Mountebanks and Misfits
From his difficult childhood under the tyrannical rule of an abusive stepfather to his young ascendancy to the heights of American theater, David Mamet is one of America's greatest talents. As he aged he began to produce essays about his dark past, novels about his relationship to his Judaism, and even poetry whose subject is too bizarre to describe. Mamet's ideas about how people talk to one another are evident in every corner of American television and cinema, where his rapid-paced style perfectly fit the limitations of a generation with a short attention span. In 1997 he sat down with the film critic Barbara Shulgasser in front of a San Francisco audience to discuss his ideas about Hollywood, acting, and why he writes. What follows is the first part of that interview. - A.C.
with second wife rebecca pidgeon
BARBARA SHULGASSER: You've said that, if you hadn't found the theater, you probably would have become a criminal.
DAVID MAMET: Yeah, I think that that's probably true. I knew a lot of criminals. I used to live with criminals.
BS: How do you mean? Literally in a house with criminals?
DM: No, no I used to spend all day playing poker with them. And then I sold nonexistent real estate for awhile with people who were basically criminals.
BS: Preparation for Glengarry?
DM: Yeah, well, that's what it turned into. And I was one of those kids who was always told that he probably possessed a great intelligence, but why must he act so stupidly? And so I never did very well at anything. So, I figured I was going to end up in prison somewhere.
BS: Uh-huh. What was your response when people asked you why you must act so stupidly?
DM: Well, it took me thirty years to find out that every rhetorical question is an attack.
BS: Yes. I won't ask any.
DM: Oh, good.
BS: Have you had to fight a lot of idiocy in your work in Hollywood?
DM: Only my own.
BS: Your own?
DM: Sure.
BS: Well, that's very modest of you, but I'm sure that's not true.
DM: Well, it says in the Bible, "What is he who conquers a city compared with him who overcomes his own nature?" So the thing about Hollywood is: there it is. I mean there's nothing hidden about Hollywood. It's what it is. And —
BS: Well, I think a lot of people go there with that attitude and hope that they can overcome but find it's just an avalanche of one form of moron telling you how much they love your work when they buy it and then how much it has to change in order to be made into a movie.
DM: Yeah, but to try to change Hollywood is like someone who goes out to work for the Ford Motor Company and says, 'You know, we should really invest in public transportation because it makes a lot more sense."
the verdict
BS: I see your point. Let's talk a little about your early screenplays. I love The Verdict. How did you get that job?
DM: I got the job for The Verdict...I was hired by Zanuck and Brown to write a movie based on a book by Barry Reed, a lawyer in Boston, Mass. And it's based on an actual case. They had me write the movie, and they didn't like it. They were very polite about it. They paid me. They said, "We just don't like it, and, if you'd like to write it again, we'd pay you again." They did. I said, "That's very flattering, but I couldn't write anything differently."
And so the project went on, and they hired several other well-known writers, and I became morose and sent a copy to Sidney Lumet, who I knew in passing, just to get someone else's opinion, hoping he would praise it. And the good fairy descended. The director, who was going to be, I believe, Robert Redford, dropped out of the project when they were committed to making the movie, and they sent the scripts they had commissioned — not mine — to Sidney Lumet. They never sent him my script. And coincidentally, that same week I'd sent him my script, and he called them back and said, "I'd love to do the movie. I'm just going to do Dave's screenplay." And, lo and behold, the day was saved.
BS: Wow.
DM: You know, one time in thirty years, what the hell?
BS: Well, the difference between movies and theater, as far as writers are concerned, is the difference between a medium that values the writer and one that kind of undervalues the writer. I'm wondering, since there has to be some kind of adjustment for a playwright who gets to write the way he wants to when he goes to Hollywood, how that changes the writing.
DM: Well, it's a completely different medium. One of the fascinating things about writing is that, when you write for radio, radio is different from stage, and stage is different from television, television is different from movies. They're all different. And it's like the poker player who says, "I sat down at this game, and they were playing deuces wild. And you had to trade in a one-eyed Jack on another card. I can't play that game." Well, if you can't play the game, you shouldn't play the game.
