Interview Susan Ray 

There’s no cultural curio quite like the unfinished film. Given the exorbitant sums of money and the life-consuming time commitments that are inherent to filmmaking, it always seems odd that projects would be abandoned mid-production. Some barely get off the ground (Roger Ebert and Roger Corman’s Sex Pistols comedy, Who Killed Bambi?), others get re-edited and reimagined by other filmmakers (Godard’s One A.M.), and some get scrapped when tragedy befalls one of the leads (George Cukor’s Something’s Got To Give, forsaken after the death of star Marilyn Monroe). And a lot of the time, these films are pet projects that their makers labour over until their death.

Such is the case with We Can’t Go Home Again, the final film by Nicholas Ray. In 1971, while working as a film instructor at the State University of New York at Binghamton (and considered by many to be “washed up” and well past his prime), Ray undertook a massive collaborative film project with his students, as way of furnishing them with on-the-job filmmaking experience. Shot on multiple formats and casting Ray and his students as versions of themselves, the film can be broadly called “experimental,” especially because Ray is so directly associated with his classic Hollywood films like Rebel Without A Cause. After premièring their film at Cannes in 1973, Ray and his (now lifetime) students worked on another cut, which circulated in 1976. Ray was still tinkering with We Can’t Go Home Again when he died in June 1979.

You can see glimpses of the film in Lightning Over Water, Wim Wenders’ meta-fictional portrait of the last years in Ray’s life. But otherwise, by and large, the film has been unseen for 30 years, with the existing prints ravaged by time and exposure. This year though, We Can’t Go Home Again resurfaced. Aided by interest at the Venice International Film Festival, where the film was met with hurrahs last September, Ray’s widow, Susan Ray, helped to reassemble a workable cut of We Can’t Go Home Again that maintains the vision of her late husband. Susan Ray also produced and directed a “companion film,” Don’t Expect Too Much, which documents the making, remaking, and rediscovering of We Can’t Go Home Again.

Susan Ray will be in Toronto this weekend, accompanying the newly struck print of We Can’t Go Home Again, which will make its Canadian première at TIFF Bell Lightbox as part of Hollywood Classics: The Cinema Is Nicholas Ray. The A.V. Club spoke with her over the phone about her work on We Can’t Go Home Again and Don’t Expect Too Much, her late husband’s approach to filmmaking, and the generation of betrayers.

The A.V. Club: The reassembled, remastered cut of We Can’t Go Home Again premièred early this year at Venice. But it’s been around for more than three decades. What spurred finally getting it together so it could be presented theatrically?

Susan Ray: It’s been around in a version that was very difficult to screen, to be honest with you. The sound was not good quality; the picture, after 20 or 30 years of use, was really worn out. There were only two prints in the world, and after 35 years, they’d just been worn out. My goal, since before Nick died but even more after he died, was to get this film seen, and to get it into a form where it could be seen without frustrations due to technical failings. And it took me this long to find backing to do it. I think I had to learn a lot in order to do it right. In truth, Nick’s work had always been 40 or 50 years ahead of its time, which makes now the right time for this film.

AVC: Your husband’s films have always been popular. But it seems like, in the decades since he died, there’s been a new appreciation of films like Johnny Guitar and Bigger Than Life as being hallmarks of American cinema. Did this renewed interest, or reappraisal, help get We Can’t Go Home Again off the ground?

SR: It’s hard to say what came first, really. This project has generated a certain amount of “buzz,” is the overused word. I think there’s a natural cycle to an artist’s attractiveness to the public. And particularly someone like Nick, who was controversial. He went out of favour for a while and then came back in. There’s so many causes for every effect, that it really is hard to say.

AVC: From what I understand, We Can’t Go Home Again is a pretty radical departure from classical, mainstream filmmaking. Can you speak a bit about how he came to develop the project?

SR: Sure. He needed a job. And he took a job teaching film at [SUNY Binghamton’s] Harpur College. His feeling was that the only way filmmaking could be taught by anyone was by hands-on experience. His plan from the outset was to have the students work each position on the film crew and rotate every couple of weeks. Once he knew that, he had to decide what the film would be about. We worked together to come up with one storyline, which would be his storyline, about a film director who had left Hollywood. He made a few spectacles in Europe and then had a premonition that he’d never make another film. So his arc was that by working with his students, he’d overcome this premonition. But then, as Nick got to know the students and they got to know him, and their lives began to intersect, more storylines were added. That’s how the film evolved.

