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James Mangold’s Identity Crisis
Writer/Director James Mangold on his career and his new thriller, Identity
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In 1985, at the age of 21, James Mangold was the envy of every aspiring moviemaker. Only weeks after graduating from Cal Arts, he landed a development deal at Disney, garnered himself an agent at ICM and traded phone calls with Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
But things didn’t work out the way he planned.
Three days into shooting, he was fired from his
first directorial assignment and at the end of the first year,
his deal at Disney was not renewed. “I felt
about as low as you could feel,” recalls Mangold. “I felt like
I’d blown it.”
Ultimately, he decided to go back to film school, this time to
Columbia, where he found a mentor, Milos Forman, who helped continue
the mentor-student journey that Mangold had forged with director
Sandy Mackendrick (Sweet Smell of Success) during his earlier
stint at Cal Arts.
Mangold wrote Heavy while studying under Oscar-winner Forman (Amadeus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and that film, which was independently financed by Mangold from friends and family, went on to win the Director’s Prize at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival. After the success of Heavy, he found himself, at 32, directing Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta and Sylvester Stallone in Cop Land.
During the making of Cop Land, he also met an important collaborator, producer Cathy Konrad (Scream, Citizen Ruth, Kids).
“I remember getting the script,” recalls Konrad. “And it was quite long—like 139 pages—and I remember thinking ‘great.’ But then I was really drawn into the way Jim told stories.” The two later married and Konrad has produced all of Mangold’s subsequent features, Girl, Interrupted, Kate & Leopold and his latest, the thriller, Identity.
Ryan Mottesheard (MM): You scored a development deal with Disney at the age 21. Did you think that you “had it made?”
James Mangold (JM): I didn’t have it made, ultimately. It was a bumpy road. It was like being thrown into a world where you don’t even know how lucky you are because you haven’t struggled that much. I graduated from Cal Arts in June and I was writing in my office at Disney in August. It was a great early experience in understanding the business side of filmmaking. Understanding the politics of this business is a big part of doing well in it. There were a lot of early lessons for me in that. And I didn’t play everything the right way. It wasn’t a matter of learning by observing; I learned by making mistakes.
MM: Your deal at Disney was not renewed at the end of that year. How did you feel at that point?
JM:Coming out of Disney, I felt about as low as you could feel. The funny thing is, when I went back to Columbia Film School, I was the ultimate film school student’s nightmare come true. I graduated from film school (the first time) with a hot short film, I got signed by a studio and a year later I was on my ass, going nowhere. None of my fellow students wanted to hear my story because all they hoped for was to get the opportunities I had when I was 21. I carried a good bit of baggage about “blowing it.”
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James Mangold with producer/wife Cathy Konrad on the set of 2001’s Kate & Leopold. |
MM: Did you ever consider giving up?
JM:Sure. I thought about becoming a novelist. I started writing short stories and poems and books and would send them into quarterlies and get feedback. I ended up calling the head of UC Irvine’s creative writing school and he told me, “If you’ve gotten as far as you have, and you’re only 22, then you might want to stick with it.” I was looking for a mentor. That’s the main reason I went back to film school. Some people put down film schools, saying, “What do you really need them for when everything you need to learn you can learn by watching great movies?” Which is true, in many ways. But one of the things you don’t get is a community. If you’re working in the business, everyone is so starving that no one has time for anyone else.
MM: What were some of the most important things that you learned from your film school mentors, Milos Forman and Sandy Mackendrick?
JM: Sandy was a brilliant man, but he had a lot of formalized rules about filmmaking—where exposition should go, how you should structure things, how stories worked from the Greek times. The real lesson that Sandy taught me was if I turned in a 10-page short film script, he would come back the next day with 11 pages of handwritten notes. What he was doing was not only making you believe in yourself, but he also made you take yourself seriously, because he did. He also made me understand how much hard work goes into filmmaking.
Milos was also a great writing teacher. He would go through a screenplay with me and pick out pieces and say “This is good, this is better, this is not so good.” It was about finding moments inside the script. One of the reasons why he’s so good with actors is finding moments in the screenplay. I wrote Heavy while I was studying with Milos.
MM: You’ve gone from a smallish independent film, Heavy, to directing much bigger budgeted projects for huge studios. How were you able to make that transition?
JM:I think the job of directing a movie remains essentially the same—at least for me. It changes more for the line producer or the DP, who will have more lights and more people to hang those lights. But for me, you’ve got a 35mm camera—I did on Heavy, I did on Identity—I have actors’ faces and a script and a scene and I have to finish the work and be satisfied with it.
MM: Identity is the first film in which you don’t have a script credit. Was there a certain liberation you found in working from someone else’s script?
JM:No, I don’t think so. What’s weird is that when I’m directing something I wrote myself, I still think of the person who wrote it as this other person. By the time you arrive on the set and a line isn’t working or whatever, the director in you just says, ‘Oh, that idiot writer.’ There’s a very clear switching of hats in order to be healthy as a writer/director. Certainly, [something that’s been] very helpful for me has been having a very smart, creative producer at my side—and also have a really smart cast.
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| John Cusack and Amanda Peete are part of the talented ensemble cast in Identity. |
MM: You’ve always been able to put together interesting casts, particularly in the smaller roles.
