OUT OF THE NOW
Duncan was wedged in economy — Thanks for the downgrade, Uffy! — between a young guy in a grey UC Davis hoodie and a fifty-something woman in the aisle seat. The guy was already slouched and turned toward the window, hood pulled over his bulky headphones. But the woman, biting her cuticles and smiling at every flight attendant who passed, she had TALKER written all over her.
She gasped, once, twice, as if about to plunge into icy water, and said, ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Italy.’
They hadn’t even started to taxi.
Duncan looked around, hoping for someone across the aisle — another lonely soul spoiling for conversation, a sucker with a surfeit of empathy, anyone who’d take her off his hands — but no one would meet his eyes.
‘My husband,’ she continued, gasping again, looking at her hands, ‘doesn’t travel.’ She turned to him and gave a guilty smile. She was faintly freckled, springy haired, but her face was puffy, lumpen. A terrible word, but he’d thought it. Had she been crying? She reminded him of someone. Lea Thompson, maybe, when she was made-up to look thirty years older in Back to the Future? Was this unkind? Lea Thompson, at least, had aged much better in real life.
‘He doesn’t travel, but you know what? Now, I do travel. Italy!’ She groaned and clutched the end of each armrest.
‘Well,’ he said, unable to hold his silence any longer, ‘I’m sure you’ll have a wonderful time.’
And she was off: explaining her itinerary (Rome, Amalfi Coast, Florence, Cinque Terre, Venice), how her husband had proposed to her (a new vanity plate on his Mustang that read PANDY, a merger of their names, long before people caught the Brangelina bug), and every joy and disappointment of life as a wife, mother and part-time realtor in Fresno.
When at last they were in the air and the seatbelt sign had been switched off, he retrieved his satchel — a semi-conscious echo of Motta — and got out his laptop.
‘Work,’ he said, making a What can you do? expression with face and hands.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course. And maybe later you’ll tell me about your family.’ She nodded at the ring on his finger. It was something he never did, look for a ring on other people. Was it a generational thing? A guy/girl thing? Was she coming on to him?
He clicked to open a file of notes he’d prepared long before he’d known what type of job Motta would give him, when it was still a pipe dream. Over the keyboard he unfolded a paper version of the final itinerary from Uffy. It was eight pages thick, printed on both sides in small type. He’d tried to rework his notes before he left, tease out what was now important. But those three days between the offer and his departure had been so intense, and with the itinerary seeming to shift by the hour, his cut-and-pastes from biographies of Saint Joseph of Copertino and critical assessments of Motta’s oeuvre had been impenetrable, another kind of commotion when what he needed was silence, calm. All he had was that unshakeable scene: Joseph’s death in Osimo, as vivid as if he’d seen it in one of Motta’s earlier movies, pored over it two dozen times, dissected it and put it back together. But what good was two minutes of certainty when another ninety remained in complete darkness? And now, en route to Rome, he felt the eyes of the woman in the aisle seat on him and his screen.
He brought up another document from his research folder, a selection of quotations from Motta that pertained, in some way, to his passion project.
My next film will be a little different. Hester had a spiritual dimension, but I want to really delve into that. Wallow in it. [laughs]
[Playboy, 1982]
It’s called The Mystic.
[Entertainment Weekly, 1984]
It’s called Tirami Sù.
[New York Times, 1986]
You’ve got to take risks. You’ve got to attempt something difficult, something that hasn’t been done before. But, and this is the most important thing, you’ve got to stick the landing.
[Variety, 1989]
It was hard to reconcile this Motta, the one Duncan thought he’d known from his soundbites and cinematography, with the man he’d encountered at Sforza’s on Saturday night. Each time he recalled their conversation, the director’s words shifted and blurred. When he tried to pin down a statement, his hands passed through it like smoke.
It didn’t help that so much had passed since their encounter. The torrent of emails from Uffy on Sunday afternoon, the meetings Monday and Tuesday with everyone but Motta, each time being promised a copy of the script for Giuseppe — as the project was now called — at the next meeting, only to receive another volley of excuses and revised non-disclosure agreements for his signature. He still didn’t have a script when he checked in at LAX late Wednesday morning. He’d lingered outside the security check, waiting for a runner bearing a thick brown envelope.
A runner that never came.
