Musician Charlie Louvin

There are few album covers as strange and eerily foreboding as the one Charlie and Ira Louvin created for Satan Is Real, and few album’s boasting tracks as enduring. Satan Is Real was created at the height of the duo’s career, when hopes were high and demons were in submission. Yet there seems to be a premonition of things to come in the album’s artwork and songwriting, a secret dread of dark days up ahead, a plaintive sincerity that belies a soul wanting badly to be saved.

The Louvin Brothers were a product of a place and time that allowed for high emotion and passionate spiritual devotion. It was a naïve and raw America, the deep South Alabama they called home still dictated by the slow beat of farm life, the up at dawn, hands in the dirt labor their daddy did each day.

The Louvins were two sons amid seven children, raised on rich land where their family tilled the soil, growing, as Charlie remembers, “cane, cotton, watermelons. Anything that would sell – you grew it.”

Music was as much a fabric of the day-to-day as canning beans or baking bread, their Mama singing praise to the Lord in a sweet, smooth voice that she passed along to her children.

“They could all sing, but the girls screwed up and got married when they was 13 or 14. By the time they got 18 or 19, and really knew what they wanted to do in life, they had three or four children. You don’t run off and leave a house full of children, for somebody else to care for.”

Charlie and Ira, however, kept the rings off their fingers long enough to keep on singing, right through adolescence and on into a burgeoning career on the gospel circuit.

“We would crawl under Mama’s and Papa’s bed, which was about 16″ off the floor,” Charlie reminisced in an interview for Raised Country magazine in 2009, “We’d put our hind ends together and we would sing a song. That’s how we learned to phrase together without lookin’ at each other, without steppin’ on each other’s toes, or winking at each other.  It just come natural.”

“If the song was gonna get too high for me to sing the lead on, at that instant Ira would take the high lead, and I would come under him with low harmony. We learned it that way, and it that kinda mystified other duets who were tryin’ to figure out who was doin’ the tenor and who was who was doin’ the lead.”

The two brothers could sing with a deep gut belief in whatever words happened to be spilling from their mouths. And their voices together, Charlie’s rich lower notes under Ira’s heaven-sent, high 5th tenor, were like a miracle – enough proof of God to make a nonbeliever raise their arms up high.  The boys had been born Baptist, their family dug in to the Church just about as deep as you could get.

“Salvation was as important as the food you eat or the clothes you wear or the shelter on your house.  It was that important. It didn’t make any difference what we did on Saturday night. You didn’t have to ask, ‘Are we going to church tomorrow?’ You knew you were. And our folks never sent us to church. They carried us.”

Sweltering summer and bone cold winter, Ira and Charlie were wrapped up in the Word, blanketed by religion from the cradle on out. Their subsequent affinity for the high and the Holy would help get the Brothers signed to Decca in the early 1940s and make them a popular touring act, but it would be their move to secular music that would finally make the Louvin Brothers stars.

“We wanted to do Secular music. Don’t forsake the Gospel; we’d still cut it also. We got a lot of resistance from the label, ‘cause they knew how much money they could take to the bank on the Gospel stuff. And they were afraid that we would offend the Gospel fan. But we had to take that chance, because we were working in too narrow of a place, and we were willing to take the gamble.”

It was a gamble that paid off, but not without a price. Their first stab at the secular, “The Get Acquainted Waltz”, was recorded with Chet Atkins and earned the Brothers a minor hit.  The Louvins were drawing inspiration from country and bluegrass acts like the Delmore and Monroe Brothers and The Blue Sky Boys, but there was something uniquely effective about not only Ira’s elegant mandolin playing, but also the Brothers’ interlaced, soulful and soaring harmonies.

Eventually, other, bigger, hits followed, “Cash on the Barrelhead”, “When I Stop Dreaming”. Ira would write lyrics at a lightening pace, (“as quick as you’d write a note to your wife to buy milk”, Charlie once said) while his younger brother kept things steady with simple guitar melodies and underlying harmony. By 1955, the brothers had earned a place in the Grand Ole Opry, winning legions of new fans with each show.

Back home, their family stood proud.

“They were thrilled as we were  with it. My father would go in a cafe where The Louvin Brothers was on the jukebox, and he would go play it. And he’d tell the cashier, ‘Those are my boys’.”

When they weren’t in Nashville, the boys were touring in the manner of the era, nonstop and full throttle, sometimes nearly 356 days a year, back and forth, back and forth, across wide and open roads. There was a thrill in fame of course, in hearing your voice crackle on the radio – but in the end, selling music on the road was nearly the same as selling shoes, requiring the same grueling traveling salesman schedule and lack of domestic luxuries.

And it was on the road where the first jagged cracks began to show, a shadow brewing beneath Ira Louvin’s smooth as silk exterior.

By August of 1958, the Louvins were running full throttle. They were riding high on numerous hit songs and had just settled with produced Ken Nelson to record a series of aching, tormented numbers, hellfire and brimstone forewarnings that were to become Satan Is Real.

Ira was the older of the brothers, as well as the taller, nearly full 12 inches between his six feet and Charlie’s five. He was slick, he was charming and by the time the two recorded, Satan is Real, fully sure of his talents as a mandolin player and songwriter and of his unchallenged title as one of the greatest tenor singers in the history of country music.

Ira was, by all accounts, kind, funny and filled with love for his little brother, but when he took to drink, something in him turned black.  Whiskey, beer – it didn’t much matter the poison – pour some in and Ira turned to the devil – full of spit and ire, prone to violent outbursts and a totally unreliable onstage presence.

Recording session for the Louvins were anything but relaxed affairs. They moved at lightening pace, laying down song after song in marathon studio runs. Satan Is Real was recorded in a mere three days, a furious pace that would add to the dark, chaotic river of emotion flowing just under the boys’ angelic melodies. The album was a mix of covers and originals, made a cohesive whole by Louvin’s uniquely plaintive vocal style and more than a hint of religious fervor.

There was Hazel Housers’ “The River Jordan”, the traditional hyme “Dying from Home and Lost”, and the Carter Family’s “Kneeling Drunkard’s Plea”. Then there were the tracks the Louvins wrote themselves, among them the classic, “Christian Life”, later championed by Gram Parsons, Chris Hillman and The Byrds, to the soaring elation of “The Angels Rejoiced Last Night” and “There’s a Higher Power”, to the dire foreboding of  “Are You Afraid to Die?”.

Ira himself had penned the album’s title track and it pretty much summed up the question then burning in his guts – if God was real, didn’t that mean Satan had to be real too?

“Satan is real,” he sang, “ Working with power / He can tempt you and lead you astray.”

Ira’s words chilled to the bone, pushing a sore spot on his own soul, on a truth about himself that he wasn’t quite ready to admit.

The album’s artwork, it’s surreal details dreamed up by Ira, featured an enormous, blood red, crossed eyed, bucktoothed Devil, the Brothers beneath, both clad in virgin white. The wooden Satan stands astride a flaming pyre, the end of his pitchfork pointing directly at the top of Ira’s bare head, as if to point out exactly whom the Devil would be choosing.

“We were poor folks back then,” remembers Charlie, of the album’s photo shoot,  “my son had a Lionel train on a 4×8 sheet of 3/4″ plywood. So we removed his train, and split the 4×8 right up the middle. It made the devil 16 feet tall. My brother made horns for him, and a pitchfork. And that’s kind of the way that we were raised to think that the ‘booga’ man looked like.”

“it was in an old rock quarry, was where we set the setting up. Had car tires, and they were full of kerosene, coal oil we called it then. And so when we actually got ready, we lit the fires, and when the fires were high, it just started to sprinkle rain. And Capitol Records had sent a photographer all the way from California to do this photo, he said, ‘Boys it’s raining, we’re gonna have to put this off.’. I said, ‘If we can stand out here in these white suits, surely it’s not gonna hurt your camera. So it’s either now or never.’ So he went ahead and took the pictures.”

The resulting image has haunted record hounds around the world for decades, the potent weirdness of the Louvins, smiling gleefully, arms spread in welcome – and the leering, myopic, plywood Satan, threatening to strike Ira down – is now a nearly mythic image in album cover lore.

But it wasn’t just the cover that was unforgettable. The music within would be the Louvins at their most raw – a document of glorious, cathartic and committed revelations – for both the listener and the Louvin’s themselves. In the end Satan is Real was both a struggle with, and glorification of, their God.

When it was finally released by Capitol, in  November of 1959, the album would be met with wide acclaim. The Louvins would continue to ride high, at least musically, for the next few years. But the demon was hot on Ira’s trail. His drinking, carousing and bad temper would result in numerous fisticuffs, cancelled gigs, smashed mandolins… and three failed marriages. During a particularly nasty domestic spat, Ira’s the third wife shot him – but didn’t succeed in killing him.

The chaos was quickly dismantling the world around Ira and by association, Charlie’s world as well.

Then there was Elvis, his hip swing sexuality thrusting rocknroll to the forefront. The girls swooned, the boys strutted and suddenly the Louvin Brothers’ sweet, spiritual harmonies seemed out of step with the times.

“We were doing quite well.  Then Elvis came along.  That hurt country music a lot – it changed all music.  And it made my brother drink more.”

Finally Charlie had enough.

“In ’63, it got … I just didn’t know how to deal with a drinker, and still don’t today.

If someone came to the Louvin Brothers and said, “When you go to this particular date, you’d better do a good one, because so-and-so is going to be there, and this booker’s going to be there,”  … just as sure as they said that, Ira would drink, and it would turn out to be the worst show we’d ever done.”

“Then the news got around.  First thing ya know, one promoter would tell another promoter, “If you want to BUY problems, get the Louvin Brothers.”

“If you’re in the music business, and you’re a brother team, both of ya gets judged by what either one of you does.  So, it was the Louvin Brothers that was undependable. It hurt money-wise, and date-wise.  I knew that someone had to leave.”

