O: You discovered Shelley Duvall working in a mall. You've used a lot of non-actors over the years in films like The Long Goodbye and Kansas City. Do you feel that there's a fundamentally different approach to using non-professional actors?
RA: By the time I use them, they're professional. Professional is just somebody doing it. How much experience they've had is a different thing. Sometimes that's the desirable thing, because their experience helps you. At other times, you want the off-the-wall kind of raw truth that comes out of some of these inexperienced actors. It's like any skill or art: When you get too good at it, you get too facile and the art disappears. So I'd much rather see... I don't think any rule should be set down. You get the very best, most experienced actor, and you're also not going to get surprised as much. They're going to do a great job because they're skilled at that, but you're not going to see anything that really makes you sit up and say, "Wow, that's truthful."
O: Do you feel that, outside of films like yours, actors are underutilized?
RA: Well, I think their talent is underutilized. I think many of these people should have fewer reins on them.
O: It seems with actors that you either work with them once or work with them repeatedly. To what do you attribute that?
RA: Well, if I work with an actor—say he plays a cop—I think, "Man, this guy is really good." But then you go see the film and say, "Wow, he's a great cop. Let's put him as the cop in the next picture." Suddenly, the guy is playing cops all the time. I see that they have a larger range than that, just in the process of working with them. It may not appear on the screen, but I think, "Wow, this guy could play the priest." So I usually don't repeat people in the same roles.
O: Well, you can't get much further apart than Shelley Duvall in Thieves Like Us and her part in Nashville.
RA: That's right, that's right. Still, it's her. She's the painting. She's the piece of art herself. I stick her up in different kinds of murals, or I had. McCabe, I thought, was the first real acting thing she did. She was spectacular in that, I thought, in her naivete and truthfulness.
O: That's a film I'd like to talk about a little bit. In that one, you built an environment from scratch. Did you use that approach in any of your other films?
RA: I think in all of them.
O: Right, but actually building the actual city, in that case.
RA: There's always an arena, I find, and in a case like McCabe, or someplace where it's in a contained physical area, you can control more. In other words, they're not going to get into the wardrobe. Everything that goes on the screen, I've put there. Then I can say, "Okay, I'm not going to have any blue shirts in this film, and I'm not going to have any red in this film." But when you go out to shoot, say, Brewster McCloud or Nashville, I have no control over the art direction. I shoot people in real situations, so I can't call up the world and
say, "Don't wear a blue shirt tomorrow." So, consequently, I have to then change and say, "I have to deal with these elements." That's what I do.
O: How much do you think your Midwestern background influenced your sensibility?
RA: Oh, I don't have any idea. I don't know. For the life of me, I can't think of anything different about being in Missouri or New York City or Los Angeles or Toronto or Texas.
O: You've made some quintessentially L.A. films, but you're also one of the few directors who regularly make a point of showing life between the coasts.
RA: I just do what interests me and occurs to me the most. But with most action films or genre films, it's more convenient to shoot them in L.A. or go to Toronto and try to make them look like L.A. It's all driven by money, and I just don't know the difference, really.
O: Were you surprised to find yourself still fighting with the studios when you made The Gingerbread Man?
RA: Well, I didn't think that was a studio. I was fighting, yeah, and I was quite surprised at that. But those were a bunch of... What was that, Polygram? They went ahead and hired a bunch of guys who had been fired from other studios, or lost their jobs, and they came in and tried to develop these films. They go out and do these test screenings, and whatever the test screening says, they say, "Oh, this is what we have to do." Because then, when the picture fails, they can say, "This isn't my fault. I did my job." They're not interested in, say, how we get the film to the largest and most appreciative audience. They say, "How can I protect my job and not look like an asshole if it fails?" That's what they all do.
O: Your cut went out, but only after the studio tried its own. Is that the first time a film had been taken out of your hands and re-cut?
RA: Uh, like that it was. But, of course, I got it back, and what ends up on the screen is, in fact, my work entirely. But, in the meantime, the company went out of business—they sold themselves off—and they wrote it off as a loss and never distributed it. They didn't make enough prints. This is as close as I came to getting people to go to court on a thing like this, because they [acted] maliciously. I mean, we had really strong evidence, and we had attorneys ready to go along with us on spec to sue them, because theater exhibitors called them and tried to get that film, and they said, "We only have 15 prints," or whatever the number is. They would send them a print and say, "You can only have it for a week." That film could have been commercially successful, The Gingerbread Man, and it wasn't.
O: Was that the worst conflict you've had with a studio?
