A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting and Filmmaking
Page 51
After depicting the little guy and his right to be different in movie after movie, no matter what economic status or race, I thought I'd made my position on integration and equality crystal clear. What right did this man have to snoop around, making a nuisance of himself, no matter the honorable objectives of his organization? The NAACP should have, at the very least, had the courtesy and respect to wait and see the finished movie. I was deeply offended by this intrusion, and I told Jon Davison in no uncertain terms that I didn't want this Mr. Edwards on my set. Davison agreed with me completely and asked the NAACP man to leave.
We delivered our final cut of White Dog on time, thanks to terrific work from our veteran editor, Bernie Gribble. Christa had the idea of asking Ennio Morricone to do the film score. Morricone had earned a worldwide reputation because of his music for Sergio Leone's movies. Paramount was resistant but finally allowed me to use him. His visceral, haunting music added just the right touch to the picture. Since then, Ennio has written many memorable scores, among them Roland Joffe's The Mission (1986), Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (1987), and Giuseppe Tornatore's Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1988).
To my amazement and consternation, rumors began to circulate that White Dog was a "racist" movie even before the picture had even been previewed in public. Paramount hadn't set a release date yet. Where the rumors came from was vague, but it was not unreasonable to suspect that Mr. Edwards, the NAACP spokesperson who'd never seen one frame of my picture, had something to do with it. A meeting was called at Paramount with studio heads Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg. As soon as I sat down in their conference room, they dropped the bomb. They were going to shelve my film. Releasing White Dog would risk an ugly controversy that wasn't worth the film's profit potential. In the most absurd twist of events I'd ever heard of, the studio was backing down from opening my picture because of rumors from people who'd never seen it. What's more, the rumors were ludicrous, pure horseshit. One comment that came back to us was that White Dog would incite race violence, inspiring madmen to train their own white dogs to attack black people.
It was 1982, Reagan was president, and the Republicans had the country's morality by the balls. Shelve the film without letting anyone see it? I was dumbfounded. It's difficult to express the hurt of having a finished film locked away in a vault, never to be screened for an audience. It's like someone putting your newborn baby in a goddamned maximum-security prison forever.
We used several white dogs on the production and an experienced trainer to make the violence feel real. To some, it was too real. White Dog changed the course of my career and my life.
It was little consolation that the movie was released later in Europe to rave reviews. A prominent Swedish critic wrote that "no one has used the color white in such a dramatically symbolic way since Herman Melville's Moby-Dick." It would be ten years before White Dog was shown in the States, but in art houses only.
Holy shit, if the chopping up of The Big Red One had put a few dents in my resolve to pursue moviemaking in Hollywood, then the lockup of White Dog had totally wrecked it! I was deeply hurt. The studio had used me as a scapegoat for their lack of determination and courage. White Dog was a thought-provoking movie exposing the stupidity and irrationality of racism in our society. Nothing more, nothing less.
I'd been offered a film in Paris and decided to take it. Moving to France for a while would alleviate some of the pain and doubt that I had to live with because of White Dog. It would be a relief to get away from the perversity and backbiting of Hollywood. Europeans seemed to respect their filmmakers as artists. You never had to fight for the final cut on your films. It was your prerogative.
We packed some clothes, Samantha's favorite toys, and my old Royal, leaving the Shack and all our furnishings in the care of some dependable tenants. When we flew to Paris in 1982, I never dreamed it would be the debut of a thirteen-year, self-imposed exile.
PART
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Still trying to capture emotion on film after all these years.
A Third Face
51
For me, coming back to Paris was full of good feelings. Seventeen years earlier, Christa and I had first met and fallen in love in the City of Light. For our daughter, Samantha, it would be an opportunity to expand cultural horizons. In the past, while working on movie projects in Europe, I had considered settling over there for good. Other American directorsJoseph Losey, Stanley Kubrick, Fred Zinnemann, Nicholas Ray-had made terrific pictures in Europe. John Huston had lived for a while in Ireland. Why couldn't I live out my days in France? There were still plenty of movies in me, weren't there? But holy shit, who was I bullshitting? Wasn't Paris really the beginning of the end? Deep down, the truth was inescapable. You can't hide anything from your third face.
See, you've got three faces. Your first face is the one you're born with, the one in the mirror every morning, a touch of your mama in those blue eyes, Papa's ruddy cheeks and thin lips, or maybe, like me, a set of crooked chops from an ancestor only some fake genealogist could identify. Your second face is the one you develop thanks to ego, ingenuity, and sensitivity, the one people identify as "you," laughing at punch lines, downcast when things aren't going well, exhilarated by passion and success, cold when confusion and fear set in, charming when seduction is part of the battle plan.
Then there's your third face. No one ever gets to see that one. It'll never show up in any mirror nor be visible to the eyes of parents, lovers, or friends. It's the face that no one knows but you. It's the real you. Always privy to your deepest fears, hopes, and desires, your third face can't lie or be lied to. I call it my mind mistress, guardian of my secret utopias, bitter disappointments, and noble visions.
