Biography

[on Gary Oldman] I had a great relationship with him [on State of Grace (1990)] - later he was in Final Analysis (1992) but I cut him out. He was so good he tipped the whole movie. People just wanted to see a movie about him. They're like "Why can't we see a movie about that guy in an insane asylum that Richard Gere treated?"[2015]

[on Final Analysis (1992)] Working with Orion...it was a one-of-a-kind experience. And I didn't realize that until my next movie, which was Final Analysis (1992) for Warner Brothers. The politics of making a movie in the Hollywood studio system, versus the New York-based Orion, were very, very different. And "Final Analysis"(1992) was a star-driven movie with Richard Gere as a producer coming off of Pretty Woman (1990), so I was also managing that in a way I didn't have to on State of Grace (1990). I wanted "Final Analysis"(1992) to be more like a Brian De Palma movie, a kinky thriller like Sisters (1972) or something, but Gere wanted the guy he was playing to be an ethical psychiatrist. I said, "But Richard, you're sleeping with the sister of your patient and the other patient has a crush on you. You're totally fucking with her head. By the nature of the story, he's never going to be ethical - he's a schmuck. Why don't we go all the way?" He wasn't having it. He said, "Well, he just makes a bad decision." And I said, "Well, kind of a really bad decision that gets you kicked out of your industry. It gets you kicked out of psychiatry for doing what you did. They revoke your license." Up until "Final Analysis"(1992) I had lived a privileged existence. My first film, Three O'Clock High (1987), was produced through Amblin and I had Steven Spielberg protecting me. Then I did U2: Rattle and Hum (1988), and the band was financing it - later they sold it to Paramount, but I was supported and got to make the movie I wanted to make. Same thing on "State of Grace"(1990). Then I go on to "Final Analysis"(1992), and I was supported but it was much more political in terms of appeasing all the big power players. I had big producers and big stars, and there was a lot of fiddling with the script and a lot of fiddling with casting. I wasn't allowed to just make decisions - every decision I made was scrutinized, and I wasn't used to that. It really threw me off. A lot of my time and energy was put into being careful instead of filmmaking, and that disturbed me.[2015]

[on scoring State of Grace (1990)] I went to Orion and said, "Hey, listen, we lost U2. What about Ennio Morricone?" They said, "Fantastic. Go see if you can get him." So my editor Claire Simpson and I go to London with the film, and we're carrying it in this big film can. We both look really young and small. We arrive at Ennio's screening room in Rome, and Ennio is waiting for us in the lobby. He always talks through an interpreter, so we carry the film cans in and the interpreter says, "Mr. Morricone says you two may take the film upstairs to the projection room while he waits for the director." I said, "I am the director, and this is the editor," and I could just see the guy roll his eyes like, "What have I gotten myself into? Nobody told me it was this punk kid." He hated the temp music, which was chosen when I thought U2 was doing the score, but eventually he came around and we had a great working relationship. It was really fun. He'd sit at his piano and we'd run through themes. It was really exciting for me, because this is the guy who did The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), you know?[2015]

[on pre-planning the visual style of a film] For me to have a visual point of view, it has to be worked out ahead of time because you shoot totally out of order. If you're shooting page 100 on day three, who's to say what's going to come before that in the movie if you're making it up as you go? On every movie I've ever made, I list every single shot before I get to the set. I have this document, often 75 or 80 pages long, of every shot in cutting order. It takes me a few weeks, and I don't do it on and off. I do it day after day after day after day until I'm done. That way, I basically go to sleep and wake up with the movie in my head, because I'm trying to be very cognizant of what I like to call the symphony. Like symphonies, films all have rhythm: they have low points, and they have builds, and they have crescendos, and they come back down. Every shot you do contributes to that rhythm, whether it's going to be a long take or a bunch of quick cuts, whether it's going to be slow motion, whether it's going to be tight or wide. Those all affect the visual and emotional impact of the movie on the viewer. So now I have this document, which I rearrange again once the schedule is done. I cut and paste all the shots, not based on story, but schedule, because what you can get done in a day has more to do with the amount of shots you're doing than with page count. Each shot takes time. So I look at the schedule and the shot list, and we redo the schedule based on shots. If there are a bunch of crane shots, we schedule those all at the same time so we don't have to build the crane, take it down, build the crane, take it down. That allows you more time for acting and creativity, because you're not sitting there watching guys put up scaffolding all day. I want to give the actors the most amount of time to do their thing, because if what's in front of the camera isn't working, everyone behind the camera and every dollar we're spending is worthless. To me, the whole reason to go to the set every day is to get the actors to do their thing, and to give them the room to do that, and to really let them explore the characters. We got to rehearse for a week on State of Grace (1990), and I took the actors to the locations - I didn't rehearse in some empty room. I took them to the church, I took them to the bar, I took them out to the river. We went around in a van, and we actually staged and rehearsed on location, because that way they go home and think about the scene where we're really going to do it, as opposed to walking through in the morning going, "Oh, this is the church. OK. Where would I be in here?" Orion paid for a week of rehearsal for the entire cast, which is one of many things they did that was incredible.[2015]

