AVC: You said you're involved in the writing process for this film and Down In The Valley. This happens often, but you never actually get credited for these things.
EN: I wrote Frida.
AVC: Entirely?
EN: Yeah. I wrote Frida. I wasn't a member of the Writer's Guild, and I didn't get paid, and so me and Miramax, we kind of goofed because the WGA denies you credit onscreen for a film if you break their rules. We appealed it, Miramax appealed it and everything. I just got sort of shafted by them, quite frankly. In some cases, I've worked on lots of scripts, very substantially, with David Jacobson or my partner Stuart [Blumberg], but there's a point at which you have to say to yourself, "Down In The Valley wasn't my idea, it was David Jacobson's idea." It was a very personal vision. He grew up in the valley. I wrote scenes in the movie, and I wrote dialogue, and worked on the structure and everything, but listen, it doesn't matter. It's David's film. It's his vision. But people don't understand it all, anyway. They don't really care about credits. When I'm the one who sits down and looks at the blank page and writes it out all the way, then I'll call it my script.
AVC: Down In The Valley wouldn't seem out of place in the '70s, but it doesn't really fit into any of the boxes today. It's not really something a studio would do, it isn't something Fox Searchlight would put out, it's certainly not some micro-budget indie. Is there a place for movies like that anymore? Could you see a movie like Badlands, for example, being made today?
EN: People use that phrase a lot: "Would that be made today?" And my answer is always, "Yes, I think it would be made today." I mean, Down In The Valley did get made. The question is, will it get put out effectively today? There's an appropriate sort of reverence for that period in the late '60s and early '70s when some really great films got made, and they got made within the studio system, which is strange. But I'll say this, I think it's a total fallacy for people to say, "You couldn't make those movies today." I think there's more ways to get a movie made today than ever in the history of the entertainment industry. It's a very exciting time to work in movies, if you're a creative person looking to make a very personal, weird vision.
You know, independent films have been institutionalized, practically. Every studio has got a boutique arthouse label. There's like, 18 different independent film-financing funds. There's stuff that people hadn't even dreamed of 25 years ago, and I think you could absolutely get Badlands or Five Easy Pieces or Taxi Driver made today. In fact, I think the children of those films are getting made. A more interesting question is whether those films are going to get seen and appreciated. Five Easy Pieces probably got to run in some arthouse for 26 or 30 weeks. And that certainly doesn't happen any more.
Of course, something else has happened, which is that DVDs create this enormous extended life for a movie that didn't exist back then. If you missed Five Easy Pieces, you missed it, that's it. There was no VHS, no nothing. And so the fact that Down In The Valley got really great reviews and didn't do very well in arthouse cinemas in New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles and Chicago and places… I don't consider that a failure or a disappointment; you have to curtail your expectations in a way. Do I wish more people would see the film? Yes, but I think they will, that's the thing.
I've gone through the experience enough times. I think American History X made less than $9 million at the box office, but I was down talking to some of the Blockbuster executives about Down In The Valley, and they said American History X was one of their 30 top rentals of all time. And we've watched it happen. Everyone thinks that Fight Club is a very important and successful film, but it was a massive box-office failure. Massive. It was a big flop by any commercial-release standard. And it's been a huge hit on DVD. Everything that movie has become has been on DVD. So you can't stake your sense of creative success on this whole box-office-performance matrix, because if you do, you're going to be disappointed most of the time.
If you try to make interesting films, you're going to be disappointed most of the time. I choose just not to look at it that way. I don't look at American History X as a failure, or Fight Club as a failure, or 25th Hour as a failure, or Larry Flynt as a failure, or any of the movies that I care about that I've made that were not immediately successful. I'll stand with those movies any day over 90 percent of the movies that came out at the same time that made a hundred million dollars. I don't think you could name half the movies that won Best Picture across those years. And all I'm saying is that you have to decide where you root your own taste. We revere those films that we revere now, but at the time, a lot of the mainstream critics totally dismissed Dr. Strangelove and The Graduate and Taxi Driver. They didn't get it. Then that generation comes of age and takes over as the mainstream critics, and they get the chance to name their classics.
AVC: What was it like making 25th Hour? At what point did the movie evolve in order to incorporate 9/11, and how do you feel that ended up resonating in the story?
EN: Well, David [Benioff]'s novel was obviously written before 9/11, but the book has a lot of melancholy to it. It's about regret. To be honest, the initial impulse to say, "We're going to deal with this event" was totally Spike's. I don't think anybody even hesitated to go with him into that, but it was definitely Spike's. And I think that had a lot to do with who Spike Lee very fundamentally is, as a filmmaker. I don't think you could name a filmmaker of his generation that is as tuned into his time. That's what he's all about. I think he's all about documenting the moment that he feels around him, or in some of his films like Crooklyn or Summer Of Sam, moments that he remembers really intensely. And I think he just said, "There's no fucking way I'm making a movie in New York right now and not responding to the emotion that I feel around me." And in a way, I think that particular story dovetailed with it really nicely. But I give it all to Spike.
AVC: At the time, studios were all digitally erasing any shots of the Twin Towers. It's such a shame that 25th Hour is the only film that took the pulse of New York at that particular time.
EN: That's what I mean about Spike, though. Sometimes as an actor, you wind up bringing parts of yourself and how you're feeling into a performance. Like Naomi [Watts] did in [The Painted Veil]. I give her a lot of credit. She came off King Kong, and she was tired, like really exhausted. I don't really think she wanted to be entering into the heaviness of this process with us. And we kind of plowed early on into the scenes where she's tired and worn out in the Chinese village. And it was really interesting to watch an actor just go right with what they were in the middle of, just take everything they're actually feeling and channel it right into the work. I thought it was very, very bracing, in a way. Because in films, especially, you can't help it—you fall into those artificial patterns that go into making a movie. And it felt really alive to me, what she was doing.
And Spike is that way as a director. It's like he has no filter. When he feels something going on around him, that's the movie he wants to make—boom. Look at the fact that Spike had cameras in New Orleans within days of [Hurricane Katrina] happening, because he's like, "This is happening. This is one of the biggest things that has ever happened in our lifetimes, and in five lifetimes in this country, and I've got to be there. I've got to see what's going on. I've got to document it. I've got to try to capture this event." I so admire that about him, because it's like what Diego Rivera was. That's what I think really great artists do. They're the ones who just go, "This is my time. This is the time I have, and I want to interpret it so that later people can look back and go, 'Yeah, this is what this was.'"
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