The Hollywood jungle drums have for years been passing along tales of the fearless exploits of director Mark Rydell, tamer of ferocious, director-mangling actors. In view of the fact that his last three movies, The Rose, On Golden Pond, and The River, together won 17 Oscar nominations, many in acting categories, Rydell obviously has the clout to take on these predators. But it's not just these credentials that Rydell takes onto the set--when necessary, he can bear his teeth and beat his breast with some of the scariest specimens this side of Skull Island. While shooting The Cowboys, for instance, only his third movie, he chewed out historical landmark John Wayne before a stunned cast and crew.
In the course of making The Reivers, he took revenge on feisty superstar-producer Steve McQueen by ordering hours of retakes of a scene that had the actor knee-deep in mud. On day one of filming On Golden Pond, Rydell quietly dismissed his assembled team, including Henry Fonda, and brought the Great Lady of the Silver Screen Katharine Hepburn around to his wishes. Details later about these and other feats of on-the-set oneupmanship. For now, let's let Mr. Rydell define his credo: "I am an autocrat, in a sense, with everybody."
Sitting in his Hollywood offices, his gaze weary and his voice like a sackful of stones rubbing together, thanks to marathon editing sessions on For the Boys, his first film in seven years, Rydell elaborates on his theme: "Directing is a job where you must unambivalently lead. It's about will: 'This is the way I want the shot or scene to go.'"
It's not Mark Rydell's autocracy you notice first when you meet him on his turf. It's his showboating. Step too quickly into his spacious production suite, for instance, and you could trip over a seven-foot-high For the Boys standee poster on which Bette Midler and James Caan bask in stage limelight. And then you find yourself surrounded by walls full of showy career bagatelle. These photos and memorabilia are, metaphorically speaking, the stuffed and mounted heads of stars that you'd expect from a Hollywood Big Game Hunter. There's a portrait of Rydell flanked by the mighty John Wayne and the mightier John Ford. There are swank, nostalgic production sketches that might lead one to mistake the director's 1976 bomb Harry and Walter Go to New York for a Fellini masterpiece.
"Crews, for the most part, respect and like me. Actors do the same," says Rydell, who is himself an actor (he most recently played scumbuckets in Punchline and Havana).
"The set isn't a dangerous place, but rather one where actors can reveal themselves. But moments arise during shooting when you either stand fast or you're hamburger for the rest of the picture."
By all accounts, Rydellburgers were never the plat du jour on For the Boys. This despite the fact that the gifted stars who play USO song-and-dance troupers in the $30 million plus, four decade-spanning dramatic musical love story are two of the stormiest actors in town. Other directors might sooner face amputation of a favorite body part than mess with either Bette Midler or James Caan. Rydell, who introduced Midler to movie audiences in The Rose and has directed Caan twice before, admits only to some "times" on the movie. Nothing serious, you understand.
If so, then making For the Boys was nothing like dealing with Midler's behavior on The Rose. Midler's first time out of the box, she won an Oscar nomination for her on-screen portrayal of an out-of-bounds, Janis Joplinesque wailer, while she won an offscreen rep for indulging in excesses of all kinds. "She has not lost her daring," Rydell says, swiveling in his seat as he talks about the star who was perhaps repaying him for once having taken a chance on her when she suggested they reteam on this big, showy project. "She's still sensitive and volatile. But today, she's much more in control of her excesses, that mercurial instability. For The Rose, we shot two full concerts back to back, only stopping to reload the cameras. She was brilliant all the way through and, at 3 a.m., I had enough film for 12 movies. But when I yelled 'Wrap,' she was outraged because she wanted to do a third concert. She's obsessive and compulsive, in an endearing way, about making it better. Sometimes, Bette just needed to be told: enough. But throughout all of it, she was a sensitive, courageous artist."
Rydell's affection for Midler is obvious. He grins occasionally, as if he might be recalling juicy anecdotes but isn't sure he wants to tell them. "She still has quite a bit of temperament, but it doesn't interfere. She retains a certain painful concern with her looks, a concern I doubt she will ever surrender. Knowing that she doesn't look like Annette Bening or Michelle Pfeiffer sometimes distracts her from the task at hand, makes her fearful that she won't be acceptable, when, in fact, she turns on that light inside her and becomes beatific, like a madonna. She suffers the torments of a virtuoso. She's troubled by the fact that she's not everything she wants to be. Her passion for excellence brings pain. Because there is no excellence, just relative excellence."
