Original subtitles

- Other than sing in a Broadway musical,

I have done everything, for better or worse.

I started in little movies, big movies.

I starred in daytime soaps, I did nighttime soaps,

I did miniseries.

I did Broadway, off-Broadway, radio.

And you come back to movies

because when you get it right,

it does stand alone.

I have this belief that I've never gotten this right.

I either felt that I was a useful pawn

to a director who was a skilled director.

To Mike Nichols, I just was a spatula he used

to flip an omelet with.

I wasn't the omelet.

I wasn't the spinach or the olives in the omelet,

I was just some salt you might have sprinkled on it.

Or the directors were outright obstructions

to getting anything done.

They were just hideously unqualified.

When you try to ignore the director on the film

and pretend he doesn't exist,

or try to kind of sidestep in every way,

that's like trying to sidestep the birth canal

when you're coming out of your mother,

you know what I mean?

It's like, how the fuck do you do that?

Great films with great directors,

that's the pinnacle.

When I got a phone call from my agent,

and I was in the Tet Offensive of my divorce,

it was probably the worst time of my life.

And my phone rang, and my agent said to me,

he goes, "How's it going?"

I said, "It's terrible."

I said, "This is just a horribly contentious and ugly day."

And he said to me, "Well, whatever you do," he said,

"you go upstairs into that conference room,"

we were doing depositions.

And he said, "You tell those people that from now on,

"they have to address you as Juan Tripp."

And this was his signal to me

that Scorsese had asked me

to do this smaller role in the film.

- I mean, I wish you were up there with me, Juan,

it was, it was exhilarating.

- Be that as it may,

you still have to answer for The Spruce Goose.

- It's called the Hercules!

And it will fly, God dammit!

- I certainly hope so.

The American people deserve something for their $13 million.

See, people think,

they think that this is about money,

and they think that this is about fame,

and they think this is about ego.

And when Scorsese called me and asked me,

I can't tell you what it meant to me.

- I want to ask everyone in this movie,

are you ready to die?

Because if you're not ready to die,

you're not ready to live.

And I am ready to die.

I've been ready to die since I was 19

when I flipped out on LSD for eight days.

Making movies is the oxygen of my being.

It gives structure to the chaos of my life.

- Why do I want to make a film with you?

- I'm sure people have asked you that question.

- How could she turn on me like that?

I thought she liked me.

- Can we just try to keep our pants buttoned

and get out of this town in one piece?

- I'm ready. - Well, stay ready.

And stay by yourself in your room.

- And what am I gonna do for fun?

- Why don't you learn your lines?

- I know my lines.

- You do?

- I just don't know what order they come in.

I trust you.

But in the past, I trusted people

who I should not have trusted,

like the guy that's the dog wrangler over there.

I should not have trusted him.

You should fucking whack him right now.

- What fascinates me about what we're going to be up to,

and what excites me so much is that on the one hand,

we're doing what I regard as not a documentary,

not a fictional film,

but an uncategorizable movie

called "Seduced and Abandoned,"

about our journey to Cannes

to celebrate film, and filmmaking,

and filmmakers, and the festival that honors them.

And with the intention of raising the money

to finance this intimate movie we're talking about

against a big political backdrop

without being absurdly grandiose about it,

our version of "Last Tango in Paris,"

last tango in Tikrit, for short.

- Please give a warm welcome to writer-director James Toback

and a man who needs no introduction, actor Alec Baldwin.

- Give me the scissors.

- What?

- Gimme the fingernail scissors.

- But what do you see in Last Tango that resonates for you

that you want to try to mine again

in a film potentially we would do?

Ideally it would be our analogous attempt to erase

the line between role player and role

to create something bold and dark from you for you.

- I want you to put your fingers up my ass.

- What?

- Put your fingers up my ass, are you deaf?

Go on.

I'm gonna get a pig and I'm gonna have the pig fuck you.

And I want to pig to vomit in your face

and I want you to swallow the vomit.

You gonna do that for me?

- Yeah.

- Huh? - Yeah.

- I want the pig to die while you're fucking,

and then you have to go behind him,

I want you to smell the dying farts of the pig.

Are you gonna do all of that for me?

- Yes and more than that.

And worse than before.

- Clearly here, what Brando did was become Brando

when he was doing those scenes.

One of the master strokes in the history of directors

directing actors was Bertolucci getting this out of Brando.

- You have pointed the way better than anyone,

which is to create a character

which is this close to myself.

And whether you have the framework of a script,

it's improvisatory in one way,

but what has to happen is it's this battery.

And you have to have that other woman.

And as I said to you,

I can put my finger on why, but to some extent,

what's wonderful is I can't put my finger on why

we have the right woman.

Once I met you, I said to him,

there's nobody else we want to do this with.

- My experience with Jim was just, it was exploration.

There weren't limitations.

It was about finding things, on the day even.

- But here's my question, it's gonna be difficult

to get 20, $25 million in Cannes for this movie.

- Especially without us bringing down.

- That's right, exactly.

So what... - It is?

What?

You didn't tell me that.

- I just wished to fuck were coming with us, I really do.

I mean, what fun that would be apart from everything else.

But we will be faithful to you in trying to cast the movie

and raise money with the absolute given that either

it's you or it's no movie.

We will not give in when somebody says,

you have a movie, as long as you use.

- Oh my God,

Claudia Cardinale and Marcello Mastroianni.

So how does it feel to be an hour away

from losing your Cannes film festival virginity?

I'm already excited about losing

my French Riviera virginity.

You've been all over the world

and you've never been to the Riviera?

Never.

And now that I see it, I may never leave.

What would you say distinguishes Cannes

from the other hundred or so film festivals

around the world?

Two things, first, it's history.

Not just in years, but in the range of who's come

with movies they've made over the last six decades.

Practically everyone from practically everywhere,

Hitchcock, Bardot, Welles, Cocteau, Moreau, Kiarostami,

Groucho Marx, Gregory Peck, Wong Kar-Wai, Gary Cooper,

Beatty, Mizoguchi, Loren, Mickey Rourke.

- And second?

- The fact that it's a market for buying and selling

and for finding financing, as we're gonna do,

as well as a celebration of film as art.

Sort of like a split personality festival,

like the split personality movie we're making about it

even as we speak.

We've set some meetings with all

the major foreign sales guys over the next week,

as well as with several billionaires,

at least one of whom I'm assuming will beg us

to allow him to give us his cash.

On his knees, I hope.

But first, we're gonna see Bertolucci,

then we go to the opening ceremony and we've got a slew

of other luminaries we'll be seeing mixed in

with our quest for cash.

- First of all, Natalie, Bernardo's assistant,

is gonna come down and see us here now.

Now she is recommending that we do the interview here

in the Carlton Hotel.

- In a suite or on the table?

- We could do, probably we could do either,

but I would recommend it in a suite.

- Let's have him do it in my room.

Let's have him come rolling into the Bertolucci Suite.

- That's a great idea. - And just then I'll say

to him, I beg your pardon, my lord,

but you're in my room.

- I think that we got a movie in...

- I was told I was being evicted because you are

taking this room from me.

I was told this...

- They take off your name and they put mine.

- It's interchangeable. - This peels off.

- The sexual dialogue feels as if it's coming

not just improvisationally, but from him.

- It is a kind of manipulation.

He did all the text that existed before.

For example, when he's next to the,

he goes to the dead wife.

I was starting with a line from Strindberg.

- I might be able to comprehend the universe, but,

I'll never discover the truth about you, never.

- He starts with that and then he took that and he started

to say, you big fucking liar.

And he goes on with this.

- You cheap God damn fucking God forsaken whore,

I hope you'll rot in hell.

You're worse than the dirtiest street pig

that anybody could ever find anywhere.

And you know why, you know why?

Because you lied.

You lied to me and I trusted you, you lied.

- You know, it starts with something which is written

and then he changed it completely but he makes it his own.

- Did he feel grateful that he had a chance to do that?

- He didn't speak to me for five years.

I was calling him, I was saying,

Marlon, I know you're there.

Why do you think he did that, why?

- Maybe he felt betrayed by me because I stole

from him so many sincere things of himself.

So many real, - The real Marlon.

- Real things of him.

Maybe he felt tricked by me, but I said,

but he was a 49-, 50-years-old man, I was 30, 31.

- When I came first time, I slept in my car,

and from Jeune it was easy.

So I came in car, I was a student

and I just didn't know how to be able to watch a film.

But I was here.

- In 1970, when I came here the first time,

there were exactly three American journalists in Cannes.

It was very rare.

- People here from the first coffee in the morning

'til the last whiskey in the night, they talk about film.

- You know, here is a really amazing combination

of the high art of cinema, there's a reverence for it here.

There's a respect for it, I mean,

the whole tradition of how they receive movies here

and how they honor the filmmakers here,

it's just, it's not like anywhere else in the world.

