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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 16 - 22 November 2000 Issue No.508 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 16 - 22 November 2000 Issue No.508
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The New Jerusalem
Roland Joffé speaks to Mohamed El-Assyouti about honesty, entertainment, Hollywood and the future
DIRECTORS WHO WENT TO HOLLYWOOD, as I did, did not go expecting Hollywood to be at their service but knowing that it would be a battle, and a complicated one. That's not to say that there isn't good will. The intentions are very good. Hollywood is not made up of bad people. Their intentions are good, but they're pushed by the system. The system has changed a lot. When the system was run by the old producers, then each studio was actually built around the character. It was a very personal relationship of studio to film, right up to the 1950s. The real shift in American cinema, of course, came curiously about the same time as Vietnam... At the back of Vietnam was that the American army thought it could organise itself on the lines of General Motors, and the studios were doing exactly the same thing. So what you got was that the companies that bought studios didn't like producers because they thought individual producers were inefficient. They thought you can manufacture movies like you manufacture hamburgers, or cars. The systems began to be designed for mass production. Look at the way the studios were subsequently put together in the 1960s. One thing was, while the change was going on, there was an enormous amount of freedom. Some great films came out of the late 1960s and early 1970s. It was a kind of flowering, I think. The old studios were fading and the new ones hadn't quite taken over.
Then of course, we went into the real sort of mass production, which has gone on until today, and where the voice of individual talents finds it very difficult to emerge. What you get is cookie cutter filmmaking, a battle you have to fight every day against the system. Each director will find his own way of doing that.
You have to not be taken in by Hollywood's slavish praise, for one. Also, you have to find a way of supporting yourself so you don't have to do films if you don't want to, which I think is very important. It's a kind of exercise of taste, where you have to choose to do what you like, then fight to get that done. A lot of luck comes into that. I've done that for a long period, I don't know whether I'll be able to go on doing it forever. You just don't know, because luck comes into it every single time. Because movies are international, of course, one needs to make movies carefully. I try to make my movies look expensive, while they're not as expensive as they seem. By the time I put foreign sales together, usually my movies work, usually they encourage investors to put some more money into them. But it's always a matter of luck, and I guess one just has to accept that. I find other things to do. We produce the MTV serial Undressed, which is actually quite radical in its own way, in the subject matter it deals with. It's actually quite cutting edge in the kind of issues it addresses, which are to do with what I call the politics of desire. I rather enjoy the work with young writers and directors.
Studios now are getting more and more panicky. Movies are getting more and more expensive. Now we're talking about movies that cost some $200 million.
Yet of the 600 movies produced in total in America every year, probably only 10 to 20 have major box office gross. Of those only five or six really make huge sums of money. Those huge sums of money of course can generate tremendous income for the studios. But the danger of that is that it becomes what the studios are searching for. That's dangerous because it doesn't produce great movies, just ones that are very similar, because they end up imitating each other. You can get surprising examples, something like The Blair Witch Project, which takes the studios completely by surprise. The Blair Witch films, let's face it, were both lousy. It was the emperor's new clothes completely, but they spoke in the kind of dialect that I think kids understood. I wouldn't argue against that kind of cinema. It's fine, and great that it happens, but it's a pity that that's been influencing what the studios do. They don't understand that that was sort of a one off, and they feel that that's what movie making should be. It makes one think about where cinema is going. Maybe it is coming to an end. We don't know. Cinema has been going for a hundred years, which in some sense is a long time. Maybe the truth is that something new is coming, and maybe that's not bad. Maybe, in a way, rather like the coming of the printing press destroyed the old tradition, the coming of digital, and digital cameras, is going to destroy cinema as a kind of group experience. Perhaps it will create much more personal expression, expression that's more available to individuals. That will produce its own form. No one can stand in the way of those things even if one gets nostalgic for the kind of thing that one has loved.
I don't think anybody knows what will eventually emerge. Those who love cinema hope it's going to be a kind of cinema, but I'm too pragmatic to believe just because I love it, it's going to survive. I'm very intrigued to know what's going to come next. In a way, the real question is this: will what comes next allow people to express themselves so they can feel good about communicating and sharing the strains, the anxieties, the delights and joys of their lives? Which is something we want to do. We're social by nature, and we need to communicate. I think there will be communication, and that digital revolution when it finally comes and is understood will provide a way for most people who have an interest to actually have access to means of expressing themselves that they may not have had before. So the caste system of the cinema, which said you have to be a director, you have to be an actor, you have to get trained, all that's going to disappear, just as the priestly castes disappeared. That's never a bad thing, in a sense that can be a revolution. Then I think it has to be an act of faith after that, that says what will that revolution in communication bring. Will it just bring self-indulgence? Will it achieve a greater degree of contact between people? And that you can't know. That you can just hope.