Rydell is equally effusive about Midler's co-star, James Caan: "Many actors who are more in demand than Jimmy wanted to play this part, but I needed him as seriously as I needed Bette. He is a master of tiny, visible moments." The fact is, though, that Rydell waited 15 years before working with Caan again after Cinderella Liberty (1973) and Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976). Did this hiatus have anything to do with the actor's alleged battles with drugs and depression? According to Rydell, no. "I wanted him all the time for roles," Rydell insists, squaring his chin and sounding like the protective father of a gifted but errant son. "I know for sure that he didn't use anything for the 92 days we made For the Boys. There was a time when the tragedy of his sister's loss may have made him stumble that way, around the time of making Gardens of Stone. I think he was very troubled at that time. I can testify that he's clean as a whistle. I certainly hope that he stays erect and together."
Playing a guy who bears more than a passing resemblance to Bing Crosby, Jackie Gleason or Jerry Lewis (what Rydell calls "megalomanic stars who could be monsters, and at the same time be wonderful, loving, enormously multifaceted people"), Caan is, according to his director, "masterful. He doesn't curry favor, doesn't look to be sympathetic. There was nobody else who can sing, dance, be funny, and be very profound."
Rydell can't be talking about the same guy who, in Harry and Walter Go to New York, crooned as if he'd gargled with Drano and hoofed like--well, like an 800-pound gorilla. But he is. Unlike many of his peers, Rydell really does love actors. And the reverse must be true, for bankable predators in the jungles of Hollywood don't so much invite Rydell to crack his whip over them as practically line up and clamor for his directorial brand of tough love. Rather like an old-style actor's director of the George Cukor variety, Rydell appears to survive these tough customers with a combination of muscle, street smarts, and schmoozeability. "He's a pussycat with actors, a taskmaster with everyone else," explains an admiring associate on On Golden Pond who recalls the director and Hepburn stretched out chummily on the grass absorbed in hours of private conversation--this, after the opening day confrontation. A less-enchanted observer calls Rydell "an equal opportunity tyrant."
If I'm described as a pussycat with actors," the director observes, "it's because it's hard for me to disguise the fact that I think they're the most exposed people. They will tear themselves inside out for you if you recognize their contribution. I'm proud that actors seek me out. And maybe my background gives me a little edge with someone like Bette, because I can see the depth and resonance of that bottomless well of talent."
One can see from his own performances in movies like Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye that Rydell possesses the talent to have made it as a character actor in the Gazzara/Cassavetes mold if that's what he'd really wanted. But he was attracted to directing early on. He had ditched a career as a jazz pianist ("I was surrounded by drug addicts," he explains, "and saw for myself a future of playing cocktail lounges") when the acting bug hit him. After six years on the TV soap "As the World Turns," roles on Broadway opposite Rod Steiger, among others, and a movie debut with John Cassavetes in the 1956 Crime in the Streets, Rydell had worked with enough directors to know he wanted to be one. He worked his way into the field by directing episodic TV ("Gunsmoke," "I Spy") and occasionally teaching acting (which he still does--he's an executive director of the Actors Studio).
Rydell, who briefly (and apologetically) interrupts the interview to take a call from one of his children, speaks about actors with the tough tenderness of a dad. "I like to create an atmosphere on the set where people feel free to give me their best," he says, after hanging up and ordering an unseen assistant to hold further calls. "If you like being a father, which I do, then you're comfortable with nurturing people."
The question of the hour is whether the nurturing padre of For the Boys can believe the advance word around town, which is positive for the picture--and righteous for the musical sequences. After all, an oft-repeated rumor goes: When Rydell and Fox cut their deal, he gambled on a cut-rate directing fee in exchange for "points" based on every Oscar nomination he expects the movie to get. Admirable bravado, even by Tinseltown standards of co-jones, particularly notable in view of the fact that the pundits who presaged awards and ticket sales by the bushelful for his last movie--the costly farm epic, The River, starring Mel Gibson and Sissy Spacek--were dead wrong. "Life in our business is a roller coaster," he concedes, sighing. "My experience for the past 12 hours has been worrying about a section of material. You shoot a scene that you thought worked, then you see it at night on a screen and something's wrong. You can't sleep. 'Is it the cutting?' 'Does the scene belong?' On this movie, it's an endless, obsessive concentration. You know, you could cut forever."
