Tod Lippy: I know that in 1942 you fled with your family from the Nazi occupation of Belgium, and, after spending most of your adolescence in Cuba, came to New York in 1948. Where did you live when you got here? 

Ulu Grosbard: We moved to 77th Street and Riverside Drive. When we got here, I spoke English fairly well, but not completely fluently. I was fluent in terms of reading and comprehension, but I was largely self-taught, in the sense that I was an avid reader ever since I was a child. Anyway, I wanted to go back to school, because I had had no high school—I had gone to work when I was about 14.

Didn’t you train as a diamond-cutter when your family was in Cuba?

Yeah, diamond-cutting. So I had to get some high school credits. There was this private, sort of preparatory school called Morningside, and I went there for about six months. I didn’t quite finish, because in the meantime I had decided I would apply for college. It turned out, of course, that these credits wouldn’t qualify me at places like Harvard or Yale, but I’d discovered that the University of Chicago didn’t require an actual high school record; they would give you a battery of their own tests. So I took them, and they accepted me, and I was able to catch up—I got my bachelor’s there in about a year. And then I went on and got a master’s in English, with a minor in philosophy. After that I went up to Yale Drama School for one year—which I felt was basically enough time there. This was during the Korean War, and I had been drafted, so I left Yale and went into the Army for a couple of years.

Did you end up in Korea?

No. The armistice was arrived at while I was in basic training, so by the time I finished, it was over. I ended up in Fort Bragg attached to the 82nd Airborne in a military intelligence unit, basically marking time. And then I came back to New York. So really, before that, I’d only spent about six months in the city, right after we’d first arrived.

Had you been interested in theater all along?

No, it wasn’t really until college in Chicago that I thought this was something I would want to pursue.

When you came back to the city, how did you get involved in directing plays?

What happened was, when I came back, I took a part-time job teaching English, oddly enough, at Berlitz. And then I ran into an acquaintance from Yale, and he and his father had a summer theater in Bellport, Long Island. He had just been drafted—he’d done the full three years at Yale, and had gotten a series of deferrals to do so. And he was supposed to direct the second half of the season, but obviously wasn’t able to, so he asked me if I would do it for him. That’s really how I came into my first full-fledged directing experience. And that’s where I met Duvall and Hackman—they were both in my first production, which was Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. It was the first time the full-length version—which had been directed by Peter Brook in London—had been staged here. The one-act version, in conjunction with Memory of Two Mondays, had been done in New York on Broadway, and had failed. So Miller rewrote it and had a successful staging in London, but nobody would do it in New York, so it was released as a summer-stock production.

You also directed the first Off-Broadway production of the play some years later, didn’t you?

Yeah. It must have been six or seven years later. By then I had done The Days and Nights of Beebee Fenstermaker, and I had done The Subject Was Roses, and I couldn’t find anything I really wanted to do—after Roses, I was being offered this, that, and the other, but nothing I was interested in. So I went back and did Bridge with Duvall, Jon Voight, and Susan Anspach.

That must have been one of Voight’s first appearances.

I think he had been in a musical on Broadway, but Bridge really made his career—it established him. He was wonderful in it.

When did you begin assistant-directing for films?

That happened around this time, too—in the late fifties. And again, it was totally by accident. I ran into another classmate from Yale, Eric Bercovici, on Cornelia Street in the Village, where I was living. I asked him what he had been up to, and he said he was working for a small movie company in New York. I can’t even remember what he was doing, but I asked him how he got the job, and he said, “Well, I looked in the Yellow Pages.” [Laughs.] I thought, “My god, what a brilliant idea.” And that’s exactly what I did. There must have been 150 listings for this and that—I systematically made my way through it, one by one, knocking on doors. I ended up at a stock-footage company on 57th Street. In the meantime, though, I had made contact with a guy who was doing a half-hour, non-union series they were shooting in Yonkers.

This was for television?