- I was very young, I was 24.

And "Before the Revolution," my second film,

I was invited to La Semaine de la Critique and here we go.

And the movie is seen, and all Italian critics hate it.

And all the French loved it.

So I decided to become French. - French, yeah.

- You've had in France for decades,

this very entrenched divide between Cahiers du Cinema

and Positif, Cahiers du Cinema is famous

for in the late '50s having had, as writers,

all of the filmmakers who went on to become

the French new wave.

They were at the time huge enthusiasts of a lot

of American genre films, like Sam Fuller, and Nicholas Ray,

sort of B cinema that hadn't really gotten

its due in America.

And very against what Truffaut famously called

the Cinema de Papa,

the sort of French tradition of quality movies.

- When the French and the Italian new wave films started,

I mean, we always heard about the Cannes Film Festival,

the Cannes Film Festival, and so it was

like a Valhalla of cinema in a way.

This was the place.

- And I never missed a festival.

It's kind of adrenaline for me.

It's where you plan almost the whole year.

You see in 10 days, about half

of the important films of the year.

So it's essential.

- Le Film Francais runs a daily guide as to what,

a checklist of what the critics thought.

And if you go down the list looking at Positif

and Cahiers, they're 99% opposite.

And it's almost like they consult each other ahead of time

to make sure that they're not gonna agree

because they almost never do.

- Thank you very much for doing this.

My great pleasure to see you.

- Thank you. - Thank you.

I was invited to the festival to participate

in the jury in famous '68, was Francois Truffaut ran,

and he said you must come right away.

We are gathering here to support our Henri Langlois,

to have him reinstated into the cinematic.

He was men adored by youth, me included.

But he was a very messy director of this cinematic.

He kept some copies of some movies under his bed.

Langlois was an icon, I loved Henri Langlois.

But he was not what the government of that period wanted.

And that started an unrest among the students in Paris.

And it spread out and finally became

the whole May '68 revolution or whatever you call it.

When I came, I realized they wanted to disrupt the festival.

They said that this thing has to be stopped.

I remember Godard shouting cameras, cameras,

the students from Nice are just arriving.

Festival, as the word suggests, is to have fun.

So they were in this mood and stopping festival

couldn't change it, in fact,

added a kind of absurd joy to it all.

- When "Mean Streets" was there, it was a real joy.

And I went there and I had a great time.

We had the Carlton terrace.

You'd be meeting all these different people, all kinds of,

you know it's like, and all these interviews,

talk, talk, talk to everybody, me, me, me, etc.

- I came back with when "Novecento," 1900,

which was very difficult to handle because it was five hour,

little bit more than five hours.

They said, okay, we do one day all dedicated to this film.

So the festival stopped.

There was only "Novecento", the first part in the afternoon

and the second part in the evening.

That was the peak of my megalomania.

If I see the movie again or a piece of the movie,

I can see myself in the kind of ocean of pleasure

of one year shooting.

I was young, I was desiring,

and I was seeing my desires accomplished.

- We went there for two days, it was DeNiro, Jodie Foster,

I think Harvey was with us.

Tennessee Williams was the head of the jury.

He came out, he said he didn't like the picture,

it was too violent

But we had dinner with Sergio Leone and Costa Gavras

and they liked the film very much, they were on the jury.

And so we had a nice dinner at Lo Acis, it was a restaurant,

and we all talked to Leone and Costa, it was terrific,

and we thanked them very much, and we went home.

And the picture won.

Fuck Tennessee Williams.

- I mean, what's the matter with Tenn, it's too violent?

What the fuck does he know about movies?

- I love his stuff. I never,

I only say good things about him, I don't know.

♪ Well you never can tell, but you're looking so well ♪

- When I was a kid and we went to Cannes,

I had done a film called "You're a Big Boy Now."

It was just with Elizabeth Hartman, who was a wonderful,

wonderful young woman, and Tony Bill, when he was a kid,

it was a dream.

And then little by little it started to just become mean

and it wasn't any more a film festival,

it was a film market.

It was one in which all the people were in the know

and they knew whether your movie was gonna go good or not,

even before you did.

And it became very mean spirited, I felt.

And you never had to avail yourself of that market

to raise money for... - No, and I never wanted

to go back to it again. - And you didn't?

- I didn't.

It's not the administrators of Cannes's fault.

It's the people it attracts,

the press that is attracted there.

It's the game, it's like a bullfight.

- It was after, at the end of the 1977 film festival,

when Robert Altman's film "Three Women" was here,

Pauline Kael was on the jury, was the only time

she ever came to the Cannes Film Festival.

The film won the best actress award,

but didn't get anything for Altman.

I was at the Nice airport the day after the festival ended.

Pauline is there, Altman shows up,

sees Pauline, and his great friend for seven years,

you fucking cunt, you were supposed to like my film,

you're supposed to be my supporter and you didn't like it,

you didn't get me an award, blah, blah, blah, blah.

In front of everyone, it was a massive explosion

that was excruciating.

- Talk to me about Damon.

- He's a legendary figure in this world of film finance.

- Truly, you use that wording specifically?

- I do.

He's really the pioneer. - Legendary how?

What did he pioneer?

- The process of foreign sales

where you get a movie financed based on cast names

with a projection of what... - For pre-sale.

- That's right.

- Show 'em a business plan that'll work

and if I can project what my sales will be and I can show

them what I think the US should be, if I can project that

they'll get their monies back in a profit,

I can probably finance any picture that I want to.

I just finished funding an $80 million picture

with Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg.

- Where's the money coming from now?

Where do you go get money now?

Different parts of the world, different kind of...?

- It comes from all over, all over.

My next picture, I have some Saudi Arabian money

and some Russian money.

- Is there more money available now than,

proportionately, allowing for inflation or less money?

- I'd say less money.

- Do me a favor, 'cause I'm gonna go text,

'cause we have to let them know that we're running behind,

bear with me, I'll be right back.

- I would like to ask you,

I have Alec for this next film.

It's a political romantic adventure.

We're gonna be shooting in the Middle East.

Would you be interested in getting involved financing

a movie with Alec, with Neve Campbell,

with four, three or four other names,

political, romantic adventure at 15 to 20 million?

- Neve Campbell is wonderful

but doesn't have marquee value today.

Right, right.

- Alec Baldwin is sensational. - Right.

- But does not denote a theatrical movie.

- Just for argument's sake,

the kind of movie we're thinking of

couldn't go much lower than that.

But what would be the number that that cast

would be feasible at?

- Four to five million.

- I'm too old for that, you know, it's like.

- No kidding. - Yeah, I don't have the,

- It's horrendous. - It is horrendous.

- It's either very, very big or very, very small.

There's nothing in between.

- There's never enough money.

- Never enough money. - Never enough money.

Fighting with them, perhaps about money or no.

- Never enough money, with "Repulsion,"

I had lot of problems shooting the film

because we doubled the budget, unfortunately.

The budget of "Repulsion" was 41,000 pounds

and it cost at the end close to 90.

- Why? - Well, try to make a film

for 90,000 pounds.

- I happen to have an Australian distributor

and a Russian distributor.

- These look like two gentlemen who've been waiting

to give me money.

There's politics, there's adventure, there's sex.

- It's supposed to be comedy?

- And there Will def...

- No, no, no, no. - No comedy.

- There will be humor built into a serious movie.

- It needs to be comedy.

- Oh, you think so?

- Of course. - Okay.

- Why are you wearing a tux?

- It's after six, what am I, a farmer?

- I'm familiar with "30 Rock."

- But here's the thing, submarines are your thing.

How close is that alpha, Jonesy?

- 1,000 yards. - It's been a long time

since you did the submarine picture.

We need action and we need submarine.

Listen, you can have sex, as well.

I don't have a problem.

That's what was missing in the other one.

- Last tango in the missile bay.

- Well, absolutely.

- Unless it's a gangster movie or some genre

that you're associated with, unless you do that,

you have to scratch, I said,

how am I gonna get to make this movie?

I don't know where to begin,

Who's gonna let, no one wanted me

to do "Apocalypse Now."

I had finished two Godfather films, won a ton of Oscars.

In fact, I took the Oscars, I had six of them

and I threw 'em out the window and they all

went down and got all broken and everything.

And my mother went and said you shouldn't do that.

And she gathered the pieces of the objects,

- The shards. - And she went down

to LA and she went to the Academy and she said,

oh my son, the poor boy, says the maid

was dusting the Oscars.

So I was so frustrated.

I said, what do you have to do to get

to be able to make the movies that you have in your heart?

- Can we help 'em out with the actress,

a hot new star, Jessica Chastain?

- Listen, here's my feeling, 'cause I don't want to throw

Neve under the bus, I love Neve, I did a movie with her.

What I could do is invent a role for Neve, another role.