AVC: You mention, in your piece on the film in the new issue of Cinema Scope, that We Can’t Go Home Again exhibits a mystical vision, or is mystical. What do you mean by this?

SR: Well, it’s not that the film itself is mystical. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that. But there’s a mystical aspect—at least as I use the word—to the way Nick approached things. He was looking for the essence of a person, the essence of a situation—what it would be, or what he or she would be, at the core—and what forces were acting on this person or were active in a set of circumstances. His dedication to his craft was that of a seeker. He gave himself completely. It’s quite visible, if you see the documentary that accompanies We Can’t Go Home Again, in how he worked with these kids. They worked around the clock for days at a time. Total dedication. Total love.

For all the talk about his excesses and his addictions, this was a very loving man who cared about his fellow human beings. He didn’t look at all like a saint. Not at all. But his caring and his generosity were very real. His concern for the underpinning was very real. He had a love for truth. At the same time, he was a perpetual liar. He was a man of many contradictions. Oh, I’m saying too much here.

AVC: This documentary you mention is Don’t Expect Too Much, which you made, correct?

SR: Yes.

AVC: So what’s the origin of this film? Does it date back as far as the making of We Can’t Go Home Again?

SR: Oh, no, no, no. I just began making it this past February.

AVC: So it didn’t have as long of a gestation period…

SR: God, no. It had no gestation period! [Laughs.] It was a spring from start to finish.

AVC: Well, what motivated you to put this accompanying film together?

SR: To be perfectly honest, it was never my intention to do it. I was hoping someone else would do it, but they backed out at the last minute due to personal difficulties. There was no time to find someone else and bring them up to speed. I had the sense that nobody could do what I wanted done better than I could, which may not be very well. But [there were] certain questions that I wanted answered, and I couldn’t conceive of anyone prodding those questions more efficiently than I could.

AVC: What were those questions, exactly?

SR: I was, and am and always have been, quite absorbed and fascinated by the process of how wisdom is transmitted, in any form. I’m interested in the relationship between teacher and student, and what the dynamics are for passing on wisdom of any kind. I was interested in how these students, now that they’re the same age as Nick was when he was teaching them, think or feel about this experience, which, for most of them, was a pivotal experience of their life.

So many people had described Nick, in the last 10 years of his life, as “washed up.” They said he was making this film as a kind of desperate attempt to get back into Hollywood. I was interested to see if this was really true. Was he washed up? Did he know what he was doing? Or was this a hallucination of a man losing his talent and losing control of his resources? I was interested in what, precisely, he wanted to do with the film. I knew that he hadn’t gotten where he wanted to go, but I wanted a clearer idea of where he wanted to go. These were some of my questions.

AVC: Where does the title, Don’t Expect Too Much, come from?

SR: I don’t want to spoil it, but it comes from a line in We Can’t Go Home Again. It’s not self-effacement, believe me.

AVC: It seems like it could be self-effacement on your part, or it could kind of temper the expectations of anyone who’s been clamouring to see We Can’t Go Home Again.

SR: Well, I’d be sorry if it had that effect. I really thought about it. When you see it, you’ll know it’s a perfect title for the documentary, and for the subject that it addresses. It’s not meant to cast any doubts on We Can’t Go Home Again. That would make me sad.

AVC: Going back to something you mentioned earlier, about the transfer of wisdom: It seems, from reading about Nick Ray’s work and watching his films, filmmaking was more about process than the final product. It was about setting everything up, working with the actors, framing the shots, and all the work that went into the finished film itself. Does this philosophy come to a head in We Can’t Go Home Again, which seems to be explicitly about process?

SR: I think it came to a head in the sense that he didn’t have a chance to go further. I think you’re very accurate in describing how he thought about it. And by the way, that’s another aspect of what you described as the “mystical.” It’s the daily process by which one learns oneself. If you do something every day, you have a reference to inform you about who you are and how you live in that moment. Please stop me if I’m not being comprehensible.

