The Queen of Independent Film

Having seen men get raked over the sociosexual coals in her films, I ask Savoca about what appears to be a predominant theme in her work: that men are, simply, assholes. With a sarcastic smile, Savoca urges me to elaborate. I say something about her films' interrogation of masculine prerogatives, blah, blah, blah. She finds the whole avenue of discussion uproarious.

"In True Love Donna is very selfish and possessive. Girls can be just as stupid and arrogant as guys. With all of my movies, there's no good guys or bad guys. That drives me crazy, when films say here's the good guy, here's the bad guy. If it's that easy and we know the answers, then I can stay home. I don't have to make movies. That's the reason I make movies, because I don't understand something."

I point out True Love's groom's preadolescent buffoonery, Dogfight's appalling macho rite and military piggishness; even Household Saints, I've heard, features men betting their own daughters in card games...

"Well, yeah, guys can be really tribal. Look at Diner, with one character giving his fiancee a football quiz, which if she fails he's not going to marry her. Now that's not a movie 'about' guys being assholes, but they are. The director doesn't tell you that--he thought it was pretty cool. There have been many movies that deal with this kind of material, but none before mine that say it's not funny."

I'm thinking she's agreed with me here, but I could be wrong.

"I don't like making generalizations. It's more complicated than saying, 'Men are assholes.' What do we want women to do? Get married. What do we want men to do? To escape that. We laugh at mother-in-law jokes, jokes about running away from the altar, we encourage boys to be independent and free and to run away from responsibility. When John Wayne rides off into the sunset, he doesn't have his wife beside him, he rides off alone. On the other hand, and I don't know how we want the world to run this way, we encourage girls to tie themselves down emotionally and be dependent. In True Love, Michael is irresponsible and an asshole, but we love irresponsibility in men, we champion it. It's not as simple as saying this person's an asshole and this person's fine. I think it's pretty rotten and pathetic, how dependent Donna is. See, as a man you find the man's behavior worse. As a woman, I think it's pathetic she can't be alone with her girlfriends without obsessing about her fiance, wondering where he is every second. Get a life, girl! Could Donna leave town, if she backed out of the wedding? No! If you don't think women in that environment can't be as tribal as men, I should take you on a tour."

"Let me ask you this: does the oafish Boy's Club motif of your movies reflect your experiences in Hollywood?"

"I haven't thought of it that way ... but sure. Absolutely. That's why it's so hard for me to be tough on Penny Marshall."

Since Savoca's new film Household Saints stars three strong actresses, I ask her what kind of women it's about. Savoca talks about her film like she's discovered a brand of ice cream with the calorie count of celery.

"It's a kind of fable-like story," she begins, "dealing with three generations of women, played by Tracey Ullman, Judith Malina and Lili Taylor, three women characters you've never seen before and you'll probably never see again. Part of it is how they relate to God, though it ends up on one level being a study of the immigration experience--how the first American generation wants to reject everything that came before it, and then how the second generation wants to go back and get something from its heritage ... It's very complicated. Basically how it begins is this guy wins his wife in a card game. Actually it's very funny, and very mystical."

"What's Lili Taylor's part?"

"She plays a girl who wants to be a saint."

"She doesn't even want to be a nun first?"

"She starts off wanting to be a nun, but then she gets really ambitious. You can see this movie any number of ways. Either say she's crazy, or simply say this is what it looks like to want to be a saint. We passed the script around to our friends and it's split down the middle."

"How much of Household Saints relates to you personally?"

"Well, my mother's Argentinean, and very, very Catholic, and to me a lot of Household Saints is actually very Argentinean Catholic, full of superstitions. Like Gabriel García Márquez, that sort of magical realism. Ghosts show up, and no one seems very surprised. Before making the movie I sat down and watched two films by the Taviani brothers, The Night of the Shooting Stars and Padre Padrone, and the Yugoslavian movie Time of the Gypsies. What's great is that Francine Prose, this Jewish girl from Brooklyn who wrote the novel, really understood this world very well, and understood Catholicism very well. She saw lots of humor in it, too, which is rare when it's not outright nun-bashing. That's not to say nun-bashing isn't great fun, but it's too easy. And guess what?" she says with mild amazement, "nobody curses in this movie. Not one 'fuck.'"

Savoca's other films are virtually Scorsesean in their breadth of profanity.

"It's not in the book," says Savoca. "And there's just no occasion for it: They say 'Jesus Christ' a lot instead. Quite a change of pace."

"Household Saints sounds like another hard box-office sell."

"Yeah, well, people don't think women's movies, if that's what you want to call them, sell, apart from babysitters killing each other or women killing each other over men, that kind of crap. They don't think just regular, girls-hanging-out movies can find an audience."

"Unless Jessica Tandy's in it."

