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Reprinted from London's Daily Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=000933649949939&rtmo=fMVoV0fs&atmo=99999999&pg=/et/98/3/7/bfmamt07.html .
As his new film opens, David Mamet talks to David Gritten about Clinton, Shakespeare and being a boy scout.
DAVID Mamet's characters have tended to talk tough, in staccato rhythms, heavily laced with profanity. This choppy, salty language has become his trademark, from the mid-Seventies, when he first won recognition with his plays American Buffalo and Sexual Perversity in Chicago, through to Glengarry Glen Ross, his Pulitzer-prize-winning drama about a group of predatory real estate salesman.
Outspoken and irreverent, he has always embraced controversy. Oleanna, his exploration of political correctness and sexual harassment on a college campus, polarised audiences. America's pre-eminent playwright is known as well for his interest in male-bonding activities such as poker, hunting, gambling, shooting and the world of confidence tricksters.
He has also enjoyed success as the author of film scripts such as The Untouchables and The Verdict, which starred Paul Newman as an ambulance-chasing lawyer. He is responsible for The Edge, with Anthony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin as deadly rivals struggling to survive in the wild, which was released in this country last week.
Opening this Friday is Wag the Dog, with Robert De Niro and Dustin Hoffman, the story of a US president embroiled in a sex scandal with a young girl. The president is advised to wage war on Albania to distract public opinion. Given these hard-boiled themes and his own macho image of beard and crew-cut hair, it comes as something of a shock to hear his precise speech lapsing comically into schoolboy Anglicisms such as "Golly!" and "Goody gumdrops!"
David Gritten: Having written Wag the Dog, how did you feel when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke?
David Mamet: What stunned me was that Clinton planned to bomb Iraq rather than Albania. Which is just another example of someone not following the directions of the script.
He's seen the film?
I'm sure he has. Jane Rosenthal, who produced it, is active in the Democratic Party and threw a small dinner party for a million of her closest friends and Clinton, and invited me to go. I just didn't have the stomach for it.
Jane told me that when I first wrote the script she gave it to [NBC news presenter] Tom Brokaw, who said: "It's pretty funny, but it's so dammed far-fetched." So, after the Clinton thing broke, she called him up and reminded him of that.
How did you come to write it?
I was trying to talk Bobby de Niro into doing a film. He was shooting Heat, and I spent a couple of nights in his trailer talking to him. Finally he said, "This idea isn't for me - do you wanna do something else with me and Barry Levinson?"
Next day Levinson called and said: "It's this book about a president who goes to war because he's in trouble and needs to change the subject." I said: "That's great." Six weeks later, we were filming.
How did The Edge come about?
My producer friend Art Linson just moved over to Fox, and they asked: "What do you want to do?" He said: "I want to do a movie Dave wrote." They said: "What?" He said: "I don't know: I haven't asked him yet."
I was up in Vermont, spending a lot of time in the woods, and I told Art I wanted to do an adventure in the outdoors. Art said: "OK - make sure it has a great big grizzly bear or an Englishman's penis." So I flipped a coin, and the bear won.
Mamet has also directed five of his film scripts. These include two about elaborate confidence tricks: his debut House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner, starring Steve Martin as a rich con-man, which opens later this year.
Is The Spanish Prisoner a companion piece to House of Games?
I think of them differently. House of Games is in the genre of film noir, compounded of irony and violence. It must end badly. The Spanish Prisoner is a light romantic thriller, Hitchcockian, compounded of jeopardy and comedy, which must end well. It's intriguing, watching films about confidence tricks. You see the first trick, you expect a second, but you don't see the third.
The confidence trick, the magic trick and, to an extent, the drama work because the audience is endeavouring to understand the play. It's that very preoccupation which enables the confidence man, the magician, the dramatist, to misdirect them. Because they're working so hard.
Somerset Maugham once said drama isn't a craft, it's a trick. I understand what he meant. When drama functions, it's because it's mechanically correct. It engages the audience by relieving them of the necessity of work. The work, to make the audience want to know what happens next, has been done by the dramatist through plot. If the plot is correct, the audience will enjoy the entertainment. If not, their attention will wander. They'll say: "What beautiful scenery." Or: "I loved the visuals." It's always a sign a film's in trouble when people say: "The production design was fantastic."
