Period: Home for the Holidays 1995-96
Date: November, 1995We hooked up at the Skywalker Ranch, George Lucas's film compound in Northern California, while we were finishing the sound mix on Home for the Holidays, the film Holly stars in and I direct. We chose a stretch of grape arbors overlooking a duck pond, the perfect picture-book setting for Lucy's first adventure in heeling. There we were - two chicks and a bitch, sitting around talking discipline.
JF: Did you ever have dogs?
HH: I've never had a dog on my own as an adult, but I grew up with an infinite number of dogs. Hound dogs, weimaraners, setters, Dobermans, rottweilers. We had millions of dogs.
JF: Did you train them?
HH: No.
JF: They just ran wild and crazy?
HH: Some of those dogs were really intelligent. This German shepherd-Doberman we had was unbelievably sharp, and so were all the weimaraners. We trained them to hunt, but you don't have to do a whole lot to train them. They know so much by instinct, like how to flesh out a quail, for example.
JF: Are you kidding?
HH: When they're little puppies - thirteen weeks or so - they're pointing already. You know, they see a bird over there, they're pointing.
JF: Oh, they'll put one leg up?
HH: Yeah. Be really still and put their noses out. But we never trained our dogs like you're training Lucy. It's so elegant, so dignified, to see this dog that is so well-trained.
JF: I think dogs enjoy it because they know they have boundaries and when it's appropriate to be wild and crazy. I've been training Lucy to run to all the bases at the softball field, but now she cheats. When I get to third base, she knows that I'm going to run home so she just goes from second to the end, so that she'll beat me.
HH: [laughs] I think all this training gives a vocabulary to the relationship you have with her; it will just become more defined.
JF: I've been wanting to train a dog for years, but I wanted to make sure that I had enough time to really be there, to be able to do it right.
HH: Did you have a dog when you were young?
JF: I had a tiny Yorkshire terrier that I lost. It was when the car arrived to take me to the Cannes Film Festival in 1976. He heard the driver at the door and I think he was scared - he was yapping and yapping. He was kind of looking at me and he flew down the stairs and banged into a wall.
HH: And died?
JF: And died. He was in convulsions, blood squirting out everywhere. I locked myself in the bathroom and wouldn't come out. I freaked out.
HH: How old were you?
JF: About thirteen. I got on the plane and my mom said, "We'll get another dog." I said, "I don't want another dog." [pause] At Cannes, we ended up winning the Palme d'Or for Taxi Driver, and I decided that, to be successful, I'd had to give up the only thing in my live that I loved and watch it die in my arms. For the rest of my live I would be completely unhappy and sad. [laughs] Like, it was a bargain with the devil! For a while, I didn't want to be successful, because of that. I would never mention it. It became a ritual.
HH: Like a sacred covenant.
JF: Yes. See, It's actually kind of big deal for me to get my own dog. In fact, this whole last year has felt so charmed. And, of course, Holly, there's been Home for the Holidays, the movie that we've done. So, has it been a charmed year for you, too?
HH: Well, I've found that the people I've enjoyed working with the most are people who have taken it on themselves to take possession of a movie when they make it. When I signed on to do this movie with you, it seemed there was no particular formula you had in mind; it was about seeing how fully you could create it, and then whatever would come would come later. To me, that seemed to be the way that it was with the Coen brothers on Raising Arizona [1987], too, and even with Jim [James L. Brooks] on Broadcast News [1987]. Even though Broadcast News was a bigger, more commercial kind of movie. Jim definitely conceives his films that way, so you don't know exactly ho it's going to end up. There's always that unknown answer, so no one involved in making it ever feels they're in a gun-for-hire situation. I I were going to direct, that's what I would want to do. Those more spontaneous kind of movies are the kinds that I like to see. I do like to see more commercial movies, too, but it's not like I feel we need more of them.
JF: I know. There's this whole tendency these days to talk about a movie in terms of how much it made in the first weekend. I sometimes think people think of the entire film industry as a bunch of people looking for mechandising opportunities.
HH: I'm not that way. I think it's really odd, too, that the public is so privy to how much money the actors make and what the movie cost. It seems to me to be beside the point. When I go to a movie I really don't want to think about the money. I want to see the story.