Being back in Paris should have been an antidote for any residual bitterness about Hollywood. But I couldn't escape myself. I took my earlymorning walks, had my coffee, and read the Herald Tribune. I ended up strolling for long stretches along the banks of the Seine, my newspaper sticking out of the pocket of my trench coat, reflecting on my past and future. As I watched the murky waters of the river, I couldn't help thinking about White Dog, wishing I'd never set foot in Hollywood. I should've pursued my dream of becoming editor in chief of my own newspaper in some small town, writing articles, composing headlines, concocting crusading editorials. It seemed that I was shrinking into nothingness, unable to fulfill any of the dreams still bouncing around my mind. I was over seventy already. Would I have enough time to achieve anything significant?
Above: With director Wim Wenders, cameraman joe Birco, and actor Frederick Forrest on one of my quick actinggigs in the eighties, Hammet. Below: On the set of ' Slapstick with Jerry Lewis and Madeline Kahn
By taking refuge in my third face, I faced my anxiety straight on and got over the numbness. My third face was my own holy sanctuary. There, my crown was buried. It was a storage room that nobody but me could enter. I'd cultivated it like a secret shrine. There, I was my own spiritual and creative master. There, I put all my noble yearnings, all my naive dreams for a utopian world, all the yarns that weren't for sale.
Not finding a catchy name in psychology for the private me, I came up with "third face." It wasn't just a concept for me but a very real locale, captivating and whimsical, cozy and seductive, the geisha girl of my brain. I welcomed solitude because I wasn't really ever alone. Maybe I was an old fart, yet a helluva lot of dreams and desires were still knocking around deep down there. My third face always reinvigorated me. There was no chance of me drying up, no way I'd be running on empty.
Your third face remains a secret to even your dearest loved ones. It's what makes every person unique and unfathomable. One of life's inscrutable mysteries is why our innermost personality remains unknowable. Many people are sad to realize they'll never completely know anybody else, never "see" their third face. For me, the perpetuation of our secret selves is what makes life both survivable and glorious.
The offer to write and direct Thieves After Dark (1984) came about beca
use of a deal with French producer Jo Siritzky, who'd made a bundle distributing Shock Corridor in the sixties through his company, Parafrance. The project began with an ambitious young writer named Olivier Beer, who had wrangled an interview out of me in California then dropped off his book called Le Chant des Enfants Morts.' Olivier then convinced Siritzky to back a movie based on his book if I were attached as director. Olivier and I were to cowrite the screenplay. The yarn was about a young French couple who are out of work and dysfunctional, their lives turned upside down by the harsh realities of modern-day life.
My experiences cowriting with people like Hank Wales and Curtis Hanson were very positive. Those guys were professionals. It was soon obvious that Olivier, though an accomplished journalist and novelist, didn't know a damn thing about writing screenplays. With professionals, I never have a problem. There are compromises to make, story twists to hammer out, characters to interpret. There's only one goal that counts whatever the shortcuts you take, the arguments you have, or the rewrites you end up doing, and that's to make a damn good finished movie. Olivier would get credit as cowriter, but I got little help from him. Our relationship turned sour.
Christa, Samantha, and I were staying in a hotel in Montmartre on a little square called Place Charles Dullin. The Atelier Theatre, an illustrious place once run by the great French actor-director Louis Jouvet, was around the corner. Everything in the quarter-the old facades, uneven sidewalks, water trickling down the gutters, streetlamps, bakery aromas-was inspiring. It reminded me of the city I'd first discovered in 1945 after the end of the war, and the one I'd gotten to know pretty well in 1965 during the Flowers of'Evil project. I put the White Dog fiasco out of my mind and got back to moviemaking.
For my female lead, I sought out Isabelle Huppert, one of the most interesting actresses in France. Jo Siritzky was pushing for Veronique Jannot. She had just appeared on the cover of Paris Match because of her role in a popular French soap opera. I was okay with Veronique, as she was a strong actress, enthusiastic and lovely. For my male lead, I insisted on Bobby Di Cicco, who'd been with me on The Big Red One. We hired Victor Lanoux as a police inspector. Claude Chabrol did a walk-on as a personal favor. Siritzky hired Antoine Gannage to put together a great crew, notably the cameraman Philippe Rousselot and set decorator Dominique Andre. I insisted on Ennio Morricone for the musical score.
The shoot went quite well, except for the behind-the-scenes struggle between Jo, his nephew, Serge, and his sister, Nadja, for control of their family company. I stayed out of it. Jo Siritzky had been completely on the up-and-up with me, honoring our contract to the letter. Serge finally took over Parafrance, but it floundered and was eventually acquired by foreign investors. The movie business is damned chaotic.
Thieves After Dark was an official selection at the 1984 Berlin Film Festival. John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands were also in Germany that year to present Love Streams. Their beautiful movie won the Golden Bear, the festival's top prize. For my screening, Gena and John insisted on sitting next to Christa and me. There was a big crowd in the hall. Midway through the movie, some spectators started booing. I didn't give a damn, but John, sensitive to the situation, grabbed my arm, whispering that he loved my film. The night ended in a bar on some backstreet of Berlin eating herring, drinking beer, and telling hilarious stories about our humiliating, exhilarating business. Gena, John, Christa, and I laughed so hard our ribs hurt. I discussed making a picture about Dorothy Thompson with Gena, the one actress whom I thought had the balls to play the lady journalist. Gena loved the character, but it never came together.
