‘Just take whatever is inside of you and speak from that.’
David O. Russell wrote and directed the independent hit Spanking the Monkey (1994), a comedy about incest. He also wrote and directed a comedy about adoption, Flirting with Disaster (1996), which starred Ben Stiller, Patricia Arquette and Alan Alda. He adapted and directed Three Kings (1999), the only American movie ever to be made about the Gulf War, from a script that was in turnaround at Warner Brothers. The film stars George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. His latest film, an existential detective comedy, I Heart Huckabee’s (2004), stars Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin and Jude Law.
Synopsis
Iraq, March 1991. The Gulf War has just ended and US soldiers Troy Barlow and Conrad Vig find a map locating the bunkers where Saddam Hussein has hidden gold bullion looted from Kuwait. Major Archie Gates convinces them, along with their staff sergeant Chief Elgin, to help him steal the gold. The four soldiers locate the bullion and Saddam’s soldiers make no attempt to stop them because they are busy suppressing local rebels. Reluctant to abandon them to their fate, the Americans decide to take the villagers with them, even though it’s against official US policy.
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KEVIN CONROY SCOTT: Books were revered in your house when you were growing up. Were there any particular authors you read at that time whose lives or careers you wanted to emulate?
DAVID O. RUSSELL: Yeah – probably J. D. Salinger or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Those were the two big guys. I wouldn’t have had Fitzgerald’s ‘rich’ thing going on, but I liked what he wrote about social classes. I read some more interesting people too. I feel as though I should be saying some more obscure French authors …
Don’t worry, it’s not that kind of interview.
Okay, so those two guys, and probably Mark Twain too; Huckleberry Finn had a big influence on me, and I also thought Twain was very cool as a gadfly, as a social critic, a satirist and a humorist.
I believe your first short film was a documentary called Boston to Panama?
I did it as an activist, mostly. I always thought I would be a writer because I had worked in Central America during the early years of the Nicaraguan revolution, teaching literacy there. Then I did some of that in Boston’s South End, and I used the writing as a political empowerment tool. In other words you get people who don’t know how to read or write and in the process of learning to read and write they write their own stories, and they realize it’s not a mystifying language that’s owned by the rich classes but it’s something in which they can express themselves as well. They wrote stories in English and I published them in a little magazine, and everybody took it to the media. Then the magazines would go out to little adult education centres, and the immigrants would see the work they’d done in the magazine and in my documentary, which was a video of one guy’s life in particular. It’s the story of how this guy from Central America was struggling to live in Boston, where people were slashing his tyres and stealing his mail. The film was a struggle for me because it was a creaky process where I used the facilities at the local community college to make it. I was cutting from one deck to the other, there was no editing system so you’d have to stop the deck exactly where you wanted to cut to, and then cut the other deck in. So it was stone-age editing …
Apparently in college you were interested in writing fiction and doing critical work. When did you start focusing on filmmaking and, in particular, screenwriting?
You know, for some reason I think I never took it seriously as a vocation – maybe because I grew up in a house with books, and I thought fiction writing was the only way to go, really. I was too laden with middle-class expectations – though I bucked all of those by growing up to be a leftist and a screenwriter, neither of which fit those expectations. I always loved movies, I loved them from my soul, I’d go to the same movie five or six times and I would relive them in my head for weeks and months, probably to a neurotic extent. And I’ve always said that all those great movies of the seventies were my film education. Then I just started making films, badly. When I came to Boston, I didn’t understand the very thing I’d been teaching my students, which was that you should just take whatever is inside of you and speak from that. I think I thought of film as some artifice that had to be fabricated to be deserving, and so my first short films are sort of weird in that respect. I don’t like to show them too much any more because I don’t think I knew what the hell I was doing. I didn’t know anything about putting a movie together.
When you became serious about what you were doing, you moved to New York City and took a series of jobs including work as a journalist and script-reader for MGM. I’ve done reading work too, so I know it’s one thing to be an analytical reader who can give good notes, but quite another to actually go out and write a screenplay …
Well, the first script I wrote was a horror thing, because that was considered to be a hot genre where you could quickly get very good and get started.
Was this during the Nightmare on Elm Street phase of the eighties?