The point for the poker player is to understand the rules of the game, and for the writer to understand the essential nature of the medium — if he or she can — because each is very, very different. Writing movies and writing plays are extraordinarily different endeavors. Application and study would probably help anybody understand them a bit, but to say, "I don't know why they don't like my plays when I wrote movies well," is like saying, "I don't know why I'm not winning at indian poker when I can play five-card stud." You got to understand the rules of the game.
BS: I thought after I saw The Postman Always Rings Twice and The Verdict - I lived in Chicago and saw quite a lot of your work — that in your writing movies and having to fulfill dictates of a much more market-oriented medium, which Hollywood turns out, there would be more plot, there would be more structure, and that it might change your plays as well. And I thought it did. Did you?
DM: I think it absolutely did. Thank you. When you write a movie, when one writers a movie, that's all a movie is, is plot. All that you and I care about when we watch a movie is what happens next. And it's told with pictures. And the pictures go by at twenty-four frames a second. And we get the idea pretty damned quickly. There's nobody here who can't come into a movie or television show at any point and understand in a tenth of a second what's happening. And so what moves a movie along is plot. What happens next. "Oh yes," the audience says. "Oh my God, now he or she has gotten into an even worse scrape. Let me sit here a little longer and figure out what happens next." So, when I start writing movies, I had to really feverishly apply myself to understanding, to learning, how to write a plot. And I think it very much affected my plays for the better.
BS: Tell me. Was there an enlightening moment when you first realized that the theater had some power, had something that you wanted to be a part of?
DM: I think that moment was the moment when I first realized that it wasn't work and that people could go there and never work. I figured out that I had found the circus and I just wasn't going home. And I found it very young. My Uncle Henry, who lived out here for a while — and his wife, my Aunt Esther, still lives out here with that part of the family — was a producer of radio and television in Chicago for the Chicago Board of Rabbis. And he gave me jobs as a kid and my sister jobs as a kid, portraying Jewish children on television and radio. And through him I got into community theater in Chicago.
BS: It was a stretch —
DM: What?
BS: — portraying Jewish children.
DM: That's right.
American Buffalo
BS: Isaac Bashevis Singer was once asked if he believed in free will and he said, "Yes, I have no choice", which sounds like something from one of your movies. You seem to believe in fate. No matter what your characters do, they seem bound up in a fate that's decided already by their class and by what neighborhood they're from and their childhoods. I'm wondering if you think very much much in those terms when you're writing these characters.
DM: No, I never think about fate because, as we all know, "Fate is the fool's word for chance." Right? No?
BS: And why wouldn't that enter into your writing?
DM: Nobody saw that movie? Oh my God, where are you people from? Yeah, The Gay Divorcee. Eric Blore. Fred Astaire. "Fate is the fool's world for chance." Oh my God, where am I? No, Aristotle, used to say —
BS: You used to hear him say this?
DM: That's right. Aristotle used to say, until someone would tell him to shut up, he used to say that character is fate. So tragedy is about character, which is about the capacity for the human being to make choices. And Don Marquis, who wrote Archy and Mehitabel, said — and I think Isaac Bashevis Singer may have been cribbing from him — that the ultimate reconciliation of the doctrine of free will and predestination is we're free to do whatever we want and whatever we choose is going to be wrong. And that's what tragedy is about.
BS: Well, religion seems to be another circumscribing factor for your characters. In The Old Religion, Leo Frank. And in Homicide, the movie that you wrote and directed Joe Mantegna plays a police offer who's kind of forced to face his Judaism, something he's apparently denied or ignored. You've recently returned, or stopped —
DM: Yeah, I think that's a fairly accurate description, sure.
BS: And how did that change things for you?
DM: Well, it made me happier.
BS: Really?
DM: Sure.
BS: How?
DM: Well, in very many ways. It's a great thing to be able to put down the intolerable burdens of, if one happens to be me, of arrogance, egoism, and self-absorption for a while.
