Interview conducted February 22, 1998. Reproduced from Lulu on the Bridge. A Film by Paul Auster (Henry Holt, 1998) by permission of Paul Auster.
Rebecca Prime: Three years ago, when you were working on the postproduction of Smoke and Blue in the Face, you did an interview with Annette Insdorf and the last question she asked you was, “Now that you’ve caught the bug, do you have any desire to direct again?” You answered her, “No, I can’t say that I do.” Obviously, you’ve had a change of heart. Any particular reason?
Paul Auster: I guess it’s dangerous to talk about the future, isn’t it? The idea for Lulu actually came to me around that time, while I was still working on those films. I saw the story as a movie. And because I was feeling burned out by movies just then—postproduction on Smoke and Blue in the Face dragged on for almost a year—I did everything I could to resist it. But the story kept coming back to me, kept demanding that I do something about it, and eventually I gave in to the impulse. And when I did, I made a fatal mistake.
RP: How so?
PA: I decided to write it as a novel. If the story was good, I said to myself, then it didn’t matter how I told it. Book, film, it didn’t matter. The heart of the story would burn through no matter what form it took. So I sat down and started writing—and six or seven months later, when I stood up and examined what I had done so far, I realized it was no good. It didn’t work. It was a dramatic story, not a narrative story, and it needed to be seen, not just read.
RP: Why?
PA: Because of the stone, to begin with. Because of the film inside the story. Because of the dreamlike structure of events. A whole host of reasons.
RP: And so you went back and started over again …
PA: Not right away. I thought the project was dead, and I turned my attention to other things. A year went by, maybe a year and a half, but the story never really left me. When I finally understood that it was something I needed to do, I took a deep breath and started again. But this time I stuck to my original conception and wrote it as a screenplay. So much for trying to force things. I learned a lot from that blunder.
RP: Still, even though you wrote it as a film, the story feels more like a novel than most films one sees. Like one of your novels, actually.
PA: Well, habits die hard, as Izzy says at one point. But the fact was that I felt all along that Lulu was a continuation of my work, that it’s of a piece with everything else I’ve done.
RP: Most films seem to set out to tell one thing, and they usually proceed in a linear fashion. With Lulu on the Bridge, the story works on several different levels at once.
PA: That’s what makes it so difficult to talk about. There are a number of threads running through the story, and by the time you come to the end, they’re so tangled up with one another, you can’t pull one out without disturbing all the others. The most important thing, though, is that at bottom it’s a very emotional story, a story about deep and powerful feelings. It’s not a puzzle, not some code to be cracked, and you don’t have to “understand” it in a rational way to feel the force of the emotions.
RP: Let’s talk about the “dreamlike structure of events” you mentioned earlier.
PA: On one level, it’s all very simple. A man gets shot, and in the last hour before his death, he dreams another life for himself. The content of that dream is provided by a number of random elements that appear to him just before and after the shooting. A wall of photographs in a men’s room featuring women’s faces—mostly the faces of movie stars—and a chunk of plaster that falls from the ceiling. Everything follows from those elements: the magic blue stone, the young woman he falls in love with, the fact that she’s an actress and lands a role in a film, the title of that film, the director of that film, and so on. That’s one way of reading the story—the framework, so to speak. But that’s hardly the most interesting way of looking at it. It gives the film some plausibility, I suppose, but it doesn’t take the magic into account. And if you forget the magic, you don’t have much of anything.
RP: Can you elaborate?
PA: Because, on another level, all these things really happen. I firmly believe that Izzy lives through the events in the story, that the dream is not just some empty fantasy. When he dies at the end, he’s a different man than he was at the beginning. He’s managed to redeem himself, somehow. If not, how else to account for Celia’s presence on the street at the end? It’s as if she has lived through the story, too. The ambulance passes, and even though she can’t possibly know who is inside, she does, it’s as if she does. She feels a connection, she’s moved, she’s touched by grief—understanding that the person in the ambulance has just died. As far as I’m concerned, the whole film comes together in that final shot. The magic isn’t just simply a dream. It’s real, and it carries all the emotions of reality.
RP: In other words, you believe in the impossible.
PA: We all do. Whether we know it or not, our lives would make no sense if we didn’t. … Think of something like A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Elves and fairies prancing through the woods. Sprinkle pixie dust in a man’s eyes, and he falls in love. It’s impossible, yes, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t real, that it isn’t true to life. Love is magic, after all, isn’t it? No one understands what it is, no one can explain it. Pixie dust is as good an explanation as any other, it seems to me. And so is the blue stone—the thing that brings Izzy and Celia together. Just because a story is told “realistically” doesn’t make it realistic. And just because a story is told fancifully doesn’t make it farfetched. In the end, metaphor might be the best way of getting at the truth.
