date: May 1995
place: Martinez Beach Bar, Cannes
under discussion: Heavy
intro: For a director interested in creating "essentially silent" cinema, James Mangold certainly likes to talk. And despite being a screenwriter who gave the hero of his two-hour film debut Heavy just twenty lines, Mangold tries to cram in as many concepts as possible in his own speech. "It's not about hating words," he explains, "It's about loving pictures. If you are constructing a scene, you want to get the dialogue out of the way." The son of minimalist painter Robert Mangold, James was given a prestigious writer/director deal with Disney while he was just 21. But on his refusal to play Hollywood's "very elaborate chess game,"the deal was not renewed. After a spell of unemployment and odd jobs, Mangold went back to film school where he developed Heavy, the tale of a overweight pizza chef who falls hopelessly in love with his diner's new waitress.
Why did you go back to film school?
Because it was some kind of shelter from Hollywood where I could generate
scripts. And I was very lucky. I ended up working under Milos Forman when
I developed Heavy. He taught me not to be frightened of how small it was, to be proud of how tender it is; not to make it bigger and not to pump it up.
Where did you get the idea for Heavy?
I knew a tavern like this in the place where I grew up (upstate New York).
I also had a friend who was very heavy, although he wasn't like Victor in
any way. And then all those memories and that information interfaced with
a very specific goal to make a film about a large man who's invisible;
he's so big, yet no-one looks at him. The contradiction on screen is that
he's physically larger than anyone else, he takes up more screen space.
And I just tried to find my way through it all, just writing and not
knowing particularly where I was going. What I did know was that
essentially the story was about four or five lives that intersect, and
everyone comes out changed without any of them ending up together, which
would have been complete bullshit.
How did you find the leads?
Taylor Pruitt Vince just blew me away. What was amazing about him wasn't
only his power as actor, but that I needed him to be extremely lovable. I
had already cast Shelley (Winters), Liv (Tyler) and Debbie (Harry), and
all got a chance to test with him and they just adored this guy. And the
fact that this guy with no kind of standard magnetism had gotten under all
of their skins was very informative to me. I knew if he could generate
this innate affection from these women he was well on his way
How about Liv Tyler?
Liv had never done a film when I first met her, but she had just
auditioned for the casting director of Luc Besson's The Professional who was also casting Heavy. He sent her over to my place, and I was just like 'Wow, I've just seen a movie star. A movie star just visited my house; she's sixteen years old and I know she's going to be a movie star!' And it wasn't just beauty. You could see the gears spinning in her head as she sat in pauses between moments and I knew very much that that was how the engine of the movie was going to work - finding actors who were comfortable with the moments between the lines. Most of us feel awkward in the moments we're not speaking; we use speech as a defense - Which is probably why I don't shut up in these interviews (laughs) - but Liv was so comfortable in those unspoken moments, and so was Pruitt. They were people most comfortable just being, and speaking was secondary to them.
Aside from Milos Forman, who has influenced your filmmaking?
Probably the most central inspiration for the last five or six years for
me is (Japanese director Yasujiro) Ozu. I have a boxed set of his films,
and you can't get them subtitled. They're all just completely
incomprehensible to me in terms of dialogue, but the visual stylization is
incredible. I think that where directors really reveal themselves is in
the transitions - where they leave a scene, how they leave a scene, how
they come into a scene - and Ozu is an absolute master of these passages
from one scene to the next, almost making them incredible flourishes of
poetry.
How would you classify these filmmakers?
They're all formalists. They're all extreme. They all insist on some kind
of very intense, rigorous, visual style for the film. I'm a big fan of
Coppola and Scorsese too, but these filmmakers don't have as much to offer
me, partly because I'm trying to find some kind of vein to tap that is a
little less overtapped.
Your movie certainly seems to go against the current trend in American filmmaking. What are you trying to do?
So many of my peers are making really great films, but they're all chasing Martin Scorsese's tail to some degree. And I'm happy to chase Robert Benton's tail. People keep telling me: "Your films are very European." Well, then so are the films of Hal Hartley, Todd Haynes, Gus Van Sant and Jim Jarmusch. At a certain point there will be enough of us making interesting, stylised films (in America) that we're not just rebels. Most of what I try and do is try and construct a story to tell that comes from my life, but also find something formal/architectural something structural that makes it interesting to me cinematically, that makes it a different movie. It's not just some fresh spicy dialogue and a neat story.
In what way do think Heavy is stylised?
I think we've gotten a little screwed up in the way we perceive style, we
think style should be flamboyant. Heavy is stylised in reverse - I move the camera once in the movie. When I talk about stylised I'm talking about how I tried very hard to tell the story aggressively, but within a very limited palette. To some degree I'm trying make films composed of certain kinds of haikus and silent moments and emotional moments and those kind of moments get obliterated by naturalistic talking. (Emphatically) Restraint is a style. I think we're incredibly used to being spoon-fed information in movies through dialogue and to me that's a weak choice.
What will your next movie be?
I'm a big fan of classic westerns and I wanted to try and construct a
modern western. Itís called CopLand. I've set the movie in suburbs full of commuting NYPD: New York city cops who hate the city; who get out of it every night after work; who have established this all-white, very peaceful community in New Jersey where you can see the NYC skyline across the river and who hope to god the chaos of the city doesn't come across into their new neighbourhood. And the movie follows the sheriff of this New Jersey town of hard-boiled cops who have these incredible stories to tell from their travails in the city. The sheriff is deaf in one ear and kind of wishes he could be a cop in the city. He worships these cops but ends up realising that his town is an absolute centre of police corruption. It'll climax with a completely silent gun-fight because when they realise he's against them, they blow out his only good ear. You'll have this gun-fight in which there's no sound, so the most violent moment of the movie will be nothing but heartbeats and the sound of wind and distant tinkling of glass...
How does it relate to your work on Heavy?
The hero has much the same kind of tenderness and soulfulness that Victor
has, and much of the same kind of struggle to climb out of life's shadows
and do something, but in some sense because of the kind of big plot engine
underneath it, itís a much more aggressive movie than Heavy. I think it ís important, though, that I don't make a movie just like Heavy every time, else I'll grow weary of it as well as the audience.
