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1. MagicMike
and BehindtheCandelabra, the Liberace biopic which you are about to shoot for
HBO, are two of thefinal threemovies that will be in your filmography when you
retire in-january2013. Did you have a todolist for your career, nearlythirtymovies
in less than twentyfiveyears, and was the male body thelastitem on it? When we
were setting up this interview, you emailed, with characteristic modesty, that
theLiberacebiopic will be “the gayest movie ever.”/Certainly, I felt that MagicMike
would be the way to build credibility for the final assault on heterosexuality
in movies. I’m actually glad the two movies timed out like this. I thought
ofMagicMike as an undressed rehearsal for Liberace. I’m curious to see what the
reaction of the gaycommunity is toMagicMike, to the choices that were made in
how to present that material. I have certain ideas about how I want to present
Liberace, and I want to see if I’m on the right track or not.
2. I went
to the MagicMike screening with a young, brilliant, gay, artseditor. He was
interested in how the film walked right up to the edge of camp, but never
crossed over. He also wondered where you found the choreographer./I tasked
Channing, as one of the producers, with finding the person to do the
choreography because it was going to be his problem more than mine. It needed
to be good enough so that if someone paid a cover charge to see the show they
wouldn’t be disappointed, but these people aren’t trained dancers. He mentionedAlisonFaulk,
who had done work for-Madonna and -BritneySpears, and she understood exactly
the ["]line["] we were trying to ["]surf["]. We had
determined what the subject of each of the routines would be. There’s going to
be a firemanroutine, a doctor, a boxer, andsoon. I didn’t want to see the
rehearsals. Then, about a week before we started shooting, I saw everybody do
their routines. I couldn’t stop laughing. It was the first concrete
confirmation that this was going to be fun for the audience. They weren’t
sleazy, they were funny, and that’s when I relaxed and thought we’re going to
be fine. Is there a darker, dirtier, scummier version of that world? Of course,
but I wanted it to be fun not only for the audience’s sake but for mine. I had
no desire to spend tenmonths working on something that was going to be a ["]downer["].
After Che, I felt I had gotten the important movieshit out of my system.
3. That’s
nonsense!/It’s not. Even Contagion, I was trying to push it as far into a genre
film as I could.
4. Okay,
but I can’t believe you won’t get ["]the bug["] again to do something
difficult./That’s true. Selfimportant would be a better way to put it. Stuff
that’s conceived with an eye toward an allcategoriestrade ad at the end of the
year. That’s what I don’t want to do anymore. But even withMagicMike, when we
started testing the movie, and by then WarnerBrothers was involved, part of the
conversation became that in thelastthird of the movie, things stop being funny
for a while. Anyone who has tested a movie in the past fiveyears has discovered
that all people want right now is happiness. They reject ambiguity or any kind
of ["]shadow side["] of anything. It’s just gotten worse and worse.
What people want when they go to the movies has shifted a bit. I think there
are a lot of reasons for it. But it’s been weird for me, because I’ve been
losing a lot of arguments. Not in the practical sense, because I’ve still
gotten things the way I want them, but I’ve seen instances where the argument
that is presented to me about why people don’t like the film more often turns
out to be true. All the things I’ve argued for because they make the film
distinctive turn out to be a barrier for the audience. In that sense, the
people making the argument turn out to be right. When we asked people about why
they didn’t score Contagion higher, they said, We didn’t likeJudeLaw. We didn’t
know if he was a good guy or a bad guy, and they felt it was the filmmaker’s
fault for not making that clear to them.
5. In a
climate like that, I understand that it’s just about impossible to make
anything interesting./It’s hard. So, withMagicMike, there was a big discussion
about whether I could just carve that part out of the movie. And I said, No, I
can’t. There would be no journey. We ["]seeded["] that stuff earlier.
It happens because theKid has shitty judgment. He shouldn’t be giving ecstasy
to strange girls at a sorority. He’s stupid. But look, nobody dies. And
interestingly, people at screenings lately have said they’re glad that’s in the
movie. They thought it would be a piece of total fluff and it turned out to be
more than they expected.
6. But the
movie isn’t about the kid. He’s ["]thesecond banana["]. What matters
is that MagicMike makes the right choices, that things go well for him. And
they do because he ends up with the equivalent of the boss’s daughter. Why did
you cast CodyHorn as Mike’s loveinterest? She’s verygood and a good match forTatum.