He was scriptless but not completely in the dark. Uffy’s itinerary, this final version, mapped out every hotel check-in time and local specialist’s cellphone number he’d need for the next fifteen days. Every nave in every church that he needed to capture, logging its qualities — the light, the reverb, the birdsong through the stained glass — so that Motta’s team could construct its likeness in Mexico or on the screens of FX maestros in Mapo-gu or Miramar.
Motta had an audience with Pope Francis on the morning of the seventh of June and in the afternoon it would be Duncan’s turn to impress the director. Talk about a hard act to follow. And, not having seen Motta since that night in Sforza’s, Duncan had to complete his metamorphosis — retromorphosis? — from Assistant Manager to Serious Filmmaker. Not only produce great content — his lookbook, his insight into the places Saint Joseph lived and levitated — but present himself as indispensable from then on out. One of the smart people Motta liked to surround himself with. Maybe that was the easy part. He had to get the content first.
He’d never scouted locations, not properly. Curio Bay fell into his lap. Fury’s Reach was set on a spaceship and even then he’d had a team of professionals tee up the handful of on-world locations for flashbacks or dream sequences. What would one of these proper scouts think about his good fortune? An amateur being sent in a professional’s stead. Maybe he was digging himself deeper yet again. His next Fury’s Reach. A gift horse brimming with explosives. If only he’d given it the most cursory dental inspection. But no, he’d jumped in, headlong, again. The guild of location scouts, if such a thing existed, would rise up against him. Refuse to work on any of his future projects. Fuck them. He’d scout his own locations. How hard could it be? His path to success would have its detours, including this recent off-road stretch — unconventional all the way! — but he’d persist. He was persisting. Was working for Frank Motta. He’d take the best measurements, the greatest photos; his light readings would be terrific. The best. And what about how a piazza or a monastic cell made him feel? How much scope was there for him to shape the scenes that took place in each of his locations? Could he call them his locations? There must be some way to carve out a continuing role on the project. A way to prove his worth. His indispensability.
He had fourteen days until he saw Motta in the Vatican.
Fourteen days to find it.
It’s called The man who could fly.
[MovieMaker, 1991]
It’s called Yonder flies your saint.
[At Venice Film Festival, 1993]
—I can move things with my mind. Oh, totally. Telekinesis. Yeah! You don’t believe me. I’ll show you.
—Maybe after the show, Frank.
[The Late Show with David Letterman, 1995]
‘TK!’ the woman said, her face so close to his screen that her cheek almost brushed his upper arm.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Telekinesis. Are you a writer?’
‘No.’
She pursed her lips, trying to decide if he was joking. ‘My yoga instructor,’ she said, ‘he gave me this book. It’s really mind-opening stuff.’
‘I work in film,’ he said, as if answering her initial question would shut her up. As if working in film and opening your mind were mutually exclusive, which in Hollywood might even be the case.
‘So much of what we think is impossible can be achieved,’ she said. ‘I met this woman in class who’d been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. It’s often curable but they found it late. The doctors were pessimistic, so she beat it herself. With her thoughts.’
He was out of ways to stop her talking. Maybe there was a safe word, as if she were a dominatrix or a police dog? It was wrong to think about her in this way. She was just excited. Just scared. They weren’t so different. Maybe if he just said her name, like in Rumpelstiltskin? Had she said it? He remembered the licence plate, PANDY. Had she said her husband’s name? Her kids’? He hadn’t listened well enough. She could be Paula or Pauline or Patricia and her husband Randy or Andy. Or he could be Paul or Patrick and she was Mandy or Sandy. And would she go by Amanda or Sandra these days? Was her boarding pass visible? Her name on her luggage?
She was still talking. ‘You know we only use ten percent of our brain’s capacity.’
‘That’s a myth,’ Duncan said, trying a confrontational tack.
‘Maybe it’s twenty percent.’
‘Even if that was true, which it isn’t, who’s to say it’s not just, like, extra storage? Like, your phone has 32 gigs of memory and you’re only using eight. Does that make your phone more powerful than you give it credit for, or does it mean you can just store a lot more photos of your cat?’
She looked excited. ‘And what about the mind? Where do you think that resides?’
He tugged at the short hairs of his beard with both hands, as if he could pull the rest of his face with them, rip it clean off. Jesus. Would he be having conversations like this at every stop on his itinerary? Maybe it was good practice for how to shut down the claptrap so he could get on with the job, take his photos and hightail out of there.
She was looking at him, waiting for an answer.
‘If the brain is like my phone, the mind is the internet,’ he said, then added, ‘maybe,’ lest it sound as if he’d thought about this before, as if he enjoyed such conversations.