AVC: Nope. You’re entirely comprehensible.

SR: Okay. So, for Nick, the way he approached filmmaking—I’ve been a Buddhist practitioner for several decades—and, to my perspective, the way he approached filmmaking is the way I approach meditation. It’s what he did every day in some form to understand himself and his world, to have some sort of reference to know if he was in attunement or not.

AVC: There’s this phrase that you always seem to bring up in interviews about Nick, or maybe it’s his phrase that you’re repeating, but it has to do with the students who worked with him on We Can’t Go Home Again and their parents coming from “a generation of betrayers.” Is that right?

SR: Nick would say that. And then he would say that we were a generation who held our hands out to our kids and then pulled them away.

AVC: Was this an attitude he hoped to correct by working on We Can’t Go Home Again in this egalitarian way?

SR: That’s really the way he approached people, generally speaking. He was one of those rare folk who could talk to anybody. He never talked down to people, unless he was really pissed. He knew how to relate to anybody. He had a tremendous gift that way. So this film wasn’t really a specific amend, and I don’t know if he was trying to make amends. But that’s one of those questions where the film will answer it better than I can.

AVC: When you were getting in touch with all these former students, 30 years after the fact, for Don’t Expect Too Much, what was their reaction to the film they worked on decades ago finally getting something like a theatrical release?

SR: There was a certain sense of caution: first of all of me, and also of the project. I tried this so many times before and failed. Nick tried and never raised the money to complete it. There was a caution not to get disappointed again, not to expect too much, if you will. But they got more interested as I had more news to relate. Then they were a little nervous and afraid that the film was not going to be well-received, as it hadn’t been in the past.

But now they’re excited. The screenings had been very successful, and there’s interest all over the world, from Tokyo to Korea to Poland and all over. It’s great to see, because they worked so hard and it ended badly. By the time they stopped shooting, Nick was in bad shape. He couldn’t see a path to the end. He was too close to it. I don’t know that moment where you’re creating something personal and it’s hard to see the shape, but he was still in it. The idea that it might, 30 years later, have a better ending, and a happy ending, is beginning to dawn on [the former students]. Several of them came from across the States for the New York Film Festival screenings.

AVC: The film is screening in Toronto as part of a retrospective program that’s oriented around Hollywood classics. So it has kind of a “Nicholas Ray: Titan Of Classical Hollywood” feel. But then there’s this experimental, collaborative film programmed along with the other features. How do you think people might react to that?

SR: I do hope they ask certain questions that will be fruitful. I hope they ask themselves, “What if there’s a thread between these Hollywood films and this film? And what is it?”

AVC: He’s always seemed like a bit of a Trojan horse, in a way, getting all these radical themes and messages into his classical films. So it seems like programming this experimental film alongside all of these Hollywood classics seems like an ultimate Trojan horse gesture.

SR: A Trojan horse. Hmm, that has so many negative connotations in a way. I have trouble with that.

AVC: Well a Trojan horse in a good way: A film like Bigger Than Life, for example, sneaks all of these critiques of the American way of life after the Second World War into something that has the shape and texture of a melodrama.

SR: Oh! So in that sense, that’s well put, then. It’s my belief that We Can’t Go Home Again is very, very timely. It’s hard to talk this way, because I’m the widow, and you expect me to talk this way and maybe don’t believe me. But I’m not doing this because I’m a devoted widow. I’m doing this because Nick has some very, very penetrating observations about that time, and those observations are very relevant today. For example, he saw what he called “the hunger for self-image” or “the search for self-image” in these young people. This now has evolved into a worshipping of false images. And people die for it! If they put the wrong image up on Facebook or something. Nick saw it in its first stages. We have archival footage of him addressing a technology conference in upstate New York—40 years ago, when computers were the size of small rooms—where he says that we are creating a generation of perpetual adolescents and consumers with technology, and that we weren’t helping them to learn the joy of living, or how to say “hello” to their fellow humans. This was 40 years ago! Where you even alive then?

AVC: No. I’m only 25, about three or four generations removed from the “generation of betrayers.”

SR: Actually, it’s funny you should say that. Nick always wondered what made his generation the greatest generation of betrayers. My own conclusion, momentary conclusion, is that as you get older you become a generation of betrayers.