Yeah. He didn’t have anything for me initially, but told me to keep checking back. And about three or four months later, he said to me, “Do you know how to drive a truck?” I’d never driven a truck in my life. [Laughs.] They’d just lost their equipment-truck driver, so he told me to show up on Monday morning. I said, “Sure,” and I get into the truck and start driving, and sure enough the truck breaks down on the Henry Hudson Parkway. [Laughs.] The carburetor or something. So that was the start of my movie career. I ended up driving the truck for a couple of months, and I became an assistant to the guy who was production manager. He was then kicked upstairs, and he offered me his job.
   So I was production manager for four or five more months, and became very friendly with the first AD, Joe Manduke. Joe got a job on Splendor in the Grass as a second AD, and within, like, the third or fourth week, was offered a first AD position on another picture, so he recommended me for second AD job. I interviewed with Charlie Maguire, who was Kazan’s production manager, and he gave me the job. And once I did that, I really had my pick. It was a wonderful situation, because I had joined the union, and could make enough money to then go four or five months living off my AD’s salary while I tried to find something to direct Off-Broadway. So I would do theater work—like The Days and Nights of Beebee Fenstermaker—in between film jobs. I worked for Kazan, for Arthur Penn on The Miracle Worker, for Robert Rossen on The Hustler…

Didn’t you work on Lumet’s The Pawnbroker, too?

I was actually location manager on that. That’s sort of a complicated story. Ely Landau was doing two pictures at once: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, which Sidney was going to direct, and The Pawnbroker, with Arthur Hiller. I had been hired by Sidney and Landau to be the production manager for The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. They had cast Montgomery Clift, but about three weeks’ out from shooting, the insurance company told Landau that they wouldn’t insure Clift. Landau almost took the risk himself, but then he got cold feet, so they cancelled that production and moved Lumet over to Pawnbroker. They already had a production manager on that picture, so I moved over as location manager—I did all the scouting in Harlem for the movie.
   At that point I started getting production manager offers on other features, but my main concern, my main focus, was still the stage. I remember I had turned down an offer to do three pictures as production manager—it was a big deal—and then Frank Gilroy offered me his play The Subject Was Roses, and we were able to get it financed. It wasn’t until several years later, when Frank and Edgar Lansbury, the play’s producer, got an offer from MGM to do a film adaptation of Roses, that I directed my first film. The studio was offering a fair amount of autonomy for us, so I did it. The irony of it is, after Sidney fell out of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, they came with it to me. I decided against it for some reason—I think it was a matter of casting.

What initially attracted you to directing, both for theater and film? It almost sounds like you backed into it...

I didn’t back into it; it was a conscious choice. I was always interested in human behavior in crisis. Part of that obviously has something to do with my background, having gone through World War II. That experience left a profound impression on me, and I think it clearly had something to do with my fascination with the theater. Whether I would be any good at it or not I really didn’t know until I went to summer stock. It was then that I really got into it—I thought I had a feel for it. So it was a long period of time between when I made a decision to try and pursue it and when I was able to actually get my hands dirty.

As you mentioned, your first film was an adaptation of a play you’d already helmed on Broadway. Could you talk about some of the differences between directing for film and directing for theater, particularly in that case, where you were working with the same material?

Well, in doing the film, I found that it became more of a craft-learning experience. I used two of the three original actors: Jack Albertson and Martin Sheen had been in the play, also. The problem in that case was—and fortunately the play had closed by then, so some period of time had elapsed—to make sure they didn’t go back to remembered stage performances. They needed to keep it alive, and keep it fresh. I needed them to work moment-to-moment, and not rely on what they had done before, or what had worked for them in a particular scene on stage. And when you have good actors, they will spark off of each other, and certainly Sheen and Albertson did. And Patricia Neal was a new factor—for her the part was fresh—so that wasn’t a problem.
   You know, the stronger the play, the more it resists adaptation to the screen. So what you’re really trying to do is not to lose the point of the play—not get trapped into false attempts to translate it to film.

You mean the old cliché about “opening it up”?