- Have her play the spy. - And we can,

yes, we can use Jessica.

- So we kill Neve.

- We don't kill her, we wound her,

we wound her and she makes it...

- I seduce Neve and then I murder her.

- Her arm in a sling.

- Neve's in the movie and I'll kill her.

We'll murder Neve. - Which will make you

an action star. - Yeah.

So what do you make of the odds of Damon

coming through for us?

- Two to one against. - Really?

I say six to one against.

Well, even if you're right,

don't worry 'cause we're meeting Avi Lerner tomorrow

and he's gotten more stuff shooting

than all the other sales guys combined.

- The way you make it in this business

is you have to become a really selfish motherfucker.

You gotta, this is it,

and you tell your mother, and your wife, and your kids,

and everybody, when necessary, you don't do it gratuitously,

you don't do it purposelessly,

but you tell everybody that this is my thing,

this is who I am.

And along the way I was incapable of doing that.

- And here is Alec Baldwin. - What are you doing

in Cannes? - We're making a film.

- You are? - Yeah.

- During the festival? - Yes,

we're making a documentary that the festival

is a backdrop of the film.

- What's happening in it?

- Well, everything you see, the film is about the festival.

- Is it a documentary?

- No, my partner Jimmy Toback is the director.

- James Toback? - Yes.

- The James Toback? - Yes,

excuse me one second here, let's go, be careful.

I don't want her in the street.

- Let's be careful.

What do you expect from this festival?

- This is my first time here, so I'm very excited.

I'm very excited. - Thank you very much.

Thank you, Alec Baldwin.

- Is the film about the Cannes Film Festival?

The reason I wanted to do this with him

is that the movie business, to me, has changed.

It seems very fragile.

I don't know how much longer the film business can go

in the age of this splintering.

The technology is splintering the audience

and it's happening slowly,

but something tells me it's gonna shatter.

The movie business is the worst lover you've ever had

in terms of you go back again and again and again,

and you go back seeking to recreate this experience

you want to have.

You go back with another chance

to do something that you want to do in movie making

and movie going.

You are seduced and abandoned over and over and over again.

- Why were you making films?

What did it give you as opposed

to other options in your life?

- I don't think I had much of a choice.

The other option was certainly a religious one,

which was the priesthood.

And I certainly wasn't,

- Literally? - Yeah.

Literally I was in a preparatory seminary

and I didn't make it through the first year.

Between the world I was in,

which was the asthmatic situation where the parents,

my working class family, the doctor said, don't let him run,

I didn't run, don't let him laugh, don't let him,

I couldn't laugh, don't do this,

don't do, so I was in a room.

You started as an assistant director

to Pasolini, right?

- Pasolini was before being a director, was a poet,

a great poet.

Then he came to live in the same building

my family was living.

I was 17 and I was in love with his poems.

I was writing poems, I was writing a poem,

and running downstairs to show him.

Then one day when I was 27,

so I will do a movie soon, you will be my assistant.

I said, Pier Paolo, I've never done a movie,

I've never done anything, I've never been on a set.

Me neither, he said.

- I found a kind of peace in a way,

in the cathedral there, the old St. Patrick's Cathedral

as an altar boy, and just as a kid I enjoyed being in there.

And it was a respite from the streets and from the Bowery,

which was very, very ugly,

ugly, and crude, and unfortunate, tragic,

and what's the word, sordid, what was going on around me.

But then you had this movie theater

and that was like America.

There was something about this place called America

was out there and there were people, they had houses,

they had fences, I'm not kidding.

I mean, then there were westerns.

You could, oh man, you go and you see,

you weren't in like a hallway, you were in like this.

- But these were the hard times, as you know,

probably needless to talk about the Communist,

Stalinist period of Poland.

As with everything that I said, the advantages,

and one of them was film school

due to one line of Lenin, among all arts,

film is the most important for us, us meaning socialism.

That school was fantastic, really,

and I have great memories.

- When I was a young guy, I was a writer for Seven Arts.

And Seven Arts was a company that bought Warner Brothers

from Warner, so I was so enthusiastic that they had bought

Warner Brothers that I just showed up

on the Warner Brothers lot and everyone thought

I was the new taking-over guy.

So I went and I went to Errol Flynn's dressing room,

which was the greatest one,

and I just took it over as my office.

It was a month before they realized

I wasn't the incoming management.

- I loved sailing then in the most beautiful part of Poland,

which is called Masurian,

which has about 200 lakes somehow connecting.

And I love that part of nature.

That was a dream for me.

So I started writing a little thing on that.

It was very badly received in Poland,

particularly by the party.

The head of the party, Gomulka,

was pissed off and threw the ashtray at the screen.

I went to Paris to try in the West

and that was my dream anyway.

I never wanted to stay put in Poland.

- By the time we were able to say to myself,

I might be able to express myself,

telling a story of the stories that I know

that I heard my father tell,

that I see what goes on with my father and my uncle,

that became "Mean Streets" in actuality,

that goes on with my friends.

- That was your first story. - Yeah, that was

the first one, but it's always about

obligation to the brother.

That's what I've discovered after 35, 40 years,

it's the same picture.

It's about my father and his brother.

- What was his obligation to his brother?

- To make sure he didn't get killed.

- Literally. - Pay the debts,

sign the loans, go to the sit downs.

He was just one of those guys.

- Look, on payday, at least show up

at Tony's place to meet him, okay.

This way he doesn't think that you're trying

to make a jerkoff out of him.

- Yeah, all right.

- Hey, I'm not asking you, I'm telling you.

- Yeah.

- Bob Evans saw my films.

- So Bob Evans is your rabbi. - Yeah, Bob Evans

was my rabbi and he called me

and he said that he has a script.

So I came to the studio and he had the script and he said,

wait, but also I have this

and he had galleys of "Rosemary's Baby."

- What have you done to it?

What have you done to its eyes?

- He has his father's eyes.

- When I finally went to Washington Square College,

NYU, it was great. - And then you met Hague.

- That was the man, Haig Manoogian.

What did Haig do for you?

- He had this extraordinary passion that combined

with yours will make you go out and do anything.

But he was very different, we disagreed a lot.

And his idea, - About what?

- Well, what cinema should be, he said,

if I see any of these kids come in and there's a gun

in the movie, I'm throwing you out.

I said, yeah, but where I come from,

Well, you really must have broken his heart.

You really, really betrayed Haig, didn't you?

- Well, with "Mean Streets," well, he saw "Mean Streets."

So we argued, he loved Truffaut.

- But not Godard, all you need is a gun and a girl.

- Yeah, exactly.

Not in my pictures, no he'd eliminate it,

that's it, out, don't come in here with that.

- Where do we go?

- This is the world film business.

- All these people are here doing what?

Selling films they have?

- Or trying to find a film to grab,

to set up, to become a partner in, to get a distributor for.

I mean this is like the Diamond Center on 47th Street.

You lost weight. - I wish.

- No, you look, or I gained, so by relative.

This is Alec. - Of course.

How are you?

Come in, come in.

I don't like the Cannes Film Festival.

I don't believe in the Cannes Film Festival.

There's two things, the market,

which I been here all the time, and the festival.

Most of the movie in the festival are movie that

if the only person will go is

their mothers and cousins, that's all.

- What is fantastic about Cannes is that

a Romanian film, or a Belgian film,

or a Danish film, or a Uruguayan film is shown

at the same time with the same number of journalists.

- Therefore, it has a chance.

- Exactly, as a big American production with big stars.

- The big films protect the small films.

The stars protect the unknown actors.

- When I make a movie,

all I think is what's the profit.

Before I make a movie,

I know how much I'm going to sell it.

So it's got nothing to do with the creative part of it.

I look at it as purely business.

- Cinema is not poetry, it's not painting.

You need money.

And we had sometime people saying, well,

it's a big commercial Barnum Circus here,

say, but please, it's very important.

The day we won't have anymore advertising everywhere

will mean that there is no money anymore.

No money, no films.

So we don't have to be naive with that.

- But I think this is what is great about Cannes,

it's an hybrid. I mean, Melhor wrote an essay on cinema

and the famous last sentence of the essay,

besides cinema is an industry.

And I think the fact that Cannes has always remembered

that line, it was also an industry, to combine the two

because this is the nature of cinema, it's imperfect.

- We wanna make a movie, which is set in Iraq.

It is something very polarizing.

We come together and we have

these bizarre sexual encounters.

- Do you want me to send you a movie that we've done?

- Oh, you already made this movie, okay.

That's a wrap, let's go.

And now I am coming off the TV show, six years,

next year I have a half season,

seven years, then we're done.

And I'm going to, I don't like to say this

in some lofty way, but I'm going to

reenter filmmaking as a career.

Do you think you could be in the movie business

with me again?

- Definitely, but not by yourself.

I will have to support you.

- You lay out all the cards, exactly.

- Listen.

