I had to get rid of my Wayfarer sunglasses because of Jon Avnet. The year was 1983 when an Avnet movie called Risky Business came out and ruined everything. The success of that movie was so complete that it was impossible to go anywhere without hearing “Hey, Risky Business!” yelled at me from every passing Chrysler LeBaron. I shit-canned the glasses. Avnet changed the culture.
Since then, Avnet has been responsible for such era-defining films as 1987’s Less Than Zero, 1991’s Fried Green Tomatoes, the 1990s’ The Mighty Ducks franchise and this spring’s 88 Minutes. Currently he’s in post-production on the ultimate film geek’s wet dream, September’s Righteous Kill, starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino as two veteran NYPD detectives who’ve stuck around, seen too much and played the game a little too long. Directing De Niro and Pacino on that turf requires a certain toughness and savvy. But Avnet’s a lot like the actors’ Righteous Kill characters: He’s been around the block but he’s still got moves.
Brian O’Hare (MM): How did you get from Fried Green Tomatoes to Righteous Kill?
Jon Avnet (JA): The most obvious common denominator is not the story or subject matter: Jessica Tandy and Kathy Bates were actresses I’d admired for years. From that to De Niro and Pacino, it’s pretty obvious: Good actors are my weak spot.
MM: That’s not a bad thing.
JA: I agree. If you love creating, you are fortunate to do it with the quality of these actors. I’m more interested in what they have to say and their instincts than my own. I can destroy a great idea with a really good one. What you’re asked to do as a director, ultimately, is to judge—to make a judgment about what’s best. So if your goal is to create the best moment, get everything you can out of the actor. If it’s not better than what you thought, bring yourself into the process. That can be doing nothing or doing a lot—it varies with the actor, the scene, the movie and how much rehearsal and preparation I’ve had. There’s no firm rule, but one thing is very obvious: I’m not performing, they are. If you forget that, you’re making a mistake.
MM: Does directing a De Niro or Pacino require a different approach?
JA: One of the most difficult things you have to do as a director is to figure out what you think. It sounds counterintuitive, but it takes a while to come up with what the French call “le mot juste,” the best choice. What’s intimidating about great actors in a way is that the limit of their performance is the limit of the director’s imagination. If I can’t imagine it, articulate it or ask for it, then maybe they won’t do it.
MM: As a producer-director, how does one job inform the other?
JA: It’s a mixed blessing. I started out wanting to be a director, but I was afraid I’d never be hired. So I went the route of learning to produce to earn a living and to put myself in a position to control my destiny by knowing the mechanics of how a movie got made. It worked out—amazingly so.
I had the balls to buy Fannie Flagg’s book, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Cafe. When I sent the book to the studio heads no one wanted to do it, which I understood. It was a small movie, a limited audience film; it was difficult to understand the way I saw it. If you asked me if I thought it was going to be a big commercial hit I would’ve said no. That ability to make things happen is great.
The difficulty as a director is to fight compromise. Sometimes you do it for practical reasons and sometimes it slaughters you. It starts with accepting a project that’s got a failed premise or is unfixable. You don’t know when that compromise is going to give you a venomous bite and kill you. That’s why directors ultimately are quite mad. As a producer you want a director who demands everything and then you have to discipline him; you don’t want a director who doesn’t demand everything because, unless he’s possessed of the film, what are you going to get?
I’m caught between accepting the discipline that’s put on me and fighting for something to the death, which is what you need to do as a director. Sometimes I feel like I’ve accepted compromise too early because of being responsible. Occasionally I would like to fire the producer or the producer would like to fire the director. It’s like being an inmate in an asylum, where you’re having these arguments with yourself and, frankly, no one cares. It’s a very schizophrenic life.
MM: How do you reconcile that schizophrenia with art?
JA: If you are self-critical, you can’t look at your work the way you look at others’ work. The thing I used to comfort myself with was, ‘Was it worth making?’ I wanted to be a positive voice in this culture, but that doesn’t answer “art.” I thought Men Don’t Leave was a really great movie, but no one went to see it; Less Than Zero was received better after the fact than it was when it came out. That’s typical of any kind of artistic endeavor. At the same time, you’re still walking around with these wounds—real and imagined—asking, ‘Are they right? What’s wrong with my judgment? Why did I accept casting this person instead of saying I won’t do it unless I have that person?’
MM: How important is a well-defined concept of success for a director?
I don’t know if you had the good fortune of seeing the Picasso show in New York years ago at the Modern, but you look at this guy’s work and go, ‘There’s the Blue Period, the Rose Period, there’s cubism, then abstract expressionism, then Guernica. How could this guy be this fertile and reinvent himself so many times?’ Maybe that’s also how you define genius. Most filmmakers aren’t geniuses, so they can’t continually reinvent themselves. You hear Francis Ford Coppola talking about The Godfather and you think: “He didn’t see what he was making?”
MM: He’s a great example.
JA: Did you see Eleanor Coppola’s documentary, [Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse]? Can you imagine what this man went through? To show up and there’s Marlon Brando, out of his fucking mind. Just to get anything was a miracle. He dedicated his entire life to [Apocalypse Now]—he was literally going to die making it—then he’s got this lunatic. What would happen to you? I don’t think it’s an accident that a lot of artists are so off the beaten path. It doesn’t matter how they start, they get there.
MM: What sparks your visual imagination?
JA: I start with music: Mozart, Beethoven… Steve Wright, Philip Glass and John Cage. I like Italian opera. Impressionist paintings—that period of art seemed so unbelievably rich and played with perception. That and early music videos. Some of them, visually, were so imaginative. And, of course, films: 1960s foreign films, the Italians, the French, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, Ozu. That whole world that started post-war in Italy with neorealism—Pasolini, De Sica and Fellini—that world seemed like such an exotic and empathetic view of humanity.
MM: Any wisdom from your years on the front lines?
JA: If you can look “no” in the eye, snarl at it and dance around it, then you would be well-suited to make movies.
MM: At first, could you look “no” in the eye?
JA: No, I developed that. I had no extraordinary skills, but I learned—like most independent filmmakers—that I would run out of batteries. I’d run out of film. I didn’t have a permit. I didn’t understand what to do when the weather was bad. As I confronted these problems and felt overwhelmed by my inability to solve them, I thought, ‘Shit, I’m never gonna do this.’ But instead of walking away, I became more tenacious. Over time I developed a very patient and persistent approach to solving problems. Those skills develop by necessity and drive. You can have all those skills and you may still not make great movies. That’s the great paradox of filmmaking. What makes something great, there’s a magic to it.
MM: So what’s on the horizon?
JA: I’m adapting a book by Fannie Flagg called A Redbird Christmas; trying to finish Righteous Kill and hopefully do justice to Bob and Al, New York City, characters on the way out but with a lot of passion in them and a wonderful relationship between the two.
MM: That sets up my last question: Rooster and Turk, Pacino and De Niro’s characters in Righteous Kill versus Popeye Doyle and Buddy Russo from The French Connection. Who would win?
JA: Whoa, interesting question. A little bit like, “Pick two sports teams who were the greatest of a time...”
MM: Like the 1927 Yankees and the 1971 Pirates…
JA: Yeah, and I think on any given day it’d go one way or another. There was a phenomenal line from a movie: Two guys are looking at two gun fighters and one guy says to the other, “Who do you think is faster?” And the other guy says, “I’d hate to have to live on the difference.” That might be the best answer.
There’s something about older guys who stay in the game, even if they’ve stayed past their prime; they’ve got moves, they’ve got some savvy. They couldn’t win in a street fight that lasted beyond a certain time, but then again they may have taken you out with a blackjack before you even knew the fight started.