Opening it up, exactly. Which can really weaken the tension created by the structure of the material. The structure of a play is a very different animal than the structure of films. There is a sense of sequencing to good film material—you go from sequence to sequence, not from the beginning, middle and end of each scene. So when you’re filming, there’s almost an organic resistance there, in a funny way. It can be done, and done well, but you find yourself, for instance, sometimes wanting to go with a camera in a way that you can’t, because it would be at the expense of the tension of the scene. When you see this done with some adaptations, you realize the movie doesn’t work even though the play has worked beautifully on stage. I understand the instinct, which is to try and make it into a movie, but you’re better off trying to be faithful to what made the play work, even if it means to some degree photographing some of it. Better to err on that side and retain what made the play work in the first place.

You’ve often been characterized as an “actor’s director”—can you talk about the director/actor relationship a little bit?

Well, when you get hold of a good play or screenplay, you want to bring it to life, and it’s essential to work with actors that are capable. The paradox of good acting is that, on the one hand, the actor knows his lines—knows where the scene is headed—yet on the other hand, he has to work moment to moment: in a sense, not know where he’s going. It isn’t that dissimilar from a great athlete, except that a baseball player or tennis player has the advantage of being faced with a fresh situation every time. For an actor, he knows the scene, but at the same time, he has to be able on some level to act spontaneously. It’s a curious paradox, and yet good actors will give you the impression that those lines are totally new to them. And they themselves feel like they’ve never heard them before, that it’s never been said before. When you can achieve that, it’s very exciting.
   What I’m looking for in an actor’s performance is true behavior—the way people really do act, do behave, and do think. Not an actor’s idea, or a director’s idea, of how people act. And I think good actors have the same instincts, and work on the same wavelength. Any real first-rate actor goes for that sense of spontaneity. That sense of real life.

Have you ever used non-actors?

I have on movies. Non-actors don’t work out that well in theater, because they have to repeat. But you can get wonderful performances on film, because you only need to catch them once. And if you find someone who’s not self-conscious, and who has a strong presence, I think you can get terrific stuff. Particularly in smaller parts, where, for example, the profession of the character is important. If you’re casting a waiter in a small speaking part, you’re clearly better off using a non-actor, because there’s no way you’re going to get a day-player actor to learn how to handle the tray or put the plate on the table in the way that a man who’s been doing it for ten years will. The trick is to find someone who’s not frozen by the camera. It’s not that hard, though, because if you give the guy something to do that he knows how to do, he’ll feel comfortable with it.

You mentioned the importance of spontaneity—I recall reading that for a scene in True Confessions, you purposely neglected to tell any of the extras that there was going to be a physical confrontation between Duvall and Charles Durning in order to get the most authentic response from them.

No, that’s absolutely true.

Is that something you’ve done often?

It depends on the situation. That scene was kind of a roll of the dice, because we didn’t rehearse it, either—we couldn’t rehearse it without giving it away. So we basically just walked it through once for the cameras. We were obviously covering it as much as we could. And it was wonderful—the extras literally didn’t know what was going on. But you can’t always do that; it depends on the situation, and who you’re working with. And, of course, the luxury of time. On that picture, I had terrific producers—Bob Chartoff and Irwin Winkler—and they gave me a great deal of latitude. I didn’t have to worry about the studio at all. And I had a wonderful cameraman, Owen Roizman. But you’re very often at the mercy of the situation in which you’re shooting.

Right after Georgia was released, you said in an interview that you had “assured Jennifer Jason Leigh that her intuition was so strong that she would land on her feet, and if she didn’t, I would always be there to catch her.” Can you elaborate on what you meant by that?

Well, I think it’s important for an actor to be able to trust his director, and that trust comes out of working together. The actor gets a sense that the director knows what he’s talking about, in terms of the story and the individual scenes, in the kinds of directions he gives, and in his understanding of the character. And, of course, in his command of the set. Once an actor develops that trust, it’s easier for him to take risks. He can be bad in a take and trust the fact that the director can tell the difference between that take and one where his performance is truer, so, in the cutting room, he will end up on film with his best work on screen. It creates an atmosphere of being able to go for something, and not being concerned that you’re going to pay the consequences if you fail.

