Shadowgraph Magazine: You have a finely tuned, subtle, well-crafted sense of humor. I feel like the humor of our culture has changed and I was wondering if you’ve felt that.
Barry Levinson: Well, I think you are seeing two things. One, things are being imposed on the American public by marketing, and two, by being denied certain kinds of material on the screen, it ceases to exist. The nature of comedy has been shifting because the silliest, most stupid comedy is easiest to sell. Comedy that comes from relationships, or from the conflict we’re in as we struggle, which has been a form of comedy, has been shortchanged because it’s very hard to sell it in a mass-market world. The marketers don’t bother. All they know how to do is take 30 seconds, chop up a bunch of images that look funny, put in some kind of peppy music and a little bit of an announcer saying something, and that’s that. Sometimes they are so devoid of content that they are commenting on the commercial. The announcer says, “A movie that’s full of charm,” and then cut to a character in the movie trailer saying, “Well, that’s unusual.” So they are actually borrowing from within the trailer to create what they want to say, as opposed to the content of what the movie is, because content has no place in the marketing world. Marketing is about pure adrenalin or something that gets a laugh and that needs no context.
SG: Another thing that has changed is narrative structure. Movies like Hud and The Hustler involve complex narratives similar to your films. Diner, Rain Man, and Tin Men all had true narratives to them; many mainstream films today are much more likely to be long music videos—a little bit of narrative and lots of songs.
Levinson: Well, you know things are always evolving, whether we like it or not, they continue to change, and the language of film is being altered considerably. There is a lack of reading taking place, being replaced by a visual component, and visual components don’t normally have subtext, so what you begin to see in movies today is that the subtext and secondary stories are all being stripped away. So, for example, we’re going to have a “dodgeball team,” and that’s what it gets stripped to at its most basic. Now if you were to go back to Network, that was a mainstream movie in its time, not some esoteric independent movie. That was mainstream. That movie today is what we call an independent movie, which means everybody should work for nothing in order to get it made because it’s no longer mainstream.
SG: That film was packed full of social and political content—prophetic even in anticipating the Reality-TV craze.
Levinson: Well, if you go to Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, that was mainstream filmmaking in its time. You couldn’t make that movie today. You couldn’t end the film where he’s been shot in the throat and put in the car and they decide not to take him to the hospital but back to the work farm. So you know cool hand Luke is going to die. You wouldn’t be able to have a movie like that today.
SG: In Hud it was the same thing. He loses his farm and has nothing in the end. That’s too existential for everyone. But it’s true for foreign cinema too. You couldn’t make L’avventura today.
Levinson: No, not a chance. What I’m talking about is film in the past compared to today. There is a level of sophistication of movies in the past that by today’s standards are almost like looking at Shakespeare. It’s a whole other world. You look at movies from the 30’s and well into the late 70’s, and the sophistication of the storytelling is way beyond where we are today. We are back to some kind of remedial English here.
SG: What about Tarrantino or other filmmakers who are experimenting with structure—Run Lola Run, with its structure of hypothetical repetition. Granted, these are films experimenting with the surface structure of a movie.
Levinson: Well, I think there are two parts to it. Yes, because what they are playing with is having a grown up in front of a video tape machine. And you basically rewind it to play it again and rewind it. In other words, not to be negative, but Tarrantino’s realm of understanding is based on film, not life. So what happens is you’re going to see film references redone, as opposed to the interpretations and feelings about life, of which you bring to the screen.
SG: Your source of inspiration has always been your life experiences.
Levinson: Well, that’s basically the way things were in the past. That’s different now. Because now we are having less life experiences and more visual experiences. So our understanding is based more on things we see. This is a change that has taken place; a fundamental change. Peter Jackson, who is a very accomplished filmmaker, did Lord of the Rings, and he could basically, at this point, direct anything he wants to. So they say, “Peter, what would you like to make?” And he says, “I’d like to remake King Kong.” Right? You can make anything you want to make as a filmmaker and he says, “I want to remake King Kong.” Now, let’s go back to Orson Welles. Orson Welles is this boy genius. Orson Welles is now brought to Hollywood. “Orson, you can make anything you want to make.” Well, he made Citizen Kane. That would be like bringing Orson Welles out there and saying “What would you like to do?” And he says, “You know, I really loved the Dr. Kildare series. I’d like to remake that.” You know what I mean?
SG: So there is a discontinuity between Peter Jackson’s accomplishments as a filmmaker, and his maturity or ability to make use of Life as we live it.
