As her first film, True Love made clear, director Nancy Savoca despises easy black-and-white situations, simpleminded good-guy/bad-guy definitions and cheap happy endings. No wonder her new film. Household Saints, was not made in Hollywood.
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Driving up through the troglodytic wreckage of the Bronx, on my way to meet director Nancy Savoca, I pass one of New York's ubiquitous homeless sleeping on the ramp shoulder near the Throgs Neck Bridge. I think of tossing a firstful of change out onto the ground next to his prone, blanket-wrapped figure, but I don't. This is the Bronx, after all, Savoca's native turf and the least appropriate place on the Eastern seaboard for philanthropic angst.
A half-hour later I arrive, as if passing from black-and-white Kansas into a Technicolor Oz, in a town in Rockland County, New York--one of those huggable Victorian Hudson Valley villages you just want to put under your Christmas tree. I park and stroll around, checking out some of the 307 antique stores on Main Street. Then I spot what looks like another homeless man. This guy is vertical, shuffling toward my Volkswagen. Just as I begin to walk over briskly, leaping to grim conclusions about the spread of urban blight, I realize what he's doing. He's putting a quarter into my parking meter, which I neglected to do. Out of his own pocket. Maybe this is why Nancy Savoca now lives in Rockland County and not the Bronx.
So, who is Nancy Savoca and who cares where she lives?
With 1989's True Love, a cinematic bout of gender combat provoked by a working-class Italian-American wedding in the Bronx, Savoca emerged on the independent filmmaking scene as a reckonable force with her own territory--namely, the dark continent of blue-collar American families. Her movie amounted to open-heart surgery on a landscape she evidently loathes and loves in equal measure. By focusing her entire story on an ethnic wedding, Savoca made a dramatic arena out of what other films, notably The Godfather, have used merely as a set piece to suggest "the flow of life." With its dyed-blue mashed potatoes, rainbow-hued bridesmaids dresses and indelible Bronx logic ("I hope you didn't put Tibby and Scabby at the same table ... remember what happened with the provolone?"), True Love nailed to the wall for all time an environment--a world where wakes last three days and meals four--that other movies have either noir-ed up or romanticized.
On the basis of True Love's, critical success, Savoca was signed as a hired gun for Warner Bros. Dogfight, a tiny two-person drama about a young lunkhead marine (River Phoenix) on his way to Nam, and a frumpy would-be folksinger (Lili Taylor) linking up in 1963 San Francisco by way of a brutal ugly-girl contest held by the "jarheads." It's not easy to imagine how Dogfight was ever conceived as a studio picture, but in Savoca's hands it got on-the-set rewrites that gave it an unmistakably independent feel. The film was given a modest release and relegated modestly to the video shelves.
Savoca is now putting the finishing touches on her third film, Household Saints, a project she bought with the proceeds from True Love. It stars Lili Taylor and Tracey Ullman, and promises to be as independent as its predecessors.
The rickety staircase I am ascending behind Savoca's assistant, Trish, leads to Jonathan Demme's office. Demme, whose name appeared high on the list of Special Thanks at the end of True Love (he was an investor in it), and for whom Savoca and her husband/cowriter/producer Richard Guay served as production auditors on Something Wild and Married to the Mob, is an executive producer on Household Saints. Inside the office I find walls full of Haitian art, which Demme collects (no sign of the Oscar), and Savoca herself, who is dandling her two-month-old daughter Martina in a shoulder-slung Snugli. Having wrapped Household Saints a harrowing six weeks before Martina was due, Savoca may be the only feature-film director who manufactures kids and movies at the same rate, even at the same time.
I start out by mentioning my meter trial-by-shame, expecting Savoca, who appears to be as much endearing hippie as tough-love feminist, to give me an of-course-this-is-Rockland-County shrug in response. Instead she rolls her eyes. "Gee, that happens all the time," she says sarcastically. "What a great town!" At this point, a classic newborn caterwaul explodes from little Martina. "She's teething, poor thing," Savoca says. For the first of several times during our conversation, she quells Martina's wails by unceremoniously lifting her sweatshirt up over one breast and nursing the child as she talks.
I tell Savoca that I think she is arguably the best woman director in America. "My God," she blushes back. "That's very sweet. Who else is there?"
I know she's not being immodest. "Well," I say. "I guess we'll roast Penny Marshall later."
"Not me," Savoca shoots back. "I bad-mouth nobody. Especially not a sister." Then she admits to not having seen A League of Their Own--or almost any other recent Hollywood movie. Perhaps it is Hollywood's penchant for the happy ending she can't deal with. After all, True Love's climactic wedding reception ignites into warfare when the groom announces he wants to go out drinking with his buddies on his wedding night.
"That's a true story," Savoca says. "I remember when we were trying to get funding for the movie, people would complain that it's an improbable ending. Of course this stuff happens. Why do we think that things like that don't happen? They happen constantly. We're in such a funny, sterile little situation right now as a society, where people don't like to admit there's disharmony in the world, that people get upset with each other, that there aren't many happy endings. Culturally we're not allowed to acknowledge it. Filmwise, nobody wants to do this stuff. Maybe with Clinton elected, we can relax and let it all out."
"But even so, True Love did well, right?" I ask. "I remember seeing it at the Commack Multiplex out on Long Island, which stands as the sign of a true crossover."
"It didn't get the push it needed, not in the rest of the country. One of the biggest problems with finding a distributor was that everyone wanted to change the ending, and have them all live happily ever after. There was even a soundtrack album set. We said fine, go with it, but we're not changing the ending. And when we did the audience surveys for the film, they HATED the ending. They were so smart--they knew exactly what they wanted, writing things like, 'We want the Hollywood ending,' and, 'This is a very depressing movie, this is like my life, and I don't want to see a movie that's like my life.'"
Similar problems faced Dogfight, says Savoca. "I think Warner Bros, was looking for a teen comedy with River Phoenix. And boy, that's not what they got. They wanted to change the ending to that, too."
"They thought that script was funny?" I'm remembering in particular the scene where the toothless girl who wins the dogfight of the title reinserts her front teeth in the bathroom mirror, explaining the rules of the contest to an aghast Lili Taylor, all the while referring to herself as "Gums."
"Sure. They thought it would be very funny. Dogfight's another true story. The military advisor we had on the film told us it happened all the time, except they were sometimes called 'pigfights.'"
I take this opportunity to describe for Savoca the cheap glut of ugly-girl jokes in A League of Their Own. (Marshall's not my sister.)
"I'm really surprised by that...You wouldn't imagine Penny Marshall got many cute-girl jokes when she was a kid. Still, I'm glad Penny Marshall exists. What other woman makes movies that make money? I got into a cab once where the cabbie asked me conversationally what I was headed to. I told him it was a casting session. 'Oh so what do you do?' he asked, and I told him I was the director. He said, 'Oh really, so you're like a little Penny Marshall, eh?'"
"Please God, anything but that," I fume with my best postfeminist ardor. "Even if you do make money. Anyway, after Hoffa, I've pledged not to see any more films directed by sitcom veterans."
"Well, I'd love to make more money," Savoca says with a shrug, "but it's not my top priority. After True Love we were approached by industry people, and each time it was the same: we love you, you're so different, you're so fresh, you're so talented, but could you please do what we've been doing all along? I'd rather fall flat on my face and say it was my idea, than fall flat and say sorry, they made me do it. My main criteria when I choose to work on something--this is how I chose Dogfight--is to do things I haven't seen before. That script fit the bill. Also, I wanted to do something that wasn't so Italian in-between True Love and Household Saints, which really is the film I've been waiting to make."
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.