ll I think feel much, much happier. I’ve always felt this awful aura that descends on me when I visit a movie set, someone else’s movie and they’re not shooting. Why aren’t they shooting? Everybody’s sitting around on packing cases waiting for an Actor or lighting or something. And that I think--William Blake said, “Energy is eternal delight,” and that’s a kind of motto of mine for making a movie that people, if they believe in the movie they’re making, will give of their best and their energy cumulatively will make something that’s worth seeing. And if they don’t give of that because they are kind of demoralized before they start by the conditions that they’re working under, the, what’s expected of them, the lack of freshness of what they’re expected to do, then that will cease to happen and that’s my fear. And maybe I’m being undulling pessimistic.

INT: So I take it from what you said--we’re gonna go to TEMPLE GRANDIN in a minute--but I take it from what you said that on your set there's very little downtime.
MJ: There’s no downtime. [INT: And what about--] I make that clear to everybody, ADs [Assistant Directors], and the Actors and so on that, you know, I want a “B” plan and a “C” plan and if we’re not doing this, if we can’t do this if there’s a delay, what are we do instead? And maybe the answer is, “Nothing, we have to wait.” This is a moment you have to wait ‘cause if you try and do something else now, then everything else will fall apart and you won’t get anything. But I know on VOLCANO, I had this cast and crew of about a thousand people, probably more. And I was carrying the load of those people on my shoulders, pushing them forward like a general would. This sounds very self-aggrandizing, I don’t mean it to be that, but that’s what a Director has to do. And if we stopped, if you lost that essential momentum, then that’s such a heavy weight to pick up again and get going. So, when we got to key visual effects shots, people wanted to put down markers. We had to kinda shut down the whole thing and put a laser marker here and a laser marker there, and a laser marker there. In the end I got fed up with it and said, “I know you think that’s what you need. You’re gonna have to do it better than you were doing it. I’m just gonna take a helicopter shot of the fires, that flies all over this thing with the burning trees and you’re gonna have to find of way of taking markers there that aren’t there and put the lava in around those.” And they did. And that sort of pushed the technology a little bit. But it kept the momentum going. “Okay, we’re doing a helicopter shot next,” rather than we’re sitting around and taking a coffee break while they spend two hours doing that. I cannot bear to be inactive on the set and I can’t bear for anybody else to be inactive. Making movies is so consuming of time that you can’t afford to waste any. [INT: So, you’re DPs [Director of Photography] know that they don’t have much time to light?] I try and use DPs [Director of Photography] who will relish the idea of shooting in the way that I want to shoot it and Actors who will relish the idea of acting in the way I want to do it, which is more like a guerrilla operation than anything else, but gives the energy of--it’s something that comes back to everybody when it works on the set. It’s like famous conductors, you know, they survive into their 80s or 90s because the music comes back when the wield the baton. I remember a famous story of the German conductor, great German conductor, Otto Klemperer, who was, had a stroke and was in a wheelchair and was on the podium, in the wheelchair, conducting the overture to Don Giovanni. At one point, he just got so emotionally drawn into the music--he was drawing forth from the orchestra--the entry of the trombones, he stood up and conducted. I mean, this is not like a miracle cure--I’m sure he fell down again immediately afterwards, but I feel as a Director like that, if you got all this energy of the movie being made in everybody’s heads, as well as in actual fact coming back at you, it’s the energy that keeps you alive, it keeps you directing. It keeps the movie alive. It’s kind of osmosis. It means the, you know, the movie has kind of electricity to it, an unexpected quality to it--sometimes, not always. I wish it were always, but that’s what I try and do by being so demonic in my expenditure of energy on the set. [INT: That’s great.]

INT: So, let’s go to TEMPLE GRANDIN, which at this time has not, as we are speaking, has not aired, but I’ve seen. And--
MJ: Somebody sent me this major sent me this script and said, “We’re sending around the Temple Grandin project from HBO.” I said, “What’s that?” I must’ve been the only person on the planet who didn’t know who Temple Grandin was. They said, “Well, you’ll see, you’ll see, see if you like it.” And I thought, “It’s about temples, it’s about religion? Is it about architecture?” And I got the script and it arrived just at dinnertime, sitting down to and I thought, “I’ll read it as I eat.” And I start to turn the pages of this story, which is totally unexpected--the story of a child born with severe Autism who doesn’t speak ‘til the age of four, who ends up as an internationally respected, world authority on something, a professor at a university, jet sets around the world like a rock star and who transformed the cattle industry, a major industry in the American Southwest and Southeast. How could you foresee that? You couldn’t foresee that from the first pages and I just kept turning the pages ‘cause I couldn’t believe how bizarre this story was getting and I really wanted to do it. I also realized the more I got into Autism, the more I realized the life of an Autistic person is exactly suited to the museum--to the medium of cinematography. It’s a person whose emotions are limited, they don’t have complex emotions, but those emotions are powerful and volcanic. And the way in which those emotions impinge on the person is through their senses, through the loudness of even a tiny sound, the intensity of even a visual image so that it becomes magnified into something else. It’s like the way that you frame a shot, the way that you play with the soundtrack, the way that you heighten the intensity of a scene that is what they’re seeing of the world all the whole time. Temple Grandin turned out to be the first person who came out from that cage of Autism and could describe it. Previous stories about Autistic sufferers have told it through the point of view of the mother or the siblings or the family or someone that they were working with, but this was the first time she said, “This is what it’s like to be Autistic.” And I thought that’s wonderful because you can actually try and create that cinematically. And I’m pleased that when I showed her the result of it with great trepidation, she said, “Well, that’s it! That’s the way it is.” And various people were kind of not so sure that this had been a good idea to put all these flashes and these very cinematic, you know, subliminal things in--superimposed graphics and things, and they said to her at a lunch afterwards, “Well, wasn’t that stretching it a bit? You know, you put in all these graphic things?” She said, “No, no. I’m a pattern thinker. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly the way I see the world in a pattern, so that was greatly gratifying to me. But essentially, it’s the story of a woman’s growth, trying to understand the world while she’s trying to understand herself. A woman of great determination and surprisingly trapped within this cage of Autism, which she describes as something that kept her in a dark place, the back--the far side of darkness, discovered something about the world, because her Autism gave her the ability to see things that no one else in the world could see and to take those to people and show them and say, “Look, this is why the cow is doing that. If you do this, the cow will do something else and it will save you money.” And that suddenly got her taken notice of.

