Henry Jaglom began his screen career as an actor, but after helping Dennis Hopper edit Easy Rider (1969), he got the chance to direct his first film, A Safe Place (1971), starring Tuesday Weld and Jack Nicholson. While that film (and Jaglom's 1976 follow-up, Tracks, starring Hopper) weren't hits, he went on to become one of Hollywood's true mavericks, lining up his own financing and frequently handling his own distribution via his Rainbow Films company. Jaglom has explored women's obsessions with relationships (Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?, 1983), food (Eating, 1991), biological clocks (Babyfever, 1994), and retail therapy (Going Shopping, 2005) while also examining the often-chaotic lives of film and theater artists (Festival in Cannes, 2001; Last Summer in the Hamptons, 1996).
His new film, Hollywood Dreams (opening throughout the U.S. in May and June) stars newcomer Tanna Frederick as an aspiring actress from Iowa trying to make it in Los Angeles. Fueled by her fantasies of Tinseltown's golden age, she's forced to confront her own dark secrets and comes to realize just how far she's willing to go to become a star. Alternately witty and wrenching, Hollywood Dreams also stars Justin Kirk, Zack Norman, David Proval (playing a role about as far removed from The Sopranos' Richie Aprile as possible), and longtime Jaglom collaborator Karen Black.
You rather famously like to use improv and let your actors bring elements of themselves to the characters. When you start shooting, how much is written down?
I would say that's the biggest myth about my filmmaking, that it's improvisational. They used to say that about Cassavetes's films too, and nothing was further from the truth with him and it's not further from the truth with me either. I had a 132-page script on Hollywood Dreams, and the truth is when I give the actors the script, I say to them, "Listen, learn the character, get to know who he or she is, feel the background of the characters -- where they came from before the situation of the script, what their needs are, and so on -- and then when we shoot it, use the lines as much as possible, but feel free to depart from the lines if you feel any expression of it in your own language, some memory or some thought or some impulse or something that the other actor is doing, feel free to spontaneously riff off the script."
I think people misunderstand this because frequently what the actors give is better, more succinct, more funny or human, more to the point than what I've written, and I don't believe it in sticking to what I write the way I would for a play. On stage, I'm a stickler for the words, but film to me is about a mood, a moment, a look, a smile; it could change everything.
So your script is like handing a jazz musician "My Favorite Things"�
Exactly. It's a guideline; they can always go back to it. There are certain things that have to be said to make us understand the characters, but I'm very, very insistent on the actors -- and actors take this to different degrees, depending on their own gifts -- feeling free to just go off into their own expression of what that character needs or wants. And frequently it can be anecdotal or it can be a totally different linguistic way of achieving something or it can be behavioral, which substitutes often for words.
My favorite instance of this is my second movie: It was called Tracks, and it's about a Vietnam War veteran who came home accompanying the body of a soldier who had fallen, and he's played by Dennis Hopper. And I had written what I thought was a rather brilliant six-page oration he was doing at the funeral about America's loss of its own innocence and all that, and when he got to the last scene, Dennis Hopper said, "Could I hold the speech in my hand?" and I said sure, because, you know, at a funeral you might have notes. And he held the speech in his hand, I said, "Action," and he never looked at it. The first thing he did was tear it up and throw it into the grave, and then started just saying, "You motherfucker. You motherfucker. You motherfucker. You motherfucker. You wanna go to 'Nam? You wanna go to 'Nam? You motherfucker." He kept repeating fury and anger in monosyllabic words, and it was a thousand times better than all that smart stuff I had written. He really came to the essence of that soldier. And because I think I'd cast well, Dennis understood the anger and the hurt better than I did, really, and it was not about how to express it, it was about the fullness of the expression. I would have been idiotic to keep the actor trying to make the speech that I wrote when I see that what he's doing is more effective for the picture.
What's interesting about the new film is that you clearly have an affection for Hollywood's Golden Age although those movies are the opposite of what you do as a filmmaker.
They were artificial and false, yeah. But they went to the heart of certain human experience that is very touching and holds on to us for life. I just got a review from Boxoffice magazine that made comparisons to All About Eve and A Star is Born, in that both those films were extreme and were willing to go to big lengths and be very dramatic and over-the-top even. But they work, and this reviewer was kind enough to say that Hollywood Dreams worked in that same way. I'm owed to those studios a sense of the very large theatricality that I'm willing to and enjoy plunging into, and I cast an actress like Tanna Frederick who can go places that very few contemporary actresses can go, they're so frightened of size. But I think it's held onto by a truthfulness and reality of behavior, and to me it makes the passions work. Hollywood is a bigger-than-life place, with bigger-than-life people.
Not to give away too much of the plot, but the film seems to imply that growing up on the life lessons of classic Hollywood movies can really do a number on us.