BS: All that from Judaism?
DM: Sure. I have this great rabbi — his name is Larry Kushner — who has this magnificent congregation in Sudbury, Massachusetts. And on Yom Kippur he said, "The bad news is you're going to be here all day. The good news is you've got no place to go."
BS: So, he's a comedian. But how does this help you overcome arrogance and those other burdens?
DM: Well, there's two answers to that question. A-ha, right? And one of them is that the rabbis would say, "Whoever rises refreshed from his prayers, his prayers have been answered." And other equally nonresponsive answer is that the rabbis would say, "put on teffilin, put on tallis, hold a prayerbook in your hand. Now, sin."
BS: It's better that way. So, that's what you've been doing?
DM: Yeah, sure.
BS: Well, good. Was it a surprise to your children?
DM: I don't think so. No. After growing up with me, I think very little surprises them.
BS: Oh, I see. In Homicide the Bobby Gold/Joe Mantegna character says, "There's so much anti-Semitism these last four thousand years. We must be doing something." Did you feel that way?
DM: No, certainly not. But I heard people say that one. I heard Jews make a similar comment. the book I wrote, The Old Religion, is about the Leo Frank case. Leo Frank was lynched in 1915. He was falsely accused of a crime that was fairly evident he didn't commit. The city of Atlanta and the state of Georgia and much of the South imploded in a one-man pogrom and identified Frank as this demon and decided he was a demon because he was a Jew.
And it was the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, which had died out after the Reconstruction, and also the birth of the Anti-Defamation League. It was a show trial, and one of the many "Crimes of the Century.' It was called the "American Dreyfus" case. And I wrote a book about my imagined interior monologue in the persona of Leo Frank, a man who goes to work one day and comes home to find out he's a monster that the world wants to kill and the process he goes through trying to find out why that is true. It's a book about race hatred. And of the things that he experiments with in an attempt to explain to himself a world gone mad is that, perhaps, there is some rectitude in the libels of his accusers. I think that that's something many abused people — children, for example — adopt to deal with intolerable injustice. So, no, that's not something that I feel.
BS: I'm wondering how aware of your Judaism you were as a child growing up. Because it's another kind of outside, and you ended up becoming a writer.
DM: Well, I was pretty aware of it. As I said, my Uncle Henry worked for the Board of Rabbis. My grandparents all came from the Old Country, from Russian Poland. We were fairly Episcopal Reform as far as religious practice went. And the kids from the other side of the tracks used to come over once in a while and hit us on the head, call us all sorts of derogatory terms. But I didn't see a lot of upside in the proposition until I got older.
BS: I wanted to talk a little bit about your book about acting, True and False.
DM: Sure.
BS: The most staggering thing to me that you say in the book is this tip to the actor: If the audience enjoyed the play, you have done a good job. That just sounds like pandering to me. Does this mean that The Bridges of Madison County is a good book?
DM: That very well may be. I haven't read it.
BS: Trust me on this.
DM: If the audience enjoys the play, the actor has done their job, because the audience pays to come to enjoy the play. See actors, as another maligned subspecies of humanity love to flagellate themselves, because it takes free-floating anxiety and transforms it into a yummy little phobia: that it's not the world is bad, it's not that my teachers are worthless, that the critics are mannerless swine, it's not that the plays are no good, but, rather, that I am insufficiently prepared. And, if I just try harder, everything will come out well, and there will be no tears before bedtime.
BS: You don't know actors that use those other excuses, too?
DM: What other excuses?
BS: Those ones that you said it's not.
DM: I'm saying that most actors use those excuses. I've very seldom met an actor — and I've worked with the greatest actors in the world and am greatly privileged to do so — who didn't say, at one time or another, when you said, "Jeez, you were great," "Naw, I wasn't very good tonight." It's a terrible thing to say. It's an insult to the person paying the compliment, and more important, it's an insult to yourself. The audience comes to hear the play. If they had a good time, you did your job. If you know who to do something better, do it better tomorrow night.