In response to the question of whether For the Boys is any good, Rydell replies, "Every time I step out of the box I'm frightened. This time, I'm terrified. Frightened because, as is usual for me, this isn't mainstream material, which makes it all the more exciting. In uncharted waters, it's exciting to be playing for such wonderful stakes. I don't want to patronize American audiences. I'm banking on it that audiences will come if you tell them the truth, make them laugh, move them deeply. And the music, the band, the singing will knock them out. How the picture will do, I don't know. But whatever its reception, I will be forever proud of it."
Some might counsel Rydell that the scary part's already behind him--the seven years in which he didn't direct a movie. So, okay, he's got a reputation for being notoriously fussy about material, but still, where was he? Rydell sighs, spreads his hands, and for the first time in the interview doesn't have a fast answer. Perhaps this is because he's under gag order--which is Hollywoodspeak for "paid off to shut up"--not to recount the details of the two movie projects that took up these seven years of his life. Five years were spent on 13 screenplay drafts for the proposed movie version of Nuts, Tom Topor's play about a hooker standing trial for murder. Rydell reportedly planned to do Nuts as a $10 million movie with Debra Winger. One cringes for Rydell, knowing that he must realize what a movie that might have been, with Winger scorching the sheets as the combative, perhaps psychotic hooker. "Debra, with whom I worked on the material, was absolutely spectacular," he says, choosing his words very carefully. One version of the events around Nuts has Warner Bros. alienating Winger with a lowball salary offer (ensuring she would walk), the better to hand the picture to Barbra Streisand. True or not, Winger was suddenly out and Streisand was suddenly in, despite Rydell's thinking her "miscast, old and inappropriate for the role." They began work and, the story around town goes, they did not see eye to eye on how the picture should be achieved. "She is a very strong-willed, extremely gifted woman," Rydell says, "whose career has been characterized by a kind of monomania and self-absorption."
In short order, Rydell was out and 77-year-old, illness-ridden Martin Ritt was in as Streisand's director of choice--while the budget soared skyward. "She got what she wanted," observes Rydell, but Nuts "got sacrificed on the altar of Barbra's narcissism. A picture that could have meant something was glamorized to a point where hairdos were more important than reality." One can only imagine what Rydell might say with the gag removed.
Following the Nuts debate, Rydell fell "madly in love with" Marshall Brickman's highly touted script of Avery Corman's novel 50. He's under gag order on this one, too, but the story around town suggests a scenario something like this: After 20 Rydell-Marshall Brickman screenplay drafts, and mere weeks before the production was scheduled to start, star Richard Dreyfuss decided to do another movie instead. Rydell then secured Nick Nolte, but the studio, somehow more confident of Dreyfuss's box-office clout than Nolte's, insisted he recapture Dreyfuss. The director wooed back the quixotic Dreyfuss and cast around him Susan Sarandon, Marsha Mason and Elliott Gould. With sets built and two days to go before the first rehearsal, Dreyfuss reexited.
Although the names of other actors were proffered--James Caan's especially--the studio pulled the plug, leaving Rydell "staggeringly disappointed" over losing the chance to do "the town's best, most exquisite unmade script." (And, considering the enormous financial charges against it, it's likely to remain so.)
This is bitter stuff, especially for a guy as sensitive to actors--and stars--as Rydell, but he'd been through worse before. Get him talking about Harry and Walter Go to New York, a costly 1976 period picaresque about a pair of vaudevillians-turned-safecrackers played by Caan and Elliott Gould. Touted as a lavish, turn-of-the-century buddy romp on the order of The Sting, with costly co-stars like Diane Keaton and Michael Caine, it was a monumental dud. Then, as now, there was talk--and lots of it--about drug use on the set. "That's an exaggeration," Rydell asserts, with a dismissive wave of the hand. Moments later, he says, "In those days, there was ..." then trails off. Well, what he might have said is that in those days there was a radically different stance toward drugs: Out-there behavior from stars was more often tolerated. Finally, Rydell, who says that he's a teetotaler himself, admits, "Well, there might have been some flirtation with drugs, but it was not excessive. Drugs are a tragic escape from reality, and reality is the only thing that's going to give an actor any genuine source of inspiration. The minute an actor tempers his ganglia by narcotizing them, he's use less to me. If it happens, and it has, I won't shoot that person."