JF: I feel the money part is permeating everything. Either that, or I'm just becoming more and more sensitive about it. There's also the photo-shot thing, the image thing, where the public now opens a magazine and says, "Hey, she's wearing whatever lingerie. That photographer - that's the one who did that great book on Ethiopia!" It just feels like everybody is experiencing movies through image and not through content anymore.
HH: It's the same with people knowing absolutely everything there is to know about an actor. I actually think the more personal information you have about an actor, the more you have to carve out for yourself when you go to a movie and see them in it. More and more movies have been pressured to allow reporters and TV cameras to come onto the set while you're working, and I find that a real violation. Acting, for me, is the last vestige of doing something that I would like to feel really naive about, and I like to feel very protected when I'm doing it. It's an arena where you may not know what the answers are, may not know what a scene is about when you're doing it. It's a creative place and it's too private, too personal, to be violated.
JF: The bigger the movie you made, the harder that gets to protect.
HH: Yeah, but I've always managed to protect that, to keep it as a very special place for me.
JF: Do you want to direct?
HH: I don't know. I'm asked that all the time. The main thing you need to direct is a story that you can personally commit to and I don't have a story yet that I feel that way about, that makes me feel like I want to be the person responsible for it.
JF: That makes you feel, "I have a voice that's more appropriate than anyone else's for this subject -"
HH: And I want to be the one to-bring it to the screen.
JF: That's very much in the auteur spirit. I just don't know how directors can agree to do a movie that is about martians or cars. I mean, what do I know about martians? To make a decision on a movie requires commitment, and it requires authorship. The reason I did Little Man Tate [1991] was because I had been obsessed with J. D. Salinger's short stories for a long time and wanted to deal with the whiz-kid phenomenon, which Salinger explores with the Glass family in Franny and Zooey.
HH: Where you happy with the way Little Man Tate turned out?
JF: I think it's a good first movie but it wasn't spontaneous enough. There probably should have been a lot more messy stuff in that movie than I was willing to allow. I think I was too controlling. Because it's told from the perspective of a little boy who's trying to organize his thoughts and his life, it ended up being schematic.
HH: If there's a crack, that would be the easiest one for that movie to fall into. Probably the most forgivable one, though, because the boy is so intelligent, and intelligence has a sensible order about it. Also, the Dianne Wiest character was so anal. I didn't think it was such a bad thing that it was so controlled, because you were dealing with a controlled environment.
JF: The movie assumed Fred Tate's tone - which is so careful and precise and spare - because he's in every scene. What's interseting about Home for the Holidays, our movie, is that there's so many different points of view. It's not just your character's, Claudia's, story - the points of view shift as each new character arrives home for Thanksgiving. You have Adele and Henry's world [Claudia's parents, played by Anne Bancroft and Charles Durning], and then you have Tommy's and Joanne's worlds [Tommy is Claudia's gay brother, played by Robert Downey, Jr., and Joanne is their married sister, played by Cynthia Stevenson). The tone shifts all over the place, and somehow the chaos is managed, but it's still about Chaos.
When you direct a movie, every character has to be some part of your personality. It was so obvious to me that Claudia, Joanne, and Tommy are three different parts of me. So you unconsciously orchestrate that and show how they fight with each other and resolve things. Oh, what about that reshoot of the scene we did with Cynthia?
HH It really helps the movie.
JF: It's an incredible moment. [After a disastrous Thanksgiving diner in Home for the Holidays, Joanne insults Claudia and Tommy and goes home with her husband and children. Then Claudia comes to confront Joanne while she's working out.] People were having a hard time accepting that Joanne was so unrelenting in never having a regret about the way that she treats Claudia. But now she has a moment where she gets off her StairMaster and starts to cry but changes her mind and then gets back on the StairMaster and carries on walking. It's so sad.
HH: Did you see Smoke?
JF: No.