“I was told 100 times (by Ira), ‘When we get back off of this trip, I’m out of this rotten business.’  So, finally, on Aug. 18th, 1963, we did a show with Ray Price in Watseka, IL.  He started in talkin’ about quitin’. And I said, ‘Well, you’re right.  I’ve never said this (myself), but I’ve heard it (from you) 1000′s of times.  But you’re right.  We’ve just worked the last date we’ll ever work together, because I’m quitting.’ And I did.”

“So, that was that.  It never came to the point where you’d fight on stage, but the tension was more than you would want to put up with.”

Charlie went onward and upwards, remaining, to this day, one of the most beloved country icons of all time.  Ira, well…Ira fought the devil and he fought him hard.

He tried at a fourth marriage, to a talented singer named Anne Florence, and for a while – it seemed to stick. The couple toured together, but without Charlie, ever dependable, around to smooth out the edges, Ira struggled to find gigs. He soon burned through his money, as well as his friends. And eventually, his drinking would eat away at him, turn him bitter and finally – take everything he had.

In 1965, at age 41, Ira, his pretty wife, and four others would be dead in a violent car crash, a brutal head-on collison on a dark country road, just outside Williamsburg, Missouri.

A few years earlier the Louvins had cut a song called ‘Wreck on the Highway’, “I heard the crash on the highway,” sang Ira, “but I didn’t hear nobody pray.”

The black irony about Ira’s death, was that – despite the fact that he had a warrant out for his arrest on a DUI charge, it was the driver in the other vehicle who was drunk, and blind drunk at that. The papers reported an autopsy that revealed the presence of alcohol, nine times over the legal limit.

This fact, however did little to soothe Charlie Louvin, who remains devastated by his brother’s death to this day.

“He was told by thousands of people that whiskey was gonna kill him, and anyway you look at it, eventually, it did.”

What remains, however, of Ira and Charlie’s potent musical partnership, is a enduring legacy that continues to evolve as time passes. Their music was admired and embraced, both by their peers, by the generation who followed directly in their steps and onwards… You can hear the Brothers in harmonies of the Everly Brothers, in the country rock sway of The Byrds and Gram Parsons, in the honey-voiced songs of Emmylou Harris… and later…in the gut wrench earnestness of Wilco and Will Oldham and in the Southern Gothic darkness of The White Stripes.

And you can be sure we’ll be hearing that elating, unforgettable sound, inspiring many more great songwriters yet to come.

Charlie himself has become the gracious guardian of the Louvin legacy, still writing, singing, touring and paying homage to the sound he was so instrumental in creating.

At this writing, Charlie is about undergo surgery in a fight against pancreatic cancer, but he’s facing that enemy with same wry wit and fearless swagger that have guided him through a lifetime of musical adventures.

About the Louvin-penned Satan is Real track “Afraid to Die”, Charlie has this to say.

“I’m really not afraid to die. Seriously. There’s gotta be better places.  I think one of these days I’m gonna find out.”

As we all will.

But in the meantime, let’s count our blessings, kiss our loved ones, put the needle down….and praise the Good Word of Ira and Charlie Louvin.

Dear Reader: Charlie passed away on January 26, 2011. I was lucky enough to speak to him just before he moved on. The above was originally published as liner notes for the wonderful Louvin Brothers releases from Light in The Attic. See here for more info - http://lightintheattic.net/

Interview With Musician Jeff Buckley

I was fortunate enough to speak with the late Jeff Buckley just 6 months before his death (of accidently drowning) in late May of 1997.  This interview was conducted in Boston, during a brief concert stop for the album “Grace”.

Jeff was only 30 years old when he passed away, but he left us some truly transcendent music.  Read on for a bit of insight into one of the great musicians of the 1990s.

Q: There’s a huge line outside.

A: It’s strange how all this is happening because I never, ever gave a demo anyone. I never shopped a deal and I never brought my work to anyone “official”. It would have been wrong somehow, wrong for the music. It needs to have a real sacred setting for people to understand it. You’ve got to start things off with friends who are like-minded or even strangers that are like-minded. Sending your music to established artists or labels or magazine, I mean there is something to be said for tenacity, for trying to pursue recognition that way, but it just doesn’t make sense for the best work. And if you do make an amazing work, it’s sometimes not the best way to be heard. You have to get on a sacred space, like a stage, and do your testifying that way.

Q: Is that how things happened then, playing at Sinee Café in New York, being a regular act there and word spreading in an organic way from people who came to those shows?

A: Yes. I had a friend, Daniel, who got me the gig there. Someone else had opted out of Monday nights so Daniel took two and I took two and then there were a slew of Monday nights open and I just went on and on. And then I started playing a lot of little places around there, around the Lower East Side and a little bit uptown, just anything I could get, I took.

Q: How long were you doing that?

A: Two and a half years.

Q: Because you, and the music, seem to have emerged fully matured.

A: It was never like that before and it’s still not, really. It’s still kind of half-baked. You’ll see with the next album, it’s always kind of evolving. I just get to things kind of late. I have a sort of shy self-esteem – meaning it’s shy of healthy.

Q: What were you doing before this?

A: Oh, I’ve done a lot of things. I’ve been a janitor. I’ve been a burger flipper. I’ve been an electrician’s apprentice. I’ve been cheap construction labor. I’ve worked in a clothing store, a hotel. Been in all sorts of bands. Scuffled.

Q: So a whole slew of shit jobs.

A: Everybody in the working class – works. That ethic still hasn’t dissolved. But there was a real message inside that that I had to stop doing things that were taking energy away from what I felt would really fulfill me. So I had to organize my life.

Q: Are you a regimented person, is that how you work?

A: No. Look at me, I’m a mess! No now more than ever I have to regiment myself, which is very hard. My bunk is full of shit. I never sleep in my bunk, I just pack it full of shit. But I do feel that regimented people do better work, longer.

Q: I have your solo ep and I saw you at the Sinee and I’ve also seen you with the band. Do you have a preference?

A: They are both different. Different disciplines. Different things are possible. I’m able to move from place to place quicker, to more extreme places dynamically and material-wise – when I’m alone. Because it’s just me. But I prefer the band situation. I prefer the relationship. Music is meant to be that way. It’s meant to be interdependent.  It all sort of happened backwards for me in a way. I was playing solo in order to find the right band. But before that happened I got signed. But I was still staving off working on anything until I found the band. So I would go to the label and say, “oh yeah, I’ve got these great guys” – but they didn’t exist. I didn’t want the label to pick a band for me and I sure as hell didn’t want any session players, because then it would just be dead. I wanted a band that would last and eventually form a creative organism. Because that’s what a band should be. That’s what bands are for.

Q: How did you eventually find them?

A: Mick, the bass player came to a show and he was attracted and that was the first. Michael, was the last to join. We’d been friends for three years or so and he’d seem most of my shows and he knew where I was coming from. And Matt met with Mick and I one night and we played as a trio and immediately came up with music – the music for “Dream Brother”.  So I asked them all, please stay through this album and then, if you want to stay, stay. And they did.

Q: Are there any other bands right now that you’re drawn to? That you feel are doing something interesting or innovative?

A: Yes, The Grifters are the real thing. A band people should listen to. I met them once and immediately fell in love with them. The Dambuilders are also great – it was a total epiphany when I met that band. Shudder to Think, definitely a band to listen to. The Melvins. Those are bands I feel are real positive forces. Helium are great.  This is the thing – if you ask any music journalist expert  guy he’ll tell you – “it’s all bankrupt. There’s nothing out there.” But it’s not true. There is a tremendous amount of soul in America, there are great bands. But it’s all underground. You ain’t gonna find it if you expect MTV to feed it to you. Now is the time to go out and get music for yourself. And those bands I just mentioned are the types of people you’ll find and they are fierce! Serious songwriters, writing great songs. The quality is in their sense of melody and their sense of the impact and sound and lyrics. It’s really a ballsy thing to be a melodic artist rather than just having some writing that you sing over. It’s hard to explain why certain music is good. It’s something that gets inside you, uncomplicated, direct, romantic, and melodic. The way the words get into you.

Q: You’re describing your own music in a way.

A: I try. My favorite kind of music is the stuff that stops time. You put something on to sit there and let an experience go through you. The process is not something to glaze over. You constantly draw attention to yourself as a songwriter. It’s a very scary thing to illustrate. To look at yourself clearly through a song. It’s true of all art, all mediums, but for some reason music has a direct line straight into people.

Q: Favorite book, favorite film?

A: I don’t read half as much as I should. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. I mean, anything about rootless family life gets to me. Geek Love is about the family and a little about the evils of evangelism through the character of Arturo. But mostly, it’s about family. And as far as films – anything by Elia Kazan. I like cinematic art that is doesn’t have to include violence as the main meat of emotion. Now, excellence in cinema is based on murder, guns. Tarantino bores me. Even though he is very appealing and very facile about putting elements of pop culture into his work.  But it kinds of dates it, right? I like East of Eden, Cinema Paradiso, Last Tango in Paris. It takes a real artist to do films like that and not rely on a 45 Magnum to create action. Boring. I like My Own Private Idaho. Despite Keanu.

Q: Did you play a large part in the making of your video?

A: Yes, I got two friends – Mary who takes all the pictures – to do home movies in Brooklyn. And my friend John, who directs plays – to direct. They got it. I didn’t have enough time though. I never have enough time to do anything right. But it will be different next year.

Q: What are you doing next year?

A: I’m going to disappear. Disappear until I come back with ample material.

Q: Are you going to record in Bearsville again?

A: Never. $2000 a day? Fuck that shit.

Q: How was it working with Andy Wallace?