BS: But isn't it possible for people to enjoy something that really isn't any good?
DM: Sure, I do. Don't you?
BS: Yes, but we're talking about what a good actor is.
DM: If the audience enjoyed the play, the actor did their job because the jobs of the actor is to communicate the play to the audience. The job of the actor is not to obtain some magical, mystical state of perfection in him — or herself. It's nothing but self-consciousness. It's heresy. And it's the heresy of people who've been exposed to just a little too much education and haven't had enough time trying to earn their living by it.
BS: Well, you talk about a formal education not only being useless to an actor but harmful. You say that it generally ruins a young actor.
DM: That's right. That's absolutely right. For several reasons. The first is, show business smiles on early entry. That the things you can do when you're sixteen and seventeen and eighteen because you have a lot of time on your hands; you don't need a lot to live; you can't do when you're twenty-eight and twenty-nine and thirty. You should be out there getting your teeth kicked in and learning something and meeting some people and working hard.
Scott Zigler, a great, great director, directed my play The Old Neighborhood that Carole Hays produced, which just opened on Broadway last night, and he also teaches at Harvard. He's a great, great teacher. he says to the kids, "Get out there. And if you go to work for nothing in the movie business, if you do two movies for nothing" (he's talking about on the technical end), "you can be gainfully employed for the rest of your life." And it's true. The movie business particularly smiles on people who are reliable, dedicated and hard-working.
BS: But not necessarily good.
DM: But why should they be good? Why should anybody be good when they're sixteen, seventeen and eighteen? You gotta get out there and be bad.
BS: Yeah, but sometimes they don't get better.
DM: Well.
BS: Isn't that possible?
DM: Yes. But they're not going to get better in school, and here's the reason why. Acting is something that's done for a paying public. It's not something that's done for school administrators and for teachers. the skills needed to please an acting teacher, a casting agent, a school administrator, are those that are completely opposite from the skills needed to please an audience. The audience — just like you and me- comes to the theater to be delighted, to be surprised, and to give everyone the benefit of the doubt because they want to have a good time. The teacher, the administrator, and the casting agent come to the session as if to greet a thief who's going to be underprepared and rob them of their time.
An audience isn't judgmental. That's why they come. That's why I come. That's why you come. There's nothing one is going to learn in school except to pander to authority. And the learning to pander to authority not only wastes the individual's time but ill equips the individual to deal with the authority of the greater world that is going to continue to exploit him or her. The casting agent, the fraudulent teachers, the people who take the headshots, the unskilled teachers of voice who are going to say, "Sit still and stay in class for the next million years, and I will tell you when you're any good." It's an absolute fraud.
BS: But that pandering to authority, isn't that to the detriment of anybody who wants to do anything, not necessarily be an actor?
DM: Not if they want to be a teacher.
BS: There's one.
DM: I've got some very good friends who are home schoolers, and they say the benefit of spending enough time in an institution is that eventually you get to be one of the guards.
BS: Another thing you say about actors, you tell them not to interpret. You say that to create the illusion the actor has to undergo nothing at all.
DM: That's right.
BS: What if you're a shy person trying to play a bore? Is there some kind of mock transformation that you have to go through in order to muster up whatever?
DM: No, you have to say words.
BS: And that's it?
DM: That's it.
BS: From this point of view, how can you tell a good actor from a bad actor?
DM: A good actor is one whose performance you enjoy. I mean, if you want to get more technical, I would say a good actor to me is one whose performance I enjoy because I find it truthful. Which is to say, I enjoy the performance.
BS: Well, that's not necessarily the most truthful performance. That's just the one you enjoyed.
DM: It's the most truthful performance to me. To whom else am I going to refer to it? If you're making love to someone, you say, "Jeez, I feel great." They say, "Yeah, I'm going to do better next time."
BS: Well, if you're playing to an audience of sadists and you really screw up in front of them, they'll enjoy that.