JM:That’s the critical part. Cathy and I both pay a lot of attention to that. A movie can be undone with those roles. Even when you’re making student films, it’s apparent when you have your friend come over to play the UPS man in a scene. They always stink, and it’s a huge catastrophe. As I’m writing or directing, I try to make sure that every character has a moment to assert themselves; an aria, almost. Because I’ve seen movies be destroyed from lack of this.
MM: How did you come upon the idea of casting John Cusack in the lead for a dark noir thriller?
JM:Cathy and I both felt like John was perfect for this role. When you think of movies like The Grifters, you don’t feel like it’s such a stretch. I’d met John a few times and there’s this great “Everyman” sense to him. And while there’s this great warmth to him, especially as he’s grown older, there’s also a simplicity, a gravity to him. There’s something very solid about John.
MM: You shot Identity on stages at Sony?
JM: Yeah. You’d have been amazed if you’d visited during shooting. We built literally 95 percent of what you see in the movie. It was incredible what we got away with on the stages. It allowed me to make a stronger film. I mean, having done nights in rain on location, it’s just brutal. It’s a lot harder to control all the elements and still be worried about composition.
MM: So you filmed it like an old Hollywood director?
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“You can only go |
JM: Yeah. Shooting a movie is never 9-to-5, but I found myself getting home and having dinner, which is so unusual for me when I’m making a movie. In this case, there was something very methodical to making the movie. And in many ways, it was one of the reasons I was interested in this film. The storytelling was the star.
I’m a big fan of single location movies, whether it’s Rear Window or whatever. It’s almost the opposite of the dictum of “opening things up,” which is often applied to plays or book adaptations. To me, some of the most cinematic movies have “opened up” without doing the obvious. They’ve kept themselves in one world and said to themselves, “Somehow I’m going to keep opening doors into this one world.” I’m not going to allow myself to cut to, say, New Delhi or cut to London, etc.
MM: Do you like to put those restraints on yourself?
JM: Yes, I do. I like having a very concrete, formal hurdle. Like when I made my first film, Heavy. I set out to make a silent film, almost in response to these tongue-in-cheek, rock and roll, über-violent films that were around at the time. I set out to do something incredibly reductive. And in [Identity], what I wanted to do was take some of the exuberance and operatic-ness of horror films and marry it to a better class of acting and character work and also the audacious set of twists that was in the material.
MM: A lot of those slasher films cancel themselves out anyway.
JM:Well, it becomes about the guitar solo. There are times in movies that you can go so far, and this is true not only with gore, but with almost every stylistic touch. Where you go so far as to say, ‘It’s more important that you recognize me, doing my little film aria, than staying in the story we’ve constructed.’ That’s always the battle—for me, anyway. I think the great practitioner of the boundary was Hitchcock. He very often did amazing things that we could talk about on an athletic basis, like a shot that cranes from the ceiling down to find a key inside someone’s hand. But they’re story points!
MM: And you don’t see those things until you see them for the second or third time…
JM:…Or if somebody tells you to look out for that moment. But it’s so un-self-conscious with him. My favorite Hitchcock movie is Shadow of a Doubt, which has these incredible dinner scenes with Joseph Cotten and everyone at the table. That’s where you really see how great Hitchcock is. It’s really gratifying to me when the less showy scenes have an incredible design to them. That’s where you really see the greatness in some directors.
MM: In some of your earlier interviews, you mentioned the influence of Yasujiro Ozu. Whose work, or which films, did you look at for Identity?
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| Mangold directs Cusack on the Identity set. |
JM:There were already such icons in my head once I realized that the beginning, middle and end all occur in this one place. One of them is John Carpenter’s The Thing, which I think is a really great film. But it was extremely influenced by Alien, which I think is another extremely great film. I think of [both of these movies] as absolute penultimate integrations of the horror film, the monster film, into a modern styling.
MM: There’s this acute attention to detail in your films. They’re all very intricately detailed, from shot composition to production design to editing transitions.
JM:The devil is in the details. The films that live do so because of that care. I think every movie has its flaws. One of the things that can really paralyze you as a filmmaker is when you watch something like Citizen Kane, and you wonder how you can even be playing in the same ballpark. But if you watch it as if you made it, you might say, ‘Wow, that was kind of a stinky scene.’ Now the scene before it and the scene after it are so great, but even in that stinky scene there are great details, even if it’s a prop or a look or whatever.
MM: Do you feel like you’re a different moviemaker than you would’ve been had your early experience at Disney turned out differently?
JM:I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder how things would’ve turned out if everything had gone right at Disney. I’m just glad I’m a little older and a little wiser about making movies now. Maybe if I would’ve been a little more successful back then, I might’ve done two or three films and then burned out. I don’t know.
In any event, I think it was a blessing in disguise, because after going back to film school again, it helped me differentiate between wanting to make movies and needing to make movies. With everyone I met back in the late ’80s, early ’90s, who came out of the New York independent scene, the movies that got made were because the people behind them decided they had to happen. Whether it was $1 million in foreign money or $10 million from a studio or $200,000 that was cobbled together from friends and family. Those were the movies that had to be made. MM
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This story was published in the Spring 2003 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
The Storytelling is the Star / Writer/Director James Mangold on his career and his new thriller, Identity
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