Well, I made a film called Venice/Venice (1993), which is entirely about what the movies did to the romantic dreams of women, and my very first film, A Safe Place, is about somebody not wanting to grow up because of all the attachment to the romantic notion of film. I think it was a very dangerous thing for all of us to grow up with, because it gave us a picture of life that we can't ever really achieve. On the other hand, it was a beautiful and wonderful kind of fairy tale, and I'm very pulled into it even if I try to be cautionary about its dangerous side effects.
So do you see yourself as having one foot on either side?
I always have. Funny you would say that, that's what Orson Welles used to say about me. I think that's exactly right, because I adore those films, and I can't make a film like that. I think it was Truffaut who said, "Once you get to make films, you can no longer make the films like the films that first made you want to make films." And you can't, because you know more about life, and those films were about a dream. But nothing is gonna move me as much as Casablanca for the rest of my life, no matter what I know. That's why I frequently use music from the past, to stir that up.
There's a good reason why the film is called Hollywood Dreams. I'm not presenting Hollywood. But there is a dark and much more scary underside to the dream, to Hollywood, and to the pain of people and what they go through here in their desperation and their need for fame and the impossibility of achieving it, statistically, in this business and what people do to achieve it, to try to overcome those odds, and I wanted to look at all of that. In that sense, I think I am being true to a film like A Star is Born or All About Eve.
Tell me more about Tanna Frederick; she does give an extraordinary performance in the film …
Amazing.
… had you met at all before her involvement with the stage production of A Safe Place?
No. Well yes, but barely. I met her because she wrote me a letter. She was in a play with an actor who had been in one of my movies, and she said, "Oh, how do I get into one of his movies? I hear he's doing a movie called Festival in Cannes now." And that actor said, "He's a sucker for anybody who writes him a letter telling him how much they liked a movie of his. So just write him a letter and tell him you loved a film of his." So Déjà Vu (1997) was out then, and she wrote me a letter saying how much she loved Déjà Vu and going into great detail. And it was a very smart letter -- I thought she had extremely good taste [laughs] -- and I called her up, we got into a conversation about the movie, and then I arranged to meet her.
She came in the next week, to see whether she was right to be cast in Festival in Cannes. I didn't think she was, but she reminded me of this character I had written in a play some 30 years earlier at the Actors' Studio, a character in a play called A Safe Place, which became the basis of my first movie. And strangely enough, Karen Black had played that part at the Actors' Studio, and Tuesday Weld played it in the movie with Jack Nicholson and Orson Welles, and I hadn't looked at it in 30 years. And I said, "You might want to do this in your acting class," and I gave her a copy of the play. And instead of doing it in her acting class, she went back, somehow, scoured the town, found a producer, found a director, found a theater, found the money, and she said, "I don't want to do a scene in class; I want to do the whole play onstage at the Skylight Theater in North Hollywood." And I said, "Great." And then I saw her work. I saw her bring to life this character I had written. And then I knew I wanted to star her in a film.
Let's talk a bit about your own financing and distribution.
I couldn't get financing for so long that I learned from Orson Welles the most important lesson, I think, which was never to try to get it from Hollywood. I couldn't do it. I got a deal to make A Safe Place because I'd been involved with the editing of Easy Rider, so everyone involved with that got the chance to direct their own picture -- Bob Rafelson, Jack Nicholson, myself, Dennis Hopper, of course. My first picture was A Safe Place, and it was such a commercial disaster -- it was a poem that took place in a young woman's mind, basically, a very internal film, and it had absolutely no commerciality and it was for Columbia Pictures, and they didn't know what to do with it, and it was a disaster, and I couldn't make another film for five years. I couldn't get the financing.
Finally, this hustler actor came along, Zack Norman; his name is Howard Zukor as a promoter and Zack Norman as an actor. He raised the money for me when nobody would to make my second film, Tracks. Which was a half a million dollars in some tax-shelter money from some doctors and dentists; I don't know what that was. And that movie failed terribly.
And then he raised the money for my third film, Sitting Ducks (1980), which had a modest commercial success in America and was a big hit in Europe. And I suddenly found that in Europe, I could get the financing for any film that I wanted as long as I kept the budget within a million dollar to two million dollar range, which I've been doing ever since. And not coming to Hollywood but getting $100,000 from Germany and $200,000 from France and so on and putting together the territories and selling in advance the rights in Europe, where they seem to like my films a lot. And I learned from Orson, nobody can stop me this way. They all make their money back; they all make some profit, sometimes even a nice profit. Everybody's happy and I don't have anybody looking over my shoulder. I always think I'm the freest man in Hollywood; I get to make films the way I like them and nobody can stop me.
You're also one of the few filmmakers who self-distributes on a large scale.
I do that because the Samuel Goldwyn Company did a nice job distributing a film of mine called Always (1985). I watched what they did, and I thought, Oh, I can do that. Put a few people in an office making phone calls to art theaters around the country, somebody else making posters and trailers and sending them out. I'm a little bit of a control freak, and I thought, let's try this. And I tried it, and not just with my films; I've distributed Monty Python's films. I'm distributing a film Maximillian Schell made about his sister Maria, a documentary. When Robert DeNiro had a film he wanted distributed that he had produced called Mistress (1992), and he couldn't get a good deal that he liked, he gave it to me and we distributed it.