DM: The objections that you're raising, they're moot points. You can't argue them. But at the end of the the theater is a profession of mountebanks and misfits, much like myself, who've come in through the back door because no one else would have them and learned to find a place in society by getting up on a stage and doing plays that people need to hear and doing them well in an interesting, provocative, and unusual manner. Who haven't had the life bred out of them.
I've been teaching off and on since I was a kid, in many, many institutions, in the English departments and the drama departments, and all that I can tell you is — only I alone am escaped to tell thee — it's a big shock. You want to learn to act, go act. Go start a theater company. Go apprentice yourself. Go carry coffee. Go take voice lessons. And get up on the stage. You're going to be bad for the first x years anyway. You might as well be bad from sixteen to twenty rather than from twenty-eight to thirty-five.
BS: You also talk about how you're very much against interpretation of the text. In another book I was reading, you refer to a rabbi who points out that as one studies the Torah, the same portions at the same time of year, year after year, that one sees in them a change. But, as they do not change, it must be you who is changing. And that made me think that, isn't that another way of saying that the text has a depth that reveals itself through studying and interpretation?
DM: If one is studying the text. On the other hand, for an actor, the text reveals itself to the audience through the juxtaposition of the uninflected words, which the author wrote, and the moment-to-moment truthfulness of the actor. I don't want to hear some actor's good ideas. I and you and everyone here has the capacity to go to the library and understand what the author meant. What the actor can contribute, which is a great contribution, is the organic moment-to-moment, back and forth, the Ping-Pong game of the unforeseen.
What does it mean of somebody of whom we say they have a great technique? Of a chef of whom we say they have a great technique? It means you didn't enjoy that dinner.
BS: Why?
DM: Why? Whoever said that of a dinner they enjoyed? What we say of a dinner we enjoyed is "Yum." And what we say of a performance we enjoyed is, "Gol-ly!" We don't say, "What technique." We say "What technique' when we have been defrauded of anything more enjoyable. So we appreciate our own ability to appreciate.
BS: So, you would call a performance by Meryl Streep doing one of her accents or Dustin Hoffman in Rain Main or De Niro doing Awakenings —
DM: First of all, I'm not going to name names because it's not my job, and my taste is not the point. Everyone has his or her taste, and they're entitled to it. That's what you're entitled to when you buy a ticket. You're there to see the show. You get to make up your own mind. Let me ask you a question. What is the line, "I never want to see you again." What does that line mean?
BS: It depends.
DM: Exactly. That's exactly correct.
BS: Thank you.
DM: It depends on what's happening in the moment. It can mean any number of a million things. And just so, when the line is spoken on stage, it can mean any number of a million things. As I say in the book, for any actor to prepare what he or she thinks the "character is going through" and then bring that onto the stage is an error of the same magnitude for the basketball team to say, "We're going to go out, and we're going to perform these plays irrespective of what the other team is doing."
BS: Well, what about Horowitz interpreting Chopin? is that any different from an actor interpreting Mamet?
DM: Well, it depends. It's a very good example. There are some pianists whose technique is so good they just bore you to death. One would rather hear a twelve-year-old who wanted to play the music. And I would, too, of the actors. I would rather hear somebody who wanted to get on stage and mix it up a little bit than someone who's going to share with me his or her good ideas about the text.
It's not the actor's job to be interesting. It's the actor's job to be extraordinary brave and forthright. And, when I was a kid growing up, we used to say the best thing you could say about an actor was that he or she was dangerous. That's what people want in the theater. You know, we look at early performances of Brando. You look at something Joey Mantegna did. You look at Patti LuPone in this play on Broadway. You say, "Gee, where they hell did they come from? Man, I never could have thought of that." Exactly. you know, you see Whoopi Goldberg when she was doing her comedy on stage —
BS: I never could have thought of what?
DM: Whatever the actor —
BS: The way they were doing it.
DM: Yeah. And neither could they.
BS: Well, isn't that their interpretation?
DM: No, it's their performance.
BS: Could you elaborate on that?
