"Where Movie Critics Get A Taste Of Their Own Medicine"
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AN INTERVIEW WITH:
LARRY CHARLES
by Peter Sobczynski
August 15, 2003
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Larry Charles made his name in show-business by working on one of the most popular shows of all time, a little effort you may have heard one called "Seinfeld", as well as other hits like "Mad About You" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm". However, when he began working on "Masked and Anonymous", his first feature film as director, it wasn’t his facility for creating wackiness for Jason Alexander and Helen Hunt that attracted a star-studded cast that includes such marquee names as Jeff Bridges, Penelope Cruz, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Ed Harris, Luke Wilson, Val Kilmer and Mickey Rourke. Clearly, it was the idea of working with the star of the film, a nice young man from Hibbing, Minnesota by the name of Bobby Zimmerman-you might know him as Bob Dylan.
The film, which marks Dylan’s first on-screen performance since 1987’s little-seen "Hearts of Fire", is a visionary epic set in an unnamed war-torn land that resembles a post-apocalyptic blend of the U.S.A and Mexico. A sham benefit concert is arranged by a shady promoter and reclusive musical legend Jack Fate (Dylan) is released from prison to headline the show. Shot in the surreal, off-the-cuff style of one of Alex Cox’s oddities like "Straight to Hell" or "Walker", "Masked and Anonymous" blends strange humor, philosophical musings and oddball cameos. Most of all, of course, it features wall-to-wall Dylan tunes, both covers from an international array of artists (including a fiery Italian-language rap cover of "Like a Rolling Stone") and several on-camera performances from Dylan and his crack touring band.
Recently, Charles, who is, in person, a dead ringer for the
beloved Dude from "The Big Lebowski", sat down to discuss
the film, which is opening around the country, and how it fits
in with the considerable legacy of its star.
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You have probably been asked this question hundreds of times since you began to work on "Masked and Anonymous", so I will get it out of the way right now. Considering the fact that he has been discussed, written about and idolized by people around the world for so long, I have to ask-what was it like to work with Mickey Rourke?
(Laughs) Mickey Rourke is a fascinating human being. He has his own universe, really. He is the most intense, sensitive, strange, omnisexual person. He is like some kind of mythological figure in a way-when he walks around a set, he is like some kind of weird minotaur. It is exactly what his muse is all about. He is a very cool guy.
He’s trying to reform his image a little bit so he can work more, but the truth is that Hollywood love a story like his. It won’t happen with this movie because it is too small but he has the chops to give an Academy Award-winning performance. These little movies that he has been in during the last couple of years, he has been amazing in them. He has that one scene in "The Pledge" and it is a powerful scene. He is a fantastic actor and I knew that he would be-I always thought he was and I really wanted him to be in the movie and I spent a lot of time with him. Ultimately, he is a great guy and a truly misunderstood person.
How does one go from working on television to making their feature-film debut directing Bob Dylan?
It is going to sound crazy but if you spend a lot of time with Bob, you begin to realize that there are mysterious forces in the universe beyond our control and understanding. To some degree, that is my answer because there is no real logical reason for it to have worked out. It was some other plane of existence in which this was all being worked out for us.
When I met him, he had some vague notion that he wanted to do something and he wasn’t sure what it would be at all. We started talking and it got lively and we started riffing together. He’s a very instinctive person-he doesn’t know me from Adam and he doesn’t know my credits. He doesn’t watch "Seinfeld" or "Curb Your Enthusiasm" at all. He just related to me and I related to him and we connected. He doesn’t question the logic-if he likes you, that is what counts.
We didn’t even think about it being a film, initially. We didn’t know what it would be. We just took some ideas and played with them to see what would happen. All through the process, that was how it worked-there was never an agenda beyond having a creative experience. I think he has begun a lot of projects that haven’t reached fruition, but this combination kept moving forward and leaped a lot of hurdles.
Obviously, many of Dylan’s songs are highly cinematic in structure and he has also been interested in film over the years-he has done films like "Don’t Look Back" and "Renaldo and Clara" and there have been rumors about attempts to turn songs like "Lily, Rosemary & the Jack of Hearts" and "Brownsville Girl" into movies as well...
There is a script to "Brownsville Girl" floating around that Jay Cocks wrote and it is supposed to be great. He loves movies and his songs are very cinematic. He has had projects swirling around him but it is hard to get a project from that stage to this stage and that was part of the miracle of this.
How did the film eventually begin to evolve?
