Being raised in the shadow of his famous director father, Elia Kazan, may have helped screenwriter Nicholas Kazan develop the mordantly humorous edge that marks his own distinctive voice. And now that his career has emerged from respected but persistent obscurity with the Oscar-nominated Reversal Of Fortune, he's bringing that voice to big-budget Hollywood pictures like Mobsters.
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Nick Kazan's screenplays-edgy, terse, bleakly funny-almost always tap into the unconscious. They're peculiarly, nightmarishly American, like some Doors songs, only in Kazan, the giggles are there by design. In virtually all his work filmed to date, the family is a breeding ground of suspicion, thwarted sexual desire, and betrayal. He co-wrote Frances, in which a movie star runs mad from telling too much truth until her mother orders her lobotomized.
In At Close Range, a riveting sociopathic father seduces his kids into a crime spree, then tries to slaughter them. In Reversal of Fortune, the riddle of whether Claus von Bulow did or did not inject his wife into a coma becomes the context for a cinematic investigation into the un-knowability of human motivation, particularly within the family. In the unproduced Punk Daddy--Kazan's Oedipus Rex for the children of MTV and David Lynch-a son snuffs his papa and stuffs the corpse in a sofa. In the finale of The Professional Man, the short Kazan directed and adapted for HBO from a David Goodis story, a hired killer strangles himself to death while his girlfriend stands nearby.
So much of Kazan's early film work was either mishandled or co-credited that he has had to wait for audiences to see and hear how truly funny the monstrous can be when it's run through his brain. Reversal of Fortune, however, which won him both Oscar and Writers Guild nominations, and got him named Screenwriter of the Year by the National Association of Theater Owners, finally gave us a chance to see and hear Kazan straight, no chaser. And in the wake of Reversal of Fortune, Hollywood appears to have realized that mainstream commercial movies might benefit from the same intelligence, ingenuity and charged sensibility Kazan has brought to his screen-plays from the start. He was hired to rewrite the young, serious, and big-studio Mobsters and the upcoming Gladiator. And he might be signed on to direct his script The Ride-Along.
Born in New York, Nick is the son of Elia Kazan, a Greek-Turkish immigrant who joined the Communist party, directed the great, socially aware On the Waterfront, East of Eden, A Face in the Crowd, Wild River, and Splendor in the Grass, and, in 1952, named names of fellow Communists to the House Un-American Activities Committee. (Nick and his siblings-two sisters, a brother, a half-brother-are all relegated in their father's 825-page autobiography to the status of virtual footnotes.) After writing several plays in college, one of which, the one-act Ballgame, was professionally produced later, Nick Kazan moved to the San Francisco Bay area, where five more of his one-act plays and a full-length piece were mounted. Earning his living as a journalist, he worked as a stringer for Newsweek and wrote for The San Francisco Examiner, but his mordant, taboo-busting style is perhaps best typified by his satirical "confessional" piece in The Realist about how he slipped into the White House and slept with Tricia Nixon.
Kazan has yet to make headlines for multimillion dollar sales of the boy action-type scripts that get Hollywood all in a lather. He leaves to Shane Black The Last Boy Scout, to foe Eszterhas the Basic Instinct cops and copulation stuff, to their agents the gusty hype. Instead, Kazan-belatedly, quietly-has joined the ranks of such in-demand, handsomely-paid writers of substance as Ron Bass (Rain Man), Tom Schulman (Dead Poets Society), and Richard Price (Sea of Love). If he succeeds in firing up commercial entertainments with the anarchic temperament of an original--think Sirk, Wilder, Hitchcock--he will achieve the status of a very major player.
Stephen Rebello: Home,' 'the family,' 'marriage' are concepts that loom rather...malevolently in your scripts. Just how strange was your upbringing?