I wanted to ask you about a few specific scenes from your films, particularly with regard to the actors’ performances. One that has always astounded me is Barbara Harris’s post-audition monologue in Who Is Harry Kellerman, and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? It’s one of those moments you were referring to, where there’s absolutely no “performance”—she’s completely embodied this character who’s living through this particularly defenseless moment. What was that like to shoot?

I remember that well, because at the time Barbara had a great distrust of the camera. It took a lot of shooting to get to the point where, in that one take, she suddenly dropped all her defenses—in fact, it was probably the most film I shot in that movie. She was also able at some point to make a very personal connection with what she was saying. But it happened one time, and that was it. The others had shadings, but there wasn’t that marriage. Moments like that—well, it’s like with great performers on stage, for instance. You can look at somebody in that kind of situation and say, “He’s inspired—he can do nothing wrong.” He knows his lines, and he knows where he’s going, yet he is experiencing total freedom. And of course it happens with improvisation, but it can happen with written text, too. It’s joyful.

Speaking of working with an existing text, I thought the scene in Georgia where Jennifer Jason Leigh sings Van Morrison’s “Take Me Back” was another moment along those lines.

That’s true. And the airport sequence, too.

All of the concert footage in Georgia was filmed live, wasn’t it?

Right. I was very concerned about it at first. Barbara Turner, who wrote the script and was another one of the producers on the film, was the one who kept pushing me to do it, and I finally agreed to it. All the music supervisors I spoke to, though, thought we were nuts. The only guy who really encouraged me was Robert Altman, because he had done it in Nashville. He gave me one very simple suggestion: “Shoot the close-up first.” In this instance we used multiple cameras, but I realized what he meant. We shot the close-up live, and then for the wide shots, you recorded it live, and you used that as the playback. So you didn’t have playbacks done in the studio before you started shooting. You used the best close-up take, and then, once you moved back, the musicians who’d just played it—and all of the band members in the film were pros, except for John Reilly, who was an amateur musician—could do it again. It wasn’t like having actors fake it to music that another set of musicians had recorded months before in a studio. It was very easy.

How many cameras did you have?

Four. I had two on Jennifer, and two recording the other guys. It is one take.

Almost the first half of the song is one continuous medium shot of her from the side. One could imagine a million ways to shoot and cut that together, but the very, very slow tracking shot provides this unblinking, almost cruel, perspective on a moment of absolute vulnerability.

Well, I decided to shoot it this way when I saw it in rehearsal—to just go for broke. Originally I’d thought of not even cutting at all. But then I did eventually put in that cut halfway through, where you switch to the other side. There was very minimal cutting to the audience, also. Before I went into it, I felt I had to depend on the fact that I would not try to cut it down: that I would stick with the eight-and-a-half minutes that the song runs. I didn’t know whether it was going to work or not, but doing anything else would have violated my sense of what the scene required.

It’s almost like an endurance test.

Yeah, it is. It’s hard for an audience, but it holds.

What about the scene near the beginning of Straight Time, when Dustin Hoffman’s character, who’s just gotten out of jail, goes to visit his ex-con friend (Gary Busey) and the friend’s wife (Kathy Bates) and son? By the way, was the son played by Jake Busey?

Yeah, he was the little kid.

You shot that dinner-table scene from one set-up, taking in all four of them in a continuous take which must run four or five minutes, and the emotion just bounces out of it. How long did that take to get right?

That wasn’t a lot of takes. Actually, the most takes I did in that movie was in the first scene with the parole officer. Emmet Walsh came in and was very tense, and was really playing into the guy being a “meanie,” you know? I thought what he needed to do as an actor—because he has an edge as a person—was to go completely against it; to genuinely try and be a nice guy. It would still come across, but it would be much more subtle. I shudder to think of the amount of footage I spent on that. It was something like thirty thousand feet—it was crazy. But I thought, “If I don’t get this guy right right now, I’m dead for the rest of the movie.” Normally I don’t shoot a lot of footage.