RP: Lulu on the Bridge operates on a metaphorical level, but it is also grounded in reality.
PA: Well, you can never stray too far from the world of ordinary things. If you do, you slip into allegory, and allegory doesn’t interest me at all. Two or three years ago, Peter Brook did an interview in the New York Times, and he said something that made an enormous impression on me. “In all my work,” he said, “I try to combine the closeness of the everyday with the distance of myth. Because, without the closeness you can’t be moved, and without the distance you can’t be amazed.” A brilliant formulation, no? Lulu on the Bridge is that kind of double work, I think. At least I hope it is.
RP: When all is said and done, Lulu could probably be described as a love story, couldn’t it? That seems to be the heart of the film, at least for me. What happens between Izzy and Celia.
PA: Yes, I think you’re right. Izzy is a man who’s led a less than noble life. He’s selfish, quick-tempered, incapable of loving anyone. He’s cut off from his family, and his marriage to Hannah—a beautiful, goodhearted young woman—ended after just a few years. Probably because he couldn’t keep his hands off of other women. Then he’s shot, and in the delirium of his final moments, he conjures up a great and overpowering love. In doing so, he reinvents who he is, becomes better, discovers what is best inside him. It’s a big love, of course. A love so big he’s actually willing to die for it.
RP: Izzy is willing to die for Celia, but Celia also sacrifices herself for Izzy.
PA: Precisely. It works both ways. Celia jumps off the bridge and disappears. You think that might be the end of her. Then Izzy dies, and just as he is pronounced dead in the ambulance, we see Celia again, walking down the street. It’s as if his death has resurrected her, as if he’s died in order to give her another chance at life.
RP: Tell me about the stone. It’s probably the strangest element in the story, and yet the odd thing is that everyone seems to accept it. I’ve attended several screenings of the film, and not once has anyone questioned it or been confused by it.
PA: To tell the truth, I don’t really understand what the stone is. I have ideas about it, of course, many feelings, many thoughts, but nothing definitive.
RP: Each person finds his or her own meaning in it …
PA: Yes. It becomes more powerful that way, I think. The less fixed, the more pregnant with possibilities. … When I first wrote the story, I suppose I thought of the stone as some kind of mysterious, all-encompassing life force—the glue that connects one thing to another, that binds people together, the unknowable something that makes love possible. Later on, when we filmed the scene of Izzy pulling the stone out of the box, I began to have another idea about it. The way Harvey played it, it began to feel to me as if the stone were Izzy’s soul, as if we were watching a man discover himself for the first time. He reacts with fear and confusion; he’s thrown into a panic. It’s only the next day, when he meets Celia, that he understands what’s happened. You find your essence only in relation to others. That’s the great paradox. You don’t take hold of yourself until you’re willing to give it away. In other words, you don’t become who you are until you’re capable of loving someone else.
RP: The stone is one of the elements in the film that clues the viewer to the fact that you can’t read the film as a straightforward narrative, that we’re clearly in some sort of altered universe. At the same time, it has a very straightforward narrative function. It’s the prime mover in what could be called the “thriller” aspect of the story. What compelled you to make use of this genre?
PA: Because it seemed right, it felt right. Thrillers are very much like dreams. When you strip away the surface details, they begin to function as metaphors of our unconscious. People without faces pursuing you through dark, abandoned streets. Men hanging from the edges of buildings. Fear and danger, risk, the contingencies of life and death.
RP: With Lulu, how would you describe the thriller aspect of the plot?
PA: It’s fairly rudimentary. Dr. Van Horn is associated with the group that developed the magic stone. Various scoundrels representing other groups are trying to gain possession of this priceless object. Stanley Mar would be one. The three thugs who assault Izzy would be another. They lock him up, thinking he knows where the stone is. Then Van Horn’s group tracks down this other group and eliminates them. Van Horn then begins to interrogate Izzy.
RP: But he’s interested in more than just the stone, isn’t he?
PA: Of course he is. He’s interested in Izzy’s soul. Van Horn isn’t at all what he first appears to be. He’s an interrogating angel. He’s the figure standing between Izzy and the gates of death. His job is to find out who Izzy is.
RP: In their last conversation, when Izzy refuses to reveal that he knows Celia Burns, Van Horn storms out in a fit of anger. Why?