‘Go on.’
He sighed. ‘I need my brain to access my mind, but my mind is bigger.’
‘Yes,’ Paula or Mandy or Sandra said. ‘Yes!’
‘And when you’re on a plane,’ he said, wanting to add Or you’re a new age yoga nut but stopped himself, ‘you’ve got to switch off the connection and just live within your device.’
‘Eat the food, watch the movie.’
‘Go into hibernation.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Exactly,’ he said, put his earbuds in and closed his eyes.
I give a lot of interviews but I’m no extrovert.
I just make a lot of movies.
[Salon, 1999]
If I couldn’t make pictures anymore, I’d be a house builder.
[Charlie Rose, 1999]
If I couldn’t direct anymore, I’d get piano lessons.
[At Hong Kong International Film Festival, 2000]
If I wasn’t doing this, I’d be back in New York, fixing stiletto heels.
[At the British Film Institute, 2002]
Kari’s reactions when she first heard Motta had offered Duncan a trip to Italy, in chronological order:
1.) Reserved.
2.) Restrained.
3.) Resigned.
The three Rs of marriage. Although, to be fair:
1.) He had just woken her up.
2.) The celebratory Sambuca shots he’d shared with Vilma were probably still on his breath.
3.) They hadn’t yet had a chance to discuss the incident with the Chromecast.
4.) Duncan’s good news meant she’d have to look after Zeb on her own for a fortnight after having him and her parents to share the load that last week.
But think of the big picture! No more Sforza’s. ‘If I do a good job in Italy,’ he’d said, getting animated, ‘who knows where it’ll lead? I could be a special consultant during the shoot in Mexico. Maybe even manage the second unit. Direct all the crowd scenes, the landscape stuff, even if I am trying to make the Yucatán look like a half-dozen different parts of Italy. Even if Frank Motta is a bit of a bastard and his passion project is more than a little out there — a levitating friar! — this is my chance at redemption.’
In the morning, Kari still seemed stuck on the three Rs.
He rang Mack in search of a reaction more akin to his own excitement, and found it. She particularly liked the timing. She had a two-week gap between DoTA tournaments. Wouldn’t it be cool to get together, road trip around Italy on Echo Park’s dime? Why the heck not, right? Every fibre of Duncan’s being said this was a BAD IDEA — not because there was a chance of anything romantic between the two of them; no, Mack had plenty of other ways to make things complicated without bringing sex into it — but he was still giddy from his Motta plan having kinda sorta worked, so he didn’t stamp out the idea then and there. And so it came to pass: Mack was arriving from the Baltics a day after Duncan.
Mack the jetsetter.
Mack the minor celebrity.
He still wasn’t used to it. Still couldn’t shake the image of her as a shut-in.
You’re being criticized against the fashion of the day. But fashions change. Who’s to say what will last and what will resonate with your children or their children? My job, each and every time, is to cast out a boat that will float regardless of the tide.
[Interview Magazine, 2003]
We’re back to calling it Tirami Sù. The saga continues! [laughs] It translates as, ‘Lift me up’. I wasn’t sold on the title when David Birkett first proposed it. I couldn’t get over the dessert. For one, I don’t drink coffee. If you don’t have the energy to get through a day without caffeine, you’re in the wrong job. But then, as time went by, I kept coming back to this idea of being uplifted. How the film will layer these elements, despair, spiritual dryness, faith, ecstasy, the miraculous, and the result will be, must be, uplifting.
[At Sundance, 2003]
I wish I’d made Groundhog Day. Sure, I could have said something old and foreign and revered. There are dozens, literally dozens, of those films I’d like to have made, too. But Groundhog Day. It’s masterfully put together. That sequence where Bill Murray commits suicide three times in thirty seconds. Toaster in the bath, delivery truck, swan dive from the bell tower. The film goes dark. So dark. But the music, it’s kinda hammy. It helps us read it all as cinema. Look at the way Murray pulses his hands as the truck’s about to hit him and there are these two notes, perfectly in time, straight out of the shower scene in Psycho. What came first: the hand movements or the music? Neither! Neither, it’s happening all together. It’s cinema. You can tell I’ve really thought about this, right? It’s an incredibly spiritual film. Buddhists, Catholics, lots of people have found what they’re looking for in that picture.
[The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, 2005]
Dinner was served ninety minutes into the flight.
