An Interview with Alan Rudolph, Rain City's Cinematic Ambassador

I was always perplexed when film director Alan Rudolph's work drew comparisons to his mentor Robert Altman.

Sure, both men made/make highly character-driven efforts. Their films are populated by reflective characters; human beings frequently looking into themselves or searching the minds (and bodies) of others for insights, answers, or love. But while Altman's movies feel highly improvised, the films of Alan Rudolph feel heavily-stylized; almost dreamlike in places. This combination of introspection and visual poetry means that Rudolph's films, even the ones that ostensibly conform to a well-worn movie genre (Film Noir, Love Story), mine psychological wells seldom tapped by other American filmmakers.

SIFF Cinema is celebrating the Films of Alan Rudolph with a three-day, six-film festival called Next Stop Rain City (previewed by the SunBreak here). The director will reputedly be on hand to introduce his screening of 1978's noir-ish Remember My Name Friday night, and some of his most interesting, acclaimed, and most thought-provoking works will be unearthed this weekend. 

The director participated in this online interview shortly after he introduced his strange neo-noir Trouble in Mind at SIFF's Twelve-Hour Movie Marathon in March; and his answers via the internet were as intelligent, unpredictable, and rewarding as his feature films.     

Let's just get the obvious and most-asked question out of the way early: What was working with Robert Altman like, and what lessons did he impart to you, either directly or by example?

Bob didn’t teach you anything but you learned everything. His best advice was don’t take any. He was a major force as a person and innovator, setting standards for modern film sensibility. To be a part of that, and contributing, was life-changing.

Altman's work and life have been scrutinized extensively. Are there any aspects of the man's films, working methods or philosophy that you think go relatively unacknowledged or underrated?

The legendary high wire act that was Altmanland was a way of looking at the world, not being afraid of your own ideas. Creating on your own terms. The reason people talk about the other stuff is because Bob’s door was always open. He wasn’t hiding anything and liked interesting people, but was always the most interesting himself. To dispel a myth, Altman never indulged during official work hours, no exceptions. But when the day was done, the party began. Highly productive.

You've openly acknowledged Altman as your mentor, but there's also a pronounced European influence in your approach, I think. What other directors besides Altman have influenced/inspired you? 

 

I knew how to make movies from being an assistant director. I learned film from Bergman, Trauffaut, Fellini, et al. It all came together for me with Altman. Hollywood movies were never really my interest.

Your father was a director by trade as well. Did he approve of your vocational choice? How much did you learn from him, technically and aesthetically?

My Dad practically lived the history of movies and television, starting as a child actor in silent films. We lived modestly, somehow always on financial edge, this before big paydays. He was a great father and left an indelible mark with a fine career as a television comedy director. Only after my brother brought me a Super 8 camera and a motorcycle back from Hong Kong, was I obsessed. Have camera will travel.

Most of your work is very character-driven, and your films seldom follow a linear Point-A to Point-B trajectory. Has this approach been by accident or design?

My films are extremely linear. They go directly from one point to the next. But audiences are used to how they want to be told a story. I view life through an emotional lens. My films reflect that. Their stories are internal. For that or whatever reason, they never appeal to mass audiences. Only individuals in them.

You embarked on your own directorial career right as the Seventies film renaissance gave way to the entire B-movie marketing strategy and blockbuster mentality that quashed a lot of the creative strides made by filmmakers like Altman, Terrence Malick, and John Cassavetes. Did you have a sense that your work might be perceived as being against the prevailing grain of mainstream cinema at the time?

My films seem to be against all grains, any decade you pick. They mostly polarize. I have no idea why, but recognize the fact. Which always forced me to get the next project going from scratch before anybody saw the last one. It was stimulating but not easy. I haven’t made a film in a while because finding money is an anathema to me.

Remember My Name, Trouble in Mind, and Equinox contain strong elements of--or could be described as--film noir. You've always eschewed categorizing and labeling your films, but your directorial style really meshes well with the genre.

Label them lost. Their category is allegorical, slippery humor, cast against type. In 1978, I thought Remember My Name was an improvement over Welcome to L.A., couldn’t wait for people to see it. Wrong again. The studio took one look and gave it back. A friend released it by himself to one or two U.S. cities a year for several years. He would call up five years later and say, "This year it’s Philadelphia." Today everyone is conditioned to original American films. Back then, we were basically it. Critics compared me to what they already knew. They criticized elements that have since entered normal film vocabulary. None of it bothers me. Quite the opposite. I’m proud of the films and privileged to have made them on my terms.

Any insights into your personal take on film noir?

I was always drawn to movies that had an invented surface. The contradiction of noir was that it felt realistic because it was so highly manipulated.

You capitalized nicely on Anthony Perkins' vulnerability in Remember My Name. What was he like to work with?