PA: Because he wants the stone, and he understands that Izzy isn’t going to help him. At the same time, I see his anger as a test. He wants to know if Izzy will buckle under the pressure or try to protect the person he loves. Izzy stands firm, and even though Van Horn doesn’t get what he seems to want, in the end this might be an even more satisfying outcome for him. Remember, he doesn’t rush out. He turns at the last moment and says to Izzy, “May God have mercy on your soul.” And he means it. There’s tremendous ambiguity in that line, of course, but it also represents a spontaneous outburst of compassion.
RP: And then there’s Celia—what might be called the “feminine” side of the movie. In some sense, she’s everything Izzy is not.
PA: Her most important quality, I think, is vitality. Celia is alive. She’s generous, she’s fetching, she’s desirable—the kind of young woman every man can fall in love with. At the same time, she’s not a pushover. She’s not some simpering cutie-pie. She has opinions, she’s capable of anger, she’s willing to stand up for herself.
RP: And she’s also an actress. I was particularly struck by the line she says to Izzy about playing a prostitute: “I really liked doing that scene.” It gives us a glimpse into how she might be capable of playing Lulu.
PA: Yes. It’s a jocular, offhanded kind of line, but it does establish an important link. It’s a little fulcrum that connects Celia to Lulu.
RP: Celia is a flesh-and-blood character, but at the same time there’s a fascination with female archetypes in the film. Just under the surface, the story seems to be making constant references to myth. When Celia looks up at Izzy after she’s taken hold of the stone for the first time and says, “Come on, don’t be afraid, it’s the best thing, it really is,” you feel this is just the kind of thing Eve might have said to Adam in the Garden of Eden. When Izzy opens the three boxes and finds the stone in the last one, you can’t help but think of Pandora’s box.
PA: All the images in the story are connected; everything bounces off of everything else. To a large degree, the film is about how men invent women. It begins with the very first shot—when we see that wall of photographs of women’s faces. All those movie stars! I’m intrigued by the fact that for most of this century images of beautiful women have been projected on screens and have fed the fantasies of men all over the world. That’s probably why movie stars were invented. To feed dreams. Izzy invents a new life for himself through the medium of a picture. There’s Mira Sorvino’s face on the wall—and the movie begins. In a way, it duplicates what we all experience when we watch movies. We walk into a dark place and leave the world behind. We enter the realm of make-believe.
RP: Why Lulu and Pandora’s Box? What exactly were you trying to do by introducing that element into the story?
PA: It pushes the dream farther, throws Celia from one end of her femininity to the other. From good girl to bad girl. It’s Izzy’s dream, after all, and in some way you can see Lulu as a female version of who Izzy used to be.
RP: I see what you mean when you say that “everything bounces off everything else.”
PA: That’s why I was so gripped by the Lulu story. Lulu is a completely amoral, infantile creature, a person without compassion. Men lose their minds over her. She doesn’t intend to hurt anybody, but one by one all her lovers are driven to suicide, insanity, debasement—every horror you can imagine. Lulu is a blank slate, and men project their desires onto her. They invent her. Just as men invent the women they see in movies. The Lulu plays were written before the invention of movies, but Lulu is a movie star. She’s the first movie star in history.
RP: How did you go about adapting the Lulu material?
PA: I went back to Wedekind’s two plays, Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. I greatly admire Pabst’s film, particularly Louise Brooks’s performance, but I didn’t make much use of it when writing the screenplay, and I certainly didn’t want to refer to it in the film. The two plays tell a continuous story, and they add up to nine long acts. Obviously, I couldn’t deal with all that. The most I could do was suggest the arc of Lulu’s life, and I tried to achieve that by concentrating on what I felt were a few of the most interesting and pertinent scenes. I also decided not to do it as a period piece, to modernize the details, the settings, and so on. The plays are a hundred years old now, and there’s so much dreadful writing in them, so much that creaks and grates, there seemed to be no point in trying to restage them as they were written. In the first scene, I changed the painter Schwarz into the photographer Black. The Pierrot costume became a Charlie Chaplin costume. All in the spirit of the original—but different. In the dressing-room scene, I changed the musical revue into a rock and roll performance. That kind of thing. It’s never a word-for-word translation, but at the same time I tried not to stray too far from the gist of Wedekind’s dialogue.
RP: Once you started writing the screenplay, were you also planning to direct the film yourself?