- There's gotta be a woman.

- That's what they know me about.

I tell people what I,

you need to get support with other

movie style people around you.

Like Gerard Butler supported with another four

and what's his name.

- So you want my character to go to Iraq,

you want me to fuck four women in a hotel.

- Five, if possible.

- Five. - Make it better.

That in today world, very difficult or nearly impossible,

one man to make the movie on his own name.

- You know, years ago,

people would go to movies to see,

oh, it's a Johnny Depp movie, I'm gonna go see it.

It's a Marlon Brandon film, I'm gonna go see it.

Or even when I was popular,

we're gonna see Jimmy, okay.

That don't work today anymore.

If you look at the reasons they go and they make money,

those are all those franchise movies.

Johnny Depp, who I think is wonderful,

he'll make a movie that he wants to make and

they don't care. - Oh my God,

it's the cop we set on fire.

- Try and look normal.

- Usually that picture would make as much

as the franchise movie because they were Johnny Depp fans.

- You will not like me.

The gentleman will be envious

and the ladies will be repelled.

- What about Neve Campbell?

- Neve Campbell.

I like Neve Campbell, she's a great this,

but you cannot sell that.

- In France, we use the word bankable.

Do you use that in America? - Yes, of course.

- Yeah, it doesn't mean anything.

I mean, today, I would receive all the script,

let's say, lots of scripts.

I can read the script and see it's not me,

but because you're top of the wave, you got the scripts.

I think people don't care about the bankable anymore.

They care about the story.

When you have a good story, then they go and see the movie.

- I don't read script.

- What do you think about Bejo,

if it was Bejo and I together in a film?

- Who is Bejo? - Berenice Bejo.

- I don't know. - You can't raise

a lot of money with her, she was in "The Artist?"

- I know, no.

- They won the Oscar for last year.

- I don't care. - She's gorgeous.

- She's gorgeous, so is... - She's heart-stopping.

- She's beautiful, but she's not a girl I can sell on her.

- The thing is, I'm not 20 years old anymore.

And I know today I'm on top of the wave,

tomorrow I won't.

Especially actresses, and I know how it is.

I mean I know the business, so I don't expect anything.

- The one that I'll do it with you

if you can get is, what's her name,

Natalie Portman or Mila Kunis.

- So both me and Neve Campbell having incredibly,

just kind of exploratory,

I'm not gonna say animal sex, it's exploratory sex,

new sex, new frontiers of sex in a hotel room.

You're gonna give us what, like 50 cents to make the movie?

- Your name and her name, something like four or $5 million.

- Okay. - We may have to

adjust the concept of this movie a little bit.

Fuck these foreign sales guys.

We don't need them anyway,

we've got our billionaires lined up,

Taki Theodoracopulos, the huge Greek shipping heir,

Johnny Pigozzi, one of the richest guys in Italy,

whom Brett Ratner is gonna introduce me to.

We have Denise Rich's party on her yacht.

She's got a massive settlement from her husband

before he went on the lam.

I know all that, there seems

to be billionaires everywhere.

But what makes you think they're dying

to give any of it to us?

All we need is one.

And we still have Jeremy Thomas,

we still have Asha Armitage,

and we have several other foreign sales guys

we haven't met yet.

I thought you said fuck the foreign sales guys.

Yeah, fuck the ones who didn't say yes.

But I always try to keep an open mind.

There's a history of coming to the Riviera

of people of great wealth when they're in trouble.

King Farouk left Egypt, Duvalier left Haiti

when he was in trouble, Yeltsin left Russia

when he was in trouble, and they all came to the Riviera.

It's not a bad place.

- Best buy in the world to bump into.

You don't wanna makes plans with him,

but you can bump into him.

Sit down, sit down.

Don't forget the stars we're shooting

for "Seduced and Abandoned."

Gosling, Chastain, we can sow the seeds

for "Last Tango in Tikrit" with them.

Jimmy, your optimism astonishes me

because I expect nothing but frustration

and disappointment from the movie business.

I know, but not this time, believe me.

Of all the male movie stars in the world,

who's your favorite?

Which actor do you fantasize about the most?

Who is the hottest leading actor?

Which actor would you most like to be stuck

in an elevator with?

Ryan Gosling.

- Fuck, seriously.

It's like you're photoshopped.

- I get it, so the film,

you're making a documentary about trying to get financing.

- That's right. - We have a film

we wanna make. - So you still have that,

but would this turn into just a film about making films?

- We're gonna make this movie no matter what.

But "Seduced and Abandoned,"

the celebratory movie about film,

- But the narrative of that is that you're trying

to get funding for this other film you wanna make.

- That's right. - Which is like

a $50 million drama? - Probably,

probably, probably, probably.

- No, no, no, for that film,

we're gonna go in a time machine and go back to 1990

and do the 50 million.

Now it's like a three and a half million-dollar drama.

- Or, no, or it's a 12 to 15 million-dollar movie

unless you want to be written into it,

which I'll be happy to do, and then it becomes

a 35 to $50 million one. - If you do it with us,

it's 150 million project.

- Hi, guys. - What a dress.

- I just did the photo call for "Madagascar,"

so I'm all Madagascar-ed out.

Hi. - Beautiful.

I don't want to touch you.

- Oh. - 'Cause you look too good.

I know we only have you for 10 minutes.

- Do I need to get mic'ed or anything or are we good?

- We're gonna boom you, I think, correct?

- Ooh, you okay, you okay?

- Yeah, that works quite well.

We get her for 10 minutes and you step on her,

that's great, thank you.

- I loved going to school.

A lot of people don't like drama school.

I loved, - You went to Julliard.

- I went to Julliard.

It encouraged you to be crazy and be outlandish

and try the most outrageous things

and then fail, like fail terribly.

But you would learn so much every time you fail.

And now what's different?

- Well, I try to, - We have a result

that we have to get to. - We do.

But what I try to do is I try now with the director,

I try to make the director my teacher.

- To recreate that. - So every film

is like a master class.

- I just love movies.

I always loved movies.

Movies were like friends of mine.

My mother wanted to punish me,

she'd take them away from me.

Sometimes I put 'em down the front of my pants

'cause I liked the way they felt.

- When I was little, my parents

showed me movies, old movies.

And that's how I grew up, I couldn't watch TV,

I was not allowed.

And then what I was doing is I would take books

and watch the pictures so I could see Robert Mitchum,

Joan Crawford, and everybody was very glamour.

That's what I liked.

Just the dream that you give to the people and the pleasure

you have when you go and see a movie in the theater.

That's why I wanna be an actress.

- Because I knew I didn't wanna go to the meat market.

You know, that was my,

I didn't wanna lug meat down in 14th Street

the rest of my life.

So the only thing that was left,

I mean was I walked into the neighborhood playhouse.

- I'm from a very, very small village in Germany,

with 2,000 people, we don't even have a bar.

I started out dancing, I was a ballet dancer.

I studied with the Royal Academy of London.

From a very young age, I grew up learning

how to express emotions and whatever anger or anxieties

I would have, because I was

definitely an angry teenager.

- My uncle was an Elvis impersonator,

so I was in his act when I was, like, three.

He had the jumpsuit, he had the sequins.

He was sequining the thing himself.

He was standing in the mirror, he was working on the voice,

he's working on the songs.

- And you're watching this. - I'm watching him

create the character.

- I'm always working on something, but I don't mind that.

Like I was the student at school that during critiques,

my teachers, their critique was, you work too hard,

you should play more.

- And at a certain point, because I was there,

he thought, they should put me in the act, it'd be funny.

- And what did you do? - They made me

the head of security.

They pushed me out ahead of him

and there's hundreds of people,

and he's Elvis, I mean Elvis Perry.

And he has no hair, a mustache,

and a big birthmark on his face.

But I swear to God, he became Elvis.

Or at least he did to all of us at that time.

- Being able to allow myself to be so vulnerable and so open

to so many people staring at you and being able to feel,

and the process of getting to a certain level of emotion

is very, it makes me feel alive.

- I have an idea of what my journey is

as the character in the film,

but I don't know exactly what I'm gonna do in the scene

until I look into the eyes of the person speaking to me

and what they're doing.

I always try to act with people who are better than me

because it really puts me on my toes.

I have to rise to the occasion.

It's this moment of panic, I have to keep up.

- It's so rare to, as an actor, to do a scene

and allow yourself to get lost in it

to the point where you don't know what you did

when you're way out.

And if Francis would say, great, let's go,

I knew it was great, or good, or at least satisfied him.

- And you just do what I tell you to do.

God dammit, if I had a wartime consigliere,

a Sicilian, I wouldn't be in this shape.

Pop had Genco, look what I got.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean that.

- But most of the time figuratively speaking,

you have to sort of keep an eye outside of yourself

pointing at the woods, so that's 10%

that's not really involved.