Yeah, but I made my horror film political. I’d worked on toxic waste issues in a mill town in Maine so I said, ‘OK, you have these mill workers in Maine who are toxic mutants and they go down to New York City and start attacking and contaminating the Wall Street people who have bought and sold their factories.’ So it was like a yuppie-destruction horror picture. It didn’t get me anywhere. Actually, that’s not true, I met my wife through it. She was at New Line, but she ‘didn’t respond to the material’.
What was the problem?
I don’t know, I should pull it out and look at it again … but I do know that in general what I thought I was learning was how to express what’s inside of me and what I care about, and to turn it into some kind of cinema. There was a lot of groping around in that regard. For example, I had an idea of a guy in a Chinese restaurant who eavesdrops on every table and writes very pointed, personal fortunes to everyone, and that got me some grant money to make a short film. In the end I decided it was too cute so I tried to write it as a feature and spent two years on it. It would have been a nice comedy in some respects, but I needed to do something deeper, I think. It’s a little bit similar to what I’m doing now, if only in the sense that I think there was something there about wanting to have an interface between people’s lives.
I understand that you outline anything you’re going to write. Can you take me through your process in going about that?
Well, first there’s whatever it is that excites me about the idea, and then sometimes you have fragments or pieces of a story, and then you have scenes that you love and think are really great, and then character ideas – all these things aren’t necessarily meshed together, but I list them all in columns, like characters. I’ve actually distilled it down so that I will take each character and write an arc from left to right, and then I try to find links between those arcs, between the stories of each character, and then I curtail them and condense them into one story. It can be a long process of trying to figure out what the story is – if it’s interesting enough, whether it’s going too much in the direction of one character, how do you pull it back? That’s always a fight: ‘Who’s movie is it?’
You said that you like to write at a friend’s house because you found the writing process to be lonely. Is it really that hard for you to sit down and work on your own?
Well, you’re still working by yourself when you’re at a friend’s house. But somehow it’s easier just having somebody around to go get a coffee with when you want to take a break …
Do you find it’s easier to break through certain kinds of problems if you’re able to vocalize them?
Absolutely. It’s nice to have someone to talk to about it. I’ve actually started collaborating for the first time on a recent project, and that’s made it a lot less hard. So far it’s been entirely my idea that I’ve developed, but I want help in figuring it out, and realizing it.
So you come up with so many ideas, you just need help expressing them?
I have billions of ideas. The problem is making them as good as they can be. Sometimes that’s a long, hard process, so it’s nice to know you don’t have to do it by yourself. It’s also good to just have someone there as a critic. And I also like to bounce ideas off certain people who work in my office sometimes, but we keep it in a hermetically sealed environment – because it would be too damaging if you let in too many people too soon. It gets confused, so you just keep it sealed, and then you start letting people figure out what makes sense.
Why do you think screenwriting is, and this is your own description, ‘excruciating and painful’?
Excruciating? Screenwriting? Well, I was probably referring to the lonely arduousness of it all. It’s not easy to write a good movie, some movies just come popping out, but not all of them do, especially if it’s an ambitious idea. Those are the ones where so often I’m halfway through the writing and I’m saying, ‘Why don’t I just write something simpler?’ I mean, I recently finished a rewrite of a new project that reminded me of the Chinese restaurant one, because it’s about two existential detectives, one of whom will be played by Dustin Hoffman. People bring their cases of existential crisis to these detectives, and they investigate. So there is some eavesdropping, like in the Chinese restaurant, but it’s only a little bit. I ran into Dustin Hoffman the other day and told him I had a new draft, we were chatting, and he kept saying, ‘Congratulations.’ And I said, ‘Why do you keep saying “Congratulations”?’ and he said, ‘Because I know how hard it is.’ And I appreciated that – someone knowing how hard it is to rewrite something, to shorten it or improve it. I think endurance is a big part of being able to be a good writer – to persist in trying to find the best answers, even when they’re not presenting themselves to you yet.
Apparently Warren Beatty told you that it’s just as hard to read a screenplay as it is to write one. Can you tell me why you agreed with that?
I have a very hard time reading a screenplay. People give them to me and I don’t like to read them because I’m working all day on screenplays, so it then takes a lot of energy and concentration, because I like to put myself entirely into the script. But also I think you can totally misread a screenplay – many of my scripts have been completely misread by people, including the present one and Three Kings. The executives pass on it, and then they come up to me afterwards when the film is out and they say, ‘Oh my god, I didn’t understand what you were trying to do and now I see! And it’s so terrific, please come back to me.’ And you come back with the next project, and they say the same fucking thing – ‘I don’t understand what you’re doing here …’So you say, ‘Remember you said that about Three Kings, and then you said you really loved it …?’ And it goes on and on.