‘Gotta feed the machine, right,’ the travelling half of PANDY said, nudging him with her elbow.
The kid in the window seat tore off the tinfoil and started shovelling the beef with pizzaiola sauce into his mouth, headphones still on, hood still up. To him, Duncan was as big a risk as Mrs Pandy. What are you studying? Why are students from UC Davis called Aggies? What are you listening to? What’s your favourite movie? Not that he’d ask those questions, but he had to concede he looked like he might. He was thirty-two. Had spent the last two years taking college-aged kids with parental-hope-dashing aspirations under his wing, playing good cop to Cindy’s bad cop. But he hadn’t really thought about how the servers saw him, beyond hating him for not making his move on Motta sooner. Was Lawson sniggering behind that unwitting farmboy front? Was that his way of putting his headphones on and hood up and ploughing through his shift with as little effort as possible? What about Vilma? Surely not. She was the only one he could count on being real.
After that night with Motta, she’d started sending him WhatsApp messages, each a new theory to explain away Saint Joseph’s levitations.
Sunday:
It was hypnosis, right?!
PS did you know there’s a levitation emoji?
Looks more like Michael Jackson in the Smooth Criminal video to me.
Monday:
A monk’s habit DOES seem well suited to concealing cables or steel supports … HT Lawson.
And what about big ass magnets and the diamagnetic properties of water? (look it up) Maybe St Joe took a big drink beforehand? Or swallowed a chunk of Bismuth? LOOK IT UP!
Tuesday:
So scientists were levitating nano-objects ten years ago using the Casimir force (here’s a link, lazybones). Maybe Joe stumbled on the same thing slightly (!) earlier??
Wednesday, as he headed to LAX:
Crystals! Or, y’know, the existence of a force which belongs to a non-material reality but manifests itself in the material world.
She was — what? He took a deep breath, felt himself getting lighter in his seat, imagined lifting off, just an inch, restrained only by his belt.
‘My husband wouldn’t eat this,’ Mrs Pandy was saying.
Over her words and the constant swoosh of the engines and A/C, he could make out a tinny beat from the Aggie’s headphones. Kanye? Kendrick? The new Lil Yachty? Oh God, he really did want to ask what the kid was listening to.
I think about what that film [Tirami Sù] would have been if I’d actually made it in ’82 or ’83, whenever Jim [Sattler] and I finished the first attempt at a script. I think about it and I thank God. I’ll make it one day. When the script is there, when I can do justice to the project.
[The Movie Times, 2006]
The language of cinema is the language of dreams. Most seem to have forgotten this.
[Essay, ‘The Dreamer’s Art’, in the New York Review of Books, 2007]
I think about death a lot. [laughs] I do. Not in a morbid way, at least I don’t think it is. When you make a picture, you try and capture the essential parts and leave off before you go too far. I like to leave my characters with a couple things left to do. Is death the end of everything, or just the end of the picture?
[At Tribeca Film Festival, 2007]
‘You’ll find time to Skype with Zeb,’ Kari had said as they cleaned up after breakfast on Tuesday, ‘won’t you?’
He hadn’t asked why she’d said Zeb, not her and Zeb, just replied, ‘Of course.’
‘What’s the time difference?’
‘They are nine hours ahead of us.’
‘So that means …’
They both looked off into space, calculating. Zeb was in the living room, watching as Jafar sent the thief Gazeem into the Cave of Wonders — a scene that had scared Duncan when he was twice Zeb’s age, but his son never flinched.
‘Mornings are best, maybe?’ Duncan said. ‘Like, maybe now, which would be about dinnertime in Italy?’
‘They eat later over there.’
‘Even better. I can Skype you and Zeb from my hotel room.’
‘Not every day.’
‘I could probably manage it.’
‘I mean, for Zeb. He might want — well, maybe he doesn’t need reminding every day that you’re not here.’
‘So you think I’ll just slip his mind?’
‘No, obviously, he’ll miss you. He’ll ask for you every five minutes.’
They both were silent, considering how this might have been true even a month ago. But now? Would Zeb say anything at all? Would he just accept it, the way he accepted Gazeem being swallowed by the sand when the Cave of Wonders collapsed and disappeared?
‘I’ll let you be the judge,’ Duncan said.
‘And Mack will be with you,’ Kari said.
‘It’ll be good to have an excuse to spend some time away from her.’
Kari made a face and leaned down to set the dishwasher.