A: That part was good. But I don’t know, I think just by judging at the way the last two songs we’ve recorded sound – we can get the sound ourselves. I can produce it myself. All we need is an engineer. Bearsville was beautiful, we stayed in cabins. The town itself is sleepy, friendly. A lot of reggae shows and young white hippies – all Birkenstock quasi-dread noseringed collegiate potcuppers. It’s a friendly community, but me being a New Yorker – I went insane having nothing to do in my little cabin. The axe murderer cabin I was staying in. The “writer’s cabin” which for some reason had cable TV. Wrong thing to put in a writer’s cabin. But the studios themselves are really good and easy to work in and beautiful. But next time? When and where – I won’t tell a soul. I’ll just show up with the master tapes and say “yup. It’s done, we made it. It’s great.” I’d really love to sneak away and do it that way.

Q: What’s next?

A: To Europe for a tour, but first to New York to shoot yet another video. One thing that I’m kind of disturbed at is actually being on the television, acting, being in something that’s mainstream. And having that whole pirate article in People Magazine (Ed. Buckley was listed as one of the “100 Most Beautiful People”). They didn’t even ask me. It’s cheesy and crappy and I hate it. There are some people on that list who are just unproductive mannequins. And it caters to a certain type of person. Really, a large part of their readership wouldn’t usually have anything to do with me – so fuck them. People Magazine is dirty and cheap and shallow.

Q: Has that article attracted any obsessive fans?

A: You’re joking, but that’s actually happened! There are a few religious fanatics that correlate the songs and the lyrics to passages in the Bible. They just write me incessantly though and have yet to show up with a weapon or anything. Knock on Formica.

Q: Do you consider yourself to be religious?

A: Yes. But I don’t believe in any human organization of God. It just doesn’t work.

Q: You’re spiritual.

A: I don’t know anyone who isn’t.

Musician/Actress Jane Birkin

Serge and Jane in 1969.

Jane Birkin is speaking on the phone from Paris, sounding exactly like you might expect – breathy, sensual, and girlish. It is still voice of a young woman on the other end of the line, despite Birkin’s 65 years. She speaks her native English with an upper class lilt and her French – flawlessly. This is in large part due to 40 years spent in France, 13 of them immersed in a now legendary romance with the country’s beloved pop star, the late Serge Gainsbourg.

The couple was the Brad and Angelina of their day, their partnership fuel for the 1960s tabloids and intercontinental nightclub gossip. When they met on the set of the film, “Slogan” in 1968, Birkin was a doe-eyed 22 year old model/actress, Gainsbourg a hard drinking 40 year old madman. Their relationship would be both prolific and volatile.

The two ultimately had one child, (the contemporary actress/singer Charlotte Gainsbourg), but it was their musical output that kept the press at their door. Birkin and Gainsbourg produced numerous tracks together, such as 1969 single “Je taime…moi non plus.

(“I love you… me neither”) and 1971’s, Histoire de Melody Nelson, a concept album detailing the exploits of a middle-age man’s affair with a teen-age nymphet.

“It’s funny because these songs are not very scandalous when you listen now,” says Birkin from her Paris apartment, “they are actually rather charming and sweet. When I think of when I would take the needle off certain parts of the record so my mother wouldn’t hear the heavy breathing, I laugh now. But at the time it was considered music you only played after midnight and many of the songs were banned.”

Throughout their relationship, Gainsbourg found poetic inspiration in Birkin, the result being an unprecedented series of wry, catchy and often playfully obscene songs, all written expressly for his young lover. The process for the two was simple. Serge was the songwriter – Jane was the muse.

“He would play me songs that he had written for me on the tape recorder and I would pick the prettiest,” says Birkin now of their collaborations, “I always thought he wrote the songs for me that expressed what was his feminine side. It freed him to write these lyrics, it meant somehow that he was a complete person – that he could be fragile. I asked him once if he thought that was the case, that I was expressing the feminine side of himself, and he said yes, he thought that was true.

“He was always 20 years ahead of his time,” continues Birkin, “and he’s remembered for that but also because he also wrote some very good, very catchy tunes. He was very prolific. With me, he was very clear about what he wanted. When, later in life, I began performing live, he told me I could do his songs, or do the standards. He told me once that if I was going to do a song that wasn’t his, it had to be written by an American and they had to be dead!”

Gainsbourg continued to write songs for and about Birkin, even after she left him in 1980 for the director Jacques Doillon.  Yet even as their relationship changed, so did the lyrical and emotional import of Gainsbourg’s compositions.

“There were songs that he wrote for me when we were together, songs that I see now were written for the baby doll, innocent sort of person he wanted me to be” says Birkin, “and those songs were cute and sexy and flirtatious. But later in life, after I had left him, he continued to write songs for me and they were deeper. I felt wasn’t singing me, I was singing him. I was singing his feelings, his curiosity, his pain and difficulty in life”.

These included tracks from the 1983 album, “Baby alone in Babylone”, which included songs like “Baby Lou”, which Gainsbourg wrote about Birkin’s third child with Doillon.

“Serge was very much in my life, always,” Birkin says of the later years of their relationship, “He was my chum. He was best friend. He would turn up at any time of the night, and he had his room in our house. I would make him dinner or a cup of tea and just sit down and gossip. I was very lucky that way, because I never really lost Serge. He was always my friend. It was more fun with him later in life, to have him as an extraordinary, eloquent, loyal friend.”

Since Gainsbourg’s death in 1991, Birkin has spent much of her time keeping his legacy alive, not only in France, but also abroad.

“Serge is still very much alive and relevant,” she says, “When “Je T’aime” came out, that was such a scandal in 1968, and I think some of that curiosity remains. I think when I tour now; it is that curiosity that draws people to the show.  And I like taking Serge around; I like reminding people of his songs.

Birkin pauses.

“Although he doesn’t need me any more,” she adds quietly, “When Serge first died, I think people discarded him at first. In part, because they felt like he was someone who drank too much and smoked too much and was sort of a dandy. But over the years that has changed. They’ve come to love him again.”

Interview with Neil Young

Awesome photo of Neil by the great Henry Diltz

For the past four decades Neil Young has weathered the fickle storms of rock fad and emerged as the consummate survivor. Since his early days in Buffalo Springfield, to his hits with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, to his Crazy Horse solo years, Young has consistently produced music of unprecedented depth and gripping emotional rawness.

Instead of speaking with Young about his music (which he has discussed ad infinitum), I decided instead to talk to him about his filmmaking. Young has helmed two offbeat narrative features, Human Highway and Greendale, both music driven and atmospheric and very weird in the good way, in the way only Mr. Young can be.

Q: It seems like Greendale was a project that came together pretty organically. I’m interested in how those characters and this place developed in your mind, how much was mapped out beforehand?

A: Well, basically one thing leads to another and there really wasn’t a plan in the beginning, not even a plan to do concept album, I just start recording and the songs just started coming out. I was going to do a live video of the recording of the album. So I shot that with five video cameras hi-def and I had these green screen windows, which I was going to fill in with images once I finished the songs, but once I realized after recording the album, one song at a time, we discovered we had a story going on. So at the end, we started to rethink. In the end, it really just wrote itself, the more we did the more we liked it, the more we did what we liked.

Q: Is that the way you usually work?

A: Yeah, that’s right – you just follow it. You follow the trail. I just started writing. I don’t think about what I’ m going to write before I write it, the key thing is that I sit down and pick up the guitar. From there I play a few chords, strum them a few times and if I like the chords then I’ll put the guitar down and write some words to the rhythm of the chords and one song at a time that way. I record one song at a time, because I don’t want to be thinking about three songs at once. I do them one at a time and as these songs unfolded and these characters came to life.

Q: In a way Greendale is a place I’m homesick for, even though I’ve never been there.

A: It’s quiet a place, Greendale, it has a look and a feel to it. And we just did it so fast, we didn’t try to do a good job, we tried to capture the moments, so we didn’t worry about the weather or anything like that. We just kept on going 16 hours a day for two weeks, we didn’t even look at tests, we just trusted that it was working.

Q: So when you were filming did you have a specific structure you were working with or did the songs provide that foundation?

A: Our structure was very loose. We had the tapes and we knew where we were going with the songs, we had the locations and we knew the actors. So we just brought that together, walked in, set it up, locked it and went for it.

Q: I think in some ways musicians make ideal filmmakers in that they have a sense of tone and pacing and storytelling as well. And I think they don’t come to the medium with the same sort of restrictions.

A: We didn’t know how we were supposed to do it, which was one of our biggest advantages. When other people saw the film, I was petrified, it scared the hell out of me and then we were going to take it to film festivals and I thought we would get killed. I thought people would put it down because of its technical quality and it does have a technical quality, but it’s so low grade. I thought we would get killed.

Q: I think the audience reacts positively to honesty, despite technical form.

A: I think you might be right.

Q: This is your second film, the first was Human Highway, with Devo.

A: Yes, I had done that. I’ve dabbled; I just do it for myself, that’s the way I did with Greendale too. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it, so I shot Greendale on super 8. Plus that camera is so easy to shoot.

Q: It gives a film that inherent nostalgia.

A: Oh yeah, it’s beautiful.

Q: People see it-

A: And they believe it. Video doesn’t give you any room to move, it’s too stark and cold, that’s the way I see it for what I do anyway, other people can create masterpieces with it. You just play with it like anything else; you use what works best for you and you hope that the best comes out of what you make with those tools.

Interview with Musician Tony Joe White

The "Swamp Fox" at his finest.

Tony Joe White may be the coolest man alive.

The “Swamp Fox” hails from Oak Grove, Louisiana and is most well known for songs he wrote that would later become hits for other artists, among them, “Polk Salad Annie,” which was a chart-topper for Elvis. White’s “Rainy Night in Georgia,” went to #4 on the pop singles chart for Brook Benton in 1970, and was later recorded by Ray Charles, among many others.

The originator of a style of music know as “Swamp Rock”, White created a  combination of Cajun music, blues and traditional rock ’n’ roll. Though the sound it is most often associated with Creedence Clearwater Revival, Tony Joe White lays claim to the genre’s roots and is always quick to point out, when asked about CCR,  “there weren’t no alligators in Berkeley anyway.”

