Evil Twins?

Q: What stigma?

ALLEN: The thing that has always disgusted me about the town is that, in all these meetings, a lot of these executives and agents really thought that we were carrying guns and knives because of the movie we made. Scorsese and guys like that can make movies about the Mob, and take a meeting without people worrying, but when you're black and you make a movie like that, they feel that you had to have lived it because you don't have artistic blood running through your bones, you couldn't have just done a movie effectively without living the lifestyle.

ALBERT: A big producer stole a project from us recently, and my brother called up his assistant and said, "You better have him call us back in an hour." We made it clear we weren't making any physical threats against the guy, we wouldn't hurt him, but he had to know we were pissed off. We went to great detail to tell him what a slimeball his boss was, and the way he relayed the message to his boss was, "These guys threatened your life."

ALLEN: No, no, no, Albert. His boss took it that way. He had relayed the message effectively, I think. The next day, [the producer] tried to get restraining orders, hire an investigator, all because we were feeling pissed off that he had stolen our project. Had it been the Coen brothers, it wouldn't have been an issue.

ALBERT: That part of the movie business still goes on every day for us, where people think we're going to physically harm them when we're angry. We've never personally put our hands on anybody since, like, going back to the schoolyard, where we got our asses kicked a couple of times. I hate to pull a race card, because I don't really believe in that stuff, but I have to say, the town is really racist. There are guys who don't like you because they don't know you, and fear what they don't understand. Or you're at the Ivy at the Shore [restaurant], and some white person comes over and gives you their valet ticket to get their car.

Q: Did you get wealthy at Disney on Dead Presidents?

ALBERT: We did better, but to this day, we live modest lifestyles. We've never been wealthy by industry standards. We don't really care about money, which isn't so great. People come into our lives and we make sure they are taken care of. Somebody comes over and likes something on a shelf in our house, it's theirs. The biggest thing we learned in 10 years is that we've got to stop being so generous, willing to give everything away. We aren't broke or anything, but we're not rolling in cash.

Q: You can be hard on yourself for making a bad deal, but Menace preceded the period where people headed to the Sundance Film Festival and made piles of money selling their first films.

ALLEN: We went that route with our documentary American Pimp, and it was the worst experience. We took 10 minutes of the movie, put it on Super 8 and shopped it around, got a couple of million-dollar offers, and thought we would wait until Sundance. And what we found was a bunch of bitter distributors who were angry at us and screwed us. They were making us feel like we were the first people to come there and try to sell a movie. They were so bitter at us that we didn't sell it to them early that they trashed us.

ALBERT: That was the lowest point of our careers. Now, they're all calling us, but then, we couldn't even get our phone calls returned from people we knew for years, at big positions at big studios. We've said a lot of things in the press that reflected our goofball sense of humor, but I think the town thought, These shit-talking motherfuckers, we're going to show them. They didn't break our spirits, but they stomped on us when we were down, and I've got to say that in five years and the lessons we learned, the lowest point was being at Sundance when people we thought were our friends just turned their backs on us. These were the same people who'd gone crazy for us after Menace, and who are calling us all the time now wanting to talk deals. It's a head-fuck, but I'd never give that experience up for anything, because it was the best learning experience.

Q: You guys are wiser now, but if you feel anger for business setbacks like that, aren't you in danger of falling into that old trap, where you were thought of as the angry young black filmmakers?

ALBERT: I'm not angry at all. That's the other thing about Europe, which changed everything for us. In Prague, Amsterdam, London, people are people, and race or sexual orientation hardly matter. It was refreshing, and we got off on that. So now we come back here, and I'm not mad at any of these guys. I just recognize what they are. If they didn't want to do business then, fine. We now know that this is all about business. We know now never to trust these bastards again in our lives. Never talk to them like people again, because real people don't treat you like they treated us.

ALLEN: It can be the same when you sit down with a journalist; they lay all this stuff out, and they screw you. Like, an interviewer would start by saying, "Let me read you what Halle Berry or Alfre Woodard said about your film." We'd be like, "Well, fuck that bitch!" I don't take the bait anymore, and I'm not bitter. I thought it was cool to personalize it, but I completely understand now that it's all about dollars and cents.

Q: Should you have avoided getting into dissing contests over Spike Lee and John Singleton?