- Your job is to make it seem like something new

is happening every time.

And that's out the window when you come to set

and everyone's got sides in their pocket

and even the electrician knows what you're going to say.

You're stumbling through this blocking rehearsal,

suddenly some guy's putting tape on the floor

and now for the rest of the day, you're married

to where you stood at 6:00 a.m.

They start with the wide shot,

which in most things they never use.

And you're spending all of the newness

of it on the wide shots.

Then they get closer and closer and closer.

And by the end of the day they're on the closeup,

which is all they ever use.

And they use the last one because that's when you got it.

That's when you nailed it.

But it's now you're talking like a robot and

you leave set feeling like a failure

because you feel like nothing changed.

- If we have the dialogue,

yes, there's a script for "Mean Streets,"

but the reality is that if you have Bob and Harvey

and the other people on the scene,

they know the people that they're dealing with.

I hope that they bring something, I'm afraid,

at the same time I'm afraid, can I, how should I put it,

can I create an atmosphere that will bring out something

that I think is wonderful,

something I hadn't expected at all?

- The best experiences I've ever had,

it was the environment that I was in

that got the best work out of me.

Michelle and I, although involved in the film for years,

didn't know each other at all.

And he structured it so that we would

get to know one another on film.

So when we're walking around, I mean,

we're dictating where we go.

And we wanna walk this way,

we walk that way, we schedule a night,

we're just gonna walk around and do whatever we want

and they're going to film it.

And that's us getting to know one another.

- The good directors, they're supervisors.

If I know my relationship, I know what I want from you,

I know what the conflict is.

If I have trouble memorizing,

it's pretty much written wrong.

- For example, in that "Goodfellas" where Joe Pesci

does, what do you think I'm funny?

Literally, was something that had happened to Joe.

He said, I'd do the picture if you put the scene in.

- The fuckers.

Gee, I wish I was big just once.

We're the big cops. - You're a pisser.

You're really funny.

You're really funny.

- What do you mean I'm funny?

- It's funny, you know, it's a good story.

It's funny, you're a funny guy.

- What do you mean, you mean the way I talk?

- It's just, you know, it's, you're just funny, it's,

funny, you know, the way you tell the story and everything.

- Funny how, I mean, what's funny about it?

- Tommy, no, you got it all wrong.

- Whoa, Anthony, he's a big boy.

He knows what he said, what'd you say?

- You're right. - Funny how?

- It's two cameras and it's two medium shots

with everybody around him because as the tone

of the scene changes, the people's faces around them change,

the atmosphere changes.

But I had to work it with Joe so that he did

five or six improvisations with Ray

and we were fooling around with it and I typed up stuff.

But we had to hit certain levels

and I had to keep guiding Joe to that level.

- Oh no, you said it.

How do I know, you said I'm funny.

How the fuck am I funny?

What the fuck is so funny about me?

Tell me, tell me what's funny.

- Get the fuck out of here, Tommy.

- The motherfucker, I almost had him.

I almost had him.

- Woody Allen is the perfect director.

And who he reminds me of, oddly enough, in the moment,

in the actual work is John Hughes, the late John Hughes.

'Cause Hughes was a very successful writer-director.

And yet, when I did one of the,

I did the first real movie I did was with Hughes,

this movie "She's Having a Baby" with Kevin Bacon

and Elizabeth McGovern, and Hughes would sit there

and we would do a scene.

And if he wasn't satisfied with the way it was playing,

he would jokingly stand up and say, who wrote this shit?

And he'd throw the script on the ground.

And Woody's the same way.

You think of all the awards he's been nominated for and won.

And you think of how essential his career is

and the first words out of his mouth are, he goes,

and if you don't wanna say any of this, of course,

don't say any of it.

You say as much of it or as little of it as you care to.

And you're sitting there going, my God,

I mean, the ego.

And I've worked with guys who don't have,

Woody Allen has more talent in his toenail clippings

than these motherfuckers have in their whole body.

And they're sitting they're going, you said perhaps,

but I think you should say maybe we'll go to the party.

Not, you said perhaps, we're gonna go again.

- I'm not precious about my scripts.

I still feel like a novice writer.

I'd certainly feel like a novice director.

And I'm open to suggestions.

I like improvisation, you know, once in a while,

your an idea that's just totally fucked

and you have to humor.

- That ain't no Etch-a-Sketch.

This is one doodle that can't be undid, home skillet.

- But I had a really conventional upbringing,

Catholic, so that messes you up.

I went to college, I started working at an ad agency,

answering phones, making coffee,

making coffees, totally miserable.

And I realized I was bored with my life.

I wanted to try something that seemed kind of bizarre

and out of my comfort zone, so I started stripping.

That was the first time my writing got any attention

because I was writing about it on a regular basis

and suddenly people wanted to hear what I had to say.

- I always wanted to be a writer

from the time I began.

And so what I was going to use

with my better financial situation was to really do

a great big art film.

I made some films that, of course, I'm proud of,

but the kind of of film that I have in my mind

or in my heart, the kind of emotion

that I would love to get at,

I haven't quite ever gotten to do that.

- Honestly, I'd been writing since childhood,

but I was always interested in prose.

I went through the sort of standard

Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath phase.

- Does the choice of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath

suggest that you had early suicidal thoughts?

- Yeah, early, middle, recent.

- Yeah, right. - Yeah.

- What do you use to block yourself from acting it out?

- I think that is, I mean, I think for a lot of people,

and probably for yourself as well,

creating and writing are a catharsis.

It's a form of self-medicating.

I am actually a very driven person.

I'm always trying to think of the next thing

I'm going to do.

And I think that knowing that you're building

to something prevents you from being totally nihilistic.

- We started shooting without the end scene

because I had the argument with Bob Towne.

Bob wanted the happy end.

When I say this is impossible,

if you want this film to have any impact on the audience,

she has to die, there must be some kind of,

the evil has to win.

- Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown

- It's a quick, what Mickey Cohen used to call ankedote.

There's a great story that Charlotte Chandler tells

about Mastroianni and Fellini on "La Dolce Vita."

Fellini wanted him to do it,

offered him the part, Mastroianni wanted to see a script.

Fellini said there is no script.

Mastroianni said I need one.

Fellini handed him a manuscript,

a thick one with all blank pages except for one page

in which there's a drawing of Mastroianni

on a boat in the ocean.

And his prick was hanging down,

sticking down into the bottom of the ocean

with a beautiful mermaid swimming around

the shaft of his prick.

And Mastroianni looked at it and said, I'm gonna do it,

that's an interesting part.

- The film we wanna make is

I am a government operative and the woman is a reporter,

kind of a lefty journalist

and the two of them are complete opposites

and they meet in Iraq during the war.

So basically we come together and it's like,

the world is ending, let's fuck.

And then they have this crazy,

we call the movie "Last Tango in Tikrit."

- Okay, okay, wow. - Two of them

in the same hotel room. - It's deep, man.

- We wanna explore what happens between men and women.

Now would that kind of a film interest you?

- You know, I couldn't tell you.

I would be happy to read the script.

Your pitch has not convinced me yet,

but I'm willing to give it a shot.

- This has been invaluable.

And it shows that we have to polish the pitch.

We need to, we'll set up another bevy of sales agents.

We need three or four more.

- We have one set up for tomorrow morning at nine.

And you'll bring cash.

- Yeah, in a brown envelope.

I assume there's no car chases.

- No. - Or explosions in there.

- No. - I absolutely think

that Alec has the capabilities,

one of those few actors who can kind of cut across

all of the genres and has done it, obviously,

over his career.

Can you shoot the movie in Russia and then maybe do

a part of it in China and have perhaps

a Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and Brazilian star in it?

Then you could perhaps surround him with them.

- Yes, the answer's yes.

- And work with the emerging markets in such a way

that your movie would be financed to the,

- Yes. - At one market.

- I can justify just about anything.

- It's very hard to find anybody today who says,

I want to do that, I want to do that.

No, let's run the numbers.

So it's not anybody who's got a vision anymore.

The visionary studio boss is a thing of the past.

- Is the funding that we potentially might be able

to get from you coming from you

or is it coming from sources to which you have access?

Am I sitting with the one,

is this something that you can do by your own fiat?

- I need my partners involved.

- You do? - Yeah.

- But are you the, I swear to you

I will not repeat this,

are you the strongest voice in that partnership,

assuming we need between 15 and, say, $18 million?

- 15, 20 million too much.

- It shouldn't exceed 10 million.

- Film has to have better relation

to what you can get back for it.

- Five is always the best because that's always,

I find that the threshold is when that's the limit

when people still make money

and then when they start losing money.

- When you said what you did

about an international cast and locations,

was that 100% serious or was it metaphorical?

- It was metaphorical. - Okay, but I'm

a flexible guy.

Put it this way, I'm a prostitute who would've done

what I'm doing as a prostitute anyway.

