“I WANTED YOU TO know,” Peter Istvakson said one evening at Cyrano’s Last Night before the movie started production, “publicity is planning to advertise our film as being ‘based on a true story.’” He set out a mock-up of the poster. The title of the movie was apparently Next Life. “You haven’t even started making this movie and there’s already a poster?” I said.
“No final decision’s been made,” he said. “I have final approval.”
In conversations leading up to principal photography—the first day of actual film production—Istvakson used certain pet phrases, and besides making me cringe, these phrases struck me as being encoded: they sounded one way but meant something else, and they seemed to have a deep hostility toward language itself. I suppose they were the standard-issue currency of the movie business, since finally these phrases conveyed nothing. My favorite example of this, which I wrote down in a notebook, was “It’s not a yes but it’s not a no.” He said that one a lot. At various times it applied to (1) whether the recently famous Canadian actress Emily Kalman had accepted the role of Elizabeth (she had); (2) whether Next Life Might Be Kinder would be the title (no); (3) whether Matsuo Akutagawa, who had won international awards, would sign on to work with Istvakson again as cinematographer or remain in a rest hospital on the Sea of Japan (he did sign on); and (4) whether I would, as I had requested, be granted leave of my contractual obligation to “provide additional dialogue upon request” (an attorney got me out of that).
“What ‘based on a true story’ means,” Istvakson said, “is my film will tell what really happened, only better.”