Or, for that matter: "What a great performance." The greatest performances I've seen are so great that you forget they're acting. So you don't look for performances with a capital P from actors.I'm looking for the same thing Shakespeare was looking for. He makes his instructions to the players pretty damn clear. Stand up, say the words as clearly as possible, stand still. Let the play come through you.
You want actors to strip away mannerisms or flourishes?
It's not the actor's job to embellish the play, but to do something more worthwhile and difficult: to resist embellishing it. It's when one resists the impulse to help that the truth emerges. The great actors I've seen in movies or on stage are capable of being quite still, and letting their uncertainty, fear and conficting desires emerge rather than trying to cover them up with their ideas.
Is writing your own films different from writing for a studio?
No, it's all my own stuff, whatever I write, for someone else or myself. I don't hand it in until I'm as happy as I can be. Then I put my name on it and say, that's it, I wrote it. And, if you don't like it, you know who the author is.
You can't control what another director does. You can write the script for a film, but you're not invited on set. No. You never want to see a writer on set. It's like asking your plumber on honeymoon.
Have your scripts been ruined by directors or actors?
Oh, sure.
Isn't that frustrating?
Yes, but one of the surest signs of an amateur on a movie set is someone who makes a suggestion to someone else about their job. I have to remind myself I'm working for someone else.
Is it hard, adapting other people's work for film?
What's hard is getting involved in what you're going to keep. Trying to keep "the good bits" will waste your life. I've always said: it's the Great Scene that ruins the good movie. And the Great Line which ruins the good scene.
Born in Chicago to parents of Russian-Jewish extraction, Mamet did various lowly-paid jobs until, at 24, he founded his own theatre company. These days, does it take a massive effort to want to write for the theatre, when films are as huge and lucrative and influential as they are?
There's some of that, certainly. It's the Big Table, isn't it? I used to be a rather committed gambler and I always wanted to play at the Big Table. And the Big Table is the movies.
What about the state of theatre-going?
It seems to me that especially in America, all the discussion, the popular references, are about films. What's happening in New York is stunning. You cannot walk through its theatre district before a Wednesday matinée - there's so many people there. They're theatre-goers, and they're out-of-towners. It's become a tourist industry.
New York is a port city which has become a tourist city. Everyone wants to go there; its land becomes expensive, so the wide spectrum of people who were going to the theatre, have to move out. Because they're gone, one has to appeal to tourists, who want to see something they recognise immediately, get their money's worth.
It's like hunting. What causes the game to disappear is the lack of an environment. In New York when I began in the Sixties, you had a constant broad-based theatre-going population and theatrical stars. Now you don't.
Do you still call film executives "those swine in Hollywood?"
Every chance I get. I've met great people there, but the wonderful thing about Hollywood is that you can't insult anyone. No one falls out with you for long, because they think they just might do business with you in the future. Exactly. So it gives me a great opportunity to vent those idolatrous and well-founded feelings of superiority.
You're about to direct a British film, Rattigan's The Winslow Boy.
I picked up the play, and said, my God, what a melodrama. Everyone I know in Britain had read the play, done it in school, and said: "Why do you want to do this old thing?" I think it's a masterpiece and he's a brilliant dramatist. Just as I want to direct Shakespeare to direct the Crispin's Day speech, so I want to direct Rattigan and direct some of those scenes. They're the essence of what drama is to me.
In The Spanish Prisoner, a knife with the phrase "Be Prepared" on it plays a significant part. Were you ever a Boy Scout?
Oh, yes.
Did scouting equip you well for life?
Well, I still remember the Morse Code, which I always thought might come in handy. "Be Prepared" is the best advice. The Edge is about a lot of things I learned in the Boy Scouts: how do you get by in the woods?
A Japanese sword master once said: "In combat, the trick is to see things very far off as if they're very near. And to see things very near as if they're far off." That's a saying I try to use a lot as a writer. It's the same as "Be Prepared."
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