Do you have long rehearsal periods beforehand?

No, no. It depends on the actors, but not really.

Do you spend a lot of time with actors just discussing the character with them?

No. Again, it depends on the actor, but with most of the people I’ve worked with, once you’re on a wavelength with them, there’s not a lot of talk. The references, the discussion—there’s something intuitive going on between myself and the actors. The references are mostly concrete, and as simple as possible. I am very leery of intellectual discussions about the character. I think it tends to make it cerebral—there’s a danger of taking the life out of it by talking about it too much. Good actors really don’t require it; they have an instinct about the characters. First of all, they made a choice to play the part, so already going in they have an affinity for it.
   With plays, it’s a little different, because you can go into depth more. The whole rehearsal process is different, because you have to repeat it so many more times, while at the same time keeping it alive. You can’t always totally rely on instinct. In a play, you need to get into it more, because at some point that instinct is going to disappear, and then you have to find a way back to being fresh with the material. It’s hard: getting back to that instinctual depth takes some figuring out sometimes, and can be an arduous process.

You’re known to be meticulous in your choice of actors, both for film and theater—

I think casting is most of it.

My impression is that there have been times when a project you were interested in died on the vine, so to speak, because you couldn’t secure the actors you wanted.

Yes. That’s true. You know, the excitement and the joy of a project has to do not only with the story—the quality of the material—but who you’re going to be working with, and how right they are for the material. If they’re not, and they’re miscast, they may be a good actor, but as far as I’m concerned, forget it—you’ll never get what you’re after; it’s not possible. You need to marry the character as written with not only the actor’s ability, but with whatever it is in his personality that will enable him to create the character.

You’ve talked before about your choice of De Niro for the role of the priest in True Confessions—I recall your saying you wanted him not only because he was a great actor, but because he had a similar “street” background to the character…

Also because I trusted completely that if he felt he wanted to do it, and saw something in it, that it would happen. I mean, at that time he was very careful about the choices he was making—he was coming off Raging Bull—both in terms of the kind of character he wanted to play and who he would work with.
   He created that character in the course of our making choices about the costume, the shoes, the cufflinks, you name it. You saw him define the character for himself as he made those choices. He came into the shoot about four weeks into it—I started shooting all of Duvall’s scenes, because of the way the screenplay is structured—and in the meantime, my associate producer, Gail Mutrux, had set it up so he could spend time with a priest, who taught him mass in Latin, which is how it was delivered in 1948. I went to watch a couple of rehearsals, but most of the time he was on his own, really just learning how to perform the mass. By the time we started shooting, the character was totally there.

Do you find that most of the actors you work with are research-oriented?

Yes, particularly in this kind of situation, where a very specific knowledge of certain rituals is required. On that film, Duvall spent a lot of time hanging around homicide detectives. Again, there’s no substitute for reality. When we were shooting Straight Time, for instance, the way the original jewelry robbery was written in the screenplay and the book it was based on was that they went into a manhole and cut the alarm wires to the store. Sheer nonsense. I mean, these guys were not electrical engineers. Not to mention the impossibility of finding wires in a manhole. So again, I asked Gail, who had also worked with me on Straight Time, to call the cops and find out how thieves actually rob jewelry stores. And she came back to me and told me that what was currently in fashion is what’s called “smash and grab.” They know they have three minutes before the police will get there, so they just break into the cases and grab as much as they can, beating the alarm. So we rewrote the scene, and that’s how we did it.
   The irony of it is, we shot the scene at around noon, at a store on Wilshire Boulevard in L.A. and we had cops hanging around to control traffic, that kind of thing. At one point, my AD came over to me and said, “The police have to leave; they’re not going to be able to control traffic.” He told me they’d just had a robbery around the corner, on Beverly Drive. So I called lunch. And it was true—two guys had broken into the store around the corner in an absolutely identical way. We checked it out—the glass cases were all smashed, exactly like the ones on the set. It was uncanny to be walking from a movie set to an identical real-life situation.
   We were originally going to use candy glass for the cases, but when you get into close-ups on candy glass, it looks phony. It has a slight color to it, and it breaks in a different way than real glass does. In rehearsal, it was clear to me that it wasn’t going to work. But there was a danger to the actors if you used real glass, which is very unpredictable. That’s how we came up with the gloves and the protective goggles he wears.