Levinson: Because life becomes less of what filmmaking is about. Filmmaking is now becoming about film and the re-doing of it and the regurgitation of non-reality as opposed to dealing with the world that we’re in. And you can see it from its beginnings. When Rocky came out, which got a lot of attention in its time, I said, “Now that to me is like a remake of a movie that wasn’t made before.” Because it had all the components of every boxing movie I’d ever seen. And so everything about it was familiar. Now it was reshuffled in a way where you say, “Oh it’s exciting and he’s in the ring and Rocky goes …” But it was so comfortable in that it had all of its parts from all of those movies. It had parts from Somebody Up There Likes Me and On The Waterfront. You know it’s borrowed; you can feel it. And so what happens (and it’s not intentional, except in the case of Tarrantino, since his reference is video), is that if that becomes our collective memory, that is what we begin to make films about—films about films. They are parts of other films. We’re sort of devouring ourselves in a way, eating our own flesh, as opposed to moving on and exploring. And I’m not talking about ways of exploring where you go, “It’s so tedious!” It’s just that ideas exist in the world we’re in and you go from there. About Casablanca, you say, “Look, that is a very entertaining kind of movie.” But it was taking a period of time, the beginning of WWII, and structuring a romance in a time and place that we hadn’t quite seen, in its time. It was fresh in its own place. And you know, we have entered an age where we refer to movies as an example. You know people say, “Well, it’s not great, but it’s a Summer movie.” Right? You’ve heard that? Or, “Oh yeah, that’s a Fall release. That should be a Fall release, right?” It has become like clothing. What happens if you go to the video store sometime in March? Are the films on the shelf laid out by seasons or are they just on the shelf? I don’t know when Casablanca was made, but it was a good movie, period. Whether it was a Winter movie or a Summer movie—it was a good movie.
SG: (laughter) Do they do that to you? Do they say, “Okay, so why don’t you put out a Summer movie?” Which will mean you can take it easy. You don’t have to work as hard.
Levinson: (laughter) You don’t have to work as hard, it’s a Summer movie. They have different standards. If this movie came out in October, you’d have to have a bit more content.
SG: Just a little bit, because we don’t want to tax anyone.
Levinson: Yeah, not too much more.
SG: No audience member left behind.
Levinson: I’ll give you a comment on that. A producer told me this. He said, “I went to pitch this idea to a studio, and about halfway through the pitch the person looked at him and said, “Is this a drama?’” And the producer said, “Yeah …” And the person looked at him and said, “Oh, oh … we don’t make dramas.” It’s like a genre. What is this, a drama genre? We don’t do that.
SG: You seem pretty jovial about the film business. How have you managed to keep your independent spirit?
Levinson: You can look at the transitions that take place, and we know what they are. No one is turning back the clock. It is what it is. And I think you just look at it as those are the changes in the world that we’re in. And you try to find a way to function so you can satisfy yourself. I wouldn’t know how to go off and make a movie if I had no interest in it, just because I was making a movie. I wouldn’t know how to do that. But you have to find a way to satisfy yourself as films will continue to change and the so-called marketplace is changing. On the one hand, the studio business is at a very strange crossroads because it is working under the concept of a “First Week” opening. You maximize the amount of money in the opening weekend. But what you’re doing is, you’re chasing a big audience away. So you’re only pandering to the people who come out the first week, and therefore, you’re targeting one group. By targeting the one group you are beginning to eliminate a certain movie audience that doesn’t show up in the first week. So what’s happening is, we’re seeing more and more movies focusing on a certain group for its big dollar, at the exclusion of a wider audience.
SG: And that audience will tend to be younger teenage types because they don’t have to get babysitters and they have more time.
Levinson: Right, and so that’s the first audience they go to. But by doing that you begin to cut off a certain audience that is saying, “Well, there’s nothing for me to see.” And then that audience gets out of the habit of going. So what happens is that at a certain point, you’ve been pandering to one audience. It may be more difficult to get an older audience in the opening weekend, and then you will have to find a way to keep them engaged, otherwise your share is going to drop. You have to find more ways to be inclusive and not exclusive of them. If that makes sense. It used to be that you had a very wide band of an audience. Now, you can get a certain group to come in really fast. But that’s only the one group. You have to contend with the other group. But marketing is not designed well enough for anything other than a first-week explosion. Now you get the Miramax thing, where they try to nurture a film, but there are still so few of those types of movies that are being made that are seen around the country. They may be in New York or Los Angeles, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t work in Iowa or wherever, if the audience was aware of it and informed. That doesn’t mean they can’t play there. It’s not like these people in other parts of the country couldn’t understand what’s happening in the movie.