This way you stay in control. And again, I think it's all because of the lessons -- the negative lessons, I'm afraid -- from Orson Welles, not to let them take away your ability to get your film seen. And if you distribute it yourself, you're in a better position, just like if you get the money yourself, you're in a better position.
There's been a lot of discussion of late about how hard it is to get arthouse bookings, how hard it is to get independent and foreign films reviewed in daily papers. You've been doing this for decades now -- is it more difficult, is it the same?
I think it's easier, because the technology now is so vast that you can make a film for very little money, you can get it seen by sending it out via e-mail or posting it on MySpace or YouTube, you can get your work inexpensively made and seen and there are an endless number of distributors. When I started out, Tracks never got distributed because there were six studios -- Columbia, Warner Bros., and all that -- and I went to each one and they each turned it down and that was the end of it. There was no Miramax, there was no Fine Line, no classics divisions, there was none of that. The only person who rebelled against that was John Cassavetes, who started distributing himself. I was sort of his protégé, I watched him and I was very affected by what he did, and I decided by my third film that maybe I could do this, and by my fourth film, I did do it.
I've not always done it; Festival in Cannes was distributed by Paramount Classics, and I listened to them. I've had some very nice offers, and I like the money when it comes. But sometimes I feel -- and this is true about Hollywood Dreams -- that I want to make sure if it doesn't do the first week's business, it doesn't get pulled in this incredibly competitive market. So I could make deals on my own, sort of guaranteeing that the film will stay and have a visibility in certain markets. We're opening in about 42 or 43 cities at the end of May and early June, and I think we'll do very nicely.
Have you ever thought about directing a film you haven't written or writing for another director?
No. Neither one of those things. To me, and this is something else I learned from Orson: You may adapt something, I might find something, but it's like a painting. I don't want someone else to tell me what colors to use, and I don't want to do colors to someone else's sketch. I just feel it's all one thing. I want it to be my film, and I want you to either love it or hate it, but frame for frame, it's my film. I don't want to make compromises, and it's not a collaboration for me. It's like writing a book -- I don't understand two people writing a novel, or two people collaborating on a painting. I know some people do it, and some people do it very well, but I don't have that access to that collaborative spirit, I'm afraid. I collaborate with my actors. I always think of my films as actors' films, where the actors are writing them with me as we go along.
You mentioned Karen Black, with whom you've worked for many years, and she has some great moments in the new film. When you're that familiar with a collaborator, does it get easier to communicate with each other?
Sure. We know each other well. The first film she did with me, Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?, I think is still one of her greatest acting performances. And by now, it's kind of easy. She says this, I say that, I say no, a little of that, she says, a little of this? and I say yeah, and that's it. Sometimes people watch us and are amazed.
But I have that same relationship with a brand-new character in terms of Tanna Frederick. We've never worked together before, and it felt like we'd been working together forever. She got my shrugs and shifted her performance accordingly, and she does the most amazing things I've ever seen an actor do. I think she's a truly spectacular actress, and this is the first time I've ever been tempted to and, in fact, did put an actor under contract. I never think of myself in those terms, but I suddenly became David O. Selznick because I don't want others to grab her now. And I've made another film with her, which is now on my editing table, where she plays a very different kind of character but equally extraordinary, called Irene in Time, about the relationship of daughters and their fathers, about how that relationship affects their relationship with men for the rest of their lives. And we're planning a third one now.
There's a line the Justin Kirk character has about feeling more comfortable in a woman's world …
That's me.
… I was going to say, it sounds like the kind of thing I've heard you say in interviews.
That's definitely me. What I'm happy about, I must say, and rather surprised about, is that men seem to be responding to this particular film better than they have to some of my films in the past. I'm not quite sure what that's about, but I'm happy to see it. Usually the audiences for my films are two-thirds or maybe even three-quarters women, and they have to drag their men along. Most male audiences don't seem to get as involved with my films. My films deal with emotions and feelings and relationships, that's what I'm interested in. And it seems that women are much more open to exploring that while men like harder storylines. But so far, the men have been kind of terrific.
At their best, I think, your films explore what women talk about when men aren't around, and you'd think that would be a draw for them.
But that scares men too. The biggest thing I had in that area was when I had Eating playing all over the country, doing incredibly well, but the theaters were calling me, furious, because men and women were getting into arguments in the middle of the movie and the men were walking out. Then women were coming back with their girlfriends. It caused a really big division -- men did not want to sit around listening to women talk about food. And I had a bit of that with Going Shopping, which was my last movie. But for this film, men are staying in their seats; I don't know what they think of it, but they're not walking out! [laughs]