INT: Well, what I was gonna ask you is to talk a little bit more specifically about the structure of it, because it is quite extraordinary.
MJ: It is--she’s a woman’s who makes, as many people who suffer from Autism do, free association. Word association, when someone says something to her, she takes it literally and has a vision of something, which is a literal expression of something, which is actually meant to be a proverb or metaphor or something. But also a photographic visual imagination that can see that detail and that detail three years later in a different place and that detail that she hears someone telling a story about and that way a hose works here and put them together into a synthesis that will make something. That’s extraordinary and--[INT: She does it visually?] She does it visually. She has a visual associative memory that can see things and how they relate to each other, and she can also see patterns. I found this very difficult myself working, I’m not Autistic, I hope, working with Editors sometimes where I can see a pattern of how you can make this sequence work: you take that, you make a mark there, you slide this back three frames, you put that there, you take that there and you splice it across and you do a mix. And I see that as all in one go, as one kind of complex thing. And if you try and explain it to someone who doesn’t get it, it can take you an hour and you might as well just do it yourself. But she was able to do this in a flash, just take a snapshot of something and see the way it worked. And she talks in the one scene of the movie when she’s grown up as she’s trying to sell the board of directors of a slaughterhouse on building a completely new revolutionary kind of slaughterhouse that will respect the animals and not subject them to any kind of discomfort or distress right up until the moment and just beyond that they are killed, so that they die peaceful. And they're looking at plans and somebody says to her, “But this is a pla--you have no idea whether this will work. It’s gonna be very expensive and you’ve no idea whether this will work.” And she says, “I have. I, like Thomas Edison or Nikola Tesla, I can walk through this entire thing in my head, through this entire plant I’m showing you the plans of. I know every beam and every rivet and every screw, and I know when they’re gonna fail and when they’re gonna work and how it’s gonna work. And that’s something my Autism allows me to do.” An absolutely extraordinary story, and the fact that this took place in the ‘60s [1960s] when she was a teenager and then went to university and went as a postgraduate student into the most male dominated industry you can think of--cowboys--and suffered harassment not just because she was Autistic, but because she was a female and had a very, very definite point of view. I thought that was an amazing story. And very few people can play that character and I’m so delighted that my very, very first choice for playing that character was the person we actually got to play that character. It’s Claire Danes and I’ve known and loved her work since she was, as this character starts, a teenager in MY SO-CALLED LIFE and have seen her develop on screen. I’ve been move to tears by what she’s done in things like SHOPGIRL, the thing she did with Steve Martin, who I’d worked with or STAGE BEAUTY or any number of things and she has a sort of gamin, androgynous quality sometimes to her--extraordinarily beautiful, but it’s a very brave Actress and as I have to do many times to Actresses who are the other side of the Atlantic or Actors the other side of the country, or whatever, have to do a selling pitch down the phone and say, you know, “This is what I’m asking you to do. Will you do it?” And in this case where you’re talking about a person who has four emotions—anger, sadness, fear, and terror, no what’s that--happy, sad, angry, you know? [INT: I don’t know what the fourth one is.] They’re the basic animal emotions, plus the ability to concentrate. Then you are denying yourself, you will have to deny yourself all the things which you use as an Actress the ability to make the audience empathize with you, because this is a character who doesn’t empathize with anybody, even her own mother. She cannot bear to be hugged by her own mother, but she does have an empathy with cattle. And I talked to her about, “You know, this is gonna be the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do. You’re gonna look very unattractive, because it’s a person who’s loud in conversation, can’t modulate her voice, is very awkward in society, not given with any public graces, ‘cause she can’t think of how other people are looking at her. And you’re gonna have to work without a net, without a safety net, doing this very, very risky acting without a safety net. And she said, what I didn’t know was that the other end of the phone--she was in London in an apartment block, 14 floors in the air and she was looking down with the phone in her ear at that drop, 14 flights down and she said, “I realize that’s what you’re asking me to do is to jump that distance.” And she did and by god, she was wonderful. [INT: Yes, it’s incredible.] I think she’s wonderful in the movie. It isn’t just an imitation of the very difficult to imitate Temple Grandin, but a channeling of her.