This is music keenly defined by Tony Joe’s deep crooner’s voice and his funk-meets-country style of guitar picking. Outside of Hendrix, White has one of the most unique wha-wha pedals in rock.

“We were playing in Corpus Christi, Texas,” he remembers, “and my drummer’s father at the time owned a music store and he came down to the show and said that the way I was tapping my foot – I might as well put this pedal under it.”

“They called it a ‘Gibson Boomerang’. So we hooked it up and started playing on it and people got up and started doing this weird dance and I thought ‘damn, this things gotta stay with us.’ I’m still using the same one today. I call it a Whomper Stomper. I just keep re-building the thing when it breaks.”

By the 1980s, White was even dabbling in rap music. The tracks on his 1980 album “The Real Thang,”  might prove him to be the first Southern rapper. To hear him explain it – it seems like just another part of the feel of his sound.

“We even had a little rap back on “Polk Salad Annie” ya know, so it wasn’t nothin’ new to me. Somebody just suggested we give it a try and we did. And I got two or three new tunes like that with a little talking in it. I’ll always have that.”

Of course, being cool always starts with modesty, but you get the sense from talking with the man that he knows you expect a certain something extra from him.  When asked about the fishing near his home outside of Memphis, Tennesee, Tony Joe explains, “Man, it’s too hot right now. Ya know, fish are like me—they’re just waitin’ for something cool to come along.”

And when he’s pressed about the secret to being so cool White just laughs and says, “Well, there ain’t nothing wrong with being cool. But honestly I wouldn’t really know how to be cool. I know how to be quiet, but I think they say that about me ’cause the music’s got this slide to it. I’m always just gliding along. Maybe that’s part of it.”

Whatever it is, there is something wholly unique and original about the music of Tony Joe.

Here’s a list of where to start:

Swamp Music – the Complete Monument Recordings – Rhino Records has done most of the work for you, compiling all three of White’s earliest records with loads of extras and outtakes that have never been heard before. On his first album “Black and White,” White’s voice is as deep and murky as the swamp he was raised on and “Polk Salad Annie” is a classic in every sense of the word. White’s second and third records “Continued” and “Tony Joe” are included in the box as well and feature standout tracks like “Roosevelt and Ira Lee,” a song about two cats looking for food on the edge of a swamp, and “Groupy Girl,” about a groupie who can’t spell.

Tony Joe White – White’s S/T fourth album found Tony Joe on the brink of success. Having had a hit with “Polk Salad Annie” and with “Rainy Night in Georgia” climbing the charts, White and his new label, Warner Brothers, had plans to capitalize on White’s talent and originality. Although the album did not produce any hits, the combination of producer Peter Asher, The Memphis Horns and White’s soulful voice created an album that might be his most solid overall. It was reissued for the first time in 2002, but like everything else it sounds best on vinyl and ain’t too hard to find.

The Real Thang – Man, the ’80s were weird. The same Tony Joe who wrote songs about cutting your hair out of respect in the ’60s was now trying his hand at rap. As bizarre as the track “Swamp Rap” is, the real gem here is a song called “Even Trolls Love Rock and Roll.” The story goes that Tony Joe and his band are on the way to a nearby gig and decide to walk. Unfortunately they come across a troll who forces White into a guitar duel in order to cross the bridge. Think “Devil Went Down to Georgia” but replace the devil with a troll.  For the Tony Joe White fanatic only.

Interview with Chef/Activist Alice Waters

In the late 1960s, America’s relationship with food could be divided neatly into two warring sides, the Wonderbread and mayonnaise devotees of the Eisenhower Right and the bean sprouts and tofu flag of the hippie health movement. There was little in between.

Nearly a century of mass production and dubious innovations such as plastic and synthesized flavorings had created a disconnection between farm and table. Angry youth were rebelling by going back to the land, founding communal goat farms and thumbing their nose at the establishment. The rest of the country was about to embrace fast food with a vehemence that continues today.

Alice Waters was a student then on the overtly politicized campus of Berkeley, in Northern California, a young girl studying French Culture and education. In the thick of the era’s cultural upheaval, Waters went off to Europe and had a cultural upheaval of her own.

“I had been very politically disillusioned and I was definitely part of a counter culture movement at Berkeley, “remember Waters, “and I had come back from France, utterly inspired by the food and by those little places that served food, the places that welcomed the neighborhood and bought at the markets nearby. I remember clearly thinking – ‘that’s how I want to live my life, that’s what I want’. It was in that sort of naïve place that I opened Chez Panisse. It was never any question for me that if I had good food – people would come. At least all my friends would come! And I was appealing absolutely to the people of the counterculture.”

Chez Panisse opened in 1971, when Waters was 27 years old. It sits on a busy street at the center of Berkeley’s University district, in an old Craftsman home, warm and inviting, it’s amber lit interior, home, for forty years now to a simple philosophy of “locally grown = good tasting”.

It is a wonderful restaurant, yes, but it is more than that. Over the years, Alice Waters, Chez Panisse (and the many chefs who have trained there) have become hugely influential in spreading the gospel of good food to America – and beyond.

“Needless to say I never imagined anything more than a neighborhood restaurant,” says Waters, “And I wasn’t necessarily looking for organic at first – I was simply looking for taste. I remembered what those green beans were like in Europe and I wanted those green beans again. I wanted the crème fraiche, I wanted the chicken, I wanted everything to taste like I had remembered it tasting in Europe.”

The desire for these authentic, earthy, tastes lead Waters on a journey through Northern California…and eventually, to the to doors of small, family growers who were doing their best to resist the domination of industrialized farming.

“I went on search and of course I ended up on the steps of the local organic farmers. I was not paying attention to money, I didn’t care how much it costs, I wanted the best tasting olive oil, I wanted to give people this sense of hospitality. Of course we went into great debt by doing this, but I was willing to pay the farmers what they deserved for their amazing food. That wonderful network of suppliers still exists and we still work together. That kind of commitment was very, very important to us at the beginning.”

What Waters had stumbled upon, a deep desire for farm to table freshness and sustainable food resourcing, is now – four decades after Chez Panisse opened its’ doors – a worldwide movement.

It makes sense then that Waters herself is at the global forefront. She is Vice President of the Slow Food Movement and an intensely outspoken activist for change in the way American schoolchildren are fed in public schools. Her “Edible Schoolyard” program, which began in her hometown of Berkeley, now helps establish school gardens and healthy menus in public schools across America. Five years ago she became involved with the garden and cafeteria at the American Academy in Rome and it’s Rome Sustainable Food Project. It’s a position, which has offered her insight into Italy’s own forward-thinking food movement.

“I knew that it would have an amazing effect on the artists and scholars who came there to study. We tried to revive the traditions of Roman food and source it locally and it’s become the most energizing and inspiring kind of space. Somewhere like Rome, you have the history of food all around you, is incredibly inspiring. All of these experiences, with Academy, the Slow Food organization, people are over the world trying to make this change – it’s helped me so much to feel connected. Maybe we don’t speak the same language, but we have this bond, this respect and love for food.”

Water cites contemporaries like Jamie Oliver, Michael Pollen and the Prince of Wales as fellow in her good food fight.

“We are all part of a delicious revolution,” she says triumphantly, “we’re trying to find that place of pleasure… and when we touch it, it leads it right to places of sustainability and biodiversity and appreciation for children and elders and farmers – everything…just everything, comes with it.”

Originally published in L’uomo Vogue

Feature on Filmmaker Hal Ashby

Okay, this entry isn’t an “interview” per se, but a feature.  Unfortunately, the amazing Mr. Ashby passed away when I was just a teen. But I DID interview the following Ashby collaborators and devotees for this piece;  Dustin Hoffman, Sean Penn, Jeff Bridges, Randy Quaid, Noah Baumbach, Robert Towne, Norman Jewison, Bud Cort and Bruce Dern.

These incredible people loved Ashby and so were kind enough to give me their time to sing his praises. Please enjoy. He’s one of my favorites.

It was a grey Friday morning in 1978, Malibu still wrapped in fog and damp, the sun yet to burn off the gloom. A longhaired, lanky man in jeans and an unkempt beard was standing barefoot in the wet sand, staring intently into the surf with a bemused grin. He was looking for something out there, and the grin was a sign that he’d found it.

Hal Ashby had by then already established himself as a maverick director and editor, a consummate outsider who had helmed cult classics Shampoo, Being There, and Harold and Maude (which celebrates it’s 35th anniversary this year), as well as incisive social and political explorations such as The Last Detail and Bound For Glory. He’d won an Oscar and had been nominated for several others, and as a director he would eventually lead his actors to a total of ten Academy wins.

With a reputation for adventurousness and a stubborn dismissal of studio authority, Ashby had unwittingly fashioned himself a kind of Hollywood outlaw, a lone ranger whose dedication to his work had won the loyalty of some of the great performers of the time. His co-conspirators included Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson, Peter Sellers and Julie Christie, Jon Voight and Bruce Dern.

It was Dern who standing beside Ashby in that pre-dawn mist of 1978, looking hard into the same water.  The two were on the tail end of production of Coming Home, a raw and ragged exploration of the Vietnam War, starring Dern, Voight and Jane Fonda. The film would go on to garner a total of three Academy Awards, but that early morning the project was still in incubation.

Ashby and his cast were moving toward the film’s climax, a high action culmination involving a car chase and more than a few helicopters. But something wasn’t right, and as the final hour approached, Ashby, in his usual freewheeling, seat of the pants form, had decided to experiment.

“We had been out late, talking,” remembers Dern, “Hal had a feeling that the ending wasn’t going to work, that the movie he was making was supposed to finish in a different way. He didn’t know quite what he wanted, but he knew he needed to push things.”