DM: Yes. Stanislavski said there are three kinds of actors. There's the actor who's gonna be the hack actor and give you his or her version of what they think an actor would do in this role. They're gonna interpret other actors. And then there's the mechanical actor, who gives you their version of what they think their character would be like. They're gonna think it up. They're gonna practice in front of the mirror, and they're gonna bring it in. And then there's the organic actor, who's simply going to determine what is needed in the scene and then go on and do whatever they can to get that from the other person.
Now, a good example of this organic behavior is a child who doesn't want to go to bed. A lover who wants a second chance. A man or woman who wants a job. Somebody who wants to get laid. There's nothing that these people won't do. And that's called having an objective. Having an objective is just a fancy word for wanting something real, real bad. And when all of us — or any of us — are in these situations, there's nothing we won't do. All of our attention's on the other person. And we'll change horses in the middle of the stream to do anything to get them to give us what we want. Now, when you see that in an actor on stage it's awfully damned compelling. Because what the great actor's doing on stage is changing his or her tactics to get what they need from the other person on stage, rather than performing what they dreamed up at home.
William H. Macy in Oleanna
BS: Isn't that technique, though?
DM: No.
BS: It seems to me that it is for this reason: if you're trained, part of your training is to be constantly aware of your opportunities on stage, and one of them means, "I must change tactics when called for." Rather than going out there every time without any understanding of what may happen, you have the understanding already, and you're ready for it and can do it.
DM: One doesn't have to be constantly trained to be aware of all the opportunities on stage any more than one has to be constantly trained to be aware of all the opportunities in trying to talk a cop of a traffic ticket. We're born with this capacity.
BS: Some people are better at it than others, though.
DM: Exactly so. And some people are better actors than others. But it's an innate capacity to be imaginative. And what's needed in the actor is not these dull whips of authority with which we flagellate ourselves of concentration and discipline and technique. Who cares? What's needed is bravery and intelligence and imagination. And all of us have all of that we need.
BS: But, as you say, the addition of emotion and all that kind of stuff is not something you want to see in your actors.
DM: It's false. It's lying. There's nothing anyone can do to control his or her emotions. If there were, we wouldn't need psychiatrists.
BS: I wonder. I don't really agree with that. If —
DM: Did anyone ever tell you, "Cheer up"?
BS: Yes.
DM: What was your reaction?
BS: Let me ask you this. What if you, right now, were suicidally sad, but you decided for the hour and a half it would take you to promote your book on this tour that you could set that aside. And then, when you knew it was going to be over, you go back to your room and cry and shoot yourself or whatever. I think that —
DM: That's not manipulating emotions. That's having an objective. The two things are very, very, very different.
BS: Well, that's semantics.
DM: What?
BS: Certainly it's manipulating your emotions. I think that the theory that one can control one's emotions and urges for short periods of time is the basis of the philosophy of teaching children good manners.
DM: No, what they child controls is not what he or she feels. What they control, if they can—
BS: Is behavior. That can look like emotions.
DM: Well, it might look like emotions to you, but there's nothing a human being can do to control their emotions. Cults function by suggesting to a human being that this control is possible and then shaming them when they find that it's not. That's how a cult functions. And when psychiatry becomes a cult, as it can, or a religion, as it can, that's how it functions. Or an acting class or any kind of class.
To say to the individual, "I've asked you to do something. Now why can't you do it?" The individual gets the idea that he or she is bad, and the only cure for the inherent badness is to work harder, to, in fact, enslave themselves to, and in the case of acting schools, to the teacher. And I've seen it for thirty years, and it's a vast imposition on the acting student. And, it's a fraud. There's nothing that the human being can do, to control their feelings, to control their emotions. and it may be practiced unwittingly, and it may be practiced for the best of all possible reasons, but it, nonetheless, is a fraud perpetrated on the student.
"From the Mouth of Gabriel" - Sufjan Stevens (mp3)
"Heirloom" - Sufjan Stevens (mp3)
"Arnika" - Sufjan Stevens (mp3)