What we can find out here is logistically

what kind of cooperation we can expect,

what kind of tax breaks,

what kind of advantages to shoot in one place

as opposed to another, Iraq, Tunisia, Abu Dhabi.

- Tunisia. - Welcome.

- Bon jour, bon jour.

- Bon jour. - Bon jour.

- Hi. - Hi.

And she says, ay, ay, ay.

- We don't need a translator, you speak perfect English.

- I certainly do.

- We are here looking for film finance,

because the film we're shooting is in Iraq.

Our film requires a backdrop of war.

I am an American government operative in the Bush era,

the war maker.

He's a CIA operator who's a conservative,

he's a hawk in the purest American terms,

who meets a liberal journalist.

- We could shoot Tunisia for Iraq and make it believable,

right? - Yeah.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, it's the same.

- Which do you think is better, Tunisia or Morocco?

- Yeah, yeah.

So if I'm in Abu Dhabi, which is a city.

- Yeah, it's an Emirate, it's kind one of several...

- It's like New York, New York is in Emirate.

I live in New York. - Okay.

It's a large area. - Yeah, I live

in an Emirate, too. - Right.

- We're trying to get an idea of what's

the most physically beautiful

and also the greatest governmental cooperation.

- Today, we just announced an incentive package.

- We have an incentive, a financial incentive.

- Do you have a film fund that's similar,

that's government funded? - We do.

- Does the government invest in an American production?

Do they become partners? - Yeah.

- Yeah, it could, it could be possible, yes.

Yes, for sure. - Yeah, Tunisia's beautiful.

We have walked the,

we have walked this complex for a couple days now,

looking for the Iraqi Film Commission.

Where is the Iraqi Film Commission?

I don't know. - Why don't they have one?

- No, I don't think there are any.

- Why?

Are there films shooting in Iraq?

- I'm not aware of any.

- Why don't the Iraqis have a film commission to shoot?

- I think, again, I think you need

to put the question to the Iraqis.

- Okay, you're very good.

- This is a highly sexual movie.

Political drama, - It's an examination

of the exchange of energy, if you will.

- There is a lot of specific sexual behavior in the movie.

- Eroticism, love scenes.

- Is there any chance, even a sliver,

- I don't want to be in a bed with Neve Campbell

with a camera rolling and the Jordanian censors

kick the door down.

- It's me that reads the script

in the Moroccan Cinema Center.

- So if we make a very sexually exploratory film

and you read the script, - Yes, I would.

- And you agree that we can make the film,

that's gonna tell us a lot about you, isn't it?

- Yes.

Ultimately, immortality is the goal of many,

if not most, of the people who spend their lives

in the movie business, the chance to live forever.

And I'm not talking about in the minds

of those close to them, but in the cinematic memories

of generations to come.

- Stella!

It's no coincidence that Marilyn Monroe

is on the poster for this year's festival.

Monroe, the greatest example of immortality through death.

Johnny Pigozzi's a car magnate,

his father owns Simca.

He's got an island in Panama.

He's got an apartment in New York, apartment in London,

an apartment in Switzerland.

He's got a lot of money and he's a big investor.

He takes risks. - So getting 15 million

from him for a movie should be no problem.

- No problem, absolutely.

Johnny.

It's my friend James Toback I was telling you about.

- How much time do you spend here during the year?

- About a month a year.

- This is so beautiful. - It is.

But I have to thank my father for this.

I'm not responsible for any of what is here.

- Well, I think it's wonderful to have a father

who took care of you.

- Yeah, he did very well.

- And you'll do the same for us.

What do you take your real sense of identity from?

What makes you just a general lover of life?

Or is there one specific thing that makes you feel the way,

I would say a filmmaker, without which I have

no real sense of identity?

- Because in addition to that, you have tried many things.

You've been writing and you've been the tennis,

and the martial arts, and everything, and the writing books.

You're someone who could have sat back

and you didn't have to do anything, correcT?

- Well, unfortunately, I hate to say this,

but without my father, I would've been nothing.

Couldn't, you know, let's face it.

It's held me back in writing because a lot of people,

nobody wants to hire somebody who can afford not to write.

I think it's terrible.

It's prejudice against blacks.

It's prejudice against gays.

It's prejudice against rich.

- It's prejudice against trust funds.

- Yeah, trust funds, I mean, I think that's terrible.

- Yeah, all prejudice is wrong.

- I'm for freedom.

- You're the victim of a hate crime.

- They should make it a hate crime.

- What I'm trying to do here is talk you

into being part of a legacy of a great work of art,

'cause you're an art collector.

This is, this film is going to be a work of art,

and I need you to come in as,

were you ready to put up 15 million?

- What?

- It was the right place to go, in the Riviera.

Somerset Maugham had described it,

sunny place for shady people.

But in the summer we all came here because

they went to the casinos, and there was dancing.

At, Sidney Bechet was playing

the clarinet in.

He was very glamorous.

And Monte Carlo didn't look like Las Vegas on the sea.

It was sort of the magical place

which Fitzgerald had described.

And the Murphys had invented actually in the '20s,

Picasso, Hemingway, Fitzgerald.

Picasso came here, and de Stael and all of them,

because of the light.

And now, of course, all these people

who are anchored around us, they all should be in jail,

but they're all Russian oligarch crooks.

- Why did you think he was a good shot?

- You know, he's a risk taker.

I don't know, but maybe.

- Are you a risk taker?

- Not in the movies.

- Well, I hate to say, but I was a good friend

of President Nixon's and he liked me and he wrote to me

when I was in prison and he wrote me

a very nice letter, and the screw came in.

I was just doing four months for cocaine possession.

And a screw came in, he said,

censors wanna know if this is true or not,

it was a letter from President Nixon.

I sold the envelope for some food to one of the screws.

- Wow. - And I told him that

afterwards and he thought it was very funny.

- Where were you incarcerated? - In Pentonville.

- If Johnny's not gonna, obviously not gonna invest,

there's a guy over there, Arki Busson.

- He's big. - Very big, successful.

And he's in the movie business.

He loves the movie business.

- What did he do? - He financed

Walters Salas's new film that's in competition here now.

- "On the Road?" - Yeah.

- I'm proposing that you take a serious step up

if we do this next movie and maybe be the sole investor.

You are young, and vigorous, and healthy,

but even if you live another 20, 25 years,

you're in your last lap.

- Yes. - I am, too.

- Definite, no, no you're not.

- So you can afford to make...

- We have a phrase we're using,

which is you're in the second

to the last reel of the movie. - Right, yeah.

200 years after you're dead, quite seriously,

the reason people will know you are here and care

is that your name will be on the screen

as the producer of my next film.

Next time it's a Taki Theodoracopulos production.

You put up the 10, $15 million necessary, maybe even less.

- Please bring me some cigarettes quick

- Who has more money, you or Johnny?

- Johnny by far. - By far.

I wanted to set the stage for a future lunch

in which the investment is made on the spot.

- The investment will be made on the spot

but depends who you will bring at the table.

- Alex Baldwin? - And seriously,

so Alec, yeah. - Alec Baldwin.

- Yes. - In Last Tango?

- Well, in our version. - He can't do that remake,

he's a TV actor.

- So what's the one thing you'd like to do

that you can't do or the one place you'd like to go

that you can't go?

- I'm still figuring out all the things

that I wanna do that I can do.

So that's tough to figure out. - You can do a lot of things.

- But I've always wanted to go to space and I guess if you

would say the one thing that I really want to do

that I can say that I can't do,

but that I would really want to do,

one would be to cure cancer,

so that nobody would ever have to suffer from it.

The other thing would be to have peace in the world.

- You know, Alec and I are planning a film next year.

Would it interest you independently

to think of investing in our movie?

- I don't really get involved in anything

that I'm not really totally involved with.

- Ben Schneider. - Hey, how are you?

Nice to meet you. - Great to meet you

I'm actually the son of Neil Schneider,

who's a big financier on the film.

- Ah, I've been hearing about you and about your dad.

He's the silent investor.

The other guys were there with some fanfare.

What are you up to in life?

- Well, currently I moved out to LA about a year ago.

I've been part of a sketch comedy group

for the past six, seven months.

- Ah, I'm gonna grab a shrimp here.

- Oh yeah, go for it.

- Where are you living?

- Currently, I'm living in West Hollywood,

just down the street from the Viper Room.

- And you want to be an actor?

- Absolutely, oh, without a doubt.

- How old were you when you moved to California?

- 16.

- Where'd you stay? - West Hollywood.

- I could write an interesting role for you.

Maybe we should try to seduce your father

into being a partner.

I'm trying to put some money together here.

- Was where you are now, was that a goal?

Did you have a sense of that?

- But that's the best part about Los Angeles.

It's filled with all these Don Quixote-type characters.