Ashby, a plan germinating, convinced Dern to meet him a few hours later – in costume – just to see where those things might go.

“He didn’t tell the studio,” explains Dern, “or any of the other actors. I showed up at the beach and it was just the cinematographer and Hal with his hair blowing in the wind. It was freezing. And Hal told me to go into the water. My character had always been scripted as breaking down in the end, but it had been big and violent. Hal wanted to end it quietly and poignantly. So he asked me to take off my military uniform and walk naked into the water. And that’s what I did.”

Ashby spent the weekend frantically editing a rough cut of the film. On Monday afternoon he presented it to the rest of the cast and crew.

“I remember when the film ended, there was this complete silence,” says Dern, “because no one had known he was changing the ending. He’d done it all on the sly. So there was this stunned silence. Then Jane Fonda turned around and looked at Hal and I and said ‘You two bastards have just made our film into a masterpiece.”

Working parallel with Scorsese, Altman and Coppola, Hal Ashby was an integral part of the revolutionary crew who carved out the new cinema of the 1970s. He is also, in some ways, the most neglected. Despite a prolific output that includes some of the era’s finest work, there is a staggeringly small amount of recognition. People know Hal’s movies, but they rarely know his name.

“He wanted the films to come before himself,” explains Dern, “The importance was in what the films said. He always had an intense desire to expose the real truth of things.”

“A lot his characters are people who are being oppressed, by society or the government, and they’re standing up to it in their own way,” continues Randy Quaid, who would work on three of Ashby’s films, most notably The Last Detail, “They may not win, but they at least make an attempt to stand for something – to stand up for themselves.”

For two decades, Ashby elaborated, in various ways, upon these themes of truth and individualism. With Harold and Maude, he created a love story that exists far beyond the confines of societal norms. In Bound For Glory Ashby traced the true-life story of folk hero and activist Woody Guthrie. The Last Detail and Coming Home are character studies that expose the hypocrisy of militaristic control.  Shampoo is a scathing indictment of the vapidity of Hollywood high society. And in Being There, Ashby and his star, Peter Sellers, fashioned one of cinema’s great characters, Chauncey Gardener, a simple-minded man, whose utter innocence transforms him into a kind of demi-god – a man who exists so far outside as to be nearly ethereal.

“In a way, Hal was Chauncey Gardner,” says scribe Robert Towne, who would work on several films with Ashby, including The Last Detail and Shampoo, “ he had an innocence to him, a child-like quality. There was something about him that was pure.”

Ashby first arrived in Hollywood in the early 1950s, via a long, rough road. The son of a Utah dairy farmer, his childhood had been colored in the dulled shades of the Great Depression, a poverty that had eventually worn his father to the point of suicide. Hal had been twelve when he’d discovered him in the barn, dead of a bullet wound to the head.

By age 17, Ashby was on his own, fleeing the constraints of a conservative Mormon household and too many bad memories. He worked odd jobs in Utah and Nevada and by the time he reached L.A., at age 19, he had been married and divorced and had established what was to become his lifelong world view – the perspective of the quietly defiant outsider.

“His childhood was no sweet treat,” says Sean Penn, who met Ashby in 1981, “But he had a lot of joy in him, despite what had happened. I think he’d experienced so much as a kid, anything he was experiencing in Hollywood was just small potatoes. So he’d always be laughing, and he had perspective about what was important.”

The years in Utah, the religious restraint, the grueling day-to-day of the farm, the tragedy of his childhood, had transformed Hal into a young man with a strong social consciousness and a total disdain for authority. In Los Angeles he found a stark and seductive contrast to what he had known before, a lushness and experimentation that suited him well. He had stumbled upon a place where he could defy the conservatism of his upbringing and begin to establish his own identity – both philosophically and aesthetically.

“He was a rare bird,” remembers Dustin Hoffman, who would work with Ashby in the early stages of Tootsie, “way before there were hippies, he dressed the way he wanted to dress. I remember thinking that when I first met him – oh my god, look how long his hair is!’ If you didn’t know what he did, you would guess that he was a poet or that he is a painter. He had that feel to him.”

Just after arriving in Los Angeles, Ashby found a job working the printing press at Universal Studios. It wasn’t long before his distinctive look and easy charm nestled him snugly within inner loop of assistants and mailroom clerks looking to work their way up. Making up for time lost to his rural past, Ashby fell quickly in love with film, both the end product and the complexities of the process. He began lingering in the editing rooms, keeping the nightshift company and ingratiating himself until he was finally asked to step in and try his hand.

Working as an assistant editor for numerous studios, Ashby found a mentor in Bob Swank, who edited films for Hollywood stalwart William Wyler.  It was during his tenure with Swank, that Ashby would first meet Norman Jewison, an up and coming young director who would play an integral role in Ashby’s future.

“I was a huge admirer of William Wyler, so I’d gone in to talk with Swank and there was this long-haired, crazy looking guy there, who was helping to edit these incredible movies,” recalls Jewison, “We bonded immediately. Hal was always a little outrageous and we considered ourselves brothers in some way, renegades. We were both very political and liberal and we knew exactly what kind of projects we wanted to make.”

When Jewison was offered his fifth film, 1965’s The Cincinnati Kid, he persuaded MGM to hire Ashby on as editor.

“I said, ‘how about you be my editor?’ and he just smiled and said, “Man, I’d love that,’” laughs Jewison, “so I told the studio, ‘if you hire me, you hire Hal’. I was willing to put myself on the line for him, because he was brilliant and I knew it.”

The partnership was tremendously rewarding for both men. With Ashby on board as his editor, Jewison fought for scripts that echoed some aspect of the social issues the two were so desperate to explore. One of their most poignant collaborations was In the Heat of The Night, a taut drama exploring racial tensions that would win Ashby the Oscar for Editing in 1967.

By the late Sixties, Jewison had realized that Ashby’s skills could go far beyond the editing room. When another project called him away from a film he had been asked to direct, Jewison suggested that Ashby step in, providing his friend with yet another a catalyst.

“I always knew that when he got the chance to direct”, admits Jewison “he would prove he was a much finer director than I was.”

The film, a small, tightly scripted exploration of racial inequality, called, The Landlord, was the perfect fit for Ashby. With this directorial debut, released in 1970, Ashby would lay a foundation for what would become his few definably trademarks.

The gritty documentary feel and framing of The Landlord would mark all his future films, lending his work a distinct visual intimacy. He would eventually find a like-minded cinematographer and frequent collaborator in Haskell Wexler, who helped to define a verity style that matched the mood of Ashby’s films. The two developed a loose, informal way of shooting that lifted the veil from the characters and brought the audience directly into the fold.

“He was always pushing for technical innovation,” remembers Quaid, “On Bound For Glory, he used a Steadicam- for one of the first times ever. In fact, the inventor of the Steadicam was the camera operator on that film. He was never afraid to break out and try new things.”

Ashby was also natural storyteller, in the manner of the folk musicians of his childhood. He spoke of real things – those small moments that culminate in catharsis. There was an underpinning of unaffected earnestness, an honesty – that would thread through each and every one of his projects.

“You take something like Harold and Maude, which in the hands of a lesser director might be a difficult film to make,” says Quaid, “You have a love story between suicidal young man and an older woman who loves life. You have the humor in that and the pathos, and the real human emotions between these two people. That movie particularly epitomizes the essence of Hal – and his philosophy.”

Ashby’s outlook was in direct contrast to many of his contemporaries. Instead of brash ego, there was an easy-going humility. On set, he was soft-spoken, mellowed. He embraced Seventies counter-culture whole-heartedly, in the tone of his work and particularly with his soundtracks, which often featured music from rock innovators such as Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones.

Ashby also relied on marijuana for both inspiration and as a method of subduing the frustrations that came with studio-filmmaking. This openness to experimentation with drugs would eventually lead Ashby down a darker path, but for many years marijuana was a helpful, rather than harmful, vice.

“The first day I was on Last Detail,” remembers Quaid, “I got the hotel and went to Hal’s room and I remember someone came in with a huge garbage bag filled with grass, saying, ‘ I got the supply for the movie!’.  That was the way Hal was, but somehow it never affected his work.”

“It didn’t alter him,” says Hoffman of Ashby’s marijuana use, “ He never appeared stoned. It was a counter-culture badge  to him and a kind of self-medication. He knew all the different varieties, and could talk about it like some people talk about wine.”

Hoffman laughs.

“I remember doing work on Tootsie and I was up at his place at the beach and Hal was smoking. And I said,  ‘Hal, I just gotta ask you this. Have you been smoking a long time?’ He said, ‘Oh, yeah. Yeah. Years and years and years.’ I said, ‘Did you ever stop? I’m just curious.’ And he said, ‘A few years I ago, I did this experiment and stopped smoking for about a month.’ And I said, ‘How did you feel?’ And he just looked at me, thought about it, and said – very matter of fact.  ‘About the same!’ Then he took another hit.”

Ashby deliberately stood outside convention, both in his style and his attitude. And in many ways, Ashby’s characters would consistently mirrored Ashby himself.  His suicidal Harold and life-affirming Maude were two distinct aspects of his own personality. He embraced Woody Guthrie’s defiance, understood the pathos and desire that propelled Warren Beatty’s Shampoo character to lonely isolation. And perhaps most resonantly, Ashby was a willing innocent, searching always for ways to maintain Chauncey Gardner’s stubborn naiveté.

“In Zen there’s the Beginner’s Mind, the childlike, innocent, open mind,” remembers Jeff Bridges, who worked on Ashby’s, 8 Million Ways to Die, “and that was Hal.”

“He had such a special sense of humor, an irony and a buoyancy to him,” says Jon Voight, who starred in two Ashby films, Coming Home and Looking to Get Out, “and he was totally unique. Not of this earth, in some ways. He was the definition of a true individual.”