Wonderful, intelligent, funny. We were very low budget, but free from outside interference. Tony was amazed, and very good. More than once I recall thinking "This guy’s a real actor." Geraldine Chaplin is one of the most original actors I’ve ever encountered, very sharp.

Choose Me was one of the most resonant (and engaging) romantic films of the last thirty years. It casts a really unique spell. Could you discuss the genesis of this most hypnotic work?

The producers wanted to do a music video for the next new song by their client Teddy Pendergrass, which I hadn’t heard. I said for the same price let me do a feature film based on the song. A romantic street opera. I wrote the script in two weeks. This was their first feature as producers and distributor. I took the job directing Songwriter to pay for additional editing time because I felt we had something special with Choose Me, but then I always do. When the film came out, the response was positive and immediate. The production company expanded quickly, finally imploding during a power struggle at the height of their success, which was also halfway through shooting Trouble In Mind, my second film for them.

The movie represented at the SIFF marathon, Trouble in Mind, created a massive buzz at the Seattle International Film Festival in the mid '80s, and your debut feature Welcome to L.A. premiered in Seattle. This city and you have some history together. Care to comment on that connection?

Since I first had a driver’s license Seattle has always been my destination. Left to me, it would rain even more. The festival was always friendly, dedicated. Dan Ireland and Darryl MacDonald were true film lovers, as is Carl Spence. The festival is Seattle’s cinema soul. (Say that fast five times.)  

The Moderns and Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle are two period pieces that alternately feel genuinely of-their-time and fresh--modern, even--without slipping into anachronism. How did you manage to walk that tightrope, especially in light of the relatively low budgets you dealt with on both films?

The Moderns was the first film I ever wanted to make. Paris in the '20s was where art and commerce staked their positions for the future in the machine age. It’s entirely different than Mrs. Parker, which I approached more objectively because they were real people. I think what preserves good films, keeping them timely and timeless, are that they’re true to themselves. Humor also helps. I’m not sure where mine fall in the heap, but at least they’re original.

Recent years have seen you receiving accolades and retrospectives, including the Karlovy Very Film Festival last year, and of course the Seattle International Film Festival retrospective coming up in April. How do you feel about all of the fresh attention to your body of work?

It’s flattering, but I turn most of them down to work on my agoraphobia. I’m uncomfortable with retrospectives. Ain’t dead yet.

You use Seattle really well in Trouble in Mind. What was your experience like shooting here?

New, exciting. It was before the Emerald City went platinum. We used many talented local artists. Everyone climbed inside the Rain City bubble, where it barely rained during March and April that year. We had to water down streets, rent rain machines. The citizenry thought we were nuts. They didn’t know the half of it. I would shoot every film here if I could. But for some reason the city stopped caring about production once Vancouver arrived. I hope that’s changing. This place is too soulful and photogenic to ignore.

Trouble in Mind has acquired quite the cult following over the years. Why do you think it still grasps audiences' imaginations?

I didn’t know that it did. It’s never been on TV, no DVD. The print shown at the SIFF marathon, the only print, is falling apart. I personally tried to buy a new one last week, but was told it’s not possible. Even people who enjoyed Trouble In Mind were puzzled by its time, place, tone. What kind of movie was it? Too silly to be serious, too stylized to have substance. Seems most American audiences need their security. Last year I showed the film in the Czech Republic to a full house. Until the Velvet Revolution, only 20 years ago, the country was forbidden to show Western movies. I explained that the story’s setting confused people when it was released, but I didn’t know why. It was clearly set when past and future meet, but not in the present. Although they barely heard of the film, or me, they truly got something from it, right from the start. Rain City felt like Prague under Communism to them, the dark humor almost Havel-like. They couldn’t believe it was made when it was. It was one of the most satisfying screenings I'd ever attended.

Divine's so great as Hilly Blue. The role seemed to bode well for a future out of drag for him. And this, of course, brings up your knack for out-of-the-box casting choices.

Terribly sad he passed so young, just as he was breaking into new areas, including television. He was fun and sharp, always entertaining. He said if he’d known the clothes were so comfortable, especially the shoes, he would have played men earlier.

What do you look for when casting your films?

I love actors. They’re living works of art, which is why we put a frame around them. Casting is not only 90+ percent of the creative choices, but at least that getting it made or distributed. Stars are the currency. But when a film is different in approach and tone to what audiences are used to, it doesn’t matter who’s in it. I’ve got scars to prove it.

You've used Keith Carradine in five pictures, in a wide variety of roles. What aspects of him as an actor drew you to use him on a continued basis?

Keith is a brother. We don’t have to communicate in the usual ways. He not only is one of the best humans I’ve ever met, and a terrific multi-talent, but he gets the joke. All of it. Unafraid with a great sense of humor.