INT: So, tell about your experience making the film. I mean, that one was fairly recent. Do you, can you say how long you had to shoot that?
MJ: I can't, I can never remember these details afterwards. I just remember there’s never quite enough time. [INT: Well was it four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, or..?] It’s about 40 days I think. [INT: 40 days? Okay.] Very difficult to do because of the logistics of the cattle--cattle are an essential part of it. It takes place on the East Coast and it takes place on the West Coast, it takes place in Arizona. [INT: And you shot it where?] Austin, Texas, in which you can find East Coast colleges, and you can find--with Styrofoam cacti--Arizona, or something that looks like Arizona. You find a lot of cattle, and you can find everywhere in between. And it made great sense to shoot it in Austin and it was one of those enlightened decisions that didn’t limit what you could shoot, but actually expanded what you could shoot; that you could shoot it all in one place, you didn’t waste time traveling from here to there. You actually put all that into the movie. The movie is constructed in a kind of associative way because of her associative thinking. You meet her full on at the age of 18, getting off a plane to visit her aunt in Arizona in the mid-‘60s [1960s] and you meet her as the Aunt meets her. The Aunt is kind of ordinary person in the street. And you meet full on all these strange obsessive story tellings, the loud voice, the social kind of awkwardness, the obsessions with things, and studying for moments when something that seems to be kind of trivial. And slowly you get to realize that underneath all this something really mightily interesting is happening inside the head. So, she carries that through. And then you get to another point in the movie where somebody says something or somebody remembers something and you’re back into her middle school and really by association through the movie. She had this metaphor for herself, a conscious metaphor, which was, “There are doors I have to go through in my life and each one will represent a change to me of my life.” I was always looking for those doors, so I changed that metaphor into something filmic. If this is of interest, there was a movie called PAS DE DEUX by Norton--Norman McLaren in the ‘50s [1950s], ‘60s [1960s] the National Film Board of Canada took two dancers, filmed them in high contrast black and white and then overprinted the images of them doing something like this [gestures dancing with his arms] with the same image retarded by 5 frames, 10 frames, 15 frames, 20 frames, so you had a kind of elastic, bungie like echo, which not only traced the pattern of something, but traced where it had been. So you saw the shape of a decision--the decision to go through a door was marked by where the door had been and opening and was now open, or a movement, you know by… I used that, you know, for some of her shots of cattle. And she also had the ability to put herself in that viewpoint even though she’d never seen it. So there are a lot of overhead shots, which of course were very like a meticulously drawn plans and just flashes. I chose to do them in black and white because that era, she had a black and white Instamatic camera, the TV program she watched, THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., was in black and white; it was thought that cows thought in black and white, saw in black and white, so those black and white images were like taking snapshots of the world that no one else could see. And, you know, like I remember a New Wave movie called LIFE UPSIDE DOWN, LA VIE A L’ENVERS, French movie, by Alain Jessua, in I think 1962 [1964], in which a man is slowly losing his mind, in one sense in that he’s withdrawing from contact with people. But he’s also zeroing in on things in the world that strike him as fascinating like the sun shining through the veins in a leaf and will spend hours just looking at them in awe. If you break a loaf of French bread in half and you just look at the structure of the bread itself with the backlight coming through it. And I saw that movie and it was incredibly beautiful and I thought, “That’s exactly the way that she sees the world, in this incredibly vivid detail,” so there are times when she’s just looking at the pattern of grains falling through an hourglass and that’s as important to her as anything that’s happening in the room, which happens to be her mother and her doctor discussing what’s gonna happen to her, whether she’s gonna be put in an institution or not. But as you go through the movie, you see that these little things that she spots are things are things she puts together makes a kind of symbiosis. It’s so close to me that I can’t remember--

INT: Okay. Well, let me, let me ask you this question because of the film being so unusual, how much of the film, you know, in terms of story telling, obviously in terms of performance, was achieved in the script; how much was achieved in the shooting; and how much was achieved in the post-production? How would you break that down because of the fact that it’s such an unusual…
MJ: Several people had a go at doing the script. It’s not an easy story to tell. The person who finally cracked it was Chris Monger [Christopher Monger], who is an English Director most notable for the Hugh Grant movie that he wrote and directed, THE MAN WHO WENT UP A HILL AND CAME DOWN A MOUNTAIN [THE ENGLISHMAN WHO WENT UP A HILL BUT CAME DOWN A MOUNTAIN]. And he said, “Look, all these other attempts have failed of doing this story. Let me throw it all up in the air and do it in this kind of associative way--free fall, free association.” And people said, “By god, he’s got it! That’s the movie we’ll shoot.” They didn’t mean that, of course. They meant, this is the movie we’ll develop. [INT: Right.] So, there were long and, you know, sometimes heated arguments in the development process arguing for this particular way of it and not doing the easy way. There is a kind of model for this, which is the disease of the week movie. [INT: Right.] The problem with the week movie, the person has a disease that they recover from and I didn’t want to make it that way, I didn’t want to give it that easy sentimentality and I wanted to make it as, you know, a close to her experience of the world as we could. That gets to her experience of the world. What it does deprive you of, apparently, is emotion, and so the idea of surrounding her with people who had an emotional reaction to her, like her mother, like her aunt, like her teacher, was another great kind of compliment to the movie. You could take their emotion and it gave you a reflection the distance between what she was seeing of the world and what they were feeling around her, protective or--[INT: So how, that was in the script?] That was partly in the script, a lot done in the production. [INT: So, what--]