HH: Oh, you have to see it. There's one character in it who's extraordinary unrelenting. But she's onscreen for just a short period of time. You're not ready for her to have any kind of regret or any kind of reflective moment of wishing for something more for herself. You really just want to see her two-dimensional, just one big color that's full of rage, hatred, and resentment. And that's what she is. But then she does have a moment of regret and it's so affecting. With Joanne in Home for the Holidays, you're really ready for that kind of moment after having seen so much of her life.
JF: Yeah, I think you can accept the fact that people don't change, but you need to see a glimmer of them wishing they could.
HH: Well, people do do that, even if it's sentimental. Actually, that's what I see the most. People who are really blind to their lives will have this big sentimental, dramatic moment where they wished that their life could be different. They wish that they could change this one part of themselves. Often it's accompanied by alcohol or whatever.
JF: As an actor, I often play characters who are brave about things that I'm just not good about in my life. In a weird way, if I can spend six months doing that in my role, maybe I can even attempt it in my own life. I just don't think I'm a very emotional or brave person, but I attempt to play characters that are. The woman in Sommersby [1993] was a big character for me because that movie brought up an interesting issue - how do people manage to deceive themselves? Because if you deceive yourself, you live a much riskier life. Sometimes, in order to cope, people will unconsciously create scenarios for themselves so that they can survive intact. People will lie to themselves a little bit, say, to keep a long-term relationship going, so they have the will to continue in it. You know, the guy you're with, you hate these ten things that he does, some of which feed right into some part of yourself that you're totally ashamed of. To go through with that, you might have to say to yourself, "Well, maybe he'll change."
HH: I really admire people who are extraordinarily tolerant and patient. But it's possible to confuse tolerance and patience with shameful compromise, where you're letting something happen that's a violation of yourself, where you're deceiving yourself and saying, "I will put up with this, because, hey, we're all human and I understand."
JF: It's such a luxury to be able to work that out in a therapeutic way in certain roles. Otherwise, standing on a movie set in someone else's clothes with a bunch of people putting compresses on your face is not that interesting to me. I have to have this huge monologue or dialogue about what I'm doing in a movie or I just don't know why I'm doing it. I've no idea why it's becoming harder and harder for me to find movies that fit into that category now.
HH: Do you think that it has to do with the fact that you're directing now and that is fulfilling?
JF: Yes, it is fulfilling. But there is something great about performance and about not just talking about something but actually doing it and making it physical and visceral. Tell me about this movie Crash that you're doing next.
HH: It's based on the J. G. Ballard novel and it's about these characters who experience violent acts and eroticize them instead of being victimized by them. They use them as a kind of sexual outlet. I think it's interesting because normally we perceive violent situations as being diminishing or crippling, and with these people, that's not even an option. Scars and wounds and braces and wheelchairs are vehicles that enable them to perceive the world in a much more erotic way than they've done before. I've just finished the book called Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist. Bob Flanagan is this guy who has cystic fibrosis. As an infant, he had all this incredibly traumatic, painful stuff done to him by doctors, but he just took comfort in the pain. Then he eroticized the comfort and made it a way of life. In fact, he turned it into performance art.
JF: As a kind of therapy, in a way?
HH: Yeah, it was a healing thing. That's the extreme example that I've stumbled on in reading around the subject of Crash. A lot of Ballard's stuff is about redefining eroticism.
JF: Talking about a film like this makes me realize I won't take a role unless I already have some kind of interest in the subject. It's always something that, for some reason, has been working on me.
HH: And then a movie comes along.... Yeah, I've had that happen a lot, too. That's one of the reasons why you found Home for the Holidays.
JF: It's a weird thing when you stumble on something. Even though it may be a mess, you somehow know that for the next two years of your life, you're going to be obessed with it. [to Lucy]Come here, come here.... Are you going to leave those people with the chocolate cake alone?
You know, she's not like other dogs. I took her to the beach and she saw other dogs there and played with them for a while, but when I said , "Come on, let's go," she did.
HH: She's become pretty attached to you.
JF: [to Lucy] Come, come Lucy. Bring your stick. [Lucy barks] Training a dog is a bit like being a director. Good directors tell you where you're heading, and they encourage you to fly and you figure out how to get there. But if someone's flailing in the wind and improvising all over the place, that makes everything unstable and you have to call them to heel. Ah, philosophy....
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