Nicholas Kazan: Laughter in the Dark

SR: Control, freedom-pretty elusive stuff for screenwriters.

NK: The amazing thing about Reversal of Fortune was that I didn't lose the control with Barbet [Schroeder]. It was very much like the relationship I would have had with the director of a play. My wife knows Tom Schulman and, apparently, before Peter Weir changed a line of Dead Poets Society, he'd consult Tom. It's interesting that Tom won the Academy Award for best script last year and Peter Weir was nominated for best director. I was nominated for best screenplay, Barbet for best director. I don't think it hurts the director to use the writer and even to defer to the writer's opinion. The writer is an incredible resource.

SR: The pressure a writer is put under in that situation isn't a drain on creativity?

NK: One of two of my favorite scenes in Frances came at about 11:30 at night. It was a very emotional scene and I was so wasted, so wired, my defenses were so down, I thought I'd just go home for the day, but I said, "No, I'm going to sit here right now until I get this scene." It was a perfect time to write that scene where she comes down the stairs and tells her mother she doesn't love her. I would not have been able to write that scene in an ordinary state.

SR: Did getting the Frances assignment come about because you were a child of Hollywood?

NK: Nah, I grew up in New York. I wasn't around movie sets much. The film wasn't about Hollywood to me, it was about telling the truth. When I was a journalist at Berkeley I went to interview these Gestalt therapists who had just given up their lucrative practices because they believed in living in the moment. I became friends with one of them and suffered-or enjoyed-this outburst of personality where I just told everybody everything that was going on. Some people liked it, some didn't. My wife at the time didn't. All I was doing was being myself, only more so. Frances, to me, was about someone in that state, someone who was telling the truth and enjoying her life and being honest. And the world just said, No, you can't do that.

SR: That movie doesn't seem to me to be as smart or tough as it thinks it is.

NK: I thought Jessica was wonderful and I like the movie, but it always gave me a headache. Graeme Clifford, the director, wanted to pound the audience and I thought he did that too much. Jessica gave a more subtly varied performance than the one everyone sees. He loved her power so much, he kept showing her at her most hysterical, her most angry. She hit ten notes, he showed four.

SR: In a town that likes to typecast people, I guess you're seen as the guy who does hard-hitting, disturbing, and based on fact. Right?

NK: Typecasting is the bane of our existences. I got Patty Hearst because of At Close Range. I lived a few blocks from where Patty Hearst was kidnapped and I wanted to write a play-this was before she surfaced-because I thought it was the most fantastic, wildly comic, terrifying expression of a certain era. In the play, you'd see her fucking everyone in the SLA, lesbian orgies, every fantasy that people had about her was going to be completely played out. No one knows this but, on the night she was kidnapped the SLA kidnapped somebody else first-a guy they kidnapped so that they could use his car to kidnap Patty Hearst. When I got hired to do the script, my film was going to begin with these guys stalking a guy unpacking his groceries. He's thinking he's just going to have a snack or some-thing, but he gets kidnapped as the SLA members go down the street singing, "You're So Vain." Paul Schrader wanted to make the horror film version. In my first meeting, the first thing I said to him was, "Do you see the humor?" He said, "Yes, it's not what I'm interested in." So, we were making a serious film. He made a wonderful film, but it wasn't the one I wanted to make. I withdrew from the process at that point. Paul was very nice to me and I was respectful of him. Michael Wilmington reviewed Patty Hearst in the LA. Times as a comedy and the producer and I called each other and said, "He's reviewing the script not the fucking film."

SR: How might you have handled yourself as a writer during the '30s and '40s?

NK: The great thing about those days was there was a lot of work and it was regarded as a job you did. I mean, to get to work on five film noirs a year, how bad could that be? Last year, I wrote 11 drafts: one of the scripts I'm working on now, a polished first draft of The Ride-Along, which Universal optioned, and then I went back and forth rewriting Mobsters and Gladiator. I didn't take any breaks or vacations. My process was very clean and there was no time to get blocked. Fortunately, there were no disasters in my family and I didn't get sick. It was very exciting.

SR: How was it for you working on Mobsters and Gladiator, both scripts that weren't your concepts?

NK: I'm really curious as to how these pictures will turn out because neither one of them came from my own impulses. Neither one of them came from love in the way that something that I generate myself does. It's like if you have a child and the child is nothing like you, you'll still grow to love the child. One of the scripts I identified with immediately and it was very easy to do. The other was a lot more work. In essence, they were like old studio jobs: "Here's this, do it." Part of the appeal was that they were big studio pictures, which I hadn't worked on previously, that both stand a chance of being commercial ventures.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5