Basically it’s a character study. It’s a quiet piece. It reminds me the most of “Remains of the Day,” the Merchant/Ivory film. It’s by a first-time screenwriter who lives in San Francisco. A couple of young producers brought me the script and I thought it was just beautifully written.
Basically it’s the study of a man, a writer in the late years of his life – Michael Caine would play him in his 60s – and then in his late 20s – and Paul would play him in his late 20s. The man in his 60s is asked by "The New Yorker" magazine to write an article about someone in his past who affected him. And he goes back to a relationship he had as a young man that kind of completely altered his view of himself and of the world, but that he’s never completely dealt with. So you go between those two worlds of him as an older man and him as a younger man sort of just reflecting on this relationship and how it changed who he was.
It’s very much a grown-up movie. It’s very quiet, there are no car chases, and nothing blows up. We’ve got half the money for that out of Europe already, but the challenge will be finding an American company that won’t say, “But nothing explodes.” We’re going to have to find those people that are willing to base it on the fact that it’s just beautiful writing and a bunch of really good actors, instead of the obvious hook to sell it with.
It sounds like you are incredibly busy.
Oh yeah (laughing). But the reality is that it’s so hard to get any one of these films made that if you don’t have a bunch of them going it’s nightmarish. So if you have four or five going on, then maybe one of them happens in any given year. So you just try to have a lot of balls in the air.
Are you always going to stick with these edgy, independent films? Any big studio productions down the road you think you’d be interested in?
You know, it’s funny, it’s not like I get up in the morning and go, “I only want to make edgy, independent movies.” But the stories that interest me tend to fall into that category. What’s sad for me, but it’s the time I happen to be living in, is that there’s been this ghettoization in film between independent and mainstream. When I was a kid and falling in love with the idea of making movies, it was an era where things like “Taxi Driver” or “Clockwork Orange” were mainstream films. They were grown-up mainstream films, but there wasn’t that division. You had great directors doing great work and it would be put out by Warner Bros. right next to the Warner Bros. summer comedy. But now you’ve got this sort of weird, schizophrenic business where if something is aimed at an adult audience or asks questions or is innovative, it’s immediately, “Oh, that’s an indie movie.” Within that world, I’ll probably continue to make basically indie movies because that’s, I think, where all the interesting stuff is.
If somebody wanted to hire me for that rare Hollywood grown-up intelligent movie that they want to make for a big budget, would I object? No (laughing). Somebody wants to add a zero on to my paycheck that would be fine, as long as it was a project I thought was worth making. But to me it’s not worth it to do something I don’t like or believe in or to lose so much artistic control that it’s re-edited by 12 other people 12 other times and by the time anybody sees it it doesn’t resemble anything I wanted to do in the first place. So to me, it’s a frustrating trade-off. I’m probably going to stay in the indie world but I wish it wasn’t so nice and divided and neat the way it is right now.
PAGE 3: The Attraction to Ambiguous Reality Films
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES:
Director Keith Gordon Interview - "The Singing Detective"