So yeah, I think it is hard to read a screenplay. You know, Dustin Hoffman asked me to read my new script to him aloud. It took three days to sit with him and read it, but he wanted to really hear it, how I feel and hear the script myself.
Is that because he wants to get your tone? Because your tone is very unique – you shift gears, you’re always on a kind of high-wire …
Exactly.
After Spanking the Monkey and Flirting with Disaster, two films that the critic Graham Fuller called ‘neurotic family comedies’, you made the $50 million Three Kings, which you called a ‘political war film’. Can you tell me why as a writer you wanted to switch gears that way, or increase the size of the canvas?
That’s a damn good question, and I look back and go, ‘Why the hell did I do that?’ But again, I think it’s another one of those cases where you’re writing and you don’t understand why you are going through that process. You just feel you need to do it; something is drawing you to tell that story. Obviously, making that film got me to where I am today, where I feel very clear about what I want to do: smaller films that are sort of more about strange, spiritual matters, which is most dear to me. But for some reason that was not crystal clear to me at the time. Part of it was a curiosity about the movie business that I just hadn’t got out of my system; and then you make a studio movie, with a stunt department – for some reason I was drawn to that – and, having done it, I could not be less interested in repeating it. Let alone the genre aspect of the heist, which just bores me to tears.
In your video journal that accompanies the DVD of Three Kings, we see you during pre-production, cycling to a casting session. You’re not in the back of a studio car, you’re whizzing down Central Park West, and then you bump into Spike Jonze … and your world seems quite small and hermetically sealed. Then later, during production, you’re in a hotel conference room round a table with sixty other people, all looking to you for an answer. I thought that, juxtaposed, those two images said a lot.
Yeah, that’s just sick, isn’t it? I was like God Almighty with how many people were working on that film. It’s really good to work with a skeleton crew – I want to work with the smallest crew possible from now on. Having a gigantic crew can be problematic because half of them treat it very impersonally because they’ve just come off a string of five movies. It’s not a good energy to have on the set, when you’ve slaved away at something for years.
I have a lot of things that are in me, and movies take so long to make that I suddenly woke up and thought, ‘Jesus Christ, let’s bust out some more jams! Let’s get some more of me out there.’ And I still have that, there are whole parts of me that I think by the time I tell all my stories I’ll be ninety years old. I want to get some of my politics out there, because I was in Central America during a very unstable period – well it’s always unstable – and I was always drawn to that. Another reason I was drawn to Three Kings was because I wanted to make a male movie, I didn’t want my next movie to revolve around women, like my first two movies.
You alluded to your distaste for the heist aspect of the plot in Three Kings. Did it ever occur to you to take that element out of the plot?
Good idea … No it didn’t, and it would have made my life a hell of a lot easier. For some reason, I was like an autistic who gets hung up on one idea, even if it doesn’t make sense any more. I probably could have made a much more interesting movie if it had just been about the characters – a M*A*S*H*-like comedy.
It seemed as if throughout Three Kings there was a tension between what you need to do with the story and what you wanted to show about the American soldiers fighting in Iraq. I thought the cultural elements were very well-observed – such as the soldiers sneaking booze into their camps, the journalists angling for a story …
I’m gonna say two things about that. First is that I’d like to think we did the action in an original way; secondly I felt as though we offered a very good political metaphor for the naïvety of the soldiers. This was through their green feelings, that they didn’t have a satisfying experience in the war because they didn’t get to fight and wanted to take something with them as a souvenir of their time in ‘the war’. That goal of wanting to take something with you – either experience or a material possession like gold – is sort of like the oil: we get it and then we leave everyone behind. Which is what we do with these societies, we suck their resources out and leave behind these really fucked-up situations with repressive dictators, which is exactly what we did at the end of the Gulf War. I thought that was a huge hypocrisy. At the time I couldn’t believe no other filmmaker was interested in exploring those themes and that war.
Three Kings has become a very important film, especially in the current political climate. How do you feel about America’s strategy in Iraq today?