MJ: Claire [Claire Danes] did her own preparation when she was cast. We had some discussions about the nature of how she would be on the set and how much or how little she would base it on the real Temple [Temple Grandin], you know, not to be an actor, just mimicry. She and her boyfriend invited the real Temple Grandin around her apartment in New York and spent the afternoon, the three of them, getting Temple [Temple Grandin] to talk and move about, and they videotaped her with a camera phone or something and recorded her. And Claire [Claire Danes] had that on her iPhone just listening to it day and night and just studied the movements of a person like that. And I kept saying as we got closer and closer to shooting, “Claire [Claire Danes], I know you’ve been working on the voice with a voice coach and I know you’ve been working on the movement, if you like sharing that before we start shooting or do you want to keep that as a surprise?” It’s one of those things that different Actors have different techniques for doing it. It’s like a table read and table read is one of the things here. People like Jeff Goldblum, for example, came to a table read, knew every word of the script without having to refer to a page of it, had all his movements and characterizations and acted the thing, and terrified the hell out of all the other Actors who were around the table thinking, “Oh my god, we have to follow that.” And there are some who like to keep their powder dry, who will not exactly read it in a monotone, but they’ll go through the motions of it and knowing that they have something in reserve, which can only happen when the camera’s running--and that was Claire’s [Claire Danes] way. She said, “I don’t think you’ll be disappointed, but I’m not ready to show you yet.” As it happened, the first shot of the movie is actually the first thing that we shot and the first time she acted as Temple Grandin on that shoot. It was done the day before we started full production for the movie. It was in this strangely shaped room named after Adelbert Ames [Adelbert Ames, Jr.] called the Ames room. It’s an optical illusion. When you see it from one viewpoint, although it’s a misshapen room, it looks like a normal room, except for the person who is walking from one corner to the diagonal opposite corner will appear to grow to a giant in size and then shrink back again. And she was in that and she opens with the words, “My name is Temple Grandin,” and, you know, we saw it with studio executives and Producers there and I was there, and it’s almost like the tears ran down our face--it was a thrill. Hair stood up on the backs of our heads. Not only has she got that booming voice, but when she walked from one corner of that room to the other, she strode with the, you know, leading with the shoulders, and I thought, “Oh my god, that’s Temple Grandin,” and I was so relieved and… She did a lot of work on her own and didn’t want for that to be public except with her movement coach and her dialect coach. [INT: So there were no rehearsals with her other than the read through?] Not until we got onto the set for that particular scene. [INT: But there were no pre-production rehearsals?] No. As I’ve said before, we talked a lot and we read through scenes, so we agreed what the scene was about, how it would go, what the kind of thrust of the scene was, what--the shape of the scene--[INT: Right. But not performance wise?] Not performance wise, no. [INT: Okay.]

INT: Alright. So, when you're--her characterization obviously was the addition that was made during production, but what other things that were added during the production--
MJ: Just the world of the cattle, I mean, just going through what she did in the cattle industry and seeing cows the way that she saw them and as you do scene after scene in which that comes to the fore, you start loving the cows and you can’t help it, you can’t help shooting them in a different way, as if those are things to be noted and cared for. We had our own herd, the HBO herd of cattle that we used for these dip shots and so on. And one particular was a star, it was the little runt of the herd, a little red cow, and everybody said, “No you can’t use the red cow for the underwater swimming shots. The black cow’s been trained to do it.” But black cow couldn’t do it. We put the red cow in and the red cow swam. We loved the little red cow and I think the chief animal wrangler bought the red cow at the end and as Will Rogers did, kept it as a pet for as long as he could in his own house, and it’s still there as far as I know. Maybe it’s been eaten. But those cattle got very kind of media savvy. You know, they got so used to the camera that they would do things they were meant to be scared by, you know, without batting an eyelid, so that was a disadvantage, but, you know--

MJ: What I think Claire [Claire Danes] brought to the performance were those things that I always hoped that she would bring. Having played a gawky teenager, she could play Temple [Temple Grandin] without any prosthetics or other makeup as a gawky fifteen year old, and knowing that the character grows up through these events and becomes, you know, a fully self possessed, but still Autistic, 30 something year old at the end of the movie was something she could do as well. And brought a great sense of comic timing to the things that she does, which are delightful and unselfconsciously funny, and that’s something that was a true kind of bonus for us all. But to just play it with no vanity at all, no star vanity, knowing that she looked really kind of drawn and haggard in this scene, and as many of the best Actresses are, have a face that can be one thing or something completely different depending on the emotion that animates it, and sometimes it just radiates. And there are scenes like that where she looks like a young Grace Kelly and scenes where she looks like an old horse-faced English duchess. And she didn’t want to see the rushes, she didn’t want to see the dailies, and it was very difficult to persuade her to see the movie, which she just saw a couple of weeks ago, but which she has to see in order to publicize it. But I think she saw it like this not because she was particularly hideous in this movie, although it was kind of egregious example, but I think like many Actors, they’re sort of shyer than their persona, once it’s done. Very much wanted to be in the moment and not have that moment broken by thinking how does this look, how do I look? Is my right profile showing to my best advantage here? And not wanting to really let go of that once it’s over and see how I did look, because then you’re inevitably gonna say, “Oh, well, I’ll do that again,” and I think she wants that moment to be sacrosanct, the moment when you’re in the character and nothing else in the world matters.

