AVC: After The Godfather and Last Tango In Paris, it became very hard to control him.
FO: I think he saw the hypocrisy in the business. In my opinion, there are more things in the world that were important to him, he was more of a world man, and he was not interested in a career in show business. In my opinion—again, it's only my opinion—I only knew the man for three weeks, and for a couple of hours twice in his home. So I don't know him that well as a man. But from my observation, the only thing he really liked about the movies was from the moment I yelled "action" to the moment I yelled "cut." You can't be that good and not enjoy it.
AVC: Was it intimidating working with actors like Brando, De Niro, Angela Bassett, and Edward Norton?
FO: No, I can't be intimidated. If I stood back and said, "Oh my God, I'm working with Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro and Edward Norton and Angela," then I'm not too involved in the characters. To me, they've got to be the characters. If I'm intimidated, I shouldn't be directing a movie. I gotta treat 'em as characters, not as stars. It's hard to not treat Marlon Brando as a legend, a star, it's difficult not to treat Bob as a star, but that had to go away very fast after I knew them, because I had to work with them. I'm the director, I'm the boss. They're looking to me for guidance.
AVC: The Score is one of the last restrained performances Brando ever gave. Do you consider that a triumph, that you did manage to direct him?
FO: It was hard. And it's interesting you say "restrained," because it was a battle to be restrained. Marlon was trying to make more of a statement in his acting, and I wouldn't let him, and I was very tough—I should have been more nurturing, it was more my fault. But because I wasn't, he hated me, and wouldn't really let me direct him after that. So I said I directed the movie, but I really didn't direct Marlon—90 percent of the time, he wouldn't listen to me. But I do believe I'm very happy with his performance, because it was naturalistic. As a matter of fact, when he was forced to not do the character he had created, which was too large as far as I'm concerned, and he was forced to be more natural, what you see up there is Marlon. And I remember going over to him, 'cause he didn't want to hear from me, but I remember going over to him when he and Bob did a scene together at a table, and I said, "This is great, this is wonderful." And he said, "I have no idea what I'm doing." And he didn't, because he didn't have a character, he was just being himself, and that's exactly what I wanted.
AVC: After a while, the impulse with him was to go way over the top.
FO: That's why I wouldn't allow it.
AVC: What was his original character?
FO: Well, I told him, "This character is gay, but I don't want him to be overtly gay." I had just done In & Out, for God's sake, I'm not gonna make fun of gays. In his home, he showed me how delicate it would be, and I said, "Great." But on the set, it was way over the top, to the degree that my editor looked at me and said, "Holy cow, can we use this?" We had to junk the first day of shooting, and I handled it very, very badly. And I was too tough. It was a big mistake. I learned a great deal, that even the greatest actor in the world, Marlon Brando, is scared and needs nourishment. So it was a good sad lesson, but it was certainly a lesson. That character had to be restrained, otherwise the Bob De Niro character would not have worked with him.
AVC: It's all about chemistry.
FO: It's not about chemistry, it's the fact that Robert De Niro's character was a professional thief, and very under the radar. He would never have worked with anybody who's flamboyant and over the radar—you want to be invisible.
AVC: That seems to be the whole core of The Score—that these people are professionals.
FO: Totally, and that they're under the radar. So now I look at it, and I'm very pleased with what Marlon did. Sadly, Marlon was very unhappy about it.
AVC: You talked about your instincts being darker, more subversive. In the original ending of Little Shop Of Horrors, apparently everyone dies. Were you surprised that you got away with filming it?
FO: No, David Geffen was very supportive of how Howard Ashman and I wanted to do the original ending. David said, "You can't do that, you can't kill your leads," but he supported us. Two years later, we killed our leads and the audience hated us for it. They loved those leads, because in a stage play, you kill the leads and they come out for a bow—in a movie, they don't come out for a bow, they're dead. And the audience loved those people, and they hated us for it. It got very, very, very exceedingly low scores as a result, so we had no choice but to re-shoot it. And I believed it was the right thing to do. I was unhappy that Howard and I couldn't solve how to use a million dollars worth of great B-movie shots and footage, but we had no choice.
AVC: It's an interesting project, because the original was such a tiny little thing, and then it was turned into this giant musical.
FO: But actually, it's not a giant musical.
AVC: But it feels that way, it feels like a really, really big movie, which is a testament to your direction.
FO: I disagree. If you really look at all the big movies, like Fiddler On The Roof, My Fair Lady, Sound Of Music, etc. etc., those are big musicals with huge crane moves and wide vistas and shots. And I kept it, very on-purpose, an Off-Broadway feel. It's only one street, it's all we had.
AVC: It seems a lot bigger.
FO: It was certainly "big" compared to the original stage play, but it was an Off-Broadway thing and I tried to keep it that way.
AVC: Would it be safe to say that you preferred the original ending?