RA: Well, no, but it was one of 'em. It was as bad as any, and it was pointless and silly. They didn't have to go through what they went through. Many of the major studios in the '80s and back in the '70s... I looked at a new print of Brewster McCloud the day before yesterday, because they're doing a lot of retrospectives of my stuff right now in New York and L.A., and that film was... Jim Aubrey, when he had just taken over MGM, he just buried that film because he was selling off assets. He was crashing the company. He couldn't care whether that was film or green socks.
O: I was sorry to hear on the audio-commentary track to The Player that some of your films had faded and needed restoration. Has any of that been addressed for the retrospectives?
RA: They've recently done most of them. The only film we can't find the negative of—we can't really find out who owns it—is Images. But the rest of the films, as I say... I just looked at this new print of Brewster, and they're looking great. They're doing a great job.
O: A number of your films have never been available on video. Do you think this will lead to their release?
RA: I don't know. It's the first time the album of Nashville has gone out on CD after 25 years.
O: Does the idea of digital video excite you at all? It seems like technology that might be compatible with your style of filmmaking.
RA: I think it will replace everything. There's always this problem of whether the light comes through the film—is it illuminated that way, or is the light reflected from the film? They'll solve all the problems, and I think there will be a day when you don't ever see film anymore.
O: Do you think it can be just as artistic as film?
RA: Sure.
O: Other people have drawn a direct correlation between Popeye and the fact that you spent much of the '80s working on low-profile projects. Is that fair, or was that partially by choice?
RA: I don't know what you mean.
O: When you made Popeye, did it close some doors for you for bigger-budget studio projects?
RA: Yes, it did. But Popeye is probably my most seen film. Probably more eyes have seen Popeye than all the other films I ever made, because it's the perennial babysitter.
O: It gets played a lot on television.
RA: They lock the kids up in a room and turn it on. I know four-year-olds who can repeat every word in Popeye, but it's still considered... People say, "Oh, God, your big failure." It wasn't successful at the time because it wasn't Superman.
O: It made money, though, didn't it?
RA: I don't know.
O: Of your '80s films, was O.C. & Stiggs an attempt to do sort of a genre exploration with the teen comedy the way some of your other films explored genres?
RA: I was trying to do a satire. I was attacking the teen mentality of the audience and I just was a little too... Nobody got it.
O: Did those films dissatisfy you? The teen comedies, did they upset you?
RA: They were dreadful. I was trying to show that.
O: How did you find Anne Rapp, your collaborator for your last two films?
RA: I read a short story that she had written when she started writing, and I had known her before that for many years. I read a couple of short stories, and the first one turned out to be Dr. T And The Women, my new film.
O: You're editing that now, right?
RA: Yes.
O: How's it going?
RA: It's great. It's going terrific. I'm in the mixing booth right now.
O: Of the projects you've been developing that you haven't been able to realize, which ones do you really want to get done?
RA: There's not a filmmaker alive who has had a better shake than I have. I have never been without a project, and they've always been projects of my own choosing. My perception and general popularity is quite... They say, "Oh, my God." People consider me some kind of a failure. I'm not a failure. My films may not satisfy a mass audience, but they were never made to do that. This big store, they sell shoes, and I make gloves. With films I do or am going to do, I never take into consideration, "Oh, this is really going to sell a lot of tickets."
O: But they last. I think people rediscover your films all the time.
RA: Yes, they do, and that's very gratifying, but I still have to work every year to pay my rent.
O: What was the last film you saw in the theater, and what did you think of it?
RA: Probably Cookie's Fortune, when we opened it. I see these films when we open them. I rarely go into a movie theater and actually see films.
O: What's your earliest memory of watching movies?
RA: Oh, God...
O: Or, what was the first movie you saw that made you want to make movies?
RA: The first film that allowed me to look at films as more than just a novelty was David Lean's Brief Encounter. I was probably 21, and that just startled me. The person who had the most influence on my filmmaking was Norman Corwin and his radio writing. As to, "What director do you admire the most or have you emulated?," the truthful answer to that is... The directors who've probably had the most influence on me were probably names I don't even know, because I looked at a film that was really bad and I would say, "Hmm, I'm never going to do that." That's probably the most direct positive influence on the work I do. I don't even know who those directors are, but the other directors on my list would be probably the same as yours: Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa, John Huston, David Lean. They're very easily... They float up there above anybody else, and it's very evident why.
O: You've done a lot of films that have taken on genres. Do you feel that you've laid to rest any genre clichés with films like The Long Goodbye?
RA: No, they keep recurring. I'm not laying them to rest; I'm just moving around to another side, looking into the prism from a different angle, saying, "Oh, what happens if you look at it from over here?" Basically, the material is... I have to stimulate an audience and try to get them interested in what I'm interested in. That's not easy.
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