That brings up another subject—how much input you have into the writing process before shooting begins. Herb Gardner said that you were a terrific director for a writer because your hand is invisible: “He just seems to be doing your work for you.” I know there have been times when you’ve gone with a first draft, like with Georgia, for instance—

Right.

But with a film like True Confessions, there was a rather protracted rewriting process with Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. First of all, if you don’t feel a script is “ready,” what attracts you to it anyway?

The basic premise of the story—whether it’s something that’s credible to me, and moves me. It’s not anything preconceived, really. I mean, different directors are interested in different kinds of stories, and one’s not necessarily more valid than the next. But my own interest has been in always trying to find material that I feel has some genuine relationship to my experiences in my own life and my friends’ lives—life as I know it, so to speak. In the case of True Confessions, I’d read Dunne’s novel first.

After you were given Didion and Dunne’s first draft, didn’t you ask them to restore some more material from the book?

Yeah, that’s true. John and Joan had been much more drastic with the screenplay than I would have been, and I felt there was stuff missing. For one thing, we ended up altering the structure to conform much closer to that of the book. When I first met them and Chartoff and Winkler, I went into the meeting really thinking I was wasting my time. I mean, here they had already written their own screenplay, and I was about to make suggestions that really would change some of it considerably. It was an ironic situation, though, because everything I wanted to change was in John’s book. Anyway, I said my piece, and the next day they called and said they wanted me to do it.

Since you’re not a writer, do you find it frustrating to have to wait for the good material to come to you?

Well, ideally, you write and direct your own stuff. The only possible drawback with that situation is that as both writer and director, you can sometimes get so close to the material that you lose a certain perspective. They’re different talents, to some degree, but if they’re married in the same person, it’s a great advantage.

Would you say that has anything to do with the fact that you’re not a particularly prolific director? You’ve said before that you find it hard to go into a project just for the sake of working.

I want it to excite me. It’s hard to come by, given my taste, or wavelength, or whatever it is I function on. I wish it were easier—I would have worked a lot more.

What percentage of the scripts you read do you turn down?

I can’t really give you a percentage, but it’s pretty high. And a lot of them are legitimate movies that are made and are quite successful—they’re just not my cup of tea. I feel that way even about the stuff I read that I’m not offered a lot of the time. I think you get to work a lot more if the wavelength you function on is more popular wavelength—it makes life easier, and it’s certainly legitimate. It’s just a matter of where you feel you function best.

You’re also known to spend a lot of time developing many of your projects. I know True Confessions took something like two-and-a-half years, and I remember reading that The Wake of Jamey Foster, the Beth Henley play you directed in 1982, was a several-year process…

Well, we staged that originally in Hartford, and then it was another year before we did it on Broadway. I don’t think that amount of time is necessary, though. It’s a matter of circumstance: when the cast is available, how ready the material is, all those things. Deep End of the Ocean we actually jumped into and began production on without a screenplay, because we were committed to a timetable. Stephen Schiff, the writer, and I had first met on Memorial Day, when Mandalay gave us the go-ahead, and we had to go into preproduction three weeks later. Michelle Pfeiffer was available at that point, and because of the rains and weather conditions, we couldn’t go any later; we’d get trapped. In fact, we just finished when the rains hit.

Is that a somewhat problematic way to work?

Well, we had the script by the time we started shooting, but we had to scramble somewhat. And the structure was there because it was based on the book. But quite often that’s not that uncommon a situation, because the availability of the star is an issue. And of course, with big action movies, they’re locked into the release date.
   And there are other reasons. With Straight Time, we basically improvised most of the script. We had a draft of Alvin Sargent’s screenplay—

Weren’t there several writers on that?