I'VE NEVER BEEN MUCH A STUDIO MAN. Funnily enough I have never made a studio movie. All my movies have been independent. They have been distributed by the studios and they look sort of big, so people think that they're studio movies. The studios have usually bought them, but nearly all of them have been what we call negative pick ups -- which means I find various ways of getting the money, borrow the money from a bank, then sell the movie piece-meal to pay the bank back. That way you can keep a relatively freer voice, because you don't allow the executives so much input into the movies. But this kind of movie making is disappearing slightly anyway. I think all of us really have to reassess what kind of movies we want to make. Do we want to make movies like Gladiator, or do we want to make more personal movies. These are the choices we have to make. I think my choice is probably towards more personal movies. I can only talk for myself.
FINAL CUT IS A CURIOUS THING, because it can be an act of extreme arrogance. It's very important I think that one has the controlling interest in what's put into a film. Every great writer who writes a book works with a great editor. You need someone to tell you that's unnecessary, you needn't emphasise that... etc. You can't be inside and outside of something. Though I have final cut my movies, I do preview them, and I do find out what works with the audience and what doesn't, what I should trim, or expand or advance. A film is rather like a conversation. In directing it would be very unsophisticated, and I think rather foolish, to do everything you can to make your movie a one way conversation, that says, 'I'm just going to present my vision and that's it, and there'll be no shift.' I think what one has to do is to say, 'I'm going start a dialogue, but I'm going to see what the audience receive from it. Because I can make the dialogue better and closer to what it is I'm trying to convey if I have some sense of what the audience are getting. I'm not against listening to audiences, but I'm against making the changes that would make the movie more popular at the expense of weakening it.
Filmography:
Vatel (2000)
Goodbye Lover (1999)
The Scarlet Letter (1995)
City of Joy (1992)
Fat Man and Little Boy
or Shadow Makers (1989)
The Mission (1986)
The Killing Fields (1984)Unlike Herzog or Coppola, Joffé's protagonists' gradual discovery of the inner self, is accompanied neither by dementia nor horror; if any- thing, what is brought about is a clearer vision and a sense of serenity. To them the 'evils that men do' seem to be either wholly committed by other men, or are sins they can be absolved from after strenuous penance
American cinema is more interested in the dream that it is in the reality. American movies are very stereotyped. Heroes and heroines are very stereotyped, usually to emasculate reality, to emasculate character. We know that interesting characters are not necessarily good or praiseworthy, and that's what's interesting about them. I think America's very much wound itself around the idea that it's necessary to have an idealised character with whom the audience will associate. That's not all bad, it's only bad if it gets out of control and that becomes the only kind of cinema there is because basically it becomes a cinema of lies, not even a cinema of dreams but just plain lies.
ONCE YOU ABANDON HONESTY, the stories become less and less rich, and you have less and less things available to you. Once you've decided, for instance, that each character has to be likable, which is basically dishonest, and that each character has to evoke sympathy -- that's different form being likable -- it means that you can no longer look at life to give you an infinite variety. And of course, no fiction, as we know, can be more complicated or more interesting than life itself which is remarkable in the things it manages to throw up. I think it's a sign of the industry's illness that the industry is starting to imitate, because it has trained itself to be dishonest, to rigidly adhere to one way of presenting things. Entertainment has come to just mean dreaming. Therefore as it imitates itself, and as more and more films are made, then the life span of any idea is going to get shorter, and that's because they tend to abstract themselves from the truth; hence, they're not fed by anything except themselves. More films, more outlets, the consumption of everything is higher, that's why I think we're coming to the end of a cycle, where you get a supernova burst -- where you get an enormous amount of product, but the density of the product is less and less.
Not that I'm against entertainment. But the question is what is entertainment? Can you make films that are entertaining and at the same time can attract an audience. I think a good example of that is Tootsie, which I thought had a lot to say about human relationships and was very entertaining. It's rare to be able to get the two qualities together.
You do, of course, find yourself in extraordinary situations. When I did an adaptation of The Scarlet Letter it was universally disliked by the American press, and disliked for three reasons, one of which may be valid, the other two almost certainly not. One of the reasons was that I put American Indians in the film. Critics would say: 'Well, American Indians weren't in the book. It's disgusting, why are they put into the film?' They didn't want to see this. The reason I put them in was actually because the failure was Hawthorne's, who wrote the book in the early 19th century. The events take place in the 17th century, when there were more American Indians in the colonies than there were Europeans. So to miss them out is a failure of the book, whether it's a classic or not. Therefore, I feel perfectly free with the film to say: 'This is adding to the book, it doesn't make it go away, but only adds a dimension to it.' There was a lot of anger about that, which had really to do with the fact that Americans are extremely uncomfortable with the fact that there was an American Indian indigenous population living there, because it does throw into a certain amount of relief the constitutional ideas on which America is built. It's a contradiction that the country is uncomfortable dealing with. I was trying to make a link between the idea that somehow the way of building a New Jerusalem is to annihilate the people who are there -- to possess and overtake the land -- and between the puritan religion, America as it is now. The birth of America has affected the way in which the country has grown. There's no doubt that I was under a tremendous and constant pressure to take all that out.
