DIRECTING
Henry Jaglom’s Moment of Truth
Film’s freest director dissects the Hollywood machine in Hollywood Dreams
by Jennifer M. Wood
When it comes to the film world’s original independent voices, names like Orson Welles and John Cassavetes are the first to be bandied about. But for more than 35 years, Henry Jaglom has been making movies the only way he knows how-his way!
 Henry Jaglom on the set. |
Beginning with A Safe Place in 1971 and leading up to the recent Hollywood Dreams, the former actor has managed to complete 15 feature films throughout his career-not just a writer and director, but as an actor, editor and distributor, too. Through his Rainbow Film Company, Jaglom has proven that a true artist doesn’t need a studio greenlight to put his or her vision up on the screen. All he or she needs is the passion to move forward.
Jennifer Wood (MM): You’ve been making movies successfully for more than 35 years now, which is a huge accomplishment in and of itself. But what is even more impressive is that the voice that you began making films with-and
established yourself with in films like A Safe Place-is the same voice that has carried you through the decades, which is a true testament to the personal nature of your films. To what do you attribute your longevity in the business?
Henry Jaglom (HJ): I would say the single most important factor in my longevity as a filmmaker is my determination not to let anything get in the way-and I do mean anything! This lesson was driven home to me by my 10-year friendship with Orson Welles. I learned a lot from Orson, including the most positive thing he ever told me: "You’re going to have to live with your movies for the rest of your life, don’t compromise on them, don’t make them fit someone else’s idea of what may or may not be ‘commercial,’ make them for yourself!" Unfortunately I also learned the most vital negative lesson from Orson: "Never get your financing from Hollywood!"
From the beginning I have learned that if you get your financing from Europe you will have no one looking over your shoulder, no one telling you what to do and, most importantly, no one in the position to take your film away from you, which is what happened to Orson time after time. This requires keeping the budgets low and shooting fairly fast; these "limitations" were also addressed by Mr. Welles when he said to me at lunch one day: "The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." That said it all and has been my motto ever since.
MM: In an interview we did with you back in the early 1990s you referred to yourself as "the only free person in this town." Do you still hold that to be true?
HJ: I think what I said was that I am the "luckiest" person in town and, yes, that is true-but you can’t be lucky unless you have freedom. By not playing the Big Studio game, by never getting caught up in all that Hollywood nonsense, I have managed to make 15 films so far which, frame for frame, are my very own. Audiences can love them or hate them but they are what I want to make in the way I want to make them; I really don’t know anyone else except Bob Altman who has managed to do that since John Cassavetes showed us the way. Cassavetes was the freest filmmaker I’ve ever known, and my role model since seeing a sneak preview rough cut screening of Shadows when I was a freshman in college.
MM: So many of today’s moviemakers lament the power of "the Hollywood machine"-the big studios, etc. Yet you have managed to maintain your independence, and continue to be one of the truly "independent" moviemakers working today. What would you say to the aspiring moviemakers who are just coming up now? How would you respond to those complaints; do you think it’s overstating the current situation? Particularly with new technology (i.e. the Internet) creating new distribution opportunities.
HJ: The increased technologies have been a wonderful boon for truly independent filmmakers without resources or backing. Anyone can now use the technology that exists to make a film and send it out across the Internet to countless sites or even through simple e-mails and thereby get their work seen. Nothing like this existed when I started out. There were six or seven studios and they were the only ones who distributed films. After my first film, A Safe Place, which I made for Columbia Pictures, turned out to be a commercial disaster in the United States, I couldn’t find financing to do my second film, Tracks, for four years. When, thanks to the hustling abilities of my producer Howard Zuker (Zack Norman in his acting roles for me), I was given financing for Tracks, I made it on a shoestring, showed it to each of the studios in town and when they all rejected it, that was that-no distribution alternative was possible. Today that situation couldn’t exist and today, of course, Tracks and all my other films (except for A Safe Place, and you’ll have to ask Columbia Pictures about that) are widely available on DVD and seen on cable and satellite channels all over the world.
MM: You have long worked in a very improvisational way-without a written script, shooting in the moment, working with newer actors who fit a part for you, etc. I know that you find the creative end of moviemaking much more interesting than the technical end, but it seems like "the digital revolution" would be particularly exciting for you, allowing you to shoot as much as you want on a small budget and with a quick turnaround. Is that the case?