‘I forget you don’t really know her,’ Duncan said. ‘You don’t need to be worried.’
‘I’m more worried about the girlfriend that fits into the palm of your hand.’
‘Huh? Oh.’ He looked down at his phone. ‘Listen—’
‘You ever wonder why Mack is the friend who came back into your life?’
‘No. I mean—’ He scratched his cheek. ‘No.’
‘Could you ever see yourself contacting an old friend out of the blue, like she did with you?’
‘I’ve sent a few friend requests in my time.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘She wanted to give me grief about Fury’s Reach. That’s how she is. That’s how we are, together. She brings me down to her level pretty quick.’
‘If you say so.’
‘So you think I’m pretending I’ll have a miserable time for your benefit?’
‘No, I think you really believe you’ll have a miserable time, in Italy, with your friend, on the road for two whole weeks.’
‘It’s work, though. First and foremost.’
‘How much are they paying you?’
‘It’s complicated.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Expenses are covered. There’s a per diem.’
‘But you can’t go back to Sforza’s afterward.’
‘I’m sure I could. But I didn’t have enough leave for them to hold my job. Corporate Policy. Revolving door. You know how it is in hospitality. And anyway, weren’t you the one who didn’t want me working there in the first place?’
‘That was two years ago, Duncan. You’re telling me circumstances haven’t changed?’
Had they? Was she pregnant again? Or was she referring to Zeb’s condition? Had they started calling it a ‘condition’? Perhaps she had stopped believing in him as a filmmaker.
‘Come on, Zebbie,’ she shouted. ‘I’m pausing your movie and you can watch again after daycare. Daddy’s picking you up today.’
No ‘Aw, Mom.’
No tears.
Zeb got up, switched the TV off at the set and went into the hall to put on his shoes. That was new. Duncan and Kari looked at each other.
‘What you lose on the swings,’ he said.
‘Two steps forward,’ she said.
There’s a connection between religious miracles and magic. What we call magic now — stage performers, cutting a lady in half, all that — is highly, highly cynical. But what if the artistry was shackled to something else? I liked Chris Nolan’s film, The Prestige. The way there was more to the magic. It was blood and flesh and electricity. Kooky, sure. But what if we didn’t need Nikola Tesla to make real magic?
[Deadline, 2009]
Someone once wrote that my films demonstrated exceptional ambition and adequate talent. I’ll take that. And I’ll take this. Bless you. Thank you.
[Acceptance of Directors Guild of America Lifetime Achievement Award, 2009]
‘So, Mr Film,’ Mrs Pandy said, once the meal trays had been removed and the lighting lowered for the sleeping portion of the flight, ‘any recommendations?’ The screen on the headrest in front of her displayed the different categories.
‘I haven’t been through them yet,’ he said.
‘Anything I should look out for?’
‘I mostly watch kids’ movies at the moment.’
‘Like Pixar?’
‘Disne—’ He stopped himself, knowing if she fired up Aladdin he’d have to bring the plane down. ‘Yes, Pixar. But maybe there’s a travel show about Italy?’
‘I guess,’ she said, a kind of disappointment in her manner that could have been put on, could have been real. Maybe all she wanted was to blow him in the toilets? No, that was his own sludgy reservoir of porn talking. He put the tips of two fingers into the soft flesh under his chin and blew his stupid brains out.
I was complaining the other day about this culture where everything is immediate and then discarded. It has absolutely infiltrated Hollywood. They’re remaking Spiderman? Why in the name of all that is holy are they remaking Spiderman? Then someone pointed out I was onto my fourth wife and I had to shut up pretty quick.
[The Playlist, 2011]
I’ve no problem with using visual effects. I’ll lie to your face, I don’t care. So long as you believe me.
[The Making of: Running Mates, 2011]
Sometimes I think I’d like to make a film for $10,000. Me, a couple of friends and whatever equipment I can carry. Then I think that’s the best way to ruin a friendship.
[Screendaily.com, 2012]
Tuesday afternoon, the day before his departure. The lawyers had been and gone, and it was clear that the promise of one last meeting with Motta was not going to eventuate. It was just Duncan and Uffy left.
‘Last order of business,’ she said, handing him a green folder.
Over the preceding days he’d observed her closely, trying to figure out if she hated him or really hated him. She recognised him from Sforza’s, the few times she had dined with Motta, and clearly felt it was nuts to send someone who hadn’t been involved in the project, couldn’t speak Italian and had limited experience scouting locations or working with VFX. But the best outcome for Motta, and thus for her, was to finish his current project, then get Giuseppe out of his system as quickly and as painlessly as possible. Rescheduling their location-scouting jaunt could derail everything.