INT: Can you think of another Actor that you’ve worked with that--
MJ: Juliet Stevenson, who played Rosalind Franklin in LIFE STORY [THE RACE FOR THE DOUBLE HELIX], in the DNA movie, very much the same thing--could look amazingly sexy and also very, very plain and downtrodden. [INT: What about any American Actor?] They don’t come to mind and that’s just probably the problem with my recalling this moment--doesn’t mean there aren’t any. [INT: Okay--] I think in this film, also, the role of the supporting cast is important. And they could have been played like stock characters from a feel good movie of, you know, triumph over adversity, and they weren’t. David Strathairn was great. He plays a very charismatic teacher who has lived a full life. He was, you know, we think one of the people who designed the space suites for the Mercury astronauts when he was at NASA. May have helped design, Temple [Temple Grandin] believes he did, the Stealth Bomber [Northrop Grumann B-2 Spirit], and then went for a career in teaching. So, he’d been places, you know, traveled widely, was a sort of Renaissance man, and had the quickness of mind to see that this was an intel--an exceptional intelligence inside this girl, and the way to bring it out was to challenge it, not to kind of protect it, but to challenge it. And so he set out the task of making this strange room, making a model of it. And when she couldn’t get it, he wouldn’t say, “Here’s how you do it.” He’d say, “Oh, really? That didn’t work?” She was furious, but, you know, went away and redoubled her efforts and got it and he gave her one tiny clue at the end that she suddenly got the who thing as a pattern and was able to do it. [INT: Yeah. That was a great sequence.]

INT: So what about, what about--so then where were the additions in the post? MJ: Things that were always in my head, but not in the script, ‘cause you can’t write them in the script, but these flashes of subliminal images--the way in which the world would show its patterns and the way in which things would be connected by rapid fire montages as she made the connection. [INT: What--could you just, could you give me a percentage you think of how, what percentage of the, those additions--[MJ: In the various stages?] Well, at least in the post. I ask this because--
MJ: Quite a large, more than you would expect I think in the post, ‘cause that was always in my head and I was shooting that stuff, although nobody knew quite why I was shooting it, with the second unit and the third unit. And that stuff wasn’t closely examined I think when the dailies came back, ‘cause it wasn’t principle photography, but a lot of that stuff I thought, you know, “I’ll incorporate this here, I’ll incorporate this here.” And I did. And initially I think people thought, “Jesus, will anybody watch this movie, it’s so disjointed.” It’s so kind of herky-jerky. [INT: You felt that way?] I didn’t feel that way. I knew they would, but I think within the kind of production entity--[INT: The creative team.] The creative team. There was a kind of unease that this was too far away from a movie which would safely deliver emotion with soaring strings and, you know, clichéd situations that maybe nobody would respond to it, and maybe this was too far to subject the audience to these kinds of flashes of things. We screened it for a preview audience in a fairly rough state. It was my cut, plus a few notes from the studio. And we got a ninety-five rating, which is virtually unheard of and the audience applauded and cheered at the end of the screening, which is for a preview is really--so we thought we had something special here. But then I think, you know, the longer you go on and there was a kind of unfortunate factor that happened here, which was that we were due to be in a slot at the end of last year. It was supposedly, they thought they had a shot at the Emmy with this particular long form, but in the same year, they had GREY GARDENS, which is the movie with Jessica Lang and Drew Barrymore, which cost a great deal of money, which was gonna be a theatrical feature, something went wrong with that deal. I’m given to understand it couldn’t be a theatrical feature and the only spot they had for it to present it in that year was our slot. And they didn’t want to put both movies out in the same years because they’d have been spending double the promotion budget on two very high profile movies. So we got shifted later by about a year, so that’s a delay in which people could have second thoughts and did about whether this was a good idea, about whether we were asking too much of the audience, ‘bout whether with the music should make it a little easier to feel the emotion of the scene and so on; back and forth, back and forth. [INT: And you had, but you also had an executive shift in there, right?] Yes, yes. [INT: In the middle of…] Yeah. Colin Callender left during the production period and there was a new head of HBO films. You know, I’d worked with him and knew before and liked very much indeed Len Amato, but hadn’t been a total part of the whole development of this process. He came as part of the pre-production--the development, but it wasn’t his production, so to speak, so it took a little bit of a learning curve, I think, this particular way of shooting it. And, you know, as everyone taking over some big post like this wants their first thing to be, to make a success, to be a splash and the more these doubts crept in, I think maybe it’s only human, you wonder, “Are we pushing the envelope too far?” And I got myself, you know, the unit asshole for always arguing that, “Yes, we should push it this far,” and really putting, might get me fired, not seriously on the line, but I made a nuisance of myself. And there’re always these slightly unpleasant scenes where I said, “Well, I think it should be that way and here’s why,” and other people would say, “ Well, don’t you think that’s too much black and white stuff?” And, Don’t you think we should be cutting this back a little bit,” and we’d cut it back a little bit. And I’d say, “Well, I don’t think that works. Can we put it back?” And so on; you know, the normal give and take, but stretch that over a year and it feels like cumulatively a lot of-- [INT: But, you know--]