This combination of individualism and naiveté seemed to have endeared Ashby to his collaborators, in particularly, his actors, who saw him as both nurturing and protective.

“He was always inclusive,” recalls Quaid, “After a few takes, he’d say, ‘well, I’ve got what I want, do want to try anything else?’ He was always encouraging you and not walking away from a scene unless you were both satisfied. And you just want to give your all to someone like that.”

“He worked in an observatory way”, explains Hoffman, “He loved actors and, I think, his actors probably loved him as much as any director they ever worked with.”

“I always wished I could have worked with him,” says Sean Penn, “I remember hearing a story once about the first day of filming on The Last Detail, and Randy Quaid was really giving it all, he was nervous, he was pushing it. And Hal apparently said, ‘Take it easy Randy, you don’t have to do the whole movie today’. I always loved that. That ease he must have had.’”

By all accounts, Ashby was not a dictator on set, but rather a kind a maternal figure – able to step aside to allow his films to grow of their own accord. On Shampoo, he engaged both writer Robert Towne and star Warren Beatty in open, give and take collaboration.

“Hal was the easiest guy to talk to,” remembers Towne, “It wasn’t always so much what he said, but it was him being there – it tended to make you think better. I remember not wanting to work anymore on the script for Shampoo. Then Hal and I took a drive and by the time we got from Ventura to Mulholland I had more to say about the script then I’d ever dreamed possible. I don’t know what he said, but I was suddenly inspired. He could do that to you.”

“Hal would create a route to follow,” says Voight, “ but he’d let the story tell itself. He’d never push for an effect or an emotion that wasn’t naturally coming out. Which made for a lot of very naturalistic behavior.”

Unlike many of his contemporaries, there has never been an easy label for Ashby, no pigeonhole to place him in. Coppola has his grandiosity, Scorsese his streetwise precision. Altman is the rambler, the improviser, Allen the clown, De Palma the sensationalist.

The thread sewn through Ashby’s oeuvre is much less tangible. There is that distinctly documentary visual take and the inherent vulnerability of his characters, but his films can take the form of slapstick comedy, high drama, even action flick, with equal ease.

“He didn’t need to stamp his name on things,” explains Hoffman, “He was totally uninterested in a movie saying ‘an Ashby film’.  He wanted the work to be at the forefront.”

“There is no trademark to his work, except for Hal’s heart,” says Penn, “He didn’t want anything to take away from the story, not even himself. I think he needed his scripts to speak some truth to him first. And when they did, it was that truth that was most important to convey.”

By the mid-Seventies, Ashby’s reputation was firmly established as both a brilliant director and a virile opponent to studio interference. He was a glorified outlaw, willing to fight for his vision, or a stubborn thorn in the side of the industry, depending on whom you asked. Ashby guarded his films like a lioness over her cubs. He was notorious for erupting into obscenities at executive meetings and for lashing out at anyone that attempted to sully the purity of his creations.

“The studios were basically frightened of him, because he was their total antithesis,” says Hoffman, “As sweet as he was, he was a tough guy. You could not move him if he felt the enemy was in the room. And the enemy was anyone who was going to make him compromise what he felt was the truth of what he was doing.”

“At times I was just running interference for Hal with various people,” recalls Jewison, “ ‘will you talk to him? He’s locked us out of the cutting room!’ To both of us, the freedom of the individual artist was most important- it was more important than money or anything else.”

“He wanted to protect what he felt was important,” continues Hoffman, “what he felt was pure, untainted. One of the reasons he was feared so much by the studios, was because he wasn’t concerned with success or failure, but was only driven by what he felt was his sense of truth.”

By the end of the Seventies, Ashby’s battles with the studio higher-ups had essentially paralyzed him. He had come of age as a director in an era that condoned, even nurtured this kind of rebellion, but the times were quickly changing. As the decade came to a close, studios began functioning in an entirely different manner, the age of the blockbuster, just beginning to transform Hollywood entirely.

More and more often, Ashby began to see himself blockaded. Doors closed all across town. Projects withered on the vine. One of the biggest blows came in 1981, when after working with Dustin Hoffman over the course of two years developing Tootsie, Ashby was suddenly taken off the project. Columbia, citing legal issues, fired him just weeks before they were scheduled to begin shooting.

The incident coincided with a particularly trying period of Ashby’s life. His relationships were feeling the strain of his total commitment to his work and a cocaine addiction had also surfaced, only momentarily, but long enough to sour Ashby’s reputation further.

“ He had an obsession with film to a point that went beyond anything I had seen in anyone,” says Norman Jewison, “it destroyed five marriages and it destroyed a lot of relationships. Let’s face it, Hal could be very abrasive when he was opposed or when people tried to change the colors in his painting.”

“Anything he made, he had to fight for tooth and nail to create,” remembers Harold and Maude star Bud Cort, “I was with him to the end and saw him become progressively more and more hurt by the business. It wasn’t possible to corrupt Hal, but it was possible to break his heart.”

Exhausted by near constant confrontations with the studios – arguments over final cuts, legal hassles and irreparable differences of opinion, Ashby helplessly watched as the bridges burned. Inevitably, these clashes took their toll. In 1982, while shooting The Rolling Stones concert film, Let’s Spend the Night Together, Ashby collapsed on set. Sick, fatigued and becoming more and more embittered by his inability to communicate with the studio moneymen, Hal retreated to his Malibu home.

“He’d been beaten,” remembers Bruce Dern, “they just wore him down.  All he wanted to do was make films, but suddenly there was no one who would let him do it.”

Essentially blacklisted by the same studios he where he had created such endearing classics, Ashby struggled to find work. He succeeded occasionally, shooting a music video for Neil Young, a few TV productions and finally, a film -1986’s 8 Million Ways to Die.

“Working on that film was in some ways a bittersweet experience,” remembers Jeff Bridges, “The studios didn’t trust him. That was frustrating for us, because we loved him and we knew that he could produce a true masterwork, because he’d done it many times before. But he didn’t get final cut.”

“He may have lost of the trust of the studio, but never of his actors,” Bridges continues, “He was fearless in his vision and he made you fearless too. He had the biggest creative balls of anyone I’ve ever known.”

8 Million Ways to Die would be Ashby’s last film. Soon after it’s release, he was diagnosed with cancer.

“He was still Hal, even when he was sick,” remembers Hoffman, “I remember staying with him at John Hopkins in Baltimore where he was operated on. After the surgery he tried to get out of the bed. He said, ‘Come on! Let’s get out of here. Let’s go get some crab cakes!”

“He was laughing to the end,” said Dern, “I’d go to see him while he was sick and the first thing he’d say is, ‘Dernsie, tell me something funny.’ He was trying to hold onto that joy he always had, despite the fact that he wasn’t done yet. He didn’t want to die.”

Ashby would succumb to the disease, after a long and arduous fight, on December 27^th, 1988.

“The remarkable thing about Hal and his work, is that it’s still so relevant,” says Towne, “the films don’t age. The behavior is natural and nuanced and it doesn’t strive to hype any particular effect. I think that’s why Hal continues to impress people, to move them.”

In the 18 years since Ashby’s death, his films have managed to both retain their charm and seduce a new generation of admirers. Johnny Depp sites Ashby as one of his favorite directors. Squid and the Whale director Noah Baumbach has vocally praised films like The Last Detail and Harold and Maude.

“You look at those films, you read those scripts,” says Baumbach, “ and you can’t believe they actually were made. They were so honest and simple and human. There’s no tricks or explosions, just people relating to each other in a very true way. A script like that would just never be made today. It would be just too good.”

Director Richard Linklater, who is in the early stages of development on Last Flag Flying, a sequel to The Last Detail, calls Ashby – “the ultimate Hollywood Outlaw”.

“He had what I always felt was the ideal career,” says Linklater, “he told the stories he wanted to tell. And he was pure. You look at his work and that purity comes across.”

“I was just starting out when I met him,” remembers Sean Penn, “I was mentored by him. I spent time at his house, watching movies, talking movies, He took me under his wing and ultimately, that experience of knowing and loving Hal, was huge. He had more impact on me than any other filmmaker.”

If you look close, you’ll see his influence – everywhere. Young filmmakers are continuously striving to capture that freewheeling aesthetic, his quiet insistence on truthfulness.

“There are films out every year that pull from his inspiration,” says Bud Cort, “And I can understand why. He was not an egotistical director, which is rare and he was so good to his actors that it inspired endless creativity. He was giving birth to his actors every single second.”

That nurturing, the playing of midwife to the creative process, survives, still vibrantly apparent in nearly all of Ashby’s work.

“What was stronger than his films, was his soul, his strength,” remembers Hoffman, “When he was protecting the truth, he was a warrior. He was beautiful, sweet, loving, but also ferocious – a ferocious angel.”

Originally published in Premiere Magazine

Interview with Filmmaker Monte Hellman

There was a certain moment, as the Sixties dream dissipated into the Seventies, when narrative filmmaking flowed with a defiant realism, a truer than life, stranger than fiction battle cry that shot through the studio sludge. Its safe to say there were few directors at this time with a purer sense of the slow unfolding of the day to day than Monte Hellman. The films he has given us capture a moment where experiment was embraced, when possibility spread its arms wide.

“It’s interesting,” reflects Hellman today, “because anyone who is honest will tell you that at the time, no one knew that what they were doing was anything special. I just made the movies that I could with the opportunities I was given. There was a certain amount of necessity that resulted in invention, but other than that, we were just doing the best with what we had.”

Hellman earned a drama degree from Stanford and a film degree at UCLA’s   moviemaking program. His first real job was with Roger Corman, a producer who had carved a lucrative niche out of B horror films and biker flicks. Corman knew the public’s taste, but he also had a keen eye for young talent. His roster of employees, writers and directors for hire, would boast many artists who would go on to revolutionize filmmaking. Peter Fonda, Jonathan Demme and Francis Ford Coppola are a few examples of moviemakers who honed their chops under Corman’s guidance. Hellman directed his first film for Corman in 1960; a micro budget gore fest entitled Beast From Haunted Cave. In the following years he would helm several other Corman projects, including Creature from The Haunted Sea and The Terror.