Well, Jeffrey Boam did some stuff because Alvin Sargent wasn’t available—he was already working on Ordinary People. The problem was, Dustin had committed to a crew, and there was this full crew just sitting there, not doing a thing. So I literally went back to Alvin’s first draft and cut it down with him—it was 180 pages long. But then once you cut out chunks, you have to figure out how to get reconnect everything, and that’s when Jeffrey Boam came in. And did a really nice job, by the way.
   But a lot of it was improvised. We’d improvise it the night before, type it up, and I would edit it, then we’d stage it the next morning. We really flew by the seat of our pants on that movie.

Dustin Hoffman was originally going to direct that himself, wasn’t he?

Absolutely.

Weren’t there some conflicts between the two of you on the set?

No, the conflict between us came at the very tail end of the movie, when it was almost finished. It had to do with his wanting to come into the cutting room. It was a matter of time more than anything else. We knew how to end it, with the final scene of him in the car, driving away, intercut with the successive mug shots—which had been in Alvin’s first draft. But we still had to figure out how to get from the scene where he kills Gary Busey to the last image. So we actually stopped shooting for a week or two while I did a quick assembly to get a sense of the arc of it. At that point, Dustin wanted to come into the cutting room, and I felt that it would slow us down terrifically. That’s when he got angry. During the shoot, he was high-strung, but I thought we worked very well together.

Has that ever been issue for you on other films?

Not really. At some point on Deep End Michelle wanted to go over some stuff in the cutting room, and I told her to just give me her notes, which she was really good about. Good actors have good suggestions—there’s no question about it. The thing about making a movie is that the cliché about it being a collaboration is completely true. If you have no ego about it, you take contributions from wherever you can get them. From actors, from everybody. And it makes a better movie. You have to be open to it—you pay for it if you’re not.

You already touched briefly on the kind of stories that interest you, but I wanted to go into depth on that a little more. I’ve been struck by how one theme, in particular, seems to reappear in your work: “The difference between what we are and what we wishfully believe ourselves to be,” which is how you described the situation of Eddie in A View from the Bridge. It plays off of something you mentioned in relation to True Confessions, about “why things come easily to some people and not to others.” One can certainly see how that disparity between self-perception and reality informs the sisters’ relationship in Georgia, for instance.

That’s true. I don’t know that it’s a conscious, articulated view, you know? I think it’s something I respond to on a spontaneous level. Looking back, I realize a lot of the things I’ve been attracted to are family stories, dealing with the ambivalences in close relationships, whether it’s Roses, or True Confessions, or Georgia, or Deep End. They all have in common something that I remember reading in Arthur Miller’s introduction to Salesman, where he talked about how family members can turn into strangers overnight. That aspect of relationships, I think, has always fascinated me, and there’s something that resonates with me when I come across it in material that captures it. It’s the mystery of the relationship between work and grace: the basic theological Catholic view of Thomas Aquinas, or the Prodigal Son theme: the one who it comes easily to, and the one who, no matter how hard he or she works, will never get to it. It’s certainly there in Georgia, and in True Confessions as well: the wonderful irony of the cop who seems to be the corrupt brother, and the priest—supposedly the pure one—whose salvation comes from his downfall brought about by the corrupt one, who’s actually purer in spirit. But I think those paradoxes do attract me.

Kent Jones made the observation that “subtraction is central” to your work, which is absolutely true—several critics, in fact, have mentioned the appropriateness of the fact that you trained as a diamond-cutter. Where do you think that kind of reductive minimalism come from?

I’m trying to get to making the point of the scene in as simple a way as I know how. Primarily, I think it comes from wanting to not move the camera for its own sake. On the other hand, I admire people like Brian De Palma, or Spielberg, in terms of their innate sense of being able to use a fluid camera. But it’s a question of being true to what you see in the scene, and how you feel you’re going to make the point of it. And not trying to do something that doesn’t feel right for what you’re working on.