There are many aspects of why the American press found it very difficult to handle. In the main, it was something rather poetic really, but the idea of the New Jerusalem, which is a very interesting idea, presented the Americans with some of the same problems that Zionist met when they tried to make their New Jerusalem. Remember the words of a telegram received by the early Zionists in Vienna from the first two people they sent to Palestine -- "The bride is beautiful, but she's already married." It's odd to me that these two countries, Israel and America, confront themselves with a similar problem. I don't argue the politics of it, but just the reality.
I MADE THE MISSION 15 YEARS AGO, and some of the things we were saying in that film were very pertinent to their time. But really what we are dealing with is power, when we come down to it. Freud, for all his elegance, misplaced where and what the kind of initial human drives are. Power is an incredibly strong human drive, because it has to do with a sense of control and security. So all political issues will come down to a question of power, and I think people quite rightly are worried about the immense power that's been given to business, to trade. There are aspects of trade which are quite exciting and in an odd way trade makes war less rarely than nationalist ambitions. However, at the same time, underneath this sort of cover, we're beginning to look at the resources we have on the globe, and training ourselves to think of how we're going to handle resources of such limitedness. The danger of globalisation, as I see it at the moment, is that it's actually very disrespectful of the fact that we live on one planet, and we've to learn how to live on it together. And so if you watch the flow of consumption, which is a fair measure of where power lies, it's terribly one-sided. I think that's an embarrassment. I think that people who travel and think are embarrassed.
I'm very interested in these kinds of conflicts [between the West and other cultures] left like a residue of colonialism. I've no guilt about colonialism particularly... but the fact is, now that we've emerged from periods of colonialism, we do have to deal with the residue of it. I'm interested in the way cultures interact. These issues are extremely important to us because as communication has got more and more rapid, and particularly as the movement of money has got easier and easier the world is being pulled together into a sort of straight jacket relationship that may not suit everybody. So I think these cross-cultural, cross-social, cross-political and national stresses and strains are going to be even more important. And not many people deal with that area. I liked dealing with it, and felt that it needed to be expressed, and enjoyed expressing it. And it's something that I felt, which I think is the best way to make movies, you have to just follow an instinct. There's nothing more important than that.
MY FILMS ARE NOT DESIGNED TO MANIPULATE, which they don't, and this is a strength of them. I believe they produce true emotion, which is not done manipulatively. And I don't use violence as a kind of cheap way of making people feel thrills. 'Oh my God. I was moved by that,' which very many movies do -- the audience kind of goes 'ah ah ooh,' -- and they think that's emotional. It isn't. It is the Roman game. It is atavistic. There has to be an intellectual content in films, but it has to be engaging. I don't believe in alienation particularly. It was a period in theatre and cinema, that was kind of interesting, that came out of Brecht. But finally it doesn't work. I think people need to be carried by the story. In the end if you're going to ask people to pay money to go and see something, you have to offer them something, and what you offer them has to be engagement. I certainly wouldn't offer them sentiment if I could avoid it. If people say, 'your films are not sentimental,' I'd say 'yes, I never intend them to be.' If they say 'complicated,' I'd say 'yes, they're all designed to represent life as it is. They're more about understanding what living feels like for people involved in the film. My job is to take you to Latin America or Cambodia and plunge you into the problem; or even in Goodbye Lover -- which people have called cynical though it's not cynical actually, it is ironic -- it's to take you around a culture that believes in moral relativism, which believes that there's no overarching sense of morality but everything is just comparable, so you end up by being able to justify anything. Goodbye Lover, takes through a world where, if you say something is good, then it is. The experience in the movie is what I think living in America is like -- which is you come out of it realising that what's operating as mark of goodness is not morality, but commerce and success.
IS A FILM FESTIVAL NECESSARY FOR CAIRO? I give an absolutely unequivocal yes, and that's why I'm here. Why? There's a number of reasons for that: the philosophical reason is that it's extremely important that there's an A class festival in this part of the world. Cairo is a great place, it has a history of cinema. I think that in that sense the Cairo festival can be a bonding experience for filmmakers from this region as well as for European filmmakers. I think it's great not being just an Arab film festival, but an international one. I hope these things will grow. Politically, it is extremely important that there's a film festival here that balances the film festivals that are being held in Hong Kong or Shanghai, or in France or in America. In terms of the industry here, it's important because it suggests that the film industry is one that should be taken seriously. In strictly modern terms, it's a valuable commercial asset. It's a voice. I would argue that an exciting addition to the festival would be to actually start setting up workshops where filmmakers can start working together, and young people can be brought in, which I think is very important. What would the new generation of cinema be about? The wisest thing that Cairo could do is to become a focus for the younger generation. One way of improving is to ask, what is it doing for the pan-Arab, pan-Middle Eastern if you like, youth, is it providing them with a chance to be international as well as particular to their own cultures?
Filmography: Vatel (2000) Goodbye Lover (1999) The Scarlet Letter (1995) City of Joy (1992) Fat Man and Little Boy or Shadow Makers (1989) The Mission (1986) The Killing Fields (1984)
Related stories:
See Cairo Film Festival ProgrammeRelated links:
The official Vatel website
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