Duncan had opened the folder to reveal a document headed up Itinerary — Final Version.
‘For real this time?’ he asked.
She shrugged. She was in her early thirties. The way she was dressed, made up, presented — hair dyed black and straightened, red-framed glasses, her outfit a literal power suit: the pin-stripes were lightning bolts when viewed up close — it was clear she would age better than him, if she wasn’t outstripping him already. He knew they’d both studied in programmes better known for producing academics than filmmakers: him in New Zealand, her in New York. He hadn’t been able to uncover anything she’d shot. No shorts. No student projects. Which was odd. But you could see the ambition burning inside her. It burst forth, cherry red, on her lips, her fingernails, in the corners of her eyes. It thrummed beneath her words. If he thought he’d been playing the long game, slumming it for two years at Sforza’s until his chance with Motta, she had invented it. For a decade she’d been Motta’s right hand, his other cheek, his spleen. And she was going to get hers. But now was not the time to make a play. Not with Giuseppe. This film couldn’t fail, even if it seemed she had little faith in it succeeding.
‘You call them convents,’ he said, pointing at the itinerary, ‘not monasteries. I noticed that during my research, too, reading Pastrovicchi and Parisciani —’ he paused, waiting for a flicker of respect that never came — ‘but I figured it was a translation thing. Aren’t convents where nuns live?’
‘If you’re familiar with Frank’s work,’ she said, as if delivering a carefully worded rebuttal to a journalist, ‘you’ll know how particular he is with details of language. That applies to pre-production, too. Laypeople, in English —’ another pause — ‘do tend to think of “convent” and “monastery” as gendered terms. But the difference is more accurately tied to their relationship with society. A monastery is where the religious go to separate themselves from society. A convent is much more connected to the wider world. The mendicant orders, like the Franciscans, live in convents. This is all still clear in Italian, and to people in the Church. Frank would rather be right than easy.’ Uffy readjusted her glasses and said, ‘Maybe we need to go through this one more time.’
And they did, line by line, Uffy saying, ‘Now, this is important,’ with every new town. As if it was a highly complicated action sequence and he was in charge of the pyrotechnics: one error and the take would be blown, and with it an island nation’s GDP worth of explosives. Except she’d gone into so much detail, had worked so hard to cover Motta’s butt, had immersed herself in the world of the seventeenth-century levitator — the names of every village, every convent, rolled off her tongue — that he might as well have been one of those dogs they shot into space. He was merely the vessel through which her itinerary would be realised.
The few remaining times he had the courage to ask a question, she’d shrug, run her finger down the page and read out the answer. It wasn’t indifference, her bearing, but a mixture of pride and disdain. She was proud of her work. But this was no longer the itinerary for Motta’s final looksee before setting up camp in Mexico. It was now something else. A tchotchke. A party favour for a beleaguered member of the boys’ club. Perhaps Duncan was — or might become — another Motta passion project, one nested within a larger, longer-gestating one. He’d hate himself, too, if he was in her shoes. He kind of did hate himself, or at least felt guilty about having skin the colour of old lace, a penis and a second chance.
All these movies about the world almost ending. Just once, I wish it would and we could move on to something else.
[The AV Club, 2013]
You might think a picture about a man who can fly, for example, is science fiction. Telekinesis: science fiction. Being in two places at once, reading minds, seeing the future. To me, that’s not science and, in some cases, it’s not fiction.
[Entertainment Weekly, 2013]
Zeb had stood on the cement edging of the park in Valley Glen, looking blankly at the sandpit, the slide, the unstable bridge.
‘How about the swings?’ Duncan said.
No response.
He picked up Zeb, who remained stiff, and carried him like a rifle in a military parade. He slotted his legs through the openings of the bucket-style swing seat and pushed him from the front, scrutinising the boy’s face for a hint of his younger, freer self.
‘I’m sorry you had to go to daycare today. I know it’s a Tuesday, but I had to work. You know I have a new job, right?’
Zeb’s eyes lowered.
‘And I’ll be going on a plane tomorrow. One day we’ll go on a plane again back to New Zealand to see your Nana and Mike, and Grandad and Gina, and your aunty Bianca. That’ll be fun, won’t it?’