FO: It's not that I preferred the ending, no. Our job is to entertain an audience, it's not just to do it for the director. You might as well sit in a white room and look at the movie for the rest of your life—it's ridiculous. I was frustrated that I couldn't use the ending, use the special effects with the ending, that's all. I'm not happy with the happy ending and I'm not happy with the original ending, because it doesn't work out, everybody is unhappy in the theater. So there's no real answer at that point.
AVC: You want the audience to love your leads, but if you succeed at that—
FO: You have to succeed, and then once you succeed, you can't kill them. No, I take that back, if you succeed and you kill them, you've got to kill them in such a way that the audience feels satisfied—that he died for a higher cause or something like that, like the guy who jumps on a grenade and saves his buddies. That's a different kind of death, [and] we didn't have that kind of death.
AVC: Did The Score lead you to want to do non-comedies?
FO: Oh, sure. I've always wanted to do non-comedies, I've always done dramas, comedies, music, and I always like to bop around and do different things. I'm looking for something a bit tougher, more muscle mass, something small, but the thing is, I get all the best comedy scripts, I don't get all the best drama scripts. So I'll just go with what's the best script.
AVC: Do people think of you as a comedy director?
FO: Absolutely.
AVC: Well, you've had a lot of successful comedies.
FO: I haven't screwed up so far.
AVC: Were you ever in talks about directing Willy Wonka?
FO: Nope. Never. Never heard of it, never offered. Don't listen to IMDB. I was asked to direct, like, the second Harry Potter and things like that, but I have no interest. I've done too much big stuff.
AVC: All the characters that you've played, that you've voiced—
FO: Well, it's interesting, when you say "voiced," what does that mean?
AVC: That you provided the voice for.
FO: And who did the character?
AVC: And that you also did the character for.
FO: When people say characters are voiced, then what's the rest of the character? The character actually moves—who do you think does that?
AVC: That would be you.
FO: And that's 99 percent of the hard part. The voice is the easiest part. It's so odd. People always say that, and they don't even think about the charactering.
AVC: So these characters that you play—
FO: Anyway, it doesn't matter, but I'm always curious why people think that, but I guess they do.
AVC: People compartmentalize. There aren't that many people famous for their voice work.
FO: I'm not Mel Blanc.
AVC: Famous for the characters created.
FO: It's interesting, and it's another discussion. I'm always amused that people zero in on one thing, and it's the wrong thing to zero in on, but nevertheless, the reason they do that is because the voice is what they know—the voice represents everything about the character, that's why.
AVC: Well, in movies like Shrek, they're advertising Eddie Murphy's voice role a lot more than the animation and the story. The fact that a celebrity went in and spent a day—
FO: And these animators work their asses off. When I did Yoda, me and three other people worked our asses off, and I was sweating every single day, it was tough as hell. Now that it's CGI, 24 people work on Yoda, and I get all the credit —I do nothing.
AVC: So you feel like Yoda belongs not so much to you as to those 24 people who animated Yoda?
FO: Once they start animating, yeah. The other Yoda belongs to me and those other three people, but absolutely: It's not me, it's them.
AVC: So of all those characters, which is the closest to you?
FO: I don't know, they're all facets of my personality—if they weren't, I couldn't do 'em. They're all filtered through an exaggeration and a professionalism. I haven't done them in four or five years, I don't do them anymore.
AVC: You were very involved in the creation of Yoda as a character. How did that come about? How were you approached?
FO: They approached Jim Henson, and Jim suggested me. And then I threw a couple of ideas in with Jim Henson's suggestions and such, and George Lucas and Larry Kasdan wrote the character, and I just kind of worked hard in putting all these elements together. But I had an inkling immediately who Yoda should be, it hit me.
AVC: What was that inkling?
FO: That he was incredibly powerful, very wise, but very much a human being as well. That just hit me, that's all.
AVC: Did you come up with the way the character talked?
FO: No, it was written down, but I said, "George, I think there's a reason he talks that way, and I'd like to do more," So I just I made it all the time instead of just sometimes.
AVC: You rewrote for the script for The Muppets Take Manhattan, right?
FO: Yeah, my writing partner and I rewrote it. I'm not a writer, but yeah, I did.
AVC: You weren't happy with the original screenplay?
FO: Yeah, I was unhappy with what was done, because it was not in the Muppets' intended character. It was too broad, and it was not affectionate enough.
AVC: How did you find the writing process? Did it make you want to do more of it?
FO: What I'd do—I'm not a writer—I'd do a lot of rewriting. I've rewritten a lot of the scripts I've done, Little Shop Of Horrors was a complete rewrite, but I didn't touch the dialogue. Essentially, I'm a very good editor.
AVC: Of all you've accomplished in your career, what are you proudest of?
FO: This interview right here. [Laughs.] I'm most proud of my kids, for one, and my family and my parents. Outside of that—what am I proud of? I don't know. I don't look back, I just go forward. I'm just proud of the fact that my parents were immigrants and we had nearly nothing, and all of the sudden, with the help of a lot of people and my parents as a model, I amounted to something. And I'm doing some very decent work.
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