SG: Has there been any movie recently that has made a difference in your life, and has made you feel something new like when you first started seeing films and they made a difference?
Levinson: I’d have to think about it. I have seen some movies I liked recently. My memory is not what it was.
SG: Well, let’s just analyze the inside of that for a moment. You liked them. But it wasn’t like an earlier experience in film watching in which a movie absolutely, totally and radically, altered the way you think and feel about everything.
Levinson: No, that’s true. SG: Did that happen to you when you were younger? Levinson: Yes, no question. It’s changed. My son, Jack, will go to see a movie he knows is not very good. And that is basically what the experience will be about, to go see the movie that is not very good.
SG: Did you like The Dreamers by Bertolucci? Levinson: I thought it was interesting. SG: I thought it was interesting too, and what I loved is just how people used to love cinema. They would never go to a film that might not be good. It was supposed to be a life transforming experience. It was high art. You go and you enter into a stream and a state of mind that is different.
Levinson: But you’d have to say they were part of a certain group that doesn’t really exist anymore. But there was another batch of movies that were entertaining and yet at the same time profound. On the Waterfront, for me, was probably the strongest influence of anything I had seen as a little kid. It affected me in ways that I didn’t even understand. I thought it was extraordinary.
SG: How old were you when you saw it?
Levinson: I would have been probably around eleven.
SG: Eleven?
Levinson: Well the funny thing is, I have to tell you something crazy. You see, kids don’t see movies today that have adult themes at the ages of ten or eleven. And I don’t mean sexual situations or adult themes like that. Just movies that we would go see with adult themes. On The Waterfront is about problems on the docks. Right? So you say, “What eleven year old is going to be interested in what’s going on at the docks?” But we did see movies like that, and we said, “Oh that’s a good movie.” So I think it’s just that the audience is being denied. It’s not like something got in the water and we’re losing our abilities, it’s just that if you don’t have it long enough, you begin not using that part of your brain. Movies used to be challenging. Now it’s, “Don’t challenge the audience ever.” That is a fundamental shift.
SG: I remember you asking about a film idea, “How is that going to work?” I don’t tend to ask that question first. I tend to think more about the visual ambiance and emotional content.
Levinson: Well, you know, there are two parts to how things evolve. I don’t have a mind where people talk about writing an outline. I don’t have a mind to be logical in that way. I could not write an outline. What I base it on is what I feel I want to say in the piece, and then I invent the characters and let them deal with one another. That basically takes me through the piece. Liberty Heights was written because of a comment someone made that kicked off in my head some thoughts about anti-Semitism. And I was thinking about anti-Semitism as a boy, and how I was not aware of it. Not only was I not aware of anti-Semitism, I was not aware of class distinction. Not only was I not aware of class distinction, I was not aware that there were any racial problems. So when the comment about anti-Semitism linked back to that, I thought I was an astoundingly naive kid in 1954 in school, at the time of the integration of the school system. And I had never asked myself the question when I was young, “How come there are no black people in the school?” I never realized that anyone existed other than Jewish people. So that stupidity and naiveté led me to writing Liberty Heights, not from a standpoint of anger, but just how the separation involved a lack of understanding. So that idea I thought was interesting, and I asked the question, how do I do it? And that’s how I settled on 1954, the year the school system was integrated. I remember all of a sudden three black kids entered who were never there before, and what was going on in life at that time. That is how it evolved. Now who are the characters, and what are they going to say, and what stories are going to take place and intertwine, I had no idea. But I start with the idea of something that occurs to me in terms of life, and I try to find a way to tell it.
SG: Do you have one of your films that seems the most important to you, in retrospect?
Levinson: I don’t know. Sometimes I think maybe Avalon might be, because it was so close to what was taking place in that family’s journey and the fact of this huge extended family breaking up and drifting away. As television rose and the economics of America shifted and changed, all those things happened. In some ways that idea sticks with me the most, because today it is playing out all the time. It is a struggle going on in America, this concept of family and what does it represent and what is it, and how it’s evolving and changing and how we’re not quite understanding or dealing with the realities of it. Because what we’re talking about is that from the beginning of man, there were families. And it’s only in the last 50 years that this whole thing is coming apart and redefining itself in ways that we never anticipated. We are asking, where is the family; what is a family; how do families work; how do they interact with one another? There used to be support systems in place because you had the kids and the uncles and the aunts and the grandparents and they were there like a tribe. And that support isn’t there any more. You see how religious conservatives have this reaction of protecting the family and all these constitutional things where people are screaming to ban same-sex marriages and you go, “My God!” How crazy are we getting?