A few years ago, Rydell directed some "Just Say No" public service spots featuring bone-chilling First Lady Nancy Reagan as well as other luminaries like Clint Eastwood and James Woods. "I was asked to do it by Jerry Weintraub and there was no way I could refuse," Rydell says. "We who are more fortunate than others have to give back, even if it's in a Band-Aid form like 'Just Say No.' The fact that in this insane culture, Terminator 2 makes millions of dollars within days when the Los Angeles Child Development Center has to beg for money for therapy for needy children, speaks to a cultural distortion that needs to be addressed somehow." It sounds as if the former First Lady, whom Rydell finds "a remarkable woman," displayed a few cultural distortions all her own. "I met her in her trailer and Clint Eastwood, who is a friend, introduced us," he recalls. "She betrayed a lack of knowledge of drugs that stunned me by saying: 'This is a crack [spot] we're doing? I thought we were doing something about cocaine.'"
Rydell's adventures of the last few years, with Nancy, Caan, Midler, Streisand, Dreyfuss and the rest, pale by comparison to his trials-by-fire with Steve McQueen. Rydell and McQueen met when they were both starting out as actors at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York. By 1958, when McQueen had hit big as the star of the TV hit, "Wanted: Dead or Alive," he convinced the producers to cast Rydell--a Bronx-born boy who had never ridden a horse--in a virtually all-riding role. Eleven years later, in 1969, after both William Wyler and John Huston had dropped out of directing McQueen--then the biggest boxoffice star in the movies--in a film version of The Reivers, Rydell won the shot at directing his old pal in a big-budget adaptation of William Faulkner's Pulitzer Prize winning novel. Sounds like a plum assignment, until you stop to consider that maybe Wyler and Huston had both been around long enough to know when to get out. McQueen was, says Rydell, "very unbalanced, difficult, suspicious and paranoid."
McQueen had spent a chunk of his childhood in a reformatory, and was big on tearing up the asphalt with motorcycles and racecars, rabble-rousing, and womanizing. He also had a notorious reputation for trashing his directors. Norman Jewison, who made The Cincinnati Kid and The Thomas Crown Affair with McQueen, once called him "the most difficult actor I ever worked with." It wasn't much easier for Rydell: "In New York, I had been dating Neile [Adams, later McQueen's wife] until [he] met her and I was finished. On The Reivers, a very attractive girl who was going to be in the picture came down to the location and flirted with me, and I responded. The next day, McQueen was impossible--vocal and negative, challenging every decision I made. I couldn't figure out why. Finally, someone told me that this actress was Steve's girlfriend and I said, 'I'm sorry. I had no idea.' But if you ask me, that was no excuse.
McQueen made it very, very difficult for me for a short period." Push nearly came to shove when Rydell, watching from high atop a crane, shot McQueen and two co-stars for hours as they were splashed with mud in a scene that in¬volved getting a car out of a ditch. Finally, McQueen growled, "Ryyyyyyyyydelllll, get over here!" Rydell recalls that as he descended from his perch "My heart stopped. The crew stood still. McQueen was a physical presence given to brutality. He'd demonstrated to me many times that he was a first-class karate Tae Kwon Do kicker. He said, 'You know, there's only room for one boss on this picture,' and before he could continue, I said: 'Yeah, that's me.' Inside, I was trembling but he walked away because he saw that if he wanted to fight, I was ready." McQueen continued to be difficult. He wanted to slice out all the Faulkner dialogue, and he went to Bill Paley, the head of CBS Films, and told him he wanted Rydell fired. "Bill had seen the dailies, loved the film, and realized that it was a function of an actor's ego, not reality. He told him: 'Rydell's the director. Shut up and get back to the set.'" In the end, the men patched up their relationship. "To his credit, he came to me after the picture opened and said how proud he was of it," Rydell says.
Rydell hadn't had a powerful ally while making The Cowboys back in 1972. Though the director campaigned to get George C. Scott for the role of an aging rancher leading a bunch of young greenhorns on a cattle drive, Warner Bros. wanted--and got--John Wayne, whom Rydell describes as "a man who chewed up and spat out directors before breakfast."
"Not only was I going up against a legend," says Rydell, "but also someone with whom I had the most extravagant differences politically. I flew to New Mexico on the Warner jet with my fists balled, prepared not to surrender. He was charming, seductive, and said, 'I'd sure like to play this part, Mr. Rydell,' and I fell for it like a ton of bricks. I left thinking: I've been had."