Three kids sprinted in from the south-west edge of the park, but stopped to climb the chain-link backstop of the softball diamond.
‘Looks like we’ll have company soon. Maybe some dogs will come, too? Eh? That’d be cool.’
Zeb said something, softly.
‘What was that?’
‘Higher.’
‘Oh really?’ Duncan asked, grabbing the front of the swing, pulling it up to his chest and holding Zeb there. The boy’s eyes were level with his, though they looked straight through him. ‘You want to go higher?’
‘Higher,’ Zeb said, passionless.
‘You sure?’
‘Higher.’
‘Here goes— Wait, are you sure? Are you brave enough? Are you? Too late!’ He let him go and gave a strong push at the end of his return journey. ‘How’s that? That high enough for you? Eh, Zebbie?’
Duncan got on the adult swing beside Zeb’s and began to swing too, matching his son’s degrading arc until they’d lost all momentum. He wanted Zeb to say something. To demand another push or to be let out. Any desire, however expressed, was welcome. But he just dandled in the breeze.
‘This movie I’ll be helping with, it’s set a long, long time ago. When people believed in some fantastic things. Like being able to fly. Or being able to know what is about to happen. Or making people better just by touching them. This one guy, Joseph, he can do these things. A flock of sheep is struck dead by a hailstorm, but Joseph brings them all back to life. He flukes his exams and manages to become a priest, but the Church doesn’t like that he does these things. Especially the flying. They think he’s showing off. He really isn’t. He’s trying not to fly. And where’s the power coming from, anyway? How can they be sure God’s behind it and not, uh, someone else? So the Church keeps trying to hide him. They move him around Italy, from convent to convent. That’s where I’m going. To visit the places Joseph went, to help this man, my boss, I guess, make a movie about him. What do you think about that? Maybe one day, when it’s finished, we can watch the movie together? Eh? Wouldn’t that be good?’
There were a dozen kids in the playground now. A girl in a denim dress and skinned knees stood looking at Duncan with her arms folded.
‘Nearly done,’ he said.
‘You better be, you perv.’
‘Come on. How old are you?’
‘What’s wrong with him?’ she asked, pointing at Zeb, whose face had contorted as if he’d licked a battery.
‘He’s a good judge of character. C’mon Zeb, let’s blow this joint.’
‘Aladdin,’ he whispered as his father lifted him from the swing.
I have my best ideas in the shower. Sometimes, when I’m working on a script, really tearing it down to build it back up again, I’ll take four, five showers a day. People leave you alone in the shower. There’s something about the rhythm of the water on your body, the sound just obliterating the normal voice in your head. I came up with the idea for my Saint Joseph pic that way. It wasn’t a shower. It was a waterfall actually. How terrific, right? I was in Hawaii, on vacation with my first wife. This was just after I finished Hester, 1978 or ’79. We go on this nature walk and I’m getting bitten by bugs and sweating and letting the whole world know about it. Ada convinced me to go for a swim — she was a very persuasive woman — and I get under the waterfall, the water is pounding down on my shoulders, and the pieces of this thing just come together. I knew the story of the saint’s life. I was very popular with my Sunday School teachers. But for the first time I thought about Joseph as a man. Flesh and blood. A man who, through a process of devotion, unlocks something else, something physical. And I saw these moments in Joseph’s life — being a bumbling novice, fluking his examinations, his first levitation — as cinema.
The challenge was, and still is, finding people who share this vision.
[TimesTalks video series, 2014]
After three episodes of Passion for Italy, Mrs Pandy finally drifted off to sleep and he was free to work without scrutiny.
It didn’t happen.
He fired up his own in-flight entertainment. Under ‘Classics’, Alitalia boldly offered Interstellar, though he opted for recent Italian films, none of which brought him to tears or made him any more fluent in the language.
When you’re young, you make films on this first burst of energy. You ride the wave and make five, six pictures in a row that tell the stories of the things in life you think are important. Then you look around and go, what next? But the truth is, you haven’t said all you could, haven’t covered nearly as much ground as you thought you did when you’re, what? Thirty-five, thirty-six. Each new film becomes an effort to plug another gap in what you want to say. And then you turn sixty, and you go, ‘Hold on. What’s the basis of all of this? What underlies it? It’s faith or spirituality or whatever you choose to call it. Can you build a house without building its foundation? Will my work stand up without a clear statement from me about faith? So I keep on at people, trying to get that picture made.
[The Director’s Cut podcast, 2016]