People who have come from, everyone's left their families,

their homes, their friends, their jobs

to pursue a dream where they know that the percentage

of them achieving that dream is never and they do it anyway.

And everyone has shared the same dream and no one's sure

if it was a premonition or a delusion.

And there's only one way to find out.

- Ben Schneider.

- Ben is the son. - I know.

- Yeah, and he's a budding actor.

And I said he's a handsome... - You wanna be an actor?

- Yes, I've been acting since I...

- Why? - Why?

- You know you're lucky to get an audition, then you get it,

you get there, you walk into a room full of guys

that look just like you.

You realize you're not the only one

that wore the cowboy hat.

Then you can hear the other guy in the other room

auditioning and now you're thinking about not doing it

like him as opposed to doing it the way

that you wanted to do it.

Then before you go in,

you hear the casting director negotiating the deal

for the guy that already got the part.

Turns out Jared Leto already got it.

Then you go in, you think you're doing an,

you just think I'll do it as an acting exercise.

I know I'm not gonna get it,

I'll just stick it as an experience.

And then you get to the scene where you're supposed to cry

over your friend and you get the tears going,

and you're emotional, and then she gets a call

and asks you to leave the room.

You're trying to keep the tears up, but it's 10 minutes

'cause you're waiting out there and you're trying

to keep in the zone and you lose it, and you come back

and you want to pick it up, you wanna start again,

but she makes you pick it up where you left off.

You go to your car, you got a parking ticket

because the street cleaning sign has been covered

by the auditions this way sign.

Then you get in your car, you change, you muster up

the guts to go back to

until you go to another one, and you wait in traffic

for two hours and you go through it again.

I think we had a nice connection,

the three of us, don't you?

I bet if I write an ambitious original role for him,

he'll jump on board right away

and the money will click in immediately.

'Cause the one thing we're seeing here

is that money follows stars, right.

Jessica Chastain could be the woman and Neve can be the wife

you divorced or who divorced you before you left.

- Cover sales and magazines are

a very dodgy thing right now.

And so we had to retreat and we talked about we could put

on the cover and how we would change the way

we do our covers and the number-one person by a long shot.

But with men and women in this culture,

it's harder and harder to find somebody

who's both well known enough to move the freight

around the world and who will reflect well on the magazine

but it'll be something that people wanna read about.

- Vanity Fair is not a movie magazine, per se,

but it's become the movie magazine.

Was that an intention of yours?

- No, I think that the one thing that people in the east

may have is a fascination with the, quote unquote, romance

of Hollywood, specifically old Hollywood.

And maybe we see it in a different,

through a different prism than somebody

who actually lives there.

I mean, most of Hollywood, it looks like a,

you go to a Hollywood party, it looks like a casting call

for "Jersey Shore," I mean.

- You mean now?

- Now, yeah.

I mean, look, this weekend,

I mean the movies have degenerated to the point

where you had a comic book movie going up

against a board game movie.

So many people with so much money.

You know what might be a good idea?

Theft.

Just kidding.

Although, you know, maybe not.

The problem is it's so crowded, so many witnesses.

The touching thing is that they're gliding around oblivious

to the one undeniable certainty that unites them.

That they're all gonna be dead.

What good is their money gonna do them then?

They might as well have financed us.

At least they'd have their name on a great work of art.

I gotta be careful or I'm gonna go nuts.

- I was actually quoted recently

and it was a bit of a misquote, 'cause I said,

we make a lot of shitty movies, I did not say that.

I said, as an industry,

we make some shitty movies and we make some great movies.

The real problem in this business, if you make a great film,

if you really get down to it,

you make a great film that no one goes to see

versus a bad film that everyone has gone to see.

The way you keep your job is you make that bad film

that everyone went to see.

You don't get points for the good film

that no one went to see.

- It's not the distributors who say, oh,

we're not gonna put your your film out

because the truth is no one will come in

the numbers sufficient to justify the making of the film.

- Very important to me what marketing thinks

and what they believe can be accomplished

in the campaign for that movie.

- The marketability of a movie has somehow or another

become more important than the story.

- Very important what international distribution

and home video thinks about this movie.

- And that's driven so many of the decisions today.

- Very important what domestic home video

thinks about this movie.

- How do you think that affects the quality of movies?

Because the way I see it,

one person making the final decision affords a chance

at boldness and originality,

a committee decision guarantees timidity and convention,

which is why people with fresh ideas need to run around

chasing money outside the system all the time.

- What it does to you as a filmmaker,

what it does to the sort of agent community,

it stops their ability, when I was a an agent,

I could go in to see Tom Pollock,

and I could convince Tom Pollock or Casey Silver

to say yes to a movie based on my enthusiasm,

my saying I'm gonna take this to the studio

if you don't say yes to me right now,

I could do it at that moment, I could get people.

And those, by the way, not just them, any studio.

I don't believe you could do that at any studio today.

I certainly couldn't do it at Universal,

but you couldn't do it at any studio.

- But why, why? - If I love something

and everyone else hates it, we don't make it.

- I mean, all the movies that won the Academy Award for us,

and I use the word us, so it's never really about me,

were pictures that nobody else wanted,

whether it was "Cuckoo's Nest" or "Dances with Wolves."

- There was a wide margin at the time

where pictures could get made like a 'Taxi Driver"

and ultimately a "Raging Bull" to a certain extent.

And also UA at the time was fantastic.

- And we weren't forced into doing those movies.

We knew we wanted to do them.

- All of that group at UA were very, very supportive

of making the kinds of pictures we thought

were gonna be the the norm.

- I mean, when we did "Apocalypse" and "Raging Bull"

and all those things, it was a different era.

There was a time when you did one or two big movies

which anchored your program of movies.

Now they make five of them, and so what's left?

- But I've been able somehow to navigate

that very, very thin margin now of doing pictures

that I think I could put myself into for two years

and devote that time and get the backing for it.

The thing to tell very often is that I could probably get

the backing now for a number of pictures,

but it has to be their pictures.

- We were always trying to make films,

we make a lot of money so we could be rich

and then finance our own little art films.

That was always the model that we were trying.

- How can I just, I was telling myself, survive

in that milieu?

How can I do that?

And has that margin that we talked about in the beginning

gotten even thinner?

And by doing that, when you do that and there's that much

involved in selling a picture,

you have to be very careful or you have to fight

very, very, very hard to do what you want,

to do what you think is right for the picture.

And that means you battle everyone.

And very often the battling is very, very civilized,

which is even harder sometimes,

because it always comes down to the money.

- They're never gonna give you the money with me

in the movie, you, me, and Neve,

what we've learned is that ain't gonna happen.

I mean, they'll give us $4 and 50 cents to make that movie.

Those people who really excel at this business,

and whether they're the creative forces, behind the camera

or on camera, and even in the business community

even more importantly, how they thrive,

could they have achieved this level of zen

where they move beyond all information is good information,

whatever you give me, I'm gonna deal,

I'm gonna judo what you do in order for me

to move forward with my course and my path.

When I was around in the old days,

there were some people at the top who supported me.

- John Calley. - John Calley,

a number of people.

I don't feel that those in power, not that they're bad,

it's they come from a different time and place.

Absolutely.

How have those guys changed?

- They're not, they don't exist.

- It's like what Scorsese said.

We have to learn to make movies around these people.

- You see what's gonna happen now, though,

is that we gotta get past them.

I mean, maybe not me, I'm too old for it.

I've got my own thing, I'm lucky to get a picture

made one more time, I mean,

to live and keep going for a little while

and see what I can do.

Now you, there's gotta be a way to make pictures.

You did it and you continue to do it.

- Find individuals, new individuals.

- New individuals, but also new technology.

- Cinema is bigger than all of this other stuff.

Cinema truly is an art form given to us by the gods.

I've seen grown-up men, people like, well,

Marty, or my friend George, I mean,

just take two pieces of film and put them together

differently than they were and see that it means

something else and just jump up and down,

enjoy with the magic of it.

So as long as it's that, you follow that,

the other stuff isn't important.

- You find there are things in the way and to stay angry

in a good way, which is to, what is this,

this is getting in the way, get rid of it, get rid of this,

get rid of that, get rid of this.

You have to stay true to that impulse

'cause there's nothing else, especially as you get older.

- What's filmmaking like for you now?

- Well, I would say it's easier and easier to make it.

What's always difficult is to get

the financing going for everybody else.

- I'm looking forward next to get to

different kinds of equipment again.

To move away the equipment, to move freer.

- Once I'm on the set, once I start working

on the preparation, on the editing, it flows.

And I try to simplify,

I don't have to look for some kind of astonishing effect.

- Cinema now, luckily I think, there are no more,

I don't think there are any more categories

like a documentary, non-fiction.

It doesn't matter.

The idea of the shot, the solid shot with a Bertolucci

or a Kubrick, or any great cinema master is gone.

