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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Are there advantages to being a late bloomer?
Oh, yeah. God, yes. Many advantages. I went to UCLA as a grad student and ran into all these kids who were trying to figure out who they were. I knew exactly who I was and I knew where I was headed. Also it was great growing up with such a strong ethical system and a kind of moral universe. That kind of Calvinism was very intellectual; it was very pro-educational and pro-thought. You know, they almost believed that you could think your way into heaven. When I look at my kids raised on MTV and video games, I wonder who had the better upbringing.
In your book on "Transcendental Cinema" you quoted the Dutch theologian who said, "Art and religion are parallel lines, intersecting at infinity and meeting in God." Do you find a spiritual outlet in film?
Well, of all the arts, I think film is one of the most difficult to be used in a spiritual manner because it is so kinetic, so visceral. If you're going to do something spiritual, it usually involves slowing life down, and it's kind of hard to slow something down that moves at 24 frames per second.
In "Auto Focus," the closest Crane seems to come to an epiphany is when he's with his son, talking about the color orange.
Bobby Crane Jr. is the one who told me about that orange conversation. He overheard that from his father, and I thought, Wow, that's pretty cool. So I put it in. Even though I'm not quite sure what it means. Something about hidden meanings in things.
Bobby Crane Jr. was a consultant on this film (and appears in a cameo). But you've had ongoing trouble with Scotty Crane.
The problem with Scotty began long before the film, in that he and his mother had a competing script, called "Take Off Your Clothes and Smile," which they couldn't get made. And I was told not to deal with them because they were litigious and they would claim that I stole their script. They felt they should have control over any film made about Bob Crane. So the first grievance was one of control, and out of that a number of other grievances have come over the years. And if you go to Scotty's Web site, he'll be more than happy to tell you about them. [Laughs.]
When you're focusing on a real-life subject, how do you handle these types of concerns without compromising your story?
Well, you do have two obligations. You have an obligation to history and you have an obligation to drama, and you've got to find a way to serve both masters. If you have to cheat history to tell a story, you shouldn't make that movie. And if you have to tell a boring story to be true to history, you shouldn't make that movie. So when you achieve a situation where both drama and history are being served, the line between fact and fiction then blurs because your protagonist is a factual character who has the power of fiction.
I went into this film expecting a lot of debauchery, but it wasn't as bad as I anticipated.
Well, I'd agreed to do an R film. I don't think audiences want to see porn in the multiplex. When they want to see porn, they know what they want to see and they know where to get it. They don't want to go to the multiplex and see it with their neighbors. So I think, even if I had had the freedom to be more explicit, I would have still made the same choices.
But there was a groan in the preview audience, when I saw the film, during a scene when one of the home porn shots gets blocked out.
I sort of made a mistake. I'd been watching too much HBO. [Laughs.] I thought I was making an R movie, but apparently the stuff on HBO like "Sex and the City" and "Six Feet Under" wouldn't get an R in the theater. Theatrical is more conservative than cable. So then I had to decide whether to cut the shot out or to obscure the offending area. I decided to pixelate it for two reasons. One was that it would tell the audience this was hardcore footage and not cheesecake. Secondly, down the road it would be changed. In Europe, it wouldn't be there, and on DVD it wouldn't be there. But if I cut it out, it would always be gone.
Can you talk a little about the camera and lighting tricks you use to affect the film's mood?
The idea was to go from clean lines to clutter. We degraded the image and used different cameras, from seamless dolly moves to Steadicam and finally to handheld. It's not a genius idea, but the trick was to pull it off before the audience notices they're watching a different movie from the one they were watching an hour ago.
