05/14/2002 Entry:
"Projections 10"

Projections is a series of books put out by Faber And Faber. Each "issue" covers film in various ways. This book was guest edited by Mike Figgis contains a series of interviews he conducted with a variety of writers, executives, actors and directors. The interviews are fairly wide-ranging but they have a general theme of Hollywood and how the mainstream movie system does and doesn't work. Its a sensible theme for Figgis to cover, he's done large and small films, with varying levels of control, most of them challenging in one way or another. The book is quite interesting, and like all the other books in the series I got a lot out of it.

The interviews work really well, largely because Figgis chooses people he knows and feels comfortable with and they work less as q&a sessions and more as extended conversations. This gives them a nice loose feel, and often you learn as much about Figgis as the person who is questioning him. Thats fine with me, but might annoy some people. A lot of stuff that comes out of the conversations is about what you would expect. The women all pretty much have a common theme of "there are no good roles for women", however it is interesting to see how differently each of them deals with it. One of the more resonating passages for me occured when Ally Sheedy was inquiring with her casting agent why no she wasn't getting called in for any roles, and the agent replied "because nobody wants to fuck you." Now, we all know thats the truth, and now that I sit here and think about it I'm not even that surprised that someone would come out and say it flat out like that. It was just jarring at the time, to see it laid out so unabashedly like that. Maybe its best for everyone that the truth is just told, but it is something I personally could never have the heart to say.

An interview with Sylvester Stallone was probably the most enlightening for me. Its easy to forget that he wrote Rocky and comes from a background doing serious theatre. In the interview he complains about being typecast somewhat, and in part it rings false. Nothing was stopping him from making Rocky VI or anything. However, he claims that around the time he did CopLand he decided to stop taking the typical action here adventure roles, and you look at what he's done since then (nothing that I can recall) and you know, it rings true. It was a really interesting talk.

In fact, all of the interviews are interesting in one way or another. I mean, the executives all have the point of view you would expect. Kenneth Turan is the only critic represented. His interview puts into words something I never would have expected anyone in his position to do, basically admitting that A) people don't value the opinion of a critic, they value the opinion of a publication (oh what did the Times think?) and B) that critics are there to tell that audience what to see. I find this attitude appalling personally, but it falls right in line with the allegations Johnathan Rosenbaum makes in Movie Wars about film criticism in this day and age.

The collection ends with a piece by David Freeman eulogizing Robert Antonio which was about as good as six pages of writing could be. I know nothing of Antonio's work at all, yet at the end of this piece I felt I had an acute sense of the man. The account of Freeman's last dinner with him is touching, revealing, and perfectly revealed. A very touching piece. The book concludes with an interview with Edward Norton by someone other than Figgis. An interesting piece, although nothing special. I kind of think of Norton this way, he's obviously very talented, and he's played the roles I've seen very well, but none of the films have really been completely successful.