INT: But one of the things that should not go unnoted was something you just said, someone will make a reference, “Something is--there is too much black and white,” which is too often notes, don’t you agree, are given in terms of theoretical or general is a better word to use, in other words, “Too much black and white,” not, “It doesn’t work black and white in this sequence.” And so the solution is very general, right? Take out some of the black and white. This--
MJ: My characterizing is the suggestion and the notes are often too precise. If they were notes that said, “We don’t think this scene is working, maybe you should look at that,” or, “we are uneasy about this particular strand of the arc, could you look at that?” Then you can think as a creative filmmaker, “Okay. I’ll look at that. I’m sure I can come up with something,” and you come up with something often, and I often did and the Editor often did, which is very resourceful. And they see it and they say, “Oh yeah. We didn’t mean that, but yeah, that does it.” And I wish that would happen more often rather than, you know, “The creative team thinks that you should take three frames off the end of this cut,” or… As it happened with THE BODYGUARD when I was in the cutting room with alternately Kevin Costner who was one of the Executive Producers, and Laurence Kasdan, who was one of the Executive Producers, and Jim Wilson, who was a Director himself, and people would say, “Here is my version.” Kevin Costner’s, which is maybe hours long, and here’s Kasdan’s [Laurence Kasdan] [Mick Jackson mimes a short version of the film]. And eventually the studio intervenes and you argue it backwards and forth and you get something, which isn’t that far from the one that you had. [INT: Right.] And you go, “That was very diplomatically and well done and I think the movie survived.” I think there were, you know, passionate arguments about this and well, well what were it that there were passionate arguments because in the end you come up with something that you have fought through and you’re all happy with and you can all support and it’s not that far away from my conception. [INT: The suggestion that you made, though, is really, I think, the most significant, the best notes are the notes where someone says, “It’s not, that’s not working for me,” and let's you go and fix it.] I think that’s the same as the notes you as a Director give to the Writer. You don’t say, “Can you change this sentence, so it reads so and so?” But you say, “Have a look at that sentence, ‘cause I think this is the problem with it; the problem is I don’t get, don’t feel this from it. See what you can do.” And that’s where I think you get the most creative solutions to a problem. [INT: Right. Because you then, you allow the other person to stay in control.] Yeah. Or with the Actor, you know, rather than say, “I blocked the scene like this, I need you to finish up over here, ‘cause that’s where the next scene starts,” say, “I have a problem here, ‘cause I really would like to finish with the camera over here. Can you think of any ways that we can do that? I mean, anything you can invent that will seem natural to you,” and then you do get a really kind of inventive way, most creative solutions to a problem. [INT: Right. Because you then, you allow the other person to stay in control.] Or with the Actor, you know, rather than say, “I blocked the scene like this, I need you to finish up over here, because that’s where the next scene starts,” say, “I have a problem here, ‘cause I really would like to finish with a camera over here. Can you think of any ways that we could do that? I mean anything you can invent that will seem natural to you.” And then you do get a really kind of inventive way of getting what you wanted rather than imposing it from the outside.

MJ: The music, I think, is wonderful in TEMPLE GRANDIN. It’s the second attempt at a Composer. I had--this is funny--the Writer, Chris Monger [Christopher Monger], sent me off to Austin, Texas with a CD to play in my car as I was driving to location with everything about the movie that you could possibly think of: Roy Rogers singing “Yippee-yay-yo-ki-yay. I’m an old cow hand from the Rio Grande [I’M AN OLD COW HAND (FROM THE RIO GRANDE)], THE LITTLE WHITE BULL, TELSTAR, ‘cause that was one of the popular tunes of the period and a piece of Philip Glass, DANCE NO. 2. And it was the Philip Glass that stuck in my head as I was driving pass these stockyards every day and going... And I thought there’s a repetitive, humble sort of, working through over and over again something that’s like the obsessive working of Temple’s [Temple Grandin] mind. And it is seeing a pattern over and over again, and going back to that and not being bored with it. And so I suggested to the first Composer that we use the Philip Glass kind of motif perpetually. And then things didn’t work out with the first Composer, and the second Composer [Alex Wurman] hadn’t written anything like that before. And I played some music and said, “Well, listen to these things.” And he said, “You know, Philip Glass didn’t quite do it for me, but John Adams [John Coolidge Adams] does it to me,” which is exactly the same kind of composer--a minimalist Composer with a lot of repeated things, which, actually, cumulatively have a very emotional effect. So there’s a lot of John Adam’s [John Coolidge Adams] like score in it. But he wrote it jubilantly and not holding back at all. And that was a surprise to me, a delightful surprise when you--[INT: How were you feeling when your Composer was replaced? I mean at that point, you didn’t know what you were gonna end up with.] I don’t think anybody knew what they wanted at that point. There was a great deal of confusion. And, you know, he was a friend and a Composer who I had worked with before, and maybe it was preordained that it wouldn’t work out that way. [INT: But was your, just creatively, though, forgetting about the personal aspects of it, did you feel right then that they were making mistake that the score was really good or did you have your own doubts?] I didn’t have my own doubts. I tend to know more than is my own good sometimes about what’s the right way to go and what’s the wrong way to go, I think. And that’s what makes me a Director. And people who can’t hear that score in their heads, don’t have anything to say, “This is right,” or, “this is wrong,” just, “it’s not right yet.” And, you know, the Composer wasn’t getting it just right, yet, because just what was just right yet, wasn’t defined enough and they decided to very generously give him a few weeks to go and think about it without me intervening and talking to him, see if he would come back with the right score. Well, not surprisingly, he didn’t. [INT: Okay. Now the first time he actually, you actually recorded the score…] No. We recorded demos, samples on a synthesizer. [INT: Oh, okay. So both, he was rejected mostly on both demos, not on a finished score?] No, but, you know, sampling now is so good that you can more or less hear the finished score. [INT: Right. Right. Right.] But in the final analysis, I think the score that we got from Alex Wurman was unexpected. It did have those qualities in it that I wanted, that repetitive quality, that sentiment without sentimentality, which sometimes pushes the edge of sentimentality as far as it can, but there’s always something there that just pulls it back, and had this celebratory quality to it, which is different from soaring strings. It’s kind of dissonant and it’s in there in the opening titles and it’s like you’re the music of the spheres with those drawings of hers [Temple Grandin] rotating around. That was unexpected. That was a true contribution from the Composer that I think lifted, elevated the movie. So I’m really pleased with the movie. [INT: Yeah. It’s wonderful movie, just wonderful.]

