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As a result of the #TimesUp campaign, HBO for the first time has made women and men in lead role positions [equally paid]. I'm one of the actresses that benefited... When I first discovered how much they were offering it made me realise, ‘Oh my God, men have been paid so much more.' I had to have a big swallow of resentment. I gave it half an hour and then felt grateful. Every year I go into a new production or a new season of Westworld and I don't think to ask for more, I just feel so grateful to be working. But we need to expect more for ourselves. [The next three ‘Star Wars' films] were going to get into a microbiotic world. There's this world of creatures that operate differently than we do. I call them the Whills. And the Whills are the ones who actually control the universe. They feed off the Force. I needed a green card to work with Abel Ferrara [on his film The Blackout ] . I'd been convicted recently of possessing heroin and cocaine, and so this consul says: ‘You're not the kind of person we want in America.' He spoke to me disrespectfully. I said to him: ‘You don't speak to your wife like that, so don't speak to me like that.' And I slapped him. I was banned for seven years. I write what I write because I'm a Christian. It informs everything I do. My father always taught me it's OK to laugh at the things you love. Part of "Preacher" is about interrogating faith. You can't do that stuff lightly. For a time the other writers would look at me across the table to see if I was gonna be offended but I never am. I'm happy to write about faith and God and get angry and deep. Let's pull it all apart and see what's lasting. Steven Soderbergh, a visual director? Are you kidding? Give me an example of a great, visually memorable scene [from] Soderbergh or a silent sequence based on the staging…I saw an episode of ‘The Knick' and there is nothing that [impressed me visually]. Right around the time ‘Fruitvale Station' went down, I told my agents I didn't want to go out for any roles written for African Americans. I didn't want it. I wanted only white men. That's it. That's all I want to do. Me playing that role is going to make it what it is. I don't want any pre-bias on the character…Writers write what they know, what they think encounters with us would be, and that's slight bias...
I wanted to go out for these roles because it was just playing people. My father was very difficult. We were not close. It's hard. I don't really talk about my father publicly, because there are a lot of people that really love him very, very much – his work as an actor. I don't want to disabuse them [of] their admiration. I remember when someone asked Ian McKellen what he thought about the Brexit vote he said, “Queer people are internationalists.” We aren't about borders. We go to other countries and we feel a kinship with other queer people. It does force a universalist, international view of things, and the aliens in ["How to Talk to Girls at Parties" ] are really the opposite of queer. They're so insular that they're not even going to trouble the universe for resources. They're going to eat their own children until they decline. It's their natural form of attrition. Film is a visual medium, and, if the task of literature is to stud the brain with quotations, cinema's job is to cram it with images which transcend story line and feed the need for myth. There are very few films which have done this. We are told by the French post-structuralists that the writer doesn't write: the writer is written, is controlled by the language he uses. And so Fritz Lang [in "Metropolis" ] was controlled by the limitations of black and white, by mocked-up urban landscapes which never pretended to be real, and probably by the strange ambiguous beauty of Brigitte Helm. The film was never meant to be propaganda. Lang admits that he was primarily fascinated by machines, above all perhaps by the huge machine which is the film-making complex. Amid the horror of war, [ in
Saving Private Ryan (1998) ] Spielberg seems to be trying to rediscover American innocence, that Holy Grail that existed only in the Rousseau-esque imagination yet was virtually incorporated into the constitution. Spielberg, like other Hollywood directors of the time, came from a generation scarred by the moral quagmire of Vietnam. He understood the national need, in the post-cold war chaos, to reach back to more certain times, seeking reassurance from that moment in history – the second world war – when the fight seemed unequivocally right. “Tell me I've led a good life,” says the weeping veteran in the cemetery to his wife. “Tell me I'm a good man.” When John Dexter, the director of M Butterfly, started shouting at everyone in the cast, Hopkins told him to stop. “I said, ‘John, you don't need to do this. You're a great director. Stop it.' And he cried. I mean, I understand if people are bullies. They've got their problems. I can't judge them, I won't make fun of them at awards. It's correct for women to stand up for themselves, because it's unacceptable. But I don't have a desire to dance on anyone's grave.”
In the new introduction [of the book, “Transcental Style in Film” ], [Paul] Schrader diagrams the larger movement by showing how well-known filmmakers move in three different directions as they push away from narrative. There are the “Surveillance Cam” filmmakers (Abbas Kiarostami), who emphasize capturing day-to-day reality. There is “Art Gallery,” cinema which is a move toward pure imagery: light and color, which can manifest itself in films that are abstract, or dream-like (Lynch). And the third direction is what Schrader refers to as Mandala, or “meditation” cinema, films that work on the viewer almost like a trance (Ozu). I just wanted to make, you know, a good song. Something people could play on Fourth of July. The broken love story in ‘A Star Is Born' kept haunting me. Shots kept coming into my head. I would dream about it. I realized I had to do it, whether it fails or not. I knew I had to try and I wound up absolutely loving it. You can't hide when you sing. The best way to express love is through singing and music. I knew if I could marry that in a way, it would be special. |
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