Advertisement
James Toback vs. Mike Tyson
My earliest cinematic memories are familial—my father, Irwin Toback, shooting my mother, Selma Toback, and me at age four with an 8mm camera in Manhattan, Atlantic Beach, Long Island and Hollywood, Florida. Whether I was sledding on what seemed from my diminutive perspective to be imposing mountains in a snow-covered Central Park, jumping waves with my mother in the ocean or learning tennis from pros Martin Buxby and Fred Perry, there was a natural continuum uniting creator and subject, role-player and role.
Those rich Kodak colors on a pull-up screen illuminating my dark bedroom, silent except for the clicking of the projector, have taken on the quality of dreams while influencing profoundly the very idea of what film should be. The idea of moving pictures as a source of intimacy, revelation and permanent record was born.
The next plateau of awareness introduced actors playing parts: Doris Day, Gordon MacRae, James Stewart, Donald O’Connor, Alan Ladd—all seemed knowable and known through their performances. There remained no sense of separation between the part and the person, the one I felt sure I knew.
With time came news: Actors were not coterminous with the roles they were playing—they were acting in roles written for them by writers and doing what directors directed them to do. By the time my own life as a moviemaker began I had come to accept this conventional view as a given.
My initiation was splendid—the equivalent of a one-on-one film school—collaborating on The Gambler (my first actual screenplay) with Karel Reisz, whose skills as a director were matched only by his personal charm and generosity. Karel’s creative universe was founded on classical sequence and structure: Conception, elaboration, script, analysis, revision, casting, technical preparation, rehearsals, shooting, editing and post-production refinement. I came to Karel with the first three elements prepared and remained with him for the next two years as the other stages evolved.
But everything sprang from the script. It wasn’t so much a blueprint as a bible. Even when I, its author, felt intuitively that moments or whole scenes might benefit from adjustments—sometimes even between takes—Karel would rigorously defend my text from me. It was a Hitchcockian notion of moviemaking, based on the premise that if everything were to be prepared properly in advance—the dialogue, the staging, the dramatic psychology—then shooting could become an exercise in execution rather than invention.
Through Fingers, my first film as writer and director, Love and Money and Exposed, I played largely to those well-learned rules. But there was a personal event during Exposed which ignited a radical shift in my thinking.
After laboring (with the aid of cue cards) through a scene in which I was also an actor, I approached my next scene—an angry break-up scene with Nastassja Kinski—with a recklessly open and subversive mind. I veered off my own prepared dialogue (sacrilege!) from the first line and continued inventing—with aggressive provocation—until the end.
Kinski, who needed no coaxing to summon up her own rebelliousness, came back at me with an improvised and lacerating antagonism of her own. The essence of the scene—the fundamental intentions—were realized, but with a live, responsive connection to each evolving moment.
The exhilaration of that experience—and another scene which features Nastassja alone in her apartment and which similarly broke with the original plan—forced me to question all my basic assumptions. If life itself, despite our often desperate efforts at control and management, is brimming with twists of surprise, why should the process of making a film be any less open to the ongoing freshness of uncertainty?
1 of 2 |
Digg
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Del.icio.us
Reddit
YahooAdvertisement
COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT 
- Comment by injury in denver on 5/31/09 at 8:26 pm
An element of uncertainty in the roles a movie actor plays ensures that his audience interest always remains alive.
- Comment by Discount Pharmacy on 9/11/09 at 11:40 pm
directors are everything to a film, they make all the decisions and have the vision for the film, they are the voice and eyes of the film before its made, they shape every lighting idea, wardrobe choice, casting decisions, every shot filmed and then finally edited together, they head the music in a specific direction...they do everything to make the film what it is. not a great description but its a start..
- Comment by Franchise on 4/11/10 at 2:00 am
I was on Yahoo and found this website. Read a few of your other posts. Good work. I am looking forward to reading more from you in the future.
- Comment by Crazy Vision on 9/10/11 at 12:07 pm
thanx for shring this ..
please feel free to visit my blog asalah
This story was published in the Spring 2009 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Toback vs. Tyson / Legendary indie director challenges Mike Tyson to show his true self in Tyson
Order this issue | Subscribe to MM
posted 02.10.12
posted 02.8.12
posted 02.7.12
posted 02.1.12
SITE DELIVERY OPTIONS