Well, for instance, close-ups are so often resorted to in many films to hammer home a point—

No, I have a real aversion to punching. [Laughs.]

In Falling in Love, there’s a scene on the train when De Niro, sitting at a window seat, is trying to find Meryl Streep’s character, who he thinks is on the train. When she finally walks by, the audience sees—and feels—him notice her, but because you don’t cut to a close shot of that moment of recognition, we also get to see her miss him, which adds a layer to the scene that otherwise wouldn’t have been there. Very subtle, but ultimately very important, I think, to the truth of the moment.

I think less is more very often. Sometimes, obviously, you need to come in. But I think I do trust my own sense, when I’m in an audience, of not wanting to be hit over the head, or spoon-fed. Let me find out what is happening on the screen without being punched.

You’ve made a couple of real “New York movies”: Who is Harry Kellerman and Falling in Love. In Kellerman, I was intrigued by how well you captured the manic energy of the street, particularly in the scene where Hoffman’s character leaves with his guitar to go see his shrink, with all of the cutaways to street musicians, vendors, people getting into cabs, etc…

Well, Herb Gardner has a real sense of New York—he’s a true New Yorker. A lot of that was in the script. I’ll tell you the craziest thing that happened on that movie—probably the craziest thing I ever did on a film. There is a shot at the end where Georgie is in his plane, flying over New York City, and he dives into the Empire State Building. At that time, Mike Nichols was shooting Catch-22 in Mexico, and he had literally requisitioned all the planes with the equipment necessary to do motion-picture photography. We finally located a plane in England—the one he hadn’t managed to find—and brought it over. We met the pilot at Teterboro Airport, and it was this B-29 from 1946: multicolored, obviously cannibalized and reassembled from other airplanes. But it had the plastic bubble in the nose of the plane—the little compartment with a camera mount. So the cameraman and I crammed into this tiny compartment with the camera. We went up at the crack of dawn—we didn’t even dare apply to get permission to do this shot—and as we flew over the Empire State Building the pilot went into a dive. Let me tell you something—when we started to dive toward the building, the plane shuddered and groaned like nothing I’ve ever heard, and I thought to myself, “My God, this is insane.” It was even worse when the pilot pulled up out of the dive—it was shaking so violently—but somehow we made it back up.
   The problem was, I knew immediately that the dive had been too slow—it just didn’t give one the sense of a real dive. So we did it a second time. [Laughs.] When we got back and looked at the dailies, we realized it was still too slow. Eventually we ended up hiring a helicopter and doing it with a zoom. But it was an insane thing to do. When you’re making a movie—I’m sure any director can tell you this—you feel like nothing can happen to you in the course of your mission. You have to get that shot. [Laughs.]

Falling in Love really explored the fact that New Yorkers are often forced to play out their private moments, good and bad, in crowded public spaces, whether it’s Grand Central at rush hour or a packed store on Christmas Eve.

That’s true. Michael Cristofer wrote that screenplay, and making the film sort of quintessentially New York was something we really aimed for. That was a terrific experience, I must say. Shooting in New York can be a great; at that time it was certainly easy to do. I don’t know if it’s still true—I haven’t shot a movie here in a long time—but people were not jaded. Even when we were shooting on Fifth Avenue—like that shot of Streep and Dianne Wiest walking down Fifth between 56th and 57th—the people on the street were incredibly cooperative. Great crews, too.

More generally, what kind of influence do you think the city has had on your work?

I don’t know that it influences my work directly in any way. Indirectly, it’s a place where I feel at home. There’s certainly a different feel to daily living here than there is in L.A. If you’re in the movie business, L.A. is a company town. In New York, the minute you step onto the street you’re part of a larger sense of life, a life that has nothing to do with making movies. It’s not that I don’t like L.A.; I’ve spent a good deal of time there, and there have been occasions where I thought, “Some day I’ll wake up and my feelings will have changed overnight.” But it never happened.