Painful memories of the White Dog affair wouldn't go away. While I'd been cutting Thieves After Dark in Paris, we got word that NBC had refused to broadcast White Dog on prime-time television, calling the film "inappropriate." My yarn, inappropriate? Here's what's inappropriate: the goddamned way American racists have treated blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and everybody who wasn't as white as Shirley Temple. The NBC refusal came about the same time as the film was being released in Europe to good reviews. I took the nonsensical situation in my stride. What really mattered to me was my family's well-being. I focused on making a living for us in Paris.
We settled into a spacious, high-ceilinged apartment on rue de la Baume in the Eighth Arrondissement, a place that had belonged to the Duchess of Marlborough. The duchess had left the duke and married Jacques Balsan. His son, Humbert, a young actor who had become a formidable producer, sublet the apartment out to people in the movie business. Andrzej Wajda and his wife had lived there. So had Ismail Merchant and James Ivory. It was like residing in some bygone era, every room sporting a hilarious array of ostentatious divans, armoirs, statues, and fourposter beds. The place was drafty and hard to heat and the plumbing was lousy, but we felt right at home. The cobblestone courtyard, built for horses and carriages, was now jammed with Mercedes-Benzes and BMWs. I had a quiet study all to myself where I set up my Royal and happily started cooking up my yarns.
Only a short walk from our front door was Monceau Park, with its golden gates and beautiful flowers. Every morning, I took Samantha by the hand, walked her through the park, and delivered her to the front door of her new school, I;Ecole Bilingue. She assimilated just fine with the other children, picking up French quickly. Her schoolmates made a crack about her "grandfather" one day, the old guy who always walked her to school. Samantha told them proudly that the old guy was her daddy, and that was that.
My adventure novel, Quints World, retitled La Grande Melee, had come out in France, Germany, Portugal, and Spain, published by Christian Bourgois. Christian was respected, having done books by William Burroughs and Susan Sontag, too. Reviews of Thieves After Dark were mixed. To the French, I represented the quintessential American director. Making a French movie about a domestic problem like unemployment had thrown them off balance.
Good or bad, I was getting a helluva lot of attention in Paris, with invi tations arriving regularly, the telephone ringing at all hours of the day and night with somebody asking us to attend their gallery opening, dinner party, or film festival. Thank God Christa shielded me from all that stuff so that I could concentrate on my writing. The one person I wished I could've seen more of was Francois Truffaut. I even dreamed of collaborating with Francois on a picture. I'd cherished the few times he'd visited with us in Los Angeles. Full of respect and camaraderie, Truffaut was a delightful guy, yet there was always a little melancholy in his eyes and in his voice. Once we were talking about fame and the strange tricks it plays.
"Most people in America," said Truffaut, "know about me because of that crazy scientist I played in Spielberg's Close Encounters, not because of my own films."
The sad reality was that few Americans recognized the remarkable films the French had been producing all along, from Renoir to Pagnol, from Rene Clair to Jean-Pierre Melville, from Marcel Carne to Truffaut. At the same time, French filmgoers were familiar with every genre of American film. It was out of kilter. Living in Paris, I could feel the undercurrent of animosity toward Americans, especially those in the film business, whetted by admiration, jealousy, and box-office competition. I didn't like the inequity of the situation either, but hell if I was going to let myself be a scapegoat in some transatlantic movie-business rivalry.
With Alain Robbe-Grillet, novelist, screenwriter, and director, who won a Golden Lion in Venice (with Alain Resnais) for Last Year at Marienbad (L'annee Derniere a Marienbad, 1961). French intellectuals were a conflicted group, but affable toward me. I have no idea why.
Not long after we'd settled in Paris, we got the shocking news that Truffaut had a fatal brain tumor. He died in 1984, only fifty-two years old. For me, the saddest part was that, for a man who loved children so much, Francois would never see his new daughter, Josephine, grow up. I actually felt guilty being twenty years older, still kicking, living in his hometown, able to share in the joy of watching my Samantha bloom.
Christa and I went to Truffaut's funeral. Jack Lang, minister of cultur
e at the time, gave a stirring eulogy. After the service, we walked quietly through the Pere-Lachaise cemetery looking at all the tombstones of the great artists who were buried there. I hadn't known Francois that well, but I felt a deep sense of loss about his untimely death. He left me a warm souvenir of friendship, and he left all of us a wonderful legacy of films.
In June 1984, the fortieth anniversary of D day, the popular left-wing paper Liberation wanted to do an article about my memories of landing on Omaha Beach with the Big Red One. About thirty thousand American veterans had come over for the commemorative ceremonies. We saw President Mitterrand and President Reagan along with other heads of state and royalty, from Queen Elizabeth and Maggie Thatcher of England to Pierre Elliott Trudeau of Canada. Along with the multitude of tourists were an army of salesmen hawking war memorabilia.