"Right! The retired matinee crowd. So it's hard. It's a weird story, but it's all about the human experience. When we were searching for money for True Love, everybody was saying we can't sell this, it's about Italians in the Bronx. But it's actually a very universal experience. When we were at the Montreal Film Festival, a Chinese film student came up to us and said he'd love to take our film back with him because it reminded him of weddings he'd been to in his country. With both movies, we just filled in the color, the details, because that's what you do to make something real. But the situation's universal."

"How was Tracey Ullman to work with?" I ask.

"Tracey has very interesting tastes," Savoca offers, "and she doesn't go for the same old same old. Her projects have all been interesting, if not always executed well. I love the idea of Tracey coming on to this weird movie ... at one point she's pregnant and thinks she's going to give birth to a chicken as a result of seeing turkeys slaughtered after conception, which is all according to her superstitious mother-in-law, played by Judith Malina. Tracey's gung-ho. Whatever it is you want, she'll jump in and do it."

When I ask about Taylor, whom a growing industry consensus asserts is the best young actress in the country, Savoca merely salaams.

"There's no suffering with Lili, and it's not as if she isn't a complicated person, because she certainly is. It just doesn't get in the way of the acting. She knows how to use whatever's happening with her intuitively. It's not technical at all, just honest. She's not full of shit."

Which seems, without irony, the highest compliment Savoca can bestow. Even so, Taylor doesn't seem to be much for publicizing herself, I proffer, any more than she, Nancy Savoca, is. Savoca's first two films didn't, after all, get half the hype of Spike Lee's, Steven Soderbergh's or Gus Van Sant's.

"I'm not surprised Lili's shy with the press. This is hard to do! I don't think I do it all that well."

"You don't seem shy about it, anyway." At least not about breast-feeding during it.

"Well, there's just no way to control it-- unless you stop doing interviews. People get an impression of you, and if you don't agree with that you're stuck. A lot of interviews have done the cute-little-young-director thing on me, and that's kind of a drag. This one interviewer wanted to photograph me with the kids running around, that kind of Super-Mom Director bullshit. It's not a Super-Mom thing. You could write a whole article about that. You know what I'm saying? I'd hate to give the impression it's all effortless, because then you frustrate the real people out there trying to do both things; it's hard. That's why I don't like to be photographed with the kids."

"Don't you think it is a little remarkable raising three kids and making movies?"

"Women have been doing it for centuries, working in factories, jobs much harder than mine. Sometimes I'd think I pushed myself too far, but it's not as if there's anything heroic about it. It's all very human. Nothing super about it at all."

Which seems to be the most eloquent way to sum up her approach to filmmaking: very human.

Born in 1959 in the Bronx, her parents Argentine and Sicilian immigrants, Savoca began living movies early. "I have an older brother who was very precocious and bright, and I used to follow him in whatever he did, and we used to play at making movies. I mean really young, six or seven. My brother was really the film buff, and it would kind of ricochet off me. Now he's a cop." Later she attended Queens College and then New York University, where she won the school's prestigious Haig P. Manoogian Memorial Award for her short films, and hooked up with hubby Guay, a business major who apparently made it his business to help out NYU filmmakers with administrative and budgetary problems. "I'm not a good organizational person," Savoca admits, "and Richard's very good logically. He had a very realistic sense of making movies, which few starry-eyed film students were blessed with. Me included. But he's creative, too; he cowrites with me now. The first draft of Household Saints was 250 pages long, utterly ridiculous, longer than the book itself. I loved the book and didn't want to lose anything. He came in and just axed it to death."

How about life after Saints? Savoca mentions her long-coveted Janis Joplin bio, as well as "a comedy about parenting and working" called Grace Under Pressure.

"It'd have to be a black comedy," she says.

"Why?"

"You don't have children yet, do you?"

How, I ask, would Savoca remake some of the Hollywood stuff she doesn't like to her own specifications. I'd love to see what, given her druthers, she'd do to A League of Their Own or The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. Or how about Hoffa?

"I've seen the trailer, and that was enough. I hate it when the music comes up so loud, the crowds are lit so beautifully, everything's silhouetted. It's annoying. So many films do this. Something sad is going on on the screen, and the fucking music just comes in and it's sad, and I'm thinking y'know, I thought he was feeling sad, why does this music have to tell me to be sad. I knew that, I'm not stupid. It's so boring. Everything has to be accentuated, as if we're idiots, as if the audience is asleep and they had to wake us up and say this is funny, this is sad, feel this now, feel that now. That's not real movies. It's like being addicted to junk food. It's like the Reagan years, all those spoon-fed homilies."

"Now maybe things will change," I offer optimistically, "now that adultery, pot and draft-dodging are cool again."

"Hallelujah!" she chirps. "I'm very happy about it. A little ambiguity. No more actors pretending everything's great. No more black-and-white. Now, hopefully, we'll get a little gray back."

I'll second that. I have no quibble with ambiguity, especially if it means being treated to parking expenses by an apparently homeless stranger. If this is life on the gray side, I'm moving upstate.

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