PA: Not at first. The original idea was for Wim Wenders to direct it. Wim and I have been friends for a long time now; and we’ve always talked about doing a project together. For a while, it looked as though Lulu would be that project. We even went so far as to have a number of conversations about the story, and when I sent him the finished screenplay, he was very happy with it. I assumed that would be the end of my involvement with the film, that the torch had been passed, so to speak. Then, just a few days later, a funny thing happened. Wim was interviewed by a journalist, and at one point she said to him, “Mr. Wenders, do you realize that the past four or five movies you’ve made have all been about making movies?” The question caught him by surprise. As a matter of fact, he hadn’t been aware of it. Lulu on the Bridge, of course, is yet another movie with a movie inside the movie, and Wim called me up the next morning to say that he was suddenly feeling worried. Was that his destiny—to be a filmmaker who could only make films about films? He wasn’t backing out of the project, but he wanted to think it over for a while before committing himself. Was that okay? Of course it was okay. So I hung up the phone and realized that the film no longer had a director.
RP: How could you be sure?
PA: Making a movie is such a difficult, exhausting process, you can’t go into it with anything less than total enthusiasm. The slightest doubt, the smallest flicker of uncertainty, and you’re sunk. If Wim was wobbling about it, then my feeling was that he probably shouldn’t do it. … He was going to call me back with his decision the following week, and in the meantime I started thinking about who else should do it, who else could do it. No names jumped out at me. The script is so strange, I suppose, so particular to me and my own private universe, that I couldn’t think of anyone whose sensibility would be compatible with the material. That was when it occurred to me that perhaps I should do it myself. It was my story, after all, and why not see the thing through to the end? At least it would be made exactly the way I wanted it to be made—for better or for worse. So I wrote Wim a fax saying that if he decided not to direct the film, I was inclined to do it myself. I sent the letter through the machine, and one minute later the telephone rang. It was Wim. “I just tore up a letter I was going to fax to you,” he said, “trying to persuade you to direct the movie yourself.” And that was that. Without really intending to work in the movies again, not only had I written another screenplay, but now I was going to direct as well.
RP: And you weren’t scared?
PA: No, not really. I had spent two years working on Smoke and Blue in the Face and had a very clear idea of what I was getting myself into. No one twisted my arm to do it. It was a decision I made on my own, which means that somewhere, deep down, I probably had a real hankering to do it.
RP: You finished writing the script in early February 1997. Now, almost exactly a year later, you’re in postproduction. How did it happen so fast?
PA: Two words: Peter Newman. Peter was the producer of both Smoke and Blue in the Face, and once we started working together, we became great friends. I can’t say enough good things about this man. His integrity, his optimism, his sense of humor, his resilience. When I told him about this new project that I wanted to do, he simply went out and raised the money. In record time. It only took about two months.
RP: Peter Newman was also responsible for one of the scenes in the film, wasn’t he?
PA: I’m not sure he’d want me to talk about it—but yes, he was. The airplane story that Philip Kleinman tells at the dinner party early in the film came directly from Peter. It’s a true story, something that really happened to him. I know it’s rather disgusting, and more than a little disturbing, but the fact was that I was very impressed when Peter told it to me—for what it revealed about his moral qualities, his goodness as a human being. That’s how it stands in the film: as a moral tale.
RP: How did you go about casting the film? Did you write the script with any specific actors in mind?
PA: Harvey Keitel. He was the only one. It’s not that I set out to write a role for Harvey, but once I got into the story a bit, I began seeing him in my mind, and at a certain point it became inconceivable to think of Izzy without also thinking of Harvey.
RP: You’d worked together before, of course.
PA: Yes, and we’d both developed a great deal of respect for each other. It goes without saying that Harvey is a superb actor. But there’s something more to it than that. The way he moves, the irresistible qualities of his face, his groundedness. It’s as if Harvey embodies something that belongs to all of us, as if he becomes us when he’s up on the screen. When he agreed to play Izzy, I knew that we were going to have an extraordinary time together. And we did. Working with him on this role was one of the best experiences of my life.
RP: Mira Sorvino plays Celia, but at an earlier stage in the project the part was supposedly offered to Juliette Binoche. Is that true?
PA: Yes. But that was very early, when Wim still thought he would be involved. Juliette was the actress he proposed, and she was interested. But then she won her Academy Award, and in all the uproar that followed, it became difficult for her to decide what to do next. So I moved on. It’s not as though this kind of thing doesn’t happen every day when you’re trying to put together a movie. Early on, I formulated a little phrase to help me get through the inevitable disappointments and hard knocks ahead. “Every person and every thing is replaceable,” I told myself, “except the script.” I’ve repeated those words to myself a thousand times since then, and they’ve helped; they’ve more or less allowed me to keep my head screwed on straight.
RP: So you lost one Academy Award actress and got another. Not such a bad trade-off!
