A Constant Forge Page #3

of us and has emerged like we all wish to be.

At the onset of

A Woman Under the Influence...

Gena and I were speaking about

the pictures we were gonna make.

We were talking about

how difficult love was...

and how totally, terribly without merit

a love story would be in 1971.

So, when I started writing the script,

I kept all those things in mind...

and didn't want the love story easy.

This film deals with

the serious problems of a man and woman...

who are alienated from each other

by their backgrounds.

Ignorant of their problems,

yet totally in love.

This picture is one of the ones

that interests me the most.

Part of the fun was to imagine a self-contained

world, different from the one I live in...

to move into it and live in it.

Cosmo Vittelli is a man who proclaims

that he wants to live in style and comfort.

But for Cosmo,

comfort means living on the edge.

For seven years, he has run

and ruled a club he doesn't own.

But his reign is a sham, sustained only

by monthly meetings with a loan shark.

The picture says something to me-

that we might sell anything mindlessly.

Even our own lives.

Opening Night is about an actress

on the edge of a breakdown.

Someone who doesn't

go along with the crowd...

and accept every conceivable

formula to life...

that is fed to us 24 hours a day...

on the radio

and on television and in films.

And this actress appealed to me.

I think in all of us there's a theatrical

leaning where we have many selves...

and one of the selves is full of duty

and responsibility...

and the other self is a personal self,

which has to be fed also.

And people who deny that are unhappy.

And an actor is really representative

of the conflict of those selves.

I wrote the story to sell-

strictly to sell.

It was no great shakes,

but I liked it and Gena liked it.

I wrote a very fast-moving,

thoughtless piece about gangsters.

And I don't even know any gangsters.

Gloria has a wonderful actress...

and a very nice kid who's neither

sympathetic nor nonsympathetic.

He's just a kid.

He reminds me of me.

Constantly in shock,

reacting to this unfathomable environment.

Many themes from the earlier films

merge in Love Streams.

The photographic negative quality

of the brother-sister relationship...

was graphically portrayed

in the interracial family of Shadows.

The awful emotional isolation

in which artists trap themselves...

was the subject ofboth Too Late Blues

and Opening Night.

We've seen Sarah and Jack

fall in love and get married...

as Minnie and Moskowitz.

We saw the process of alienation

ofhusband and wife-

much like what Sarah and Jack speak of

in the divorce hearing-in Faces.

The freedom that the three friends

dream of in Husbands...

is the freedom that Robert Harmon has

and finds empty.

A female intensity

bordering on madness...

was explored in

A Woman Under the Influence.

With the exception that Mabel Longhetti's

lunacy was accepted by her family...

while Sarah Lawson's is rejected.

The nightlife that Robert Harmon

finds so fascinating...

was the subject of

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.

Even the combination

oflove and discomfort...

that Robert Harmon feels

towards his son...

is not unlike the woman-child

relationship in Gloria.

The works build on each other until

they have the prismatic effect of a vision...

or a dream.

John had a vision.

And he wasn't afraid,

in the name of that vision...

in the name ofhis obsession...

to make a fool ofhimself.

And if a someone said,

"Man, is God in ruins.!'..

John saw the ruins,

and he saw them with a clarity...

that the rest of us

would find unbearable.

But he was drawn to the God part.

Man's need for love.

And he was always

looking for a story that...

expressed the stupidities,

the weaknesses...

the foibles, thejealousies...

whatever got in the way of that need.

Extraordinary people

look at something and see three things.

The average person, he only sees one.

John could see 10.

And he was able, somehow,

to put 'em all together.

He housed within himself,

under one roof..

all the contradictions.

He was a man of action,

but he was also a dreamer.

He was teeming with feeling, emotion...

and yet he was extremely intelligent.

There are revolutionaries who want to

tear down and make something fresh...

and then there are the old-fashioned...

those who see the wisdom in the past.

John saw both.

He was both.

He was a complex man.

He had antennae like Proust,

but he was a competitor like Vince Lombardi.

He was a wild animal.

But at the same time,

the family was central to his universe.

John told me, the last time I saw him...

this story about his father.

I said to him,

"How is it that your father let you -

Didn't he fight you

about being an actor?"

And he said,

"Well, you know, it's funny you ask me...

"because I went to him, and I said...

'I don't want to go to college.

I want to be an actor. "'

And his father looked at him, and he said,

"He gave me this very solemn look...

"and I thought, 'Oh, my God.

I'm really gonna get it. '

'And he said,

'Well, that's a very noble thing to do.

"'But do you know

what kind of responsibility that is?

"'You are going to have to be truthful...

to each of those characters'

human natures. "'

And that's what he did.

He listened to his daddy.

His people were complex.

They weren't heroic.

They... had a lot of

twists and turns in them.

I'd say that the writing in his films

is the closest to Eugene O'Neill's work...

that I've ever seen on film.

People arejust hammering away at...

saying what they mean

or saying what they feel.

And they don't always get there.

Or it may take them a long time to get there.

And the dialogue, therefore,

is very, very oblique.

I mean, you go eight, nine months,

you don't see a kid.

A couple years pass by, never see a kid.

All of a sudden,

I see a lot of baby carriages, a lot of babies.

I think it's in the air.

Suddenly there's a lot of babies around,

there's somethin' in the air?

I - I -

Why did he say that at that time?

I have no idea.

I do remember being tickled...

by the fact that a lot of the guys

were looking at me...

like they didn't understand

what I was sayin

And what I was tickled by was the fact

that I didn't know what I was saying.

But I made believe I did.

So that made it fun to play.

I never see a kid a couple of years...

all of a sudden I see a lot of baby carriages,

a lot of babies.

That's an approach

that is different than most movies...

where you decide,

"Oh, his attitude is this.

"This is his attitude...

and this is his motivation. "

No, I didn't know what

my motivation was. I had no idea.

And a lot ofJohn's stuff

plays good that way.

I think it's in the air.

And he loved ambiguity.

Loved ambiguity.

Because people are ambiguous.

You killed the top Chinese dog.

Every one ofhis followers

from here to Canarsie and then some...

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