“It was training ground,” Hellman says of his initiation, “trial by fire. You were handed a script and a strict budget and expected to deliver in what was a basically impossible amount of time. You learned everything the hard way, but you learned it very quickly.”

In 1964, for the war film, Back Door to Hell, Hellman was paired for the first time with another Corman protégée, 27 year old actor and screenwriter Jack Nicholson. The two traveled to Philippines to make the film, an adventure that would serve as catalyst for a lifetime of friendship and collaboration. The result of their partnership was a series of cinematic experiments, films made for no money, but with true heart.

“We started to deviate from the norm,” remembers Hellman, “ but as long as we brought the film on budget, it was tolerated. And when the films began to be received fairly well, at least critically, that gave us even some freedom to take what we were doing even farther, to put our own mark on the material.”

The duo took the long held traditions of the Western genre and modernized them, transforming those themes into broad existential meditations, which reflected the self-exploration of the times. Ride the Whirlwind (1965) and in particular, 1967’s The Shooting – shot in the dust of the Utah desert, took the ethos of the cultural revolution and deposited those ideas amid a familiar filmic structure – the myth of the lone cowboy and the violent pioneering of the west. Nicholson starred in both films and wrote the latter, and Hellman, as director, found himself suddenly awash in international accolades, in the unexpected position of auteur abroad, B-list helmer at home.

Hellman took what opportunity he was offered and ran fast, making sure to bring some of favorite talent along for the ride. We have Hellman, in part, to thank for some of Nicholson’s finest writing and performances, as well as for providing a showcase for the riveting talents of the late, great character actor Warren Oates. Oates was undoubtedly one of the finest of the era, still waters that ran impossibly deep. Hellman recognized Oates’ unique magic and framed it gracefully, allowing Oates, with his haggard hangdog face and ragged voice, to inhabit his characters completely, lingering on those unforgettable features with an unbridled curiosity. Oates starred in some of Hellman’s most defiantly unconventional work, including what is arguably his masterpiece, 1971’s Two Lane Blacktop.

A road movie with minimal dialogue, Two Lane is the story of a race across America between two good-looking hippie kids (balladeer James Taylor and The Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson) and a life-worn middle-ager played with aplomb by Oates. Exploring the generation gap with a subtle and stubbornly unromantic eye, Hellman created one of the most fascinating reflections of the times, with Oates adding grit and spine to the film’s pop star casting. In later work, such as the Western, China 9, Liberty 7 and the brutal drama, Cockfighter, Hellman would explore an evolving masculinity, with Oates serving as his personification of gender complexity.

Since the Seventies, Hellman has continued to maintain a hard won individuality, a tougher than nails defiance of Hollywood expectation, most notably in his executive producer capacity for Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs debut. He is currently working on several new projects, including a horror film, a Western and a supernatural thriller.  He’ll also be honored guest at several international retrospectives of his life’s work.

“It’s been a real pain in the ass sometimes,” admits Hellman on getting his films made, “but you keep going, even when you know how hard it can be. You keep going, because, let’s face it, there’s nothing else like it.”

 

Interview with Musician Jack White and Filmmaker Jim Jarmusch

Hailing from Akron, OH, Jim Jarmusch first began making films amid the distorted wail of the late 1970s post-punk chaos. Fueled by the anarchic, stick-it-to-the-man energy emanating from the stage of CBGBs and the streets of Iggy-era Detroit, Jarmusch chose a 16mm camera over a battered Fender guitar and directed his spit into the face of Hollywood glam.

Funded by overseas cash, Jarmusch managed to work autonomously, subverting the studio system from the outside in and a producing a series of films which joyfully abandoned traditional storytelling in favor of eclectic, self-reflective moments, narratives linked at times only by esoteric ponderings and wry humor.

Eager to explore his own obsessions, Jarmusch’s work has been continuously inspired by a wide range of personal passions, his fascination with music perhaps the most resonate.

As a result Jarmusch has been responsible for some of the best soundtracks of the last two decades -the lonely poetry of Deadman was held aloft on the haunting guitar work of Neil Young, Ghost Dog shimmered with RZA’s urban Samurai menace. Music provides the landscape for his films, the background and the setting and at times, the stage as well. On numerous occasions he has populated his stories with musicians rather than actors, casting everyone from Lounge Lizard John Lurie in Stranger Than Paradise to the grizzled Tom Waites in Down By Law.

Jarmusch’s newest film, Coffee and Cigarettes is a collection of shorts culled from the last decade of his career, a sly sampling clearly reflective of his own particular aesthetic. Bound by the narrative echo of black coffee and burning cigarettes, the movie is a scrapbook of sorts, featuring a who’s who of Jarmusch-approved icons. Tom Waites and Iggy Pop banter in a Northern California dive, Bill Murray discusses the effects of caffeine with Wu Tang’s RZA and GZA and in one of the film’s finest segments, a deadpan Jack White delivers a monologue on the 19^h Century inventor Nikola Tesla to mildly-impressed fellow White Stripe Meg.

 

Mean- So, do you actually have a Tesla coil?

Jack- I don’t as of yet, but I’m trying, I’m trying my damndest to get one. I’m trying to work on that in my ten minutes of spare time.

Mean- Don’t you have minions to do that kind of thing for you?

Jack- No, actually, I don’t have any minions yet either. I’ve got to get some of those as well.

Jim- Where do you get them? I’d like some of my own. Can you find those at “Minions R Us”?  “Yes, I’d like the really short ones that can hide behind the couch when I don’t need them.”

Mean- “Minion” would be a good name for a heavy metal band.

Jim- Yeah, Minion Dominion! So what have you been up to? You’ve been in Nashville a lot working on Loretta Lynn’s record right?

Jack-Yeah, it’s coming out next week. We’re shooting a video for it next week as well, just kind of simple thing shot on the front porch of her house.

Jim- Well, you recorded it pretty simply, the songs that she wrote.

Jack- Yeah, we did it really traditionally.

Jim- so a simple video, a front porch video, seems appropriate.

Mean- How did you two meet?

Jim- Well, we were in Vietnam together.

Jack- Yeah ,that first time. That was rough.

Jim- We first met in NY because I was a White Stripes fan. I got to go backstage and meet you guys.

Jack – You tried to go backstage.

Jim- That’s right I tried, but there were minions preventing me. But I took care of them and I fought my way back.

Jack – Those were actually Meg’s minions.

Jim- That’s right, Meg’s Minions, they were protecting Meg. The Megnions.

Jack- Meg and her Megnions.

Jim- She deserves to have Megnions.

Mean- I’ll sign up for that job.

Jim- I’ll be a Megnion too.

Jack- See- she’s already got two more minions than me!

Jim- But anyway, we were talking about doing a video together. Jack and I are both Nikola Tesla fans and we wanted to do a video. Jack had a beautiful idea where he was going to play Tesla in the video. And I forget what happened, but we didn’t do that.

Jack- It was too expensive.

Jim- Yeah, we couldn’t figure out how to reduce our epic idea to reasonable record company prices.

Jack- Philip Seymour Hoffman was going to play opposite me as Thomas Edison and execute an elephant. Which Edison actually did, trying to disprove Tesla’s theory of alternating current.

Jim- We even had the actual footage of the elephant execution, which was very grisly and upsetting. So we were trying to figure out how to do it, but-

Jack But Meg wanted a couple million to appear in it and –

Jim- Yeah, well, she’s worth it, but the record company didn’t see that way. So then we were just hanging out. I remember Meg and Jack came by my office once and Jack was looking at all my Tesla books.

Jack- I stole one actually.

Jim- I wondered where that went! Then we did Coffee and Cigarettes for fun. I tricked them into agreeing to do it somehow. I put some drugs in their coffee- “You are under my power!”

Jack- We thought we were gonna star opposite Robert Mitchum, that he and Jim were making a film.

Jim- Yeah, they fell for it too, the suckers.  But anyway, I don’t know. To me, music is such the perfect form of expression, I’m a huge White Stripes fan. I get so much energy from seeing them play and when you find out that people whose work you love are also incredible great people, that’s always exciting. I just fell in love with these two crazy creatures and now they can’t get rid of me. I’m trying to get backstage every time they play. They send guys out looking for me- ‘Don’t let that white-haired guy in!’ But I get back there anyway. I have my ways.

Jack- You have your Jimions.

Mean- Jack, how do you feel about film? Do you feel in some ways the inverse of what Jim feels about music, are you inspired by film?

Jack- Absolutely. When I came out of high school I was really, really into the idea of becoming a director, working in film in some way. I started doing it as a job, PA work on commercials, car commercials. I figured that was one way to get my money back from the Big Three. And I was amazed at how hard it was. To me, it’s the most difficult art form, in my mind. It’s so hard to get all these people together and somehow get your idea through the people’s heads and somehow have your vision emerge intact. I don’t know how Jim does it. It was really fascinating being part of it, working with Jim and on Cold Mountain. It’s hardest thing in the world to make a great film, it’s really, really difficult. To me making some three-chord rocknroll song seems so easy in comparison. I mean, the actors, the lighting, the sound-

Jim- Hey, take it from me, it’s just as hard to make a bad film! To me, film’s a drag because it takes two years for me to make a film from start to finish and Jack can sit down and play a song right there in front of you and it goes right into your soul or your heart. It seems so much more direct. Music is so magical and film, I don’t know.

Jack- The trick is disguising how much work actually went into it. It’s just not something that happens easily. I think the trick is making it look easy, that’s the hard part.