Rydell defended himself as well as he could. He made sure every crew member on location in New Mexico was young. "None of Wayne's old cronies," he explains. "I wanted to keep him on his mettle." He also peppered the cast with such Method-trained scene gobblers as Bruce Dern. But when Rydell was preparing to shoot the big "Move 'em out!" cattle drive kickoff scene, which involved 1500 head of cattle ("When you're dealing with cattle, you can't yell 'Action!' until they're all moving"), Wayne jumped the gun--not waiting for Rydell's cue from atop the camera crane--and actually started the scene himself. "In front of hundreds of people, including the press, and [screenwriters] Harriet and Irving Ravetch, I began yelling uncontrollably, jabbing my finger at him, 'Don't you ever do that! You're an actor on this and I'll tell you when we're going to roll! Now get back to your spot.' He did, we made the shot, and he got in his car and drove off. The crew--man by man--walked over and shook my hand as if to say goodbye. The Ravetches, whom I love and adore, said, 'Mark, how could you?'
What [Wayne] did was just awful, but I was horrified at my stupidity and lack of control. All the while we drove the 50 miles back to Santa Fe, I figured that [Wayne's pal, director] Andy McLaglen would be in the next day to replace me."
Rydell returned to his location offices to find four telephone messages from the Duke. "I screwed up my courage to call back and he asked me to have dinner with him. We sat down and he said, 'Let's have a drink.' He drank a lot of tequila. I don't drink, but even I had a few and all through dinner, he never once said a word about the incident.
He excused himself to go to the bathroom and came back with the whole right side of his pants soaking wet. I asked, 'What happened?' and he said, 'Always happens to me. I'm standing there peeing and the guy next to me goes, 'You're John Wayne,' and pees all over my leg.' Now, I know for a fact that he had done that to himself as a joke. He never once mentioned my reprimand. And he called me 'sir' the rest of the picture because he enjoyed the fact that I had the chutzpah to confront him with the fact that he was wrong. Because of his opinions, I was prepared to loathe him, but I came away admiring him and realizing that many of my friends, with whose politics I agree, are not half the man he was."
Rydell found in Jane Fonda, once famous for terrific performances and liberal politics, a more kindred spirit--but that did nothing to ensure that the making of their film went smoothly. Fonda had bought Ernest Thompson's sniffly Broadway play, On Golden Pond--about the summer vacation coming-together of a pair of octogenarians and their daughter and grandson--as much to find a project on which she and her father could work as to help him land a long overdue Oscar. But this grand rapprochement was not to be easily effected. Legends of Henry Fonda's cruelty to his daughter during the shooting abound. "Everything you've heard is true," Rydell says. "I have to hand it to her for pursuing him so assiduously, when he resisted her and was so difficult and cruel to her. It was painful to watch. She threw up before every scene she played with him. It was sensational for me because it was what the picture was about. So, if you're a really good director, all you have to do is take what's really going on, let it happen, and have the camera ready. But a very difficult relationship resolved itself that summer. They became friends after years of difficulty."
Rydell recalls the film's other star, Katharine Hepburn, "baking cookies for people and being very deferential to Henry and to me," but he confirms that she could also live up to her reputation as a man-eater. In preproduction, Hepburn had happily gone along with Rydell and costume designer Dorothy Jeakins in the choice of a lived-in sweaters/pants look that seemed right for her role as a wise, devoted New England ex-faculty wife. Then, on the first day of shooting--a simple scene involving Hepburn and Fonda getting out of their car at their New Hampshire summer home--Hepburn showed another side altogether. Rydell recalls the moment when he was advised by Jeakins that he'd better go and take a look at what Hepburn was wearing: "I go to where she and Hank are chatting, having coffee, and are about to climb into the car for the shot. There she is in a suede Eisenhower jacket and slacks, a black silk shirt and suede fedora, looking like Coco Chanel. I said, 'Kate, what's this?' And she said"Rydell offers a swell Hepburn imitation'"It'll be wonderful.' And I went: 'I don't think it's right.'" While the crew looked on, Rydell and Hepburn waltzed around the issue until, the director says, "I announced: 'Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to take a 10-minute break while Miss Hepburn changes her wardrobe.' It was another of those moments: Win or take a bus home. Tears welled in her eyes. She stormed off the set.
Hank (Fonda) raised his eyebrow and I said, 'But it's wrong,' and he said, 'I know, but let's hope she comes back.' Five minutes later, she returned in the appropriate wardrobe. And it was months before she tested me again."