Nick Kazan: Well, it goes back. My great-uncle, who brought my father's family to this country, was a legendary New York character who was profiled in The New Yorker by S.J. Perelman. He insisted on sleeping on the same sofa all his life and would have it transported from the Waldorf-Astoria in New York to the Queen Mary to the Ritz in Paris, have it put on the train in Istanbul and taken off at whatever hotel he was staying at. He'd have it carted off into the hinterlands where he would buy oriental rugs, then do the return trip in reverse order. He made and lost a million dollars twice, lost it first in the stock market crash and then at the racetrack. After losing it the second time, he published three books on how to win at the racetrack. At the end of his life he called himself "Flat-Tire foe," because he could no longer... inflate.
SR: Your father's two mentions of you in his auto-biography are terse-for instance, referring to you when you were a baby as "the new one" and all that.
NK: [laughing] Of all his children. We get along great. We're temperamentally akin. Energetic, enthusiastic, hardworking, optimistic by nature. I used to believe that my father was jealous or wary of my success, because he felt in some sense he was being replaced. After every film, he'd say, "Better luck next time." For instance, when he read At Close Range, he said, "Boy, this is really good. I hope they do it," but when he went to see the movie, he wrote me a letter blaming me for all its faults. I said, "If that's what you thought, why didn't you tell me when you read the script."
SR: But they didn't make your script.
NK: No, they made their own film. Anyway, he was wildly enthusiastic about Reversal of Fortune, so I was forced to revise my theory and accept that his previous opinions had been genuine and not the result of some inner process.
SR: Several people who recommended I read At Close Range told me they thought you were an especially interesting writer because your Oedipal issues were so red-hot.
NK: I was very aware from a young age of the accident of my birth. It was my great good fortune, in many respects, to have the father that I had, to have enough food, to live in a nice house. I was also aware that there was a kind of deferred energy that came to me from my father that had the potential to feed a place inside me that wasn't healthy. That is, people would occasionally gush toward me because of who my father was or be nasty to me because my father testified at HUAC. I was aware that both of these things were completely inappropriate. Maybe I was a baby who was switched at the hospital, you know? What did I have to do with anything, good or bad, that he did? Everyone is obsessed with the mystery of where they come from because it relates to the mystery of our existing at all. I had a very strong father and mother and older brother. My father was a benevolent figure to me. I related to him. I liked him. I felt myself to be like him. I quickly asserted myself as a successful person. One of the most obvious things about me is that I bear his name, which has associations.
SR: Did you ever consider not using your last name?
NK: Some people think of me in terms of my father. A lot of people aren't aware of him. I never mention him. I'm me. If you want to deal with him, deal with him. After struggling as a writer in Berkeley for many years, sending out scripts where nothing would happen, I decided I was foolish not to use my family contacts. My father set up meetings with two people that he liked and trusted. I met both of them. Nothing came of them. I heaved a big sigh. I didn't want to be looking over my own shoulder, trying to decide, if I got any success, whether I deserved it. Now I know that whatever's come to me, I've worked very hard and done it completely by myself.
SR: On some level, your father has to feel that you're crowding his territory.
NK: My mother was a writer, so I always saw myself as going into her profession. I decided to become a writer in my room my freshman year at Swarthmore in 1964, the year my mother died. What made me become a writer was seeing a play one night when I was in college, then waking up the next morning and writing a one-act play. I just sat in my room and I wrote a line of dialogue that was in my head. Another character answered. I didn't know who the characters were. Three hours later and I had 12 single-spaced pages. I got up, drank a cup of tea and literally didn't know what I had written. That experience was so much from my unconscious and that's what's so exciting about writing. It's like a narcotic. Anybody who can get that from any experience-you know, Holy Rollers, people who sing until they get into ecstatic states, voodoo, anything so that you lose yourself, so that you're not even aware that you are-knows what I mean. You don't often get that experience, but I think I keep writing because, when it happens, it's so exhilarating that, even if I only have it once a year, it's worth it.