The whole thing just smells bad to me, it just feels as though it’s based on really stupid oil policies and stupid ways of living our lives here that we could have changed a long time ago, to a better way of living in the world where we aren’t so resource-dependent and wasteful. They obviously want to build an empire and have bases all over the world, and I don’t think that’s such a great idea. I also know how brutal Saddam Hussein is, since many of the people who worked in our movie had been torture victims of his. He’s such a good dictator – if there was like a Top Ten Dictators list, he’d be right up in the top three because he is so brutal, that’s how he can hold power. He killed his own sons-in-law …
You researched and wrote Three Kings over a period of eighteen months. Can you take me through the process?
It’s nice to have somebody helping you, an assistant that the studio pays for who helps organize all the book research. You also search out certain veterans who were there, you develop relationships with them, like I had a relationship with a Navy SEAL named John Rottger who was in Iraq, and he became one of my technical advisors. It was the same with Jim Parker. He was another one of our advisors and he actually had the experience of witnessing Saddam crushing the democratic movement after the Gulf War. Jim saw his soldiers cry. American soldiers were crying, not understanding why they weren’t supposed to do anything when they saw people who were their enemy a week before killing innocent civilians.
We also found some awesome books on the war. One of my favourites was a book that featured photos from the Los Angeles Times. It had a pictorial history of the war comprised of the day-by-day front-page colour photos from the Times throughout the war. What I liked about it was the colour; it was the first daily newspaper to run colour photos. And I liked the look of it so much that we tried in the cinematography of the film to make the colours super-saturated, the way they look in a colour Xerox copy and on the cover of the LA Times, where the colour really explodes. A lot of CNN footage gave us that vibe as well.
There was also a book by Gilles Peress that was hugely helpful. He’s a famous photo-journalist who did a book called Telex Iran, photographs from the Iranian revolution in 1979. It really informed how I wanted Three Kings to feel and look. That book has a very strange, ominous feeling of chaos amongst normal lives, brought on by political turmoil. There is amazing foreground-background deep-focus in those photos. It’s really an amazing book, and I carried it around with me relentlessly. I also met a guy who I should also give credit to – John R. Mac Arthur, who is an editor at Harper’s who had written a book about the media in the Gulf War. It’s called Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War; it sort of corroborated for me the experience that I tried to distil into the film.
And pieces such as the detail of the soldiers sneaking booze in, how did that come up?
Soldiers would tell me that they snuck liquor in with mouthwash bottles, and you’d see snapshots that soldiers had where they’d be drinking out of something that looked like a Listerine bottle but it would be Jack Daniel’s or something. We’d get a lot of pictures from guys who’d been in the barracks. They had a lot of free time, so they were giving each other really badass haircuts, taking pictures of each other and all that shit.
There’s something homoerotic about it – like being in prison, a lot of guys hanging out with each other.
All of them lifting weights … Yeah, there was, for sure.
Three Kings is a mixture of genres. First of all it’s a war film, then it’s a heist film with different parts. If the first third is a comedy, and the middle third is an action film, what would you say the last third is?
‘Political melodrama’? I’ve never heard it broken up in thirds like that, but I think that’ll work. I like to think they’re a little bit more interwoven than that, but that sounds fair enough.
Music is an integral part of the story-telling. Do you listen to music to help you establish tone?
I tried that with Three Kings. When you’re writing and listening to music you tend to intoxicate yourself. I think music is dangerously seductive. You can play music and kind of do some aural masturbation about what the movie would feel like, and that almost can preclude the work from actually penetrating directly into what you are trying to get across. I don’t like films that rely too much on music.
It’s interesting that you have inserts of the home lives of your three main characters. One was a baggage carrier, another was obsessed with guns, the other had a new-born baby at home. Do you like doing character biographies when you write?
Yeah, I give all the actors multiple-page histories.
You wrote Spike Jonze’s part with him in mind. And yet I don’t think he had acted before. So how does that work?
Spike’s a friend of mine, and he was at the time I was writing this. He has this energy, he’s also a prankster – so that I just started to consider him as this character. And once I started picturing him as that guy, physically, it started to make sense. I think Spike has a certain inner sense of himself, he took to that character very well, and he started to fuck around with the idea in a very jokey way by manipulating the voice and playing around.
Brentwood, California
François Ozon
‘She’s not crazy, it’s the only way for her to be alive, to imagine he’s present.’ Marie Drillon (Charlotte Rampling) surveys the water, looking for her husband.