- Gone, yeah. - It's been shattered.

Shattered, the shot means nothing anymore.

You caught onto this quickly.

You understood it 'cause you started doing it

with the video you went to, you caught onto it.

- In black and white.

- It's a kind of a thing where you never stop learning

because you physically change, things happen.

But it's there's such a difference

when it's a great experience when you would,

- Is that what you're still chasing?

- A good script, you have to do shit now.

I mean, not shit, excuse me.

You know, I get down on myself, I go,

Jesus Christ, you know, I've never cheated anybody,

And I start going through all this, oh, woe is me shit.

And what am I walking around like a beggar here?

Why isn't anybody calling me?

I mean, you go through all that.

I mean, the bottom line now is that

I'm happiest when I'm working,

And especially if it's not something that

I can walk through, you know, something, I like to work.

So obviously you have struggled your health lately,

as you say, you didn't make a movie for 10 years.

Was it part of it because of your back problem?

- Yeah. - Or was it all of it?

- It sounds a bit stupid.

I mean, I was obsessed by recouping my back,

which was strange.

So I had three operations I wanted to have and here I am.

Every operation was worse and more pain

But who cares, now I found out that I can do

a movie even on that.

So you're ready to go back to work?

- I want to find immediately another film

because I never felt as good for 10 years.

Like in the shooting this, me and you.

Going back to what I like to do,

going back to my normalities to do film.

- I had in mind for years and years doing a film

about my childhood on the German occupation.

And I found "The Pianist" book and I thought

that's quite well connected with what I remember

without being exactly what I know

because it was not the Krakow ghetto where I was,

it was about Warsaw ghetto.

And I would never make the film about Krakow ghetto.

- Why is that? - Too close to home.

Once you make a movie somewhere, you ruin it.

It's normal, your memory.

A memory, it's an important part of my life.

- I'm never gonna make a film as successful

as "The Godfather" again, that's a fluke

for many reasons that happened.

So basically I started anew from nothing.

"Twixt" was funny because it bit me

because "Twixt" was just gonna be fun.

But then the movie got serious on me and that's when

the film took its more tragic turn as it were.

So I didn't have an ending.

In the script, I kept asking,

what's the end, what's the end?

He says, do you want to really go there?

Because if you want to go there, you can't come back.

And I said, what are you talking about?

He says, you are the ending and you look in yourself

and you know what I'm talking about.

- Then it is time to face the truth,

to end this story there is no other way.

- I never admitted to myself

what that scene is that I should have gone,

I should have been there.

It was the weekend and I was working on a movie,

and said, let's go, we're gonna have boats.

I thought they were little boats.

I thought they were pedal boats.

Had I been there,

had I been there, I don't think it would've happened.

- And now you've had your drink.

- They shot Sonny on the causeway.

He's dead.

- An alternative to what you and I have been

talking about here is a movie in which the essential subject

is the same, the characters, the politics, the sex,

the background, the romance,

and all of the things psychologically and emotionally,

- Psychology. - But,

it is played against a far more intimately

scaled down background.

In other words, it could be that it's two people

who have come back from the war and who are both

sort of lost and they are living in whatever location

you want to put them in.

It is basically a domestic setting, it is a local setting.

Work within a financial framework.

Tell me how much money you are going to give me

and I will devise the film.

It's a considerably larger investment than the current one.

But would you guys be interested in jumping in

and becoming either part of or all of the financing

we seem to be pretty close to getting for this next movie?

I'm looking at three guys, look,

it's as if this is the parole board

and they've been told that I,

- And you're Sirhan Sirhan.

That's right, exactly.

- And you're never getting out.

- That's right.

For all I know, you would be

deeply damaged by a loss of money in that area

or it might not even be noticeable.

It's not for me to say.

Money is the one thing people lie about, people conceal,

everything else is open.

They'll talk about their gallbladder, their affairs,

the crimes they committed, the drugs they've taken,

the times they passed out from alcoholic poisoning.

- Originally, we were gonna do it in Iraq.

And finally Jimmy has this brainstorm, he says,

we don't need to go to Tikrit.

He goes, let's have them come back from Iraq.

And they're completely shell shocked

and ravaged by the experience.

We wanna make that film.

Jimmy's gonna write this film.

- Are you gonna finance that?

- Let's face it, this is much more sexy and emotionally,

sure, I want to do it.

- With you, it is all, - It's a lot more fun.

- Yeah, it is more fun. - It is more fun.

- There's two ways of doing it,

from the emotional standpoint

and from the risk-reward standpoint.

So you have to do due diligence on everything.

- Sounds like a good idea. I mean,

I think I'd have to sit down and...

How much will you give us to make the movie?

You know, you could get $25 million

for that movie just by...

- Let's square the deal right now.

- Oh my God.

- Let me write,

let me write the amount of money that I'm willing

to give it to you. - Okay.

- But you can't open it until afterwards.

- Okay. - Okay.

- Okay. - Yeah.

- How much more of this are we gonna do, fellas?

You get that lightning bolt in there?

I bet you did.

How do you feel?

I must tell you, I'm optimistic.

Of course you are.

What else would I expect from you?

I need to balance your, how would you put it?

- Fondness for reality.

- Okay, look, Taki wrote as much as you need.

- And you take him literally?

You don't think there's a very large measure

of mischievousness in his personality?

Absolutely, but that doesn't mean

it extends to funding our moving.

But even if it does,

we have our three "Seduced and Abandoned" investors.

We have Medavoy's 25 million.

We have the prospect of Gosling and Chastain.

What we have is what we came here with,

which is hope.

That's not bad, people lose hope all the time

and ours is intact. - By the way,

the music for "Seduced and Abandoned" must be

Shostakovich, the dark poetic beauty of the fifth,

juxtaposed with the perversely playful waltzes.

It's as if Shostakovich wrote these for you.

Fatality and elegance made one.

- I love you.

I wanna know your name.

- Let me ask you that,

I've been asking everybody in the movie that,

and it's, I think of it myself all the time,

are you, I know you love life obviously, and you wanna live,

but are you afraid of death or are you ready for death?

- Thanks a lot.

At 11:45.

- No, because I wanna be a mom.

- I don't think about it, so I guess, must be.

- You're ready for death, you can handle it, right?

You don't want it, but you're not afraid of it.

- Yes, of course, if you say so.

- I mean, I know I could make it into that death montage

and that's all I care about.

- I wanna make another 50 movies.

Would you settle for four?

- Not four, because I make three a year.

- You're not gonna live for another 60 years,

for another 50. - What, get out of here.

- I was never really willing to die

but I was always ready.

- To die, no, I'm not ready to die.

- Still like to do a couple things here and there.

- Maybe a little bit later on.

- I don't like to worry about my death.

It's gonna happen and interrupt what it is I'm doing.

- Still struggling with the religious aspects of it, yeah.

- No, I don't think I'm ever gonna be ready to die.

Are you ready for death?

- No.

- Now shut up.

- He's asked every God damn person.

- How the fuck could you be ready to die?

I'd be awkward, though, crack pipe and fucking.

What are you talking about?

- The only thing missing from this movie is us

actually being in the intensive care ward of a hospital

with some 95-year-old fucking guy with tubes coming out

and Jimmy goes, are you ready to die?

- I'm aware of it,

but I'm doing my best to put it off as long as possible.

- I was on a plane and it started to go down for a minute

and the things came out of the,

people were looking to the person next to them

and trying to bond with that,

you're the person I die with.

And people were crying, it was very dramatic.

And my instinct was to finish my steak.

And I just started really shoving my face.

- John Updike, very, very fine,

wonderful poet as well as novelist, obviously,

and critic for that matter,

who died in his 70s, without complaint, of cancer.

No one knew he was sick, no, he knew.

This is what he wrote shortly before he died.

It's called "Requiem."

It came to me the other day, were I to die,

no one would say, oh, what a shame,

so young, so full of promise, depths, unplumbable.

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes

will greet my overdue demise.

The wide response will be, I know,

I thought he died a while ago.

For life's a shabby subterfuge

and death is real and dark and huge.

The shock of it will register nowhere

but where it will occur.

- You know I love you.

- Yes. - You know I have

deep feelings - I know, I know.

- Of great, tremendous love for you.

- Yes. - And you just

added to the menu why.

You know, you're a very good reader of poetry.

- Thank you. - You're very good.

You read that beautifully. - Thank you.

- You read that beautifully. - Thank you.

Thank you. - In spite of all your

self-destructive tendencies, - Thank you.

- I adore you. - Well, thank you.

Come on, you know, you want to kiss him.

- I said, I adore you, I didn't say I wanna fuck you.

- But that's part of the beauty of film

is it conjures up notions of finality, of death.

The movie ends and it's like, it's over.

You're sitting there in the dark,

but there's light and you are alive as long as the movie

is on, and then all of a sudden.