SR: Well, you're talking about what Byron, Blake, Poe, Kerouac all aimed for-
NK: Oh, I abuse myself. I smoke a pipe, I chew tobacco, which I know are terrible for my health. I don't take really serious drugs. But I think, what am I doing, I'm killing myself. Well, maybe, but I'm getting to do this thing. It seems to happen more frequently, more intensely, more easily if I use caffeine. I've spent months where I've been told I can't drink any caffeine and I just look at my typewriter, look around the room, wander outside. I just have no drive to get things done.
SR: I still think of At Close Range as one of my favorite un-produced scripts.
NK: [laughing] I appreciate that. Jack Nicholson, who wanted to do it with Bob Rafelson, would have torn up the world with that part. We couldn't get the financing. The real guy on whom the "Brad Sr." character was based was so insane in such an electrifying way. When he went to prison, he started a Ku Klux Klan unit in a prison that was 98 percent black. This guy doesn't give a shit. I had the best time writing that script of any I've ever written. It was all there. I was blessed to get that story.
SR: What went so wrong with the movie?
NK: When we read At Close Range with the actors, people laughed all the way through. But Sean Penn and Jamie Foley believed they were making a tragedy, and, to them, a tragedy cannot have laughs. They also took out all the fore-shadowing that is necessary for a tragedy-a tragedy is a train wreck you know is going to happen but can't stop. Sean was at a point in his career where he felt he was on the verge of real superstardom. He felt that this was the picture that was going to do it for him and that he knew how to do it for himself. And he didn't. Sean would one day literally wake and say, "We're not going to shoot this scene," and Jamie would come to me and say, "Sean had a brilliant idea. We're not going to shoot this scene." I said, "If you don't, it means that these other scenes we've already shot will not make sense." And he'd go back to Sean and the next day he'd come back and say, "Sean had a brilliant idea: we're going to shoot the scene." Jamie always said the script was brilliant beyond understanding. And I always thought, "Maybe it's brilliant beyond his understanding, but not beyond mine." I was on location rewriting, but Sean wouldn't let me on the set. He had "too much respect for my work" to allow me to be present while he was acting. What that meant was he wanted license to change whatever he wanted to change at his own whim. Eighty-nine percent of the lines in there are mine, but there are scenes that weren't shot or were truncated.
SR: It strikes me that so many people can feel strongly about a script, yet see it completely differently.
NK: A script is like a Rorschach that everybody projects onto. Jamie Foley and Sean Penn weren't lying. They loved it. Maybe Sean felt that, as long as I was there, the script was mine and I might be saying, "You're doing it wrong." He had to make it his own and so did Jamie. Sean still boasts about how he rewrote the script which, thank God, largely he didn't. Still, they did enough. What's most painful is how few stories come to you from someone else or from your imagination that have this classic a feel.
SR: How demoralizing did it get for you on that one?
NK: People had been going around town saying that At Close Range was the best script they'd read in years. Yet, when it came time to film it, actors could make up their own lines, throw them out, decide they don't want to perform them-whimsically. I think a director should know these lines and scenes are there for a reason. The analogy that's always used is that the writer is just the architect. If you know anything about buildings, that means that the director is the contractor. When he's putting something up that doesn't work, he calls the architect who comes on site and they can solve it.
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.
SR: Even though I've seen every movie made from one of your scripts, Reversal of Fortune was the first time I'd ever really seen what I perceive to be your real humanity-and malice-onscreen.
NK: It's the first time I've seen one of my scripts. Finally I got a director and actors with a sense of humor who believed it was okay to be funny. What a relief. Ed Pressman, who had sent the book to Brian DePalma, told me, laughing, that DePalma would only do it if Sunny von Bulow were the hero. I [later] remembered Ed's remark and I realized that the one perspective we didn't have was Sunny's. So, I said, "Let's give it a whirl" and I immediately wrote the last lines of the film. It became a script about how you never know for fucking sure. That's the situation we are in life. We don't know for sure if this person loves us. We don't know for sure if our parents loved each other. The only thing we know for sure is about ourselves. By cutting back to Sunny in a coma, I was giving the film a kind of emotional solidity that most legal, murder dramas don't have. They forget the victim. It sort of reminded the audience, without mentioning it, of the emotional stakes of what we're dealing with.