Hepburn's next demand on the shoot came when she insisted that a scene be rewritten so that her character, not the grandson played by Doug McKeon, extinguished a kitchen fire accidentally started by semi-senile Henry Fonda. "I explained to her how it was a very significant story point because of Henry's character's being old and not realizing the danger he's causing and how it marks a turning point for the young boy. But I really had to fight her because she damn well wanted to put out the fire in her house and didn't give much of a damn about the boy. You have to do that with Kate or she'll swallow you for breakfast."
On Golden Pond went on to win three Oscars out of 10 nominations, including both Best Actress and Best Actor. This showy success caused more media interest than usual in Rydell's next outing, The River. Rydell says he "poured his heart into making" the picture. In casting the male lead, Rydell says he initially just couldn't see Mel Gibson, who was anxious to do the film. Though Gibson was the hottest property in town, he hadn't yet played an American on-screen, and, Rydell was, he says, that close to landing either Paul Newman or Robert De Niro for the part of the hemmed-in Tennessee farmer. Gibson was nonplussed by such news. "Mel was very persistent," Rydell recalls, "asking me to promise that I wouldn't cast it until he'd finished making The Bounty. I said, in essence, that I wouldn't, but I thought to myself that if I had to cast it, I would. I was just trying to be courteous to him. Well, Mel made a special trip to Los Angeles, and showed up at my house. I knew he'd worked very hard on the rural accent with a tutor in London, so I figured I'd play a trick on him. Instead of letting him read the scenes he'd rehearsed from the script, I gave him a copy of Newsweek and said, 'Read from it.' Being a musician, my ear is reasonably accurate. He knocked me flat. He had slaved to do that, and I like that kind of commitment. I cast him on the spot."
And here was a case where a movie star with 800-pound-gorilla status not only didn't throw his weight around, he was eager and willing--an 800-pound panda, if you will. Gibson's co-star, Sissy Spacek, proved to be a like soul, Rydell recalls. "Mel and Sissy were extremely nervous about playing a highly sensitive, startlingly intimate love scene about his being impotent when he tries to make love to her, and her subsequently getting him to confess how awful he feels about being a scab at a steel mill. We rehearsed it alone," Rydell says, "on five consecutive afternoons in a little room away from the set, until they were comfortable with each other and with the nudity. They were wonderful about overcoming their natural embarrassment. In fact, they were the least difficult actors imaginable. Sissy is a hymn to powerful, sensitive, selfless acting. And Mel is equally determined."
Yet a movie that seemed to be packed with so many of the right credentials just didn't jell. "It's awful when a picture that you love is not loved by others," says Rydell, heaving a sigh. "There's a mentality in Los Angeles that what's successful automatically makes you hot, valued--whether that has to do with your gift or not."
Between the anticlimax of The River and the anticipation of For the Boys, Rydell's name was briefly associated with several other projects, notably Deceived, subsequently directed by Damian Harris. Somehow, the project--a woman in jeopardy chiller--didn't strike Rydell at first glance as having what he calls "the resonance" he looks for in material. But hasn't he ever felt inclined to just make a workable suspense thriller without all that much on its mind? "If I could do that, I would," he says, grinning.
"I try to seduce myself. Often. I long for the ability to accept a picture and say, you know,"he makes his voice weaselly like Pee-wee Herman's'"Oh, well, this doesn't smell so bad and it's got so-and-so in it and there's lots of money involved, maybe I can fix it.' I always wind up saying, 'I'm terribly sorry. I can't cut it.' I always try to make a picture that's worth it. If I can't sink a pipeline into my unconscious about material, then forget it."
No telling where Rydell will next "sink his pipeline," but he and Midler have been talking Lenya, her long-cherished project from a script by Becky Johnston (The Prince of Tides), about the tangled destinies of actress/singer Lotte Lenya and composer Kurt Weill. "If it didn't cost $100 million," he says, alluding to the screenplay's scenes of Nazis sweeping into Germany and of Lenya and Weill making theatrical history in Berlin and Manhattan, "now there's a project worth spending two years of your life on." Rydell's ambitions seem to be goading him to work again with tumultuous actors, but also to deal in drama set against a grand tapestry. "I like that people think of me as effective with actors," he says, "but I'm also not ashamed of any of my movies visually. I think they're very sophisticated. Although one would like to be thought of more as an original, a courageous man of vision, like Bertolucci."
________________________
Stephen Rebello interviewed Ross Hunter for our September issue.