PA: The gods were smiling on me, there’s no question about it. … It’s such a difficult, complex role—in effect two roles, many roles—and only a very gifted actress could begin to do it justice. I had worked with Mira for one day on Blue in the Face and had been impressed with her intelligence and talent. She has a fierce commitment to getting things right, and you can’t learn that kind of attitude—it’s who you are. Last spring, we both happened to wind up on the jury at Cannes. We saw each other every day for two weeks and got to know each other better, to become friends. When it finally became clear to me that Juliette wasn’t going to be in the film, I didn’t hesitate to ask Mira. It turned out to be my luckiest stroke, the smartest move I made. I knew she was going to be good, but I had no idea she had it in her to reach the heights she did, to touch such deep emotional chords. Mira is a very brave person, a girl with guts. And yet she’s also immensely fragile. Her pores are open to the world, and she feels everything, registers everything happening in the air around her. Like a tuning fork. It’s rare to find this combination of strength and sensitivity in one person. Mix that in with a keen mind and a heavy dose of natural talent, and you really have yourself something. And Mira is really something. I loved the whole adventure of working with her.
RP: What about the other actors? There are at least thirty speaking parts in the film.
PA: In many cases, I approached actors I had worked with before. Giancarlo Esposito, Jared Harris, Victor Argo, Peggy Gormley, and Harold Perrineau had all been involved with Smoke and Blue in the Face. It was a great advantage to be able to turn to them, because I knew that I could trust them—not just as actors, but as people. Gina Gershon is a close friend of one of my wife’s sisters, and we’ve known each other for years. Mandy Patinkin had played the lead in The Music of Chance. Vanessa Redgrave was also a friend. And even Stockard Channing, who couldn’t be in the film, did me a little favor a couple of weeks ago when she came in and recorded the phone message that Celia receives from her agent telling her she’s been given the part. You might not see Stockard in the film, but you hear her voice!
RP: Do-it-yourself casting.
PA: To a small degree. All the other actors came through Heidi Levitt, who was in charge of casting. Auditions, video reels, telephone calls, nail-biting decisions.
RP: What about Willem Dafoe?
PA: That was a different story, a completely different story. Originally, Dr. Van Horn was called Dr. Singh, and the role was going to be played by Salman Rushdie. Salman is another friend, a very good friend, but also—believe it or not—a wonderfully able actor. I asked him to be in the movie just after I finished the script, and he accepted. We were both very excited about it.
RP: What were your reasons for thinking of him?
PA: First of all, as a recognizable figure, his presence would have reinforced the constant overlapping of dream and reality in the film. A man who has been forced into hiding through terrible, tragic circumstances suddenly appears as a man in charge of interrogating someone who is being held against his will. The captive made captor. It was my little way of trying to turn the tables on the world. I wanted to make a gesture in Salman’s defense, to reinvent reality just enough for it to be possible to have Salman Rushdie appear in the film—not as himself, but as an imaginary character. Finally—and most important of all—I knew that he would give an excellent performance.
RP: Why didn’t it happen?
PA: Fear, mostly. And bad planning on my part, bad planning all around. I’ve spent so much time with him, have been in so many public places with him—restaurants, theaters, the streets of New York—that I forget that most people think of him as a walking time bomb, that if they get anywhere near him, they’re likely to be blown to bits. Nine years have gone by since the fatwa was declared, and he’s still, mercifully, very much with us, but his name seems to trigger off an irrational panic in many people, and a certain percentage of the crew wanted extra security guarantees if he was going to appear in the film. The cost of doing such a thing would have been prohibitive, and eventually I had to abandon the idea. I fought tooth and nail to make it happen, but it didn’t. It was a tremendous disappointment to me. I consider it a personal defeat, a moral defeat.
RP: The film was already in production at that point, wasn’t it?
PA: We were in our sixth week, and those scenes were scheduled for the eighth week—the last days of shooting in New York.
RP: It didn’t leave you much time, did it?
PA: Our backs were right up against the wall. I thought the movie would have to shut down, that we wouldn’t be able to finish. It was an awful period, let me tell you.
RP: So Willem stepped in—literally at the last minute.
PA: The very last minute. He received the script on a Sunday, accepted the role on Monday, and when he showed up for a rehearsal with me and Harvey the following Sunday, he had his part down cold. He knew every line perfectly. The next day, Monday, we filmed his first scene. Can you imagine? He’s positively brilliant in the role, and he prepared the whole thing in a week. Willem saved the movie. He stepped in and single-handedly rescued us all. It was heroic what he did, and I’m so grateful to him, so deeply in his debt, that I can hardly think about it without getting a little weak in the knees.
RP: You learn to roll with the punches, don’t you?