SR: You and Schroeder worked closely.
NK: The first director on Reversal [Hugh Hudson] wanted me to keep working on the script. I believed I would be fired. But Ed Pressman said, "No, I want to make this script." With Barbet, I literally wore a beeper in Los Angeles. He wouldn't change a line without asking me. If the actors wanted to change a line, he would call me up and ask me. We spent three days going through the script scene by scene, line by line, character by character.
SR: I'd heard that Jeremy Irons had reservations about playing von Bulow.
NK: Glenn, Jeremy, and Ron Silver were all in London at the same time, so Barbet and I flew there. Jeremy walks into the reading and says, "It's a lovely script, but I'm sorry to have put you through all this trouble. You see, I can't possibly play a man who's bald. I'm not going bald and if I'm not, I'd be self-conscious about changing my appearance." After we read it, there was this long pause and he said, "Perhaps there's something I could do with my hair." He had to acknowledge that his hair was going to thin and then that it might thin more rather than less, then that his hairline might someday recede somewhat and it went on from there.
SR: Was Alan Dershowitz as interesting to you as Claus and Sunny?
NK: He owned control over how he was portrayed as a lawyer. I liked him. I didn't want him to look bad. My first meeting I said, "You are not going to like how you're portrayed." If I gave the character Alan's flaws, which are always more interesting to me as a writer, he wouldn't like it. If I gave him flaws he didn't have, he wouldn't like it even more. Also, the real Dershowitz is a lot like Woody Allen, which I couldn't write-there's a way in which he's mysterious that I never completely understood.
SR: My favorite quality about Reversal of Fortune--besides its wit-is its mystery, its respect for things that are, finally, unknowable.
NK: Mystery is the essence of art. There's an unfortunate tendency in commercial films to give audiences something that's a package, completely predigested. I always want to leave something left to digest.
SR: What do you see as your strengths as a writer?
NK: Passion. I'm a mediocre writer unless I'm really excited, then I'm pretty good. Hopefully, when I'm excited I can liberate my unconscious and then, I'm expressing, in a Jungian sense, fears, hopes, desires that we all have.
SR: How have you dealt with the awards, nominations?
NK: The ego is a monster that lives inside all of us. Everybody's had rejection by loved ones, teachers, employers. We all feel like we've been treated somehow unfairly. We're all starved for acclaim. Awards have nothing to do with my being in my grubby little office writing my script. I have to always remind myself that it has nothing to do with my work. And not to enjoy it too much. Not to expect it, hope for it, think about it. I'm happy about it, but-
SR: But you still have to clean out the cat-box.
NK: Exactly. Barbet and I would call each other up and read the bad reviews, howling with laughter, just to keep each other under control. You never know when you're doing the work. I saw the rough cut and thought, "This film is in the toilet." I thought some critics would like it, nobody will go to see it, my career's over. I think that's why I started taking on these other jobs, Mobsters and Gladiator, to at least be working on something. They kept cutting it, they put music to it, and the [final] film was just the good stuff.
SR: Are these multi-million dollar script sales we keep reading about affecting you?
NK: If writers are paid more, then maybe they'll be listened to more. My wife has a theory that people who are not creative are terrified of the act of creation. The only way they can deal with their fear is to denigrate it. Witness some men making fun of pregnant women and women in general. Women have the power to create something out of nothing. They're the vessel of the miracle of life. Likewise, writers of original screenplays create something out of nothing. Everyone else in the film business is, at best, a magician or alchemist who changes something into something else or someone who fulfills someone else's impulse. The writer is God. He takes nothing and turns it into something. That scares people.
SR: Yours is one of the few distinct "voices" in screenplays, yet now you're working in more commercial arenas with Mobsters and Gladiator.