Well, there were these two men-and this is where I go into my code-named "Sergei" and "Rene" who wrote the screenplay together. They were these two men who Bob and I know very intimately, let us say, and "Rene" had a box of scrap paper that he had been collecting over the last year or two of his tour. When "Sergei" came to see him, "Rene" dumped the scraps on the table and it was like a big jigsaw puzzle. "Sergei" started going through these scraps and there was a line here or an idea and he began to juxtapose one thing with another. "Rene" was amazed by this process-kind of like the Burroughs cut-up technique-and it became like a psychoanalytic game that started to take shape. It began to coalesce and a pattern began to emerge-stories, themes, character and conflicts-and we all began to see it.
How close does that script compare to the final version seen on-screen?
Every word was shot but I also wanted to give the actors some freedom and input within that framework. I used various techniques to give the actors a lot of flexibility even though they ultimately had to say those exact lines. I gave them a lot of chances around those lines to experiment a little with their performances. I would start a scene prior to where the script began and let people improvise and ramp up into the words and when the words were over, I would keep the cameras rolling. I would do multiple takes without cutting-because I was shooting on digital video-and step in and make suggestions and try different thoughts and ad-libbing.
The other thing is that there is a longer version of this movie that contains the entire script and all that other stuff. If there is any interest in this theatrical version-which is more compact and with fewer performances and scenes and somewhat fewer connections-I would love to put out that long version to let people see the whole thing as it was initially intended
Was it hard to get "Masked and Anonymous" financed and cast?
It was hard, certainly. We would say that we had a film starring Bob Dylan and people would say that Bob Dylan has never sold a movie ticket-pretty brutal stuff. Even with the cast and this script, it was hard to raise the money. We had to have this level of cast to make people secure that it was worth investing the extremely small amounts of money to make the film. Part of my theory of making the movie was to do it on a very low budget in a very short amount of time-we shot it in 20 days. Politically, it would have been indulgent to shoot a film like this on a big scale-it had to be done in a hand-made way.
Also, it wouldn’t have been as meaningful if it had come out of the studio system. One of the jokes that we make in the movie is the part when John Goodman gives Bob the list of protest songs he is supposed to sing and they are all songs that are protest songs but ones which have been co-opted by the mainstream culture and are owned by large corporations. I didn’t want to spend $30 million to market the film and turn it into a machine-I wanted it to be like a little gem that people could examine.
I assume that the reason that you got such a high-profile cast to appear was the chance to work with Bob Dylan...
That was the initial lure, obviously. Some of these people are very large stars and they circle around a number of things. They circled around this because it was Bob and that was exciting to them but ultimately, they read the script and loved the themes and the language and the characters. The other thing was that I would sit down with them and talk about this theory of making the film as a creative communal experience that we would all have. These were risk-taking actors and they responded to that style of filmmaking.
"Masked and Anonymous" is fairly epic in scope despite the small budget and schedule. How difficult was it to try to capture all of that, as well as presumably juggling a lot of actor schedules, in only 20 days?
We were on that thin line. The last day of shooting lasted 22 hours and I had to finish that day because Jeff Bridges had to leave-there was a plane waiting for him. Schedules were incredibly complicated to work out and there were a lot of actors that we had to decline because the schedules didn’t work out. They were very long days and it was hard to shoot. In a way, it helped the tone of the movie and the spirit on the set-everyone pulled together like we were on a submarine.
While all actors have different approaches to their work, they all have acting as their main thing. Bob Dylan, on the other hand, comes from the music world where performing tends to be more instinctual and no two versions are exactly alike-he will start a song and it will take a minute before you know what he is playing...
He never does things the same. That was one of things with the music when we shot those scenes-I didn’t know when he wouldn’t want to do any more and I had to make sure that I had one full take I could use since he never even sings a line the same way twice. I had to really be sure that I had one take and that is what you see in the film-those are all single takes of the songs with all the musicianship and liveliness of that.
That was one of the things that struck me-the choice to shoot the performances straight on with the entire band in the same shot to show the interaction...
That was one of our earliest discussions-how to shoot the songs. Bob has never been satisfied with the way he has been shot-he doesn’t think he has every been shot properly on TV or film or anything....
Even when he was doing the shooting?
Well, with "Renaldo and Clara", he hadn’t really developed this idea yet and he was still experimenting. We looked at these old tapes of "The Grand Ol’ Opry" of Hank Williams and variety shows from the 1960’s What made them work was that it was the wide-angle shot in one take and the musician directly communicating with the audience-there was something very powerful about that. With Bob’s face, we worked out maybe one camera move and just get the impact of this live music being played.