Well before you adapted Breakfast of Champions for the screen, many of your films displayed a surreal sense of humor with a bit of a Kurt Vonnegut tinge. Let's talk Vonnegut a little.... Favorite Vonnegut books (besides Breakfast of Champions, of course)? Thought of adapting any of his other works to the screen?

After Breakfast of Champions I was pretty much tarred and feathered. They barely released it (yet again), and tried to keep anybody from seeing it. It snuck out in a few places, but barely. I was always drawn to Vonnegut’s humor and insight. Bleakness with belly laughs. His most autobiographical novel was Slapstick, which is dedicated to Arthur Stanley Jefferson and Norvell Hardy, better known as Laurel and Hardy, my heroes. Kurt told me I should not feel bound by the book, so to say, which would have been impossible anyway. He said a film and a novel must be two separate entities. So I let loose. It certainly didn’t find much support, except from other directors. A French critic recently decided it was one of the great American movies no one has ever seen. Another Pyrrhic victory. Vonnegut is briefly visible as director of a commercial, but don’t blink. During the climactic sequence, the brilliant Tom Robbins, our part-time Buddha and menace to society, plays a bar patron. Tom improvised the line that I always thought should be the ad. "Not from around here, are you?"

What was it like working with Albert Finney on Breakfast of Champions? Speaking of outside-the-box casting, what was it like working (again) with Bruce Willis in the film?

Bruce read the script unbeknownst to me and wanted to make the film. He was the force behind it, raising the money. He identified with the trials the most-famous-man-in-town has to endure. Working with Albert Finney is a great man and actor. If I opened a university, I’d want Albert to teach Life. And Nick Nolte is a brave, fearless explorer of the human condition, a true off-roader. I’ve worked with him four times and it’s not enough.

Afterglow brought attention back to Julie Christie, a great actress who hadn't seen as much work in recent years. What was she like to work with?

Julie Christie is the most accomplished of actors. She was equally hypnotizing running lines in her room as when she was in front of the camera. One time I explained to her how the camera might move very close to her. She said it didn’t affect her at all. She never sees the camera.

You've done a few movies as a gun-for-hire director, not writing the scripts and not holding quite as much creative control. Given those limitations, are there any of those "freelance jobs" that stand out as exceptionally enjoyable/memorable to work on?

Secret Lives Of Dentists was the only film I didn’t write that I felt was my own. Mortal Thoughts came out better than anyone expected, given the limitations and conditions of the shoot. Songwriter was fun. With jobs for hire, as you call them, most of my energy was spent trying to smuggle a film into a movie.

The soundtracks of all of your films--from Mark Isham's scores on several, to the great melange of jazz tracks and modern rock on The Secret Lives of Dentists--seem to indicate that you put a lot more care into the music that populates your movies than most modern filmmakers. Do you offer a lot of input into the scoring/soundtracks of your films?

My most fertile film thoughts are stimulated by music. The first major interview I ever gave, many decades ago, was with a film scholar. He asked which directors most influenced my development. I said I was more shaped by John Coltrane than John Ford. He quickly terminated the interview. I loved working with Mark Isham. Music is very difficult to describe verbally. It fills in so many blanks, going right to the emotional sweet spot of a viewer.

You've championed actors as the purest artists involved in films. Do you think of directors in general (and/or yourself in particular) as an artist, a craftsman, some synthesis of the two, or something else entirely?

To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, artist is not an elastic term. I think the work itself has to have lasting impact to be considered art. And if it ain’t art, you ain’t an artist.

You said in an interview last year that you've essentially stopped making movies because of the rigors of securing financing. Is this still true? If it is, would securing sufficient funds induce you to make another film? And if so, is there any sort of "pet project' in the offing?  

I could never focus on more than one project at a time. Each film experience, especially from my own scripts, was a complete life in itself, a living thing. Over the past two years I’ve written two originals. But I can’t bring myself to do the thing I have to do to do the thing I want to do, raising money. It’s a waste of time and energy for me to try to get financing the usual way, appealing to the usual suspects. It never worked before. For a film’s and my sake, creative control is essential. I’ve always had it and I’m not changing now. So the only logical path for me is private financing. Except I don’t know any rich people. I could use an effective producer who understands my desires, and me, but I don’t know where to find them either.

You write all of your own films. How do you like screenwriting? You've worked as a director-for-hire, but never as a screenwriter-for-hire. Is this something you've ever considered? If so/if not, then why or why not?

Writing is the key. Not necessarily the script itself, but the initial creation. My films seem to be destined to be small budgets, so I write them modestly scaled. A few months ago a production group approached me to be writer-director for a real-life subject they wanted to make into a film. They tried many times to get a workable script but no one could crack it. They had no story or ideas, just a subject. I knew what I would do and felt it could be one of the best things I’ve done. So for the first time I wrote an original for someone else. That’s the good news. The flip side is that it meant I wouldn’t own or control getting it made. Someone has to constantly move the dream forward. There is no half switch.