PA: You don’t have any choice. Things are going to go wrong. You never know when, and you never know how, but you can be sure it will happen when you’re least expecting it. That’s why you need to have a good group of people around you, people you can depend on. I was very lucky in that regard. I had a game and cooperative cast, a valiant first assistant director—Bobby Warren—and the people I hired to head the various departments all broke their backs to make the film work. It’s not just a matter of knowledge and technical skill. It comes down to character and soul, the way you live your life. Not losing your temper, keeping your sense of humor under trying circumstances, respecting the efforts of others, taking pride in your own work. All the old-fashioned virtues. I can’t emphasize how important these things are on a movie set. You have to create a good environment for people to work in, to establish a sense of solidarity. If that doesn’t happen, the whole thing can go to hell in about two seconds.
RP: How did you go about choosing the different creative department heads—production designer, costume designer, director of photography, and so on?
PA: I suppose it was similar to the casting. A combination of people I had worked with before, friends, and absolute strangers.
RP: Kalina Ivanov, the production designer, was a Smoke and Blue in the Face veteran.
PA: Exactly. We had remained friends in the interim, and the truth is that it never occurred to me to ask anyone else to handle the job. Kalina is more than just a designer. She’s a real filmmaker, a participant in the whole process. And she also has one of the most energetic, ebullient personalities I’ve ever encountered—with this great big Bulgarian laugh and a wicked sense of humor. You need people like Kalina with you—people who love challenges, who never take no for an answer, who walk through fire if that’s what it takes to get the job done.
RP: And Adelle Lutz, the costume designer?
PA: Known to everyone as Bonny. A friend. But also someone whose work I had admired for a long time. Costumes are an important element in Lulu, especially in the Pandora’s Box sections, and I needed someone with tremendous flair and imagination, a person with original ideas. Just as important, I knew that Bonny was a grown-up and would be able to handle the pressures of the job—which were clearly going to be enormous.
RP: Why enormous?
PA: Because there were so many characters to dress and design costumes for—and so few dollars and days to do it in. A lesser person would have cracked up and jumped out the window.
RP: Surely you exaggerate.
PA: Well, maybe a little—but not as much as you might think. The whole film had to operate on a very restricted budget, but the wardrobe department got the worst of it, I think. One example stands out very vividly in my mind. In the original script, the last segment from Pandora’s Box—the one that Izzy watches in silence on his VCR—was an elaborate wedding scene that had at least fifty actors and actresses in it. It was supposed to be from an earlier moment in the story, and therefore everyone who had died later on—Peter Shine, Candy, and Lulu—would be seen alive again, in the pink of health, happy, resurrected, with a resplendent Lulu floating among them in her wedding dress. It would have been beautiful, but the hard fact was that we couldn’t afford to do it. The extras were one thing, but once Bonny toted up the costs of dressing fifty actors in evening clothes, the expense proved to be too great. At first, I thought about reducing the number of guests at the party, but as I continued to whittle down the list, this compromise began to look rather dismal. What saved the scene was the extraordinary dress that Bonny designed for Mira—the one with the peacock feathers. It was so striking, so sublime, that it allowed me to rethink the scene and do it with no guests at all. Just Lulu alone in her bedroom, right after she’s climbed into the dress. It turned out well, I think, and visually it’s one of the strongest scenes in the film. But it was motivated by desperation. Without Bonny, I would have been lost.
RP: And what about Alik Sakharov, the director of photography? How did you decide to work with him?
PA: Because I knew the schedule was going to be very intense and grueling, I wanted to hire someone who was rather young—a person with a lot of physical stamina, who still had something to prove to the world. I interviewed quite a few people, some of them very well known. At first, Alik wasn’t even on the list. But then Kalina called me up and urged me to meet with him. She talked about his work so enthusiastically, I couldn’t resist—even though I was on the verge of hiring someone else. It was a sunny day in late spring, I remember, and Alik came to my house. Not only had he read the script thoroughly, and not only did he understand it and admire it, but he had written out extensive notes about how he would go about filming it. I myself had very definite ideas about how I wanted the film to look and had already thought about how many of the scenes should be shot. For the first thirty or forty minutes, I didn’t say much. When you’re interviewing someone, it’s always more important to hear what the other person has to say. So I asked Alik how he would approach this scene, and then that scene, and then this other scene, and after awhile it was as if I were listening to my own thoughts. Shot for shot, look for look, he had almost the same idea about the film that I did.
RP: What kinds of preparations did you and Alik make before filming began?