The film is, of course, jammed with Dylan songs-not just the performances but also in the background as well. However, many of his best-known songs are sung by other people-Jerry Garcia, Los Lobos and even an Italian-rap version of "Like a Rolling Stone". How was it determined which songs would play in the background and which ones-such as "Down in the Flood", "Dixie", "I’ll Remember You" and "Cold Irons Bound"-would be performed on camera by Dylan himself?
When we first started discussing the project, he had six songs that he wanted to do with the band and I think that with the exception of "Cold Irons Bound", none of them wound up in the film. Over the course of the 2-3 years that we worked on the film, it was always six songs and "Cold Irons Bound" was always the constant. He was supposed to do "All Along the Watchtower" at one point. He got on the stage and ran through it once, which I filmed, and he didn’t like how it sounded even though his musicians seemed happy with it. He decided to abandon that and do "Down in the Flood" instead-this was on the set as we were shooting on one of the last days.
The six songs kept evolving and what happened was that when we got on stage to shoot the music, he would warm up with a Bo Diddley song or even Peggy Lee’s "Fever" at one point and that would warm him up to the song he was supposed to do. I filmed all of that as well and some of those performances are fantastic. Plus, there were other performances like "Dixie" that he would use to warm up and when I heard it, I thought it was fantastic and shot it. There is a lot of music that didn’t wind up in the film-he was supposed to do six songs and he probably did twenty and I filmed all of that and the between-song patter and the warm-up throwaways.
The only songs he definitely wanted in were the ones that he performed and he had no involvement in choosing the songs on the soundtrack. The scene with "The Times, They Are A-Changing" was always in the script. Ultimately, in post-production, I began to wade through 3000 Bob Dylan covers because I had the idea of this cacophonous international chaos of music and sound and I wanted to use these international versions. There is even Bob Dylan Muzak-his songs are everywhere but you don’t realize it to some degree unless you see it more than once.
The film premiered at Sundance, where it was arguably the most anticipated film because of the presence of Dylan, but it was largely perceived in the media as a disaster...
In truth, that wasn’t how it worked out there. We had this gigantic premiere with probably too much hype-all the stars showed up and it was exciting-and of the 1800 people there, I would say that most of them got something out of the film and enjoyed it. What happened was that we got three reviews out of that screening-Roger Ebert, The Hollywood Reporter and Variety. Those are two Hollywood trade papers of the studio systems and even Roger Ebert has sort of calcified into a certain kind of standard. The three were completely dismissive of the film and wouldn’t make an effort to engage with the ideas or themes of the film. I found those to be extremely lazy reviews and quite ignorant. Those reviews colored the perception of the film coming out of Sundance while my personal experience was quite different. I would come out onto Main Street and be besieged by people wanting to talk passionately about the film and their thoughts. People had strong views of the movie and even if they ultimately rejected it, they were thoughtful about it.
My experience was fantastic and I was encouraged and I was very surprised and disappointed when I read those reviews. I began to realize that those reviews were written by these trade papers whose job is to push studio product. This film was made entirely outside the studio system and that is one of the triumphs-it really is an independent movie. When we began showing the film to poets, novelists and rock critics-even the poet laureate of England-and they wrote these amazing essays about the film that far outweigh those three malicious and pointless reviews.
I saw those negative reviews and, to be honest, they actually made me want to see the film even more. Granted, I am a Bob Dylan fan but from the way the film was described, it seemed that even if it turned out to be a bad movie, it certainly wouldn’t be a run-of-the-mill bad movie and it was horrible, it would be horrible in an interesting way.
You are the same way I am. I don’t mind movies being flawed if they are ambitious and try to do something, even if it falls short, than an film that has no aspirations at all.
The other thing is that the film really is like a Bob Dylan song in that it is impossible to fully absorb it the first time you are exposed to it. There are plenty of pop songs, for example, that you can immediately grasp the meaning but the reason that "Like a Rolling Stone" works is that it is never fully explained.
Pop songs are easily digestible but they come and go very quickly
while a Bob Dylan song increases in resonance the more you listen
to it. Depending on who you are in your life, your relationship
to those songs changes as well and that is how the movie works
as well. It is asking you to engage and join with the movie and
be part of the process instead of being a passive observer. That
is how Bob’s music is-it requires you to be part of the equation.
-- PETER SOBCZYNSKI
Copyright © 2003 Peter Sobczynski
All rights reserved.
Used with permission
Peter's Film Review
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