Jim- In film, you play this game, you get people to watch these shadow plays on the screen, the whole procedure is ridiculous. I always think if aliens watched you making a film, they’d be thinking- “what the hell are they doing? They’re carrying this heavy outdated equipment-“

Jack- That’s so funny! I always think the same thing! I always think that! If aliens and turned on television they’d be like – “why do you guys watch each other?”

Jim- Yeah. I mean “what are you doing? You go through all of this to recreate life and it’s all fake! Why don’t you just walk outside! Then you corral all these people into a room and project all these fake images?” The aliens are like, “What the France? What are they doing?” Well, we’re earthlings, we haven’t quite figured it out yet.

Mean- The evolution is happening, slowly.

Jim- Or time’s running out, depending on how you look at it. I mean, really, don’t you think that if earth were some alien’s high school science fair project, they probably got a really bad grade. Like , a D+ for trying. “Interesting, but not really happening.”

Jack- I can’t believe you said that! I think the same thing!

Jim- But Jack was really great to work with. He had to deliver a monologue in the film, a mini-lecture on Tesla and electricity.

Jack- The hardest thing was to pretend to lecture Meg on anything. I’d never done that before. She’s usually lecturing me. You know when I was watching the movie, I was really amazed at how good Meg was.

Mean- she’s really intriguing to watch. She reminds me of a silent movie star, she’s got these expressive, dreamy eyes.

Jim- Me too, I agree. She’s really subtle. She understands. Hey, what did you think about Jimmy Fallon playing you on Saturday Night Live?

Jack- That was trippy! That was funny. I don’t know where he got that voice for me, but it cracked me up.

Jim- I liked it when he jumped up on the couch and played the guitar and was doing all my favorite Jack White moves. Hopefully he’s coming to the premier of the film, so if you didn’t like it, I was gonna say we could take him out in the alley and pummel him!

Jack- Or have my minions pummel him.

Jim- So what kind of stuff are you listening to lately?

Jack- I just went to Japan and got a lot of traditional Japanese folk music and that’s pretty interesting stuff. And I’ve been listening to a lot of country doing the Loretta album.

Jim- That’s quite a range.

Jack- Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you, you know how you have the painting of Lee Marvin in our scene? Is that because you look like him?

Jim- Well, you know we have this secret organization called The Sons of Lee Marvin. Tom Waites is in it, Nick Cave. You could become an honorary member.

Jack- I thought maybe it was a joke you were playing.

Jim- No, I’m, a huge Lee Marvin fan and we have this secret society. But to be honest with you couldn’t really be a full-fledged member because you’re not ugly enough. But I love Lee Marvin and I had a painter make that painting of him for the film so you could have Lee presiding over you. I have a great story about him actually. Some director, I think it might have been John Boorman, was with Lee one night and Lee was really drunk and he insisted that Boorman let him ride on the roof of his car. He wanted him to take him home on the PCH on the roof of his car. And he couldn’t be dissuaded so Boorman was like, “aah, what the hell.” So he’s driving up the Pacific Coast Highway with Lee Marvin on the roof of his car and the cops, of course, pulls him over. They walk up to his window- and the cop says to him- “Excuse me sir, but are you aware that you have Lee Marvin on the roof of your car?” That’s a true story. Lee Marvin.

Jack- Did he and James Coburn ever do a movie together?

Jack- I don’t think so, but they should have. They should have been brothers. Just like you and Johnny Depp should be brothers. Lee and James should have been brothers, that would have been the coolest thing. I love Coburn too. Those Flint movies!

Jack- And Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

Jim- They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.

Jack- No. No they don’t.

Originally published in Mean Magazine

Interview with Designer/Director Tom Ford

Born in Austin in 1961, raised in Santa Fe, Tom Ford left the west for New York City at age 17 and the rest is, as they say, history. A denizen of the waning heydays of New York’s Studio 54, Tom Ford talked his way into his first fashion job with relative ease – despite the fact he had a degree in Architecture and absolutely no experience designing clothes. From club kid to Parsons Institute grad, Ford also had a brief but hugely successful career as a commercial actor, starring in several national advertising campaigns, which paid his way through college. Ford moved to Paris soon after to work in the press office for Chloe – a job in the lower ranks of the fashion world which left him with a new obsession – designing clothes. Ford would go on to resurrect both Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent with a combination of great designs and a series of well-executed creative campaigns, most featuring nudity and sexuality – fashion ads where the fashion was absent and only bare skin remained. As a result, Ford (who notoriously posed for a Vanity Fair cover flanked by a stark naked Keira Knightly and Scarlett Johansson), is known as an edgy, sensual designer – savvy about manipulating the media to his advantage. None of these skills, however, seem to have come into play in his second career in cinema. As a film director, Ford is subtle, classy and understated. His take on the Christopher Isherwood novel, A Single Man, is a gracious and elegant debut, the work of a man who knows what he wants and how to get it…gently.

Q: What made you choose this story and this era (the early 1960s) to explore in your first film?

A: It’s set in the early Sixties, although I think it was really the Fifties until Kennedy was assassinated, at least on the surface of things. I love this era of clothes and cars and design, architecture– and it felt contemporary when I first read the story – although I do think we’ve come a long way since then. I also think that Christopher Isherwood was way ahead of his time. One of the things I always loved about his writing is the matter of fact way he treated homosexuality. Most of his stories and novels were autobiographical and so there is usually a gay character, but not necessarily as the center of the story. And the gay character is always treated as a human being. The relationship between George and Jim in this story, I felt it was very important to depict that in a very matter of fact way. They are simply two people who are in love with each other. I didn’t want this to be a gay story; I wanted it to be a human story. And really, the more that we realize that love between two people – is love between two people, the better off we’ll all be.

Q: Were there things about the story that connected with you personally?

A: I think anyone with a long-term partner, and I’ve been with my partner for 23 years, anyone with a long-term lover, if that lover dies you could easily see yourself in a situation where you couldn’t see your future and you would be living entirely in the past. It’s about that loss. But the film isn’t about death, it’s about life. It’s about living in the moment and appreciating the small things in your life that sometimes just go by without you observing and understanding your connection and understanding of the universe and understanding that relationships with other people are what really matter. The beauty at the world starts to pull at the character of George, in his loss he’s finally connecting, he’s finally looking at people and he’s responding to them in a different way. For me this film is about life instead of death, although loss is at the center of it.

Q: So there was a connection with this character for you.

A: George is a character that keeps himself together by keeping his outer world in order. This is a man who exists and gets through the day by this order. On the worse day of his life, he’s polishing his shoes; he’s putting on his tie. He’s being held together by the surface and the order of things. It might seem silly to point this out, but Christopher Isherwood was a Virgo, and for Virgo’s – it’s all about precision and order and I am a Virgo as well. This is a man whose inner world and outer world are connected and he feels if he can keep his outer world together than he won’t collapse inside. George has a veneer but just inside is a romantic guy who is suffering so much and it’s all just below this perfect surface.

Q: Tell us about choosing your actors. Sometimes its difficult for a first time director to attract talent like Julianne Moore and Colin Firth. What made they want to join in?

A: Well, I gave them a lot of leeway. I don’t want to talk about fashion, because making the film was a very different experience for me, in terms of why I did it and why I hope to keep doing it and what sort of expression it was, but there are certain similarities. Fashion is much more collaborative than one might think. You have to have an idea and vision and you have to communicate that vision to a team of people and you have to create an environment that allows those people to give the best that they can give. I was lucky enough to have great actors and I tried to create an environment where they could perform. And to make them feel comfortable, to make them do the best they could, an environment that would make them want to give the best performance they could give.  And as far as finding the actors, I don’t want to make it sound easy, but well, it wasn’t hard. I sent them the screenplay and I sent them the part that I knew they might respond to and they did. I had sent Julianne the script in the hope that she would respond to it and she did. Colin and I have the same agent and he basically said that Colin’s schedule was impossible. So I had another cast another actor in the role. But then I saw Colin at the premiere of Mama Mia and I was just thinking, – ‘God he was made to play this role!’ A few weeks later the other actor dropped out and I sent Colin an email right away and he finally said yes. I’d like to think that the actors responded to the script.

Q: You acted as well when you were younger.

A: When I was a kid, I thought I was going to be an actor. I actually studied acting when I was at NYU and I made a lot of television commercials, that’s actually how I put myself through NYU and through college. I quickly discovered that I didn’t really want to be an actor, because I didn’t feel secure enough at that time. I remember I did Prell commercial when I was 19 and a bitchy hairdresser said, ‘Oh, you have thin hair, its all going to fall out.’ And  I remember becoming so paranoid about my appearance after that. It was traumatic and I was so obsessive from then on and I was not a good actor at all, in part because I was totally self-obsessed. I realized that it just wasn’t going to happen.

Q: In what ways do you see the style and aesthetic of this film differing from the style you created in your fashion career?

A: My career in fashion has been very much about sexuality and sex and I think a lot of people think that’s all I can do and what I am all about. This for me is a story about love, about romance. Therefore it doesn’t have that kind of nudity you might expect from me. It didn’t come from the story. What came was a sensuality that I tried to express with color and tone and set pieces. That’s what I used to help us understand what George is feeling. At the beginning of the film, George is not seeing things, he’s numb, and the colors are dulled. As he begins to see the world more clearly, really look at it – that’s when things begin to warm in the film, color-wise. It takes on sensuality cinematically. Everything heightens and the beauty of things starts to pull on him.

Q: Why filmmaking? What compelled you to begin this second career?

A: I wanted to make film and had thought about doing a film for a long time, I think its important for myself and anyone else who wants to create a film, or art, is make sure that they have something to say, that they want to share something important, express something important. And I felt that the book really spoke to me, it’s a beautiful story that felt personal to me, that touched me and that I felt I had the skills to translate the narrative to the screen and to share in some way. Film is an incredible way to express yourself and your vision, as is fashion, but you have to make sure and be confident and honest and true to yourself and say something that means something, because that is really the point of any art, right?