NK: Sometime I'd like to make art films, weird films. In wanting to make Hollywood movies, I have to find ways to express that artistic part of myself and also send the audience out of the theater satisfied-movies that are emotionally satisfying to a large group but still leave questions for people who want those.
SR: On both Gladiator and Mobsters, you've rewritten other writers.
NK: I didn't think the writer of Gladiator [Lyle Kessler], which is about a young white kid who happens to have a big punch who fights in illegal clubs, should be fired. I called him up and said, "I love your script and I'd like to rewrite it, but if you don't want me to, I won't." He said, "I'd rather you do it than somebody else." Mobsters was in desperate trouble. It was an interesting collection of scenes, but there was no thematic content. I didn't feel badly because they wanted to send it out to actors in a month. If I hadn't done it somebody else would have. I got some of "my" stuff in, though. There's a great scene where Luciano and Lansky, best friends, are talking and they have this long conversation about whether Luciano wants to fuck Lansky's girlfriend. It's the kind of scene you've always wanted to see.
SR: I can see the appeal of Mobsters for you. The myths, the sex, the blood-letting...it's almost like a ritual.
NK: This is a movie about revenge. On a certain level, we all wish we could go back and find that high school teacher who insulted and humiliated us and kill him and not suffer any consequences. Gangsters get to fulfill their fantasies in this way. They kill their mothers, girlfriends, the people they hate, someone who trivially insults them. And they're completely ca-ca. I had to rewrite the script so quickly, but at first, I didn't want to change any of the scenes because [the original screenwriter] Mike Mahern had done so much research. Luciano, Siegel, and Lansky [played by Christian Slater, Richard Grieco, and Patrick Dempsey] are reasonably accurate, but Frank Costello [played by Costas Mandylor] is completely inaccurate because he was the inspiration for Vito Corleone and, if I'd portrayed him as he was, he would have been competing with Luciano. When they made gangster films in the '40s, they were meditations on the truth. It's a cinematic fantasy.
SR: Do screenwriters peak and burn?
NK: I hope I don't. People write from an unconscious drive. If you completely express that drive and have nothing left, well....but I really like different kinds of people and I have a lot of energy. I love stories which seem true.
SR: When did you write the much talked about script for Punk Daddy?
NK: There was a period of about four months when At Close Range got set up at UA and they were talking about big-name writers, that is, not me. So, I did a very quick draft of Punk Daddy because I felt, well I need to get this out of my system, so I'll just write Oedipus as a comedy.
SR: You were going to direct that. What happened?
NK: We were in preproduction. Hemdale was supposed to finance it and John Daly, who told us casting didn't matter, didn't like who we cast and pulled the plug. I had cast an unknown, scary kid as the son and Joyce Van Patten as the mother and Robert Morse as the father. His reading was so funny, so touching. Once I came back and rewrote that, I felt it was out of my system. When people approach me about father and son stories, I have no interest in it. I mean, you can't get past Oedipus as a comedy.
SR: You've directed a short and plan to do a feature this year. What should we expect?
NK: It's so much fun. I was a cheerleader on The Professional Man because it would be just the way I saw it, just the way I heard it. And it was there, on film, forever and it was there forever, not just there on the page. It's the difference between masturbation and sex with another person. You're really doing the scene, with other people, and it's there. Creating something is the most fun.
SR: Any trepidations about invading your father's arena?
NK: I was nervous about that the first day. As long as I'm focused on doing it, I'm fine. I knew that if the first thing I directed was Punk Daddy, I was really going to get those questions. I'd still love to make the movie, but I think it's a young man's film. I used to get these ecstatic calls from young executives about the script and then they'd give it to their bosses. I know a reader who got fired for recommending it. Don't you realize what this means? It means that this is very powerful material. It disturbs. That means it should be made.
SR: Will you now only direct?
NK: Oh, no. If I can write other people's movies and direct, I can tell so many more stories.
Stephen Rebello, the author of Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, wrote this month's cover interview with Christian Slater.