INT: What qualities do you think are required to be a Director? I mean, that was your own question.
MJ: I wrote them down. Persistence and bravery is one thing. To persist with something even though the circumstances are making it difficult to achieve that. It doesn’t look as if anybody else is interested in doing that, but you persist all the same because you know even though it’s gonna make your day too long or you’re gonna lose it and then do it another day, it is the right thing to do. Compassion and empathy for everybody on the unit; for the job that everybody’s doing under difficult circumstances with not enough money, not enough time, not enough overtime, to lose sleep, whether it’s the cast or the crew, and trying to be a father figure to them. Quick thinking and slow thinking. The quick thinking is where things aren’t going right and the light is going very fast and you have to completely rethink your shot list for the day and say, “There’s a different way of doing this scene. We’ll do it like this.” And slow thinking is, “I don’t care how long it takes, something is going wrong here and I need to just take a moment to work out what it is and what it is I truly want. You’re all gonna have to wait.” And I think those are both equality important. [INT: That really comes under the heading of bravery, that one.] Yeah. Omniscience and humility. To know everything about the script and to be humble enough to know that some of it may be wrong and that you may have to decide whether what you believe is right or whether what someone else is suggesting is better. A certain Calvinism. Having been a Producer, as I say, about you trying to bring this in. Be a good team player. Bring it without compromising the vision that you have, but trying not to bankrupt the studio. Problem solving I love. If it weren’t for problem solving, I wouldn’t be Otto Klemperer standing up with a baton. That’s what comes back at you that revitalizes you, rejuvenates you and makes you wanna make movies over and over again--that you can’t be beaten by a problem. You will find some resourceful way that is better than the way you first thought of doing it. The most difficult thing, I think, is being the fulcrum. There are so many times, particularly when I shoot on the edge--on the edge of exposure, focus without sufficient camera rehearsal--where you are the fulcrum, the balance point between what you need to do for the cast, for the Actors and what you need to do for the crew. And you come to a take which is mind bogglingly, stunningly beautiful and the Actor says, “I think I got it. I couldn’t do that again if you, if my life were on the table. I can’t do better than that.” And then the assistant cameraman says, “We lost focus halfway through,” or, “we got a hair in the gate. Please, can we do it again?” And you’re gonna disappoint somebody. You have to keep the moral of the crew going. They say, “We didn’t have time to get the focus marks,” or, “it was just kind of finger trouble,” and the Actor who's given what they think is their best performance and in this soft lens. So that’s the most difficult thing, to try and keep these two constituencies both of which depend on your empathy and your compassion. [INT: So what is the answer to that situation?] The answer is to see how bad it is. Can it still--and my belief in the power of the imperfect image--does the performance come through despite the flaws or are the flaws so bad that you’re gonna have to do it again. And you say to the Actor, “I’m gonna have to ask--you did it once, and it’s in you, it’s in your DNA. You can do it again. You may even do it better.” But it takes some doing. And the momentum, really, that I talked about earlier, that creating movies is making water run uphill and just making all the laws of the universe reverse themselves, and it takes a certain amount of energy to make that happen. And they can’t come from anywhere else but the Director. [INT: Well, you covered the problems there too as well.] That’s all very trite, I’m sure, but I mean that’s what just occurred to me. [INT: No. I think it’s pretty accurate.]