But you’ve made a lot of movies atWarnerBrothers./Yes, I immediately thought
they were good together. I had no idea she wanted to act. Thelast time I saw
her, she was a sixteenyearold PA. I was having trouble finding the right person
for that role. I told our castingdirector she’s got to be tough and strong and
funny, a youngRosalindRussell. She said, I think you should have a look at this
girl who just came in. She posted it and I said, “Is that who I think it is?
She’s perfect.” It’s rare that you can find a woman who can be that brash and
yet not annoying.
7. That scene
where she visits the stripclub for the first time and you play the whole thing
off her face, she was terrific./And without trying to do a lot. She just
watches. That really was the first time she saw Mike’sroutine. I purposely set
it up so we shot her side of it first. That was take one. She has really good
instincts. And I think it helps growing up the way she grew up. There’s a
consonance. I thought it would be funny and weird that the obstacle to them
getting together is that she doesn’t like his job. It’s really hard these days
to find those kinds of obstacles to romance. But ["]the big elephant in
the room["] is obviously McConaughey. When I started showing the movie
around, the first thing out of everyone’s mouth was, MatthewMcConaughey, what a
crazyassperformance. He impressed the shit out of me. He showed up with a lot
of ideas and they were all good. I described the part to him in one sentence
and he said, I know exactly who this guy is. And he did. How he dressed, how he
talked. Really fine.
8. What’s
interesting about the way he plays it is that the character doesn’t have a
sexuality that you can nail down. And in that one lowangleshot late in the
movie, he looks like the devil, reallyperverse./We talked about that. I thought
it would be interesting if you had a guy who did this job and is surrounded by
sex as a commodity, and yet we never get a ["]bead["] on what he
does. He doesn’t appear to be with anybody, he doesn’t talk about anybody. He
appears to be this strange, asexual, ambitious visionary. It was an interesting
line for him to walk. It was a prettysecure on his part to not want to ["]tip["]
it.
9. Could
we back up a bit? You’ve said twothings today that are really striking in the
context of your being a director who has made more than twodozenmovies in the
way you wanted to make them. When you talked about theLiberacemovie, you said
something about wondering how the gaycommunity would view it and then, talking
about movies in general, you spoke about what audiences want these days. Has
the way your movies are viewed always been in the front of your mind? I’ve
never heard you talk like this much about what other people might think./We
should separate that into twoparts. One has to do with how commercially viable
a filmmaker I am. Because I don’t want to waste my time trying to make things
that are either not going to get made or, if they are made, not get seen.
Wondering about why people go to the movies and what they want to see, there is
something filmmakers continually need to do. But I can only make them the way I
can make them. So it isn’t a question about how I work. It’s a question about
whether how I work is still viable. The other part is about how the gaycommunity
will respond. The rights of gays and the role of gays in our culture has become
a big part of the conversation, so that when you’re dealing with material such
asBehindTheCandelabra, which is specifically about a gayrelationship, you want
to make sure it doesn’t ["]end up["] being something that someone can
hold up and say, See, this is my problem with those people. I want the movie to
be sincere, and I want it to be accurate. Now, it may be both those things, and
it still might be used as a ["]hammer["] by someone. It’s almost like
withChe: I was ready to be attacked, but I didn’t want to be attacked for being
historically inaccurate. At the same time, you have to step back and say it’s
just a relationshipmovie. It just happens to be twoguys. I could argue that it’s
more interesting for it to be twoguys because the world they occupy is so
strange.
10. Because
of the period? Because of the closet?/Yeah. That specific aspect of showbusiness
at that time was just so weird. Liberace was living in the era when he had to
hide that part of his life. It would have been careerending. It’s sad. But, now
he wouldn’t have to worry about it. You could argue if there had been no Liberace,
would we have the EltonJohn that we have? But my job pictorially
is just to figure out how to shoot all theseJacuzziscenes.
11. The
male body./Maybe in terms of movies, the male body hasn’t gotten as much
attention as the female body, but movies are a recent Artform. But throughout History,
the male figure has gotten as much attention as the female.
