The following interview is reprinted from FILM DIRECTORS ON DIRECTING, BY JOHN ANDREW GALLAGHERJAG: Five Corners is HandMade Films' first American film.
TB: It's their first American release and the first one they've financed. I would say that HandMade was pretty much long distance geographically in London, as well as practically speaking for most of the film until we finished shooting, then they had their comments about the cut, but it was pretty much a hands-off operation once we got started.
JAG: Once again, you've made a low-budget movie that looks big-budget.
TB: It's about as cheap as you can make a film in the mainstream today. It's a real movie populated with Screen Actors Guild members, a NABET crew, catered by a real catering company, so it was made in that sense like a $20 million movie. It only cost $5 million, largely because my producer, Forrest Murray, and myself, said we'd make it for $5 million. We like to feel we'll do what we say we're going to do.
JAG: It's also a period film.
TB: It's tough. It's a New York movie, shot all on location, set in 1964, with a lot of nights, and a very large speaking cast, so all of those things were major challenges to bring it in on budget.
JAG: With those kinds of pressures, how do you keep it from getting crazy?
TB: The only way to keep a movie from getting crazy is to not be a crazy person. I like to think of myself at the very least as a very professional and responsible filmmaker. If I say I'm going to make a movie for a certain price, which is basically what I say when I go into business with anybody, I make that movie at that price, and make the same movie that we all started to make, the same script we all started with, at the money we said we'd make it for.
JAG: How do you go about creating an atmosphere for the actors?
TB: You don't have to create that much of an atmosphere. You just have to prevent it from becoming the wrong atmosphere. You have to avoid letting it devolve into something it shouldn't be. It's easy to have a happy set, it's easy to have actors that are welcomed to be creative and a crew that is contributing to the spirit of the film and not just doing their job, because that's what everybody wants and that's what everybody gravitates toward. It's when you start impeding that atmosphere and start imposing an ego on it that things go wrong. In effect, it's really letting it happen as opposed to making it happen.
JAG: Do you rehearse much prior to shooting, or do you wait until you're on the location?
TB: I don't like to rehearse mainly because I really can't get much out of it. The idea of rehearsing a scene that say two or three people are going to play on an empty set is just too difficult for me. Until an actor sees it for real and can think, "Gee, look at all these things I have to play with," the things that the art director, prop master, or director thought to put on the set, it's pretty hard to rehearse because the rehearsal you might have undergone when you're working in an empty room goes out the window when you get on the set and find out there's table and chairs where you didn't think there was going to be one, or nothing where you thought something was going to be. I like to rehearse on the set with the actors under battle conditions of the reality of what's happening.
JAG: Do you find the actors respond better to that?
TB: For the most part actors do. Some actors feel that they need and want rehearsal time. I haven't come up against a situation where an actor so needed pre-shooting rehearsal that I felt they or the movie suffered because they didn't have it. Maybe some day I'll do a movie in which somebody says, "I just can't go to work without a week's rehearsal," so we'll find a way to do that. Basically, directing for me is solving the problems that you're presented with. It may be an actor problem, a location problem, or it might be that you get up in the morning and you have a weather problem. None of these things is insurmountable and they're all gonna happen. I don't have a method. My method is to do what's best for the actors.
JAG: What kind of preparation did Jodie Foster have for her Bronx accent?
TB: She worried about her accent. We found somebody who specializes in accents and we brought him out one day to work with her. In an hour or so, he said, "She's got it," and she did. Again, there's a problem you face and you deal with it however you can. In an hour, she got it fine. If it required her having somebody on the set throughout the picture, that would have been fine, too, but that was the solution to the problem.
JAG: John Turturro is outstanding as the psychotic Heinz, yet you also feel sympathy for his character.
TB: Turturro's character is a pretty amazingly violent and simmering personality. If you look at this picture cynically, you might see this guy has no redeeming values and he's a psychopath. But within the script there is the room, and John brought to it a humanity that most bad guys in the movies don't exhibit. That's based among other things on the notion that the prisons of this country are filled with terrible guys who've done terrible things, but outside that prison there's somebody that they love. There's a wife or kid somewhere, somebody that loves them, who sees something in them that the judge and jury will never see, a compassion or a feeling. They're not just murderers, they're not just bad guys. I'm happy to say that Turturro's character reflects that philosophy of mine that every bum on the street or every bad guy in prison was somebody's little boy.
JAG: Gregory Rozakis gives a very quirky and off-beat performance as the detective who talks about Indians in the Bronx.
TB: He was the star of Kazan America, America ( 1963). The first few days of shooting we did a lot of the detective scenes. In a sense I worried more about that than anything else in the movie because it set the tone for the other performances. It walked a tight rope. I wondered, "Is it too much, is it too far out?" Gregory didn't know it, but he was sort of the trial horse for the tone of the picture. He was great.
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JAG: What qualities would you say are essential to the job of directing movies?
TB: I think everybody has different qualities that they bring to the job, but as a producer or as an actor I certainly have enjoyed most and benefited most from working with directors who embody the qualities of patience, human kindness, calmness, joy, and having fun doing your job. There's another school of thought that subscribes to the notion that great art comes out of this crucible of pain, suffering, and human conflict on the set. I just don't subscribe to that in my work, and so for me, the most important quality is the ability to lighten up, have a good time with your work and enjoy working with the people on the film. For me the process is the product. I don't really have a big stake in the success of a film in a personal way as much as I do have a stake in the process of making it. A movie takes a year of your life if you're working fast, from the moment you begin to know you're going to make the movie through pre-production, production, post-production, and the machinations of releasing it. You can't guarantee that a film will be well received critically, and you can't guarantee it will make money or that it will be well received by the public. But as a director, the headiness I feel, the power of the director, is that you can guarantee that the year will be a well-spent year of your life and that's almost my entire interest in making a film. Part of that well-spent year, by definition, is that you do the best work you can do, but not at the expense of enjoying spending the time doing it.
"The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."
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