PA: We worked for weeks, just the two of us, all through the late summer and early fall, talking through every scene again and again, making up shot lists, analyzing the story in visual terms. That was the foundation of the film. Everything grew from those early conversations. Not only did we develop a plan that we both believed in, but we learned to trust each other, to depend on each other’s insights and judgments. By the time filming began, we were comrades, partners in a single enterprise. We worked together in a state of tremendous harmony, and I can’t tell you how important that was to me on the set. Alik was a rock of dependability, and I could always count on him, could always get my ideas through to him. He’s a man of great dignity and depth of soul, and he has the endurance of a marathon runner. We were on the set for at least twelve hours every day, would go to the Technicolor lab in midtown for dailies every night, and often had to squeeze in time to scout new locations before, between, or after the day’s work. And from start to finish, Alik kept going at full tilt. He was my closest collaborator on the film, the one person who was with me every step of the way.
RP: What was it like working with the actors?
PA: That’s the fun part, the best part of the job. Four years ago, when Wayne [Wang] and I started rehearsing for Smoke, I discovered that I felt naturally connected to actors, that I had an innate sympathy for what they do. A startling discovery to make so late in life, no? But when you stop and think about it, there’s a definite affinity between acting and writing novels. In both cases, the object of the work is to bring imaginary beings to life, to take something that doesn’t exist and make it real, make it believable. A writer does it with his pen, and an actor does it with his body, but they’re both trying to achieve the same thing. In writing my books, I always have the feeling that I’m inside my characters, that I inhabit them, that I actually become them. Actors feel the same way about what they do, and because of that I don’t have any trouble understanding what they say to me. Nor do they seem to have any trouble understanding what I say to them.
RP: As a director, you’re part of a collaborative process. Did you miss the creative control you have as a writer?
PA: When I was a kid, I was very involved in sports. I played on a lot of teams—baseball teams, basketball teams, football teams—and until I was well into high school, it was probably the biggest thing in my life. Then I grew up, and for the next twenty-five years or so I spent most of my time alone, sitting in a room with a pen in my hand. You have to enjoy being alone to do that, and I do enjoy being alone, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy working with other people, too. When I began collaborating with Wayne on our two movies, it brought back memories of playing on those sports teams as a kid, and I realized that I had missed it, that I was glad to be participating in a group effort again. Yes, as a writer you have total control over what you’re doing, and as a filmmaker you don’t. But that’s like saying oranges taste like oranges, and apples taste like apples. The two experiences are entirely different. When you write a book, you have all the time in the world. If you make a mistake, nobody sees you make it. You can just cross out the sentence and start over again. You can throw out a week’s work, a month’s work, and nobody cares. On a film set, you don’t have that luxury. It’s do or die every day. You have to accomplish your work on time, and you don’t get a second chance. At least not with a tightly budgeted film like ours. So, needless to say, things can get pretty nerve-racking at times. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t enjoyable. When things go well, when everyone is doing his or her job the way it’s supposed to be done and you pull off the thing you’ve set out to do, it becomes a beautiful experience, a deeply satisfying thing. I think that’s why people get addicted to working in movies—the grips, the gaffers, the camera team, the prop men, the sound people, everyone. They work terribly hard, the hours are long, and no one gets rich, but every day is different from the day before. That’s what keeps them at it: the adventure of it, the uncertainty, the fact that no one knows what’s going to happen next.
RP: Did you find that the imaginative process involved in directing differs significantly from the one involved in writing?
PA: Not as much as you might think. The outward circumstances are utterly different, of course—one person sitting alone in a room as opposed to dozens of people on a noisy set—but at bottom you’re trying to accomplish the same thing: to tell a story. Lulu was my script; it wasn’t as if I was directing someone else’s work. And I tried to use all the tools at my disposal to tell that story as well as I could: the actors, the camera, the lights, the locations, the sets, the costumes, and so on. Those elements create the syntax of the story. There were times when I thought the camera is the ink, the lighting setups are punctuation marks, the props are adjectives, the actors’ gestures are verbs. Very strange. But standing there on the set every day with the crew, I somehow felt that they were creating the story with me—with me and for me. It was as if they were all inside my head with me.
RP: Earlier, you talked about things going wrong on the set. Can you give me an example of what you meant?
