by
Ray Carney
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Every single person on the picture, in the crew, was an actor. It makes a great difference. Actors really understand actors, and they’re really rooting for them. If something is very difficult for a performer, and the technicians are there, there’s pressure to get on with it; the technicians want to do their job. But if the technicians are actors, they’re not so concerned with being proficient in their technical responsibilities and they watch the performance, and they like it when it’s good. There were times when George Sims or somebody shooting a scene would be laughing so hard that the camera would shake. This didn’t make the actors feel bad; it made them feel good. It made them feel terrific. A man some- times is humorous with a certain person only because that person thinks he is funny. The minute that person doesn’t think he’s funny, there’s an edge taken off the humor. The same way a woman thinks a man is attractive, or a man thinks a woman is attractive. The minute that doesn’t any longer exist, there is a certain area of their relationship that’s cut off. The people that are watching the actual filming and participating in it from the outside are the third character, and they have a definite effect on these performers.
To tell the truth as you see it, incidentally, is not necessarily the truth. To tell the truth as someone else sees it is, to me, much more important and enlightening. It’s what these people are thinking, what they’re feeling. That’s the drama of the piece. Everybody just refers to their own experiences, and they call that truth. Within each person lives an image of himself and the idea is for the actor to bring that out without violating it. I am a moralist in that I believe the greatest morality is to acknowledge the freedom of others; to be oneself and not to be in judgment of others who are different from you. My trouble is that I always see the other fellow’s point of view! Sometimes I want to hit him for it – but at least I see it.
People talk about improvisation as if I say, ‘Everybody does what they want,’ and I take a camera and a movie comes out. It doesn’t work that way. Anybody who knows anything about film knows that’s crazy. Unless you’re shooting a war maybe, and even there you have to look for action. There are no accidents in this sense of the specific. A camera breaking down, a location not available, me being broke – those are accidents! You stay up all night long and worry a film to death. To make the assumption that things just happen like that is amazing to me. It doesn’t happen that way with actors.
After Shadows I realized that things work better when they’re written down beforehand. There are fewer problems. Once the script is written, people can act more freely. Otherwise there’s too much tension. It’s too hard to deal with. What happens is that the audience gets the impression of improvisation because the actors interpret their roles themselves.
The amateur has no preconceived notions of how it should be done; the professional has: he’s gone to school, learned techniques, knows what will work – his choices, his selections, are usually better. The amateur has no selection: it’s a very pure thing. So the professional gets a little jealous while the amateur begins to pick up a few things. Somewhere in the course of the film they come together and aid each other: the professional takes purity from the amateur, and the amateur takes on a cer- tain amount of professionalism. The professionals set the pace for everyone else so that all actors function the same way on the set. That’s why I like to mix professionals with amateurs in my films: amateurs work amazingly hard. What professionals can give amateurs in the way of help, amateurs can give professionals in the way of inspiration. I think every single person in the world can act. They may not be Garbo, but they can empathize with a character. They don’t need any skill except for living. If he can make someone laugh, or feel emotion in life, he can do it on the screen.
:)
My films are about personal things – marriages breaking up, love transformed by mutual treachery, the difficulty that two people have in communicating even though they live together. These are the problems which I have tackled and which concern me and concern others. Sometimes people find this painful to accept or they think that my ideas are wrong or simply they’re not interested in the difficulties which exist in communicating with others. But I am very interested in this. With my actors I try to explore it and try and relate it to their daily lives. I can’t ask people who are comfortable with their lives, with no problems, to be spectacularly interested in my work. It’s not made to please people. Many press agents told me, ‘For God’s sake, don’t sell the movie on middle age.’ But I’m sure there are some middle-aged people around. I always feel left out of most other movies. They have nothing to do with me.
I don’t care if people like our films or not. As long as I can make these films and say what I want and work with people I love and who are not afraid to express themselves, whether it’s popular or not. If we want to give Faces away to universities, we will do that. If we want to bury the film and never let anyone see it, we can do that. In other words, it’s ours. So that if it plays in a festival, fine. If it doesn’t play in a festival, fine. If people love it, fine. If they don’t, OK too.
It isn’t a desperate situation like A Child Is Waiting. These people aren’t trapped, they are always conscious of having a choice. My films strip characters of some of their illusions. Bring them to a little bit of understanding. The people come to some small awareness.