HJ: The single biggest myth about my movies is that they are "improvisational," that they are "without a script." This is the same myth that was attached to John Cassavetes’ films and is as untrue for me as it was for him. Hollywood Dreams, for example, had a 128-page shooting script and the actors all knew their characters and situations quite solidly before we entered the set. What is true and what seems to confuse people is that I don’t stop after writing the script; it is a starting off point for me and I do encourage my actors to enrich their dialogue and even their actions with their own language and imagination. Frequently what they give me is a better, fresher, more unique or exciting way of communicating a point that I had in mind than were the words I originally wrote for them and I consider it simply intelligent to use these wonderful contributions and not force actors into narrow, confining shells of dialogue.
So far the "digital revolution" hasn’t affected the way I make my films. Perhaps I am being a bit of a dinosaur, but I like shooting 35mm-I like the look of it and I like to feel it in my hands as I edit it on my Kem editing table. But I am not adverse or resistant to technological change when it is an improvement. On my first film it was Orson Welles, once again, who suggested that I use what was then a new invention-the flatbed editing table-that I have been using ever since. At that time editors were cutting films on Moviolas, and using the Kem was resisted and considered revolutionary. In fact, it caused several editors to quit and forced me to learn to edit my own films, which I have been doing happily and exhaustingly ever since.
MM: Of course, it’s impossible to talk to you-or about a "Henry Jaglom film"-without talking about your focus on the actor. For you is there anything more important than the acting? Can a great performance trump any of the technological issues that a moviemaker might face-sound, effects-or even the other creative elements, like a great script?
HJ: There is absolutely nothing more important than the actor. David Thomson has said of me that it must be understood that I am an actors’ director first and foremost. I am a product of my years studying at The Actors Studio and my work there under Lee Strasberg and Harold Clurman. For me everything derives from the actor, his or her behavior, feelings, moods, emotions-all of it. The story is also important to me and in fact has become more important of late, but the story is always that of some individuals and it is those individuals’ expression of that story, the unique and singular way that every human being differs from one another, that I am most interested in. That, I feel, is the key to the goal I always have in mind when I make a movie-trying to get the truth up on the screen.
MM: Can you talk a little bit about what it is you look for in your actors? There are few directors who collaborate so generously with their actors-allowing them to bring so much of their own creativity to the film. Though you show no preference for working with seasoned veterans over total newcomers, what are the biggest differences you find in directing a veteran like David Proval or Karen Black and a newcomer like Tanna Frederick in Hollywood Dreams, for example?
HJ: Tanna Frederick, I must say, is the most exciting new actor I have worked with in many, many years. The gift that she brings to me, and that the other exciting actors and actresses I have worked with contribute, is their singularity, their individuality, their one-of-a-kindness. Karen Black, David Proval, Melissa Leo, Zack Norman and newcomer Keaton Simons all have this unique singularity in spades. That is the greatest gift an actor can give to a filmmaker: The way he or she is unlike anyone else, despite our shared humanity.
MM: You seem to have found a true muse in Tanna; the two of you just
completed another film, Irene in Time. What was it about her that made you
want to work with her in the first place, and to continue that relationship? For you, what is the ideal director-actor collaboration like? Who are some of the people you have felt that with most throughout your career?
HJ: The collaboration with Tanna is a totally unique one. She is an extraordinarily gifted actress. What drew me to her first is a quality that she had that made me think she was ideally suited to play a character I had written in a play more than 30 years earlier at The Actors Studio. She was then an unemployed actress holding down three waitressing jobs and studying acting and when we met I suggested she look at that play to do a scene from it for her class. She took the play-A Safe Place, that years later was to become my first film-and somehow managed to find a director, a producer, financial backing and a theater and then asked me if she could put the play on. She did and it played for many months in Hollywood and she got sensational reviews. More importantly, I got to see her work night after night on the stage and realized what a rare and astonishing talent she was.
Shooting Hollywood Dreams confirmed my suspicion that she will have a long-lasting and important career of the sort that Meryl Streep and Vanessa Redgrave have had. Before I even finished editing Hollywood Dreams, I filmed another movie with Tanna, a film called Irene in Time. It is about the relationship between daughters and their fathers and how that affects their lifelong choice of men. Tanna is as astonishing in that as she is in Hollywood Dreams, yet in an entirely different way, the sign of a truly versatile and profoundly gifted actress.
MM: What’s up next for you?
HJ: Editing Irene in Time will take up much of the next year. I have also adapted a film of mine-1983’s Always, But Not Forever-into a play; we did a benefit reading of it a couple months ago for the wonderful Edgemar Theatre in Santa Monica and the audience was very responsive. Tanna shined spectacularly in the starring role, which is a switch on the characters in the film, and we are expecting to mount it theatrically sometime this winter. Tanna and I are also collaborating on a film that would take place in Iowa and look at the situation of farming and farmers in the modern world. She’d be playing a sort of Jimmy Stewart/Henry Fonda kind of role, fighting to save her family farm in an era of mega-agriculture
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