PA: I could give you dozens of examples. Some big, some small. A lighting setup that short-circuited at the worst possible moment. A prop gun that kept misfiring. A dress that tore. All the usual mishaps. Once, I even ruined a take myself by laughing too hard. Jared Harris was doing something so funny, I just couldn’t control myself any more. … The incident I learned the most from, though, would have to be something that happened in the second or third week of shooting. During preproduction, I had had several meetings with Jeff Mazzola, the prop master, and we had made a thorough list of all the things that would have to be on hand for every scene in the film. Jeff was an integral part of what we did every day, and beyond being a pleasant person to be around, he brought a lot of intelligence and enthusiasm to his work. He was the one who helped me design the stone that Izzy finds in the briefcase. He was the one who worked out the pie-in-the-face scene with me—and actually threw the pie at Mira. He was the one who drove the ambulance in the last scene. I mention these things so you’ll have an idea of how closely we worked together. Anyway, for the scene in which Celia says good-bye to Izzy and drives off to the airport, we needed a black town car. I had specifically told Jeff that I wanted a car that had a back window that went all the way down—so that Celia would be able to lean out and blow Izzy a kiss as the car drove away. Most cars these days have windows that go only halfway down, and Jeff had given precise instructions to the car rental place that we needed an older-model car. So, the day arrives when we’re supposed to shoot the scene, and the car shows up on the set. There was an establishing shot we had to do—the car parked in front of Celia’s building—and since Harvey and Mira were still in the hair-and-makeup trailer getting ready for their first scene together, I figured we could knock off the establishing shot first, which would help us save time for more important things later in the day. Just to make sure, though, I told Jeff that we should check to see if the window went all the way down. No point in doing the shot if we had the wrong car, was there? And lo and behold, the window went only halfway down. I was furious. We were working on a very tight schedule, and I knew this little blunder was going to cost us precious time and money. What could I do? I couldn’t very well turn on Jeff and start blaming him. It wasn’t his fault. He had ordered the right car, and I wasn’t about to criticize him for not doing his job. He had done his job. But still, you feel this anger surging up inside you, this horrible sense of frustration. Fortunately, Jeff was just as angry as I was. Even angrier, probably. He’s so conscientious about his work, and he treated this screw-up as an insult to his professional pride. That’s when I learned an important lesson about being a director. You can actually live your anger through other people. Jeff called up the car rental place, and as I stood there next to him, listening to him scream and curse at the man responsible for the mistake, I began to feel much better. Jeff’s anger was my anger, and because he could express it for me, I was able to stay calm. At least on the outside.
RP: Of all the hundreds of things that happened on the set, what moment are you proudest of?
PA: That’s hard to say. In general, I’m proud of everything we did, of everyone’s work. Even when we made mistakes, we always managed to fix them—so there’s really nothing I look back on with any deep regret. But the proudest moment, I don’t know. There’s one happy moment that jumps out at me, however. I don’t know why I think of this one now, but there it is. The pie-in-the-face scene. Maybe because I just mentioned it a few minutes ago. It’s such a small part of the film, but it took a lot of careful preparation to get it right, and Mira was a great sport about it. We all had fun doing those four little video scenes. The horror movie, the pie-in-the-face, the nun praying over the dying child, and the hooker bit with Lou Reed in the bar. I gave Mira a different name for each of these parts, just to keep things amusing. The nun, I remember, was Sister Mira of the Perpetual Performance. We probably had such a good time with these things because all the other work we did was so intense, so demanding, and these little clips gave us all a chance to relax a little, to play in a different key. Not just Mira and the other actors, but the crew as well. Anyway, I was very keen to do a pie-in-the-face gag. It’s a lost art, an ancient turn that’s vanished from films, and no one knows how to do it anymore. I asked a couple of older directors for advice, but they couldn’t help me. “Just make it funny,” one of them said. Yes, but how? So I had to sit down and figure it out for myself. The problem was that I didn’t have any room for flubs. It had to be done perfectly on the first take. Otherwise, we would have needed three or four hours to set up the shot again, and we didn’t have that kind of time to spend on such a small thing. If we got it wrong, the whole set would have to be redone, Mira’s hair and makeup would have to be redone, and we couldn’t afford to do that. The only solution was to devise a fail-proof technique.
RP: What did you use for the cream?
PA: Reddi Wip. We experimented with shaving cream, but it wasn’t as good. Once everything was prepared and we’d gone through a couple of dry runs, I turned on some crazy Raymond Scott music to get everyone in the mood, and then I started giving instructions to Mira and David Byrne, who played the escort. The whole crew was watching anxiously, hoping it would work, and when it did, the whole place erupted in wild cheers and laughter. It was a wonderful moment. Not just for me, but for all of us. I remember saying to myself, “Good grief, I think I’m actually getting the hang of this job.”
RP: Is it a job you’d like to do again?
PA: This is where we came in, isn’t it?
RP: Not really. It’s three years later, and you’ve just finished directing a film. Would you like to do it again?
PA: All things being equal, yes. But things are rarely equal, so I’m not going to speculate about the future anymore. The only thing I can say with any certainty is that I’ve poured myself into making this film, and I’m glad I had the chance to do it. It’s been a big experience for me, and I’m never going to forget it.