The main problem is finding an area where conflict is real and tangible. Contemporary filmmakers must find new areas of conflict, new kinds of problems. The traditional conflicts of poverty versus riches, of good versus evil, no longer reflect our situation. We’ve reached a state in which we have what we want: enough to eat, a wife, a roof over our heads and acceptance in society. The problem has become, ‘What’s the problem?’ In this country, people die at twenty-one. They die emotionally at twenty-one. Maybe even younger, now. For those of us who are lucky not to die at twenty, we keep on going, and my responsibility as an artist is to help people get over twenty-one. The films are expressive of a culture that has had the possibility of attaining material fulfillment while at the same time finding itself unable to accomplish the simple business of conducting human lives. We have been sold a bill of goods as a substitute for life. What is needed is a reassurance in human emotions; a reevaluation of our emotional capacities.
Gena tells everyone that it’s hard to live with me because there is nothing she can say that I don’t write down. I see Gena around the house and with the kids and I tape record what I see. I do tape record things and exaggerate them and blow them up and the incidents are not the same. I mean, I’m not a writer at all! I just record what I hear. As prattle. What people are concerned with in a day’s living. I have a good ear for prattle. Every line in your life is eaten up by the movies you do.
After Minnie and Moskowitz, I thought, ‘All right, I would like to make a picture to really say something.’ The most important thing in my life, in Gena’s life and in the lives of our intimate friends was the idea of marriage. We were deeply concerned with the change in illusions that marriage engenders over a period of years and the overwhelming need to understand the problems of retaining the family. Out of that came the characters, the feelings for the characters and, in a more specific sense, the complex delineation of the woman in the film.
The film was born out of my despair and questioning of the meaning of my life. As I thought about this, and, later, during the filming, I became very conscious of certain problems that were unknown and foreign to me. I’ll use anything I can to straighten out a problem – even write a movie about it. When I finally saw the finished film, I was shocked by the reality of these problems.
Usually we put film in such simple terms while being endlessly involved in talking about our personal experience. We admit how complex it is. But it’s as though we never look into a mirror and see what we are. So the films I make really are trying to mirror that emotion so we can understand what our impulses are; why we do things that get us into trouble; when to worry about it; when to let them go. And maybe we can find something in ourselves that is worthwhile. Look at it this way: if I were writing a picture and I used a situation which none of us were involved in or interested in, then I’d feel ashamed about doing it – and so would everybody else. So I use absolutely everything I can find in our own lives, in our friends’ lives, to make what we’re doing interesting. But you’d better do it honestly, and you’d better cure all those personal problems that might be holding back something you want to say.
There’s a very small part of all of us that has any kind of value. I think there’s a small part of us that says we’d like to say something better than what is usually said, on the purest level. And the rest of it is con-men and struggling people just like everyone else – where you’re constantly humiliated and go through your life, even if you’re not humiliated, thinking you are. And then you get very lucky and you meet a group of creative people that are very much like you who are locked up in their own selves, trying to come out, trying in some way to express something that is very personal to them. And then suddenly one thing develops and another thing develops, and Gena has a fantastic day and we respond to it and Peter has a fantastic day, and the rest of the actors come in and they want to do something, and it all happens out of a day-by-day situation and a commitment. The commitment comes and grows more and more into something, that little part of you that isn’t a con-man, and all of us get better as a result of making that picture and the picture then has no importance really until you then see it or someone sees it and says, ‘Yeah, that’s all right. That was good.’ Or somebody’s very touched or somebody’s bitter, and then ideas that we never even had seen, collectively, suddenly someone sees.
One of the reasons I make films is to make clear to people that family life is not always going to be a bed of roses. Don’t be upset if you fall out of love, because it’s gonna happen lots of times. Don’t be upset by conflict. The film shows that there is something to a one-on-one relationship, something so beautiful that it is worth all the problems. There is in some ways a greater value to family life, and that is something that hasn’t been said since Andy Hardy. Everything is so negative! No matter how ‘horrible’ the love story was, it really was a love story and not just a chance meeting and a two-second love affair. Nick and Mabel, with all their problems, and they have a million, were more comfortable with each other than they were with anyone else. And when they were alone I don’t know if there were two people who liked and respected each other more than any two people I’ve ever seen.
typo somewhere in the last sentence but i do like this sentiment [even if i maybe disagree with his characterisation of nick adn mabel haha]