[on Heaven's Prisoners (1996)] Alec [Alec Baldwin] and I weren't done with the movie when Savoy went under and sold their catalog to New Line. They told us, "It's over. Wherever you're at now in the movie, finish to deliver." Essentially, mix it in a couple of weeks, print it, done. If they had warned us that the company was going down, we could have pulled all-nighters for a couple of weeks and made the movie better, but they didn't have the heart to let us know. I found out from the trades. Alec and I met with New Line and said we could finish the movie right with $100,000 and a month more of work. They didn't care, they just bought the catalog for home video. The funny thing is, at one point we actually had a better cut of it, and then we were scrutinized, scrutinized, scrutinized, and did testing and all that. I began to try to fight off the scrutiny, and the cut got away from me a little bit when I was trying to fix the criticism. Really, the criticism was silly criticism that I should have ignored, but again, you get so into the battle...and it broke my heart because that movie had so much promise. I had to go to DGA arbitration against Savoy during the editing process because they tried to fire my editor. I had William Steinkamp, a huge, Oscar-nominated [editor]. (...) They fired him and gave me a guy whose only experience was doing cut-downs of movies for TV. I said, "You can't do that. I get to have my ten-week cut under the DGA rules. After that you can dump us all if you want." They said, "We don't give a shit about the DGA agreement." I went to my lawyers, we went to the DGA and they said that's a breach of the agreement. It lasted all about an hour. I got to do my cut, they liked it, and for a brief moment I had hope. Then they just reverted back to the old behavior. (...) I fucked it up, because I was not mature enough either as a person or a filmmaker to understand that I just needed to block all the irrelevant noise out, and just be like "Uh-huh, great, whatever you say" and just do my thing. I should have ignored it, but I got caught up in it. I got caught up in the phone calls, and the e-mails, and the faxes, and every day battling over equipment and the amount of film they'd give me and the locations. They would just take days away for no reason. At one point I needed some extra time to shoot the shot where Alec sees the rings that reveal the mystery of the movie of who's the murderer in the story. The producer said, "No, you don't need that." So I cut the movie together, and of course of the higher-ups said, "Where the hell's the shot?" And I said, "Well, wasn't allowed to do it." Around the time of the first preview I was doing a Tom Petty video, so I got a counter and the rings and used the video guy's hands for Alec Baldwin's fingers because they matched. I shot it on the set of a Tom Petty video and that's how I got that shot in the movie. That's how absurd it was. The clue that tells the story, they wouldn't let me shoot. No interest in the story we're trying to tell. I got so angry, so overwhelmed, and so combative that it affected the symphonic rhythm of the movie. If you watch the movie, it's out of rhythm. The movie runs nicely, then slows too much, takes too long to get to this, and over-talks about this...it's fits and starts, that movie. I needed to smooth it out and I didn't get to, but I could have done a lot, lot better when I shot it. I was fighting so much that I lost track of my shot list, if you will. (...) It really took the wind out of my sails, career-wise. I considered quitting directing, until I realized it was the only thing I knew how to do and the only thing I could make a living at.[2015]