ALBERT: What happened was, every time we sat down for an interview, the first question was, "What do you think of Spike Lee?" "You have a black film, just like John Singleton." We were like, "You know what, fuck them all." It wasn't that we hated them as much as having them brought up. How many times does there have to be a black-filmmaker article where they want us all in one picture? We think it's great to have black filmmakers working, but we don't think we should have to be clustered together.

ALLEN: We were consciously trying to keep that image away from us because, like we said, we've had to live down a legacy that has been very destructive to us. It's not about dissing black filmmakers, it just shouldn't be a clique thing. You don't see a bunch of Italian guys, a picture of a bunch of Jewish guys, you don't see that.

ALBERT: We have no beef with John, period. Spike, there was some personal stuff where he treated us badly. He never apologized about it, and when asked, we were just open about it.

ALLEN: A lot of people have ripped us off, and we're thinking, Why are these people doing us this way? The guy who ripped off American Pimp and did it as a documentary at HBO, he was a friend of ours. One of our best friends in the business told us our problem is we come at everything with love in our hearts, expecting that everybody has the same quality. People might think we're negative, and we're cynical people, but as far as human beings, it's all love and generosity and trust. We used to openly discuss script ideas, only to watch them get taken away and ripped off. Now, we realize why high-profile directors are so guarded in what they say. And when Industry people talk how someone has a big ego, but you meet them and they're the nicest person. You realize they use ego as a tool, to communicate, because it's the only way those types understand not to mess with you. We've been taken advantage of for our openness; our sweetness has been mistaken for weakness.

ALBERT: That's part of the reason we want to move to Europe.

Q: You're moving to Europe?

ALLEN: We're going to Amsterdam, and it's not for the women and the drugs. I just don't think we should change our personalities for this industry. I think we should move away so we can be who we are, and then when we come to do business, we can do it. Before we went to Europe, we loved New York because it embraced the arts a lot better than L.A., the people are more loving and when you're down in the dumps, there's more positive energy and support. It's even better in Europe, where they embrace the arts completely, whether it's poetry, singing, writing or moviemaking. We fell in love with Amsterdam, where nobody looks at you twice, nobody's freaked about who you're dating, or what your color is. We had been living out in L.A., but about 35 miles outside of town. We never hung out, went to clubs or premieres. We used to get flustered when too many people walked up to us. We were really scared of crowds, paranoid for 10 years. And it just dawned on us that you gotta get out there, because they do fear what they don't know. Part of the fear factor was that people didn't know us.

ALBERT: We have kids, so we can't really move, but we can go there for a couple months at a time. We each have one child. We would definitely make movies, we want to work now. But we'll take a month or two at a time and go there, feel free to be ourselves. L.A. is such a tension-filled town.

Q: I don't think I've seen two movies with more depressing endings than your first two films. Has this road trip made you both feel more upbeat to the point where you might actually be able to make a film with a happy ending?

ALBERT: Oh, yeah. We're pessimistic by nature, even cynical, but the European thing helped. I was very introverted--we both are, but I'm worse. I wouldn't go outside because I was very paranoid about people beating me up, people shooting me, people confronting me. So one thing Europe made me feel is, if it's meant to happen, it's meant to happen. I was missing out on life because I was so paranoid. Also, the biggest mistake I see big directors make is, they don't go out in public much, and lose touch with reality. Your observation skills diminish because you don't go out and mix with the crowds.

ALLEN: We go out when we have to, so don't make it sound like we never do. The difference between him and me is, after Dead Presidents, I got out and went around the world fishing. Being around people was never a fear of mine, but I had a fear of death, a fear of people dying around me that I cared about. And the thing about Europe that changed us both is it did instill some love in us.

Q: Given Europe and your experience with Johnny Depp, it sounds like you might be lightening up.

ALLEN: When any drama goes down, I feel like I don't want to be part of anything negative anymore. If anybody I know fucks me, I'm not going to hold a grudge. I'm not harboring anything anymore. I want to be happy, and it wasn't until three years ago that we both got happy. We'd never really been happy before.

ALBERT: We were very hard on ourselves about everything. Recently, he got a Mercedes and I got a Porsche. We still feel guilty about it, and we were avoiding that for years because of the perception that people might have of us if we had nice things. Now we think, Why should other people's perception keep us from being happy? There's still guilt, but we're getting to the point where we can appreciate life, and have things and not feel like somebody's looking at us all the time. I don't see us being angry anymore. Anger only fucks things up for us. It's hard to grow if you're angry.

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Michael Fleming interviewed Heather Graham for the September issue of Movieline.

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