INT: Could you--before I get to the last question, which is about the DGA [Directors Guild of America] in your life, let me just ask you a question that used to have more significance than it does now, but… Could you reflect a little bit about your life in the feature world versus your life in television and looking back on that and just how you feel about it? Are you personally--
MJ: I feel my natural place is probably in television, and it’s great fun doing a movie. The movie experience is more intense. The image is bigger for a start; it’s in a darkened room full of people and you’re sharing a communal experience by and large with them and there is that kind of magnified emotion that you all feel towards this thing. And by and large, there’s more ambition in that--emotional ambition, dramatic ambition, production value. [INT: Do you think so?] In my own life, no. And I’ve spoken about that. I believe that you can take that ambition and put it into television, but generally speaking, that’s why I like to be in features because there’s a scale things. You could never have done something like VOLCANO, for example, as a TV movie. [INT: But could you have ever done TEMPLE GRANDIN on a feature?] Yes. I think it would make a very good feature movie. It’s unfortunate they can’t for there is business/economic contractual reasons, ‘cause I’d like to see Claire [Claire Danes] win an Oscar for that performance. But what I hate about movies is the endless tinkering before you even get near the set. The years of your life that go past, the years of my life that I have spent that have been the happiest to me have been the ones that I've spent on the set or in the cutting room, just actually doing the damn job and getting all this life force flowing back into me and giving it back into the movie and going through endless notes and endless drafts of scripts and never getting any closer to something that they’re gonna green light is death to me. It’s a slow form of death. So I tend to gravitate to television, because the things, by and large, happen more quickly and you’re forced back on your own resources even more than you are. You can’t pay your way out of the problem the way you can sometimes on a movie, especially if there’s millions of dollars extra, which there never are. But, you know, I love the intensity of trying to do the impossible, the resilience of your own creative imagination and the resourcefulness of things you can think of to do on television. Knowing that they don’t need to be huge, but provided that you fill the screen, then you’re giving the audience not wide shots, but you're giving them a richness of experience that’s equivalent to the experience you get seeing something on a big screen.

INT: Well, you know, let’s just--that you mention wide shots, it’s an interesting thing with people having their own home theatres now. How would you define a wide shot for television?
MJ: LAWRENCE OF ARABIA is obviously the--[INT: That would be too wide a shot for television.] Yes, yes. And you see the tiny, tiny horses. But on television what I found you can do is give the, as I was saying, give the effect of a wide shot by having, say, something in the foreground, which is big foreground feature and then seeing a great expanse beyond that and--[INT: It’s a depth of focus.] It's a depth--and having some action in the middle ground. And then you really do take a sense of depth from the image. Or particularly--I’m sorry to interrupt you--in a historical movie, I’m talking about, you know, trying to make it look as if the characters are in their present tense and not in their historical past tense. Having the stuff that you normally fill a wide shot within the movies like the carriages and the women in crinolines and all this kind of period stuff come through the frame, which is that [Jackson mimes the size of a television frame.], as it would do if you were shooting a contemporary drama. You wouldn’t pull wide for an SUV to go through the frame, but just let the carriage go through the frame is part of the texture of the thing and you’ve filled the frame with the period. Nobody could ask more than that, and occasionally get wide. I used the old techniques of the German Expressionists like in THE BODYGUARD when Whitney Houston is being stalked by an assassin in the Oscars. I brought a giant camera, a giant video camera--the outline of it--and clamped that to our camera, so that was big in the foreground and that was the kind of massive weapon. And then the whole of the Oscars stretched out with the laser beam dancing around her as that tracked her up the aisle. And that was great fun to do, just old style movie making. [INT: Yeah. I mean that’s an interesting observation that the wide shot on television is depth of focus as opposed to horizontal.] Yeah.

INT: Okay. Finally the DGA [Directors Guild of America]. What role has the DGA [Directors Guild of America] played in your professional life?
MJ: By default, it has shown me how much more protected you are by the DGA [Directors Guild of America] than when you’re not. The first feature I shot here, CHATTAHOOCHEE, was not done under the DGA [Directors Guild of America]. I suspect I was given the bum’s rush in many ways by that, and if I’d had the DGA [Directors Guild of America] to advise me, I would not have been, I think. So the next movie, I did sign on to the DGA [Directors Guild of America]. The first movie I signed on for was L.A. STORY and Gil Cates [Gilbert Cates], Tony Bill [Gerard Anthony Bill] and Ed Zwick [Edward Zwick] were my sponsors. And that was in the category of feature comedy Director. And from then on, I not only felt protected--I’ll give you an example of that. There was some thought partway through TEMPLE GRANDIN, as the dailies came back, that she was doing such an extreme accent as Temple [Temple Grandin] that maybe this wasn’t gonna work. And it was suggested that somebody maybe one of the Producers, maybe one of the studio execs should sit in on a rehearsal with me to see if we could work on the accent a little bit. I said, “No. That is private time between me and the Actors and no one else is there for whatever reason, and I will go to the DGA [Directors Guild of America] with that,” I don’t know what would have happened. Probably nothing. Probably Warren [Warren Adler] would have decided it wasn’t covered under the requisite agreements, but the threat of that was enough for people to say, “Oh no, no. Sorry. Didn’t mean to infringe on your creative rights.” The biggest thing for me of being a member of the DGA [Directors Guild of America] is things like this, where you get to talk to other Directors, because as I’ve said before, every AD [Assistant Director] works for with a whole other different Directors; every Costume Designer works with a whole other different Director. A Director only works with himself and has no way of knowing, unless he’s been an AD [Assistant Director] or a Costume Designer or whatever, what he should be doing. So I have found my own way through this and it’s very inadequate in many ways. I’m sure my way of working with Actors--what I subject them to in the way of no rehearsal and that kind of adrenaline bounce on the set--would be horrifying to many Directors. And fine, that’s something I will learn, I guess, as I talk to them. But just having a forum--the DGA [Directors Guild of America] meetings, council meetings, whatever, or just interviewing with you now--talking to other Directors about what they do and what they had done in this situation, what would they do here and so on is immensely reassuring. And I found it so valuable. [INT: That’s great.]