12. But
once stories came into the picture, that changed./That’s interesting because
there are twotypes of stripclubs. In stripclubs for men, there isn’t even a
pretense of narrative. But, in clubs aimed at women, you always have a skit or
some kind of sketch that has a story in it.
13. Everyone
has their own taste. I don’t find the stripclub scenes in any way erotic, but
they are a lot of fun. But there was that one drugsexscene late in the movie,
kind of a dreamlike slowmotion strangely colored scene, that is a turnon. The
one that ends deliriously on the potbellied pig./That was a tricky sequence. As
written, it’s just, They go out and they party. So how was I going to put across
that feeling, like when you know you are going to get some reallygood drugs and
go out and ["]hook up["]. I really wanted to see if I could find a
way to give that feeling. One of the things I like about the story is that none
of us wanted to be punitive about the ways people pleasure themselves. No one
is punished in the movie because they had sex or did ecstasy. That’s not why
things go wrong. It made me think that, to a large degree, we are still in that
mindset that you need to be punished for having pleasure. What I like about the
movie is its attitude that fun is fun. Nothing wrong with it.
14. ChanningTatum
is terrific. I used to think he had a bit of potential, but here he’s entirely
different./I noticed something different about him here too when I was working
with him. I never brought it up because I didn’t want to derail him by asking
him questions about why he seemed so different. I have to believe that since
the movie originated out of his experience he knew the character so well he was
incapable of giving a wrong answer. He was more confident.
15. It’s
kind of the way Clooney was suddenly different inOutOfSight1998. InER, it had
seemed as if he had moviestarpotential, and then on the bigscreen, in
BatmanAndRobin1997, all you could see was that smirk and all those terrible
selfconscious habits. I always wondered what you said to him or what you did to
transform him./I try in every way that I can without being overt to give them
confidence, make them feel secure. I remember one of the first things we shot
onOutOfSight withGeorge. I told him that I wanted him to be stock still. I
said, We have great material, we have a great cast, you don’t have to do
anything to own this scene. That was the only conversation we had like that. He
got it. I wanted him to know how much I believed in him. The point is, Don’t
hide behind stuff. I want you, the inner part of you. That’s what’s most interesting,
so don’t distract me. But, when you have a lens threefeet from your nose,
that’s hard to do.
16. This is
a funny conversation, because it’s all about selfconsciousness. Selfconsciousness
in making a movie, selfconsciousness in the presentation of self. But let me
ask once again, are you really getting out?/Yes.
17. But you
know so much about what you do. How can you just leave that?/I know a lot about
stuff that doesn’t matter to me anymore, so I’ve got to find some new stuff
that matters to me. I’ve hit a wall. I’m not saying that I won’t come back, but
I would need to come back as a reallydifferent filmmaker, and the only way for
me to do that is to do something else, so I have time to annihilate everything
that came before and start again. I’m excited. It’s a luxury for me to do this.
I’m ["]holding out["] hope that there is something that’s eluded me
that I can get my fingers around if I ["]turn off the sound["] for a
while.
18. I think
a lot of people, me included, have the feeling that the movies as we’ve known
them are worn out, or have become less important within this totalising Mediaenvironment.
But how one could continue or if one should continue to make discrete objects
isn’t at all clear./This is a veryexpensive hobby. One thing we’ve got to do is
redefine what a success is. The ability to reach everyone is potentially
[possibly] a good thing if you are making a discrete and unique object,
providing that the scale of it isn’t too crazy. And, on the other hand, if you
are making something that only appeals to a couple of people, you can get to
them all now. The question for me is, can I withstand the tyranny of
traditional narrative. And, if that’s indestructible and that’s never going to
move, can I find another way to transmit information so that you know what’s
going on, but you don’t know how you know. I might ["]end up["] in
some weird hybrid MatthewBarneyworld. I don’t know. And maybe there is a new
cycle of filmmakers coming who are more connected to what audiences want now.
We’re due for another wave of filmmakers.
19. I think
MagicMike is going to connect. It will make a lot of money./We’re fine. It only
cost sevenmillionUSD. I hope that if it works, a door is going to open for
someone behind me. It’s an original screenplay, there are no guns, nothing
explodes, it’s aimed at adults. If we can show up in the middle of the summer
and have it work, that means someone else is going to get that opportunity too.
And I like that.
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