|
AMERICAN CINEMA PAPERS
1983
|
MICHAEL MANN – IN INTERVIEW CASTLE ‘KEEP’ by Harlan
Kennedy Has Michael Mann gone Gothic? Deep in the granite depths of a Transylvanian castle, something
terrifying stirs. It is none other than the transmogrifying remains of F.
Paul Wilson's best-selling shock-horror novel The Keep, now coming to live as a
$6-million grand guignol fantasy. Mann, the writer-director of Thief and (for TV) The Jericho Mile, has set out to transform I met Mann amid the towering sets of the castle's interior at
Shepperton Studios, This is the keep – or at least its studio-built interior. For location
shooting, a giant slate quarry in Mann insists that the movie is not just your common-or-gargoyle horror pic but a fairy tale for our times. And he will
forcefully wave a copy of Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment at you if you look
quizzical. (It's best to wave back.) Bettelheim explained how fairy tales were complex moral fables salutary for adults
and children alike. He insisted (and so does Mann) that unlike myths, which
are built around clearly identified heroes and usually given a tragic ending,
fairy tales are universal, generalized, and energetically moralistic. They
also favor the happy ending. Says Bettelheim: "The myth is pessimistic
while the fairy tale is optimistic, no matter how terrifyingly serious some
of the story may be." And terror, claims Mann, crowds The Keep. Its most notable nasty
is a metamorphosing monster called Molasar with a need for consuming human
essence by destroying human life. Into this creature's domain stumble such
tasty quarries as Jurgen Prochnow (Nazi officer), Dr. Ian McKellen (Jewish
historian sprung from ● I take it that The
Keep is not Alien Meets the Wehrmacht. You're trying to do something else? You're not just vulgarizing Nazism
and turning it into the stuff of catchpenny horror flicks? No! The answer to that is a categorical no. The idea of making this
film within the genre of horror films appealed to me not at all. It also did
not appeal to But you tend to wake up. In this movie – if it works – you don't wake up. You're swept away and
you stay swept away. So it's very much a magical, dream-like, fairy-tale
reality. There is a book called The Keep by F. Paul Wilson. Was that your starting point? No. The starting point really preceded the book. I'd just done a
street movie, Thief. A very stylized street movie but nevertheless
stylized realism. You can make it wet, you can make it dry, but you're
still on "street." And I had a need, a big desire, to do something
almost similar to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, where I could deal with something that was
non-realistic and create the reality. There is an effect in the film whereby
Molasar accrues to himself particles of matter from living organisms. Now
what is the logic of that? What does it look like? How does it happen? What's
the sound of it? I mean, that's a real turn-on, to fantasize what these
things are going to be like. So you're way out there. And you have to be
consistent. You're not rendering objective reality, you're making up
reality. But in this fairy tale we find the Nazi Wehrmacht – men dressed in totemic black uniforms with
swastikas – things we
can recognize and which set up a response. Actually only about one-fifth of the film is involved with the Wehrmacht and the character of the Captain played by
Jurgen Prochnow. The film revolves around a character called Glaeken Trismegistus,
who wakes up after a deep sleep in a transient, merchant-marine setting some
place in And in the course of coming to the keep to confront Molasar, he has a
romance with Eva, whose father is a
Mediaeval historian named Dr. Cuza, very quick, very smart. At a moment in
history when he is powerless – a Socialist Jew in Fascist And Molasar comes to life by taking the power, the souls, of the Wehrmacht Nazis. What happens is that after the second time you've seen him, Molasar
changes. And he seems to change after people are killed. After he kills
things. It's almost as if he accrues to himself their matter. Not their
souls; he doesn't suck their blood. It's a thing unexplained, his transformation
is seen visually. He evolves through three different stages in the movie. He
gets more and more complete. He starts as a cloud of imploding particles,
then he evolves a nervous system, then he evolves a skeleton and musculature,
and at the third state he's complete. And then it's a bit ironic when he's
complete, because there's a great resemblance to Glaeken Trismegistus. Is he evil personified? No. Well, yes he is. Yes, Evil Personified. But what is evil? Try Satan? Or Lucifer? Yes, but think about that. Satan in Paradise Lost is the most exciting character
in the book. He's rebellious, he's independent, he
doesn't like authority. If you think about it, Satan could almost be played
by John Wayne. I mean the Reaganire, independent, individualist spirit. It's all
bullshit, but that's the cultural myth that the appeal taps into. Is Glaeken Trismegistus the alter ego of Molasar? Is he the good side? No, he's not. I tried to find a more surreal logic to the characters;
so that there's nothing Satanic about Molasar. He's just sheer power, and the
appeal of power, and the worship of power, a belief in power, a seduction of
power. And Molasar is very, very deceptive. When we first meet him, we too
believe that he is absolute salvation. And it's all a con. Now when Glaeken
shows up, the first thing he does is seduce Eva Cuza. So my intent in designing those
characters was to make then not black-and-white. I put in things that are not
normally considered to be good into Glaeken and qualities that are not evil
into Molasar. Why did you choose these names? You wrote the script. The script was taken from a book, which we've talked about; but I did
give Glaeken his last name, which he didn't have in the book. And I couldn't
find a better name than Trismegistus. There's something about Trismegistus that rings a bell. It's the Greek for "harvest." Of course! Now once the script was written, did you change many
details? Yes. Once I've written the screenplay I've finished the movie, in the
sense that I have a complete evocation of it on paper. Then it's a whole new
film again when I start shooting. It doesn't change that much, but now
the words are plastic, flexible. So I'm constantly rewriting bits of
dialogue before I shoot, which drives the actors really crazy. Then two days
before we shoot it they get new pages. Then the day before, they get more new
pages. And then when I get them on stage I say, "You know the dialogue
– yeah, well, forget it, I want to make a small change." ● How important to you is the use of the wide screen? Very. It's important to me for two reasons. One, because this is an
expressionistic movie that intends to sweep its audience away – be very
big, to have them transport themselves into this dream-reality so that
they're in those landscapes, there with the characters. You can't sweep
people away in 1:85 and mono. Also, I'm just not interested in "passive" filmmaking, in a
film that's precious and small and where it's up to the audience to bring
themselves to the movie. I want to bombard an audience – a very active,
aggressive type of seduction. I want to manipulate an audience's feelings
for the same reasons that composers write symphonies. What are your feelings about ultimately seeing this big-screen film on
television and video-cassette, with the sides chopped off? Are you pushing
your compositions toward the middle of the screen? No. Whatever happens to it when it goes out on television or video,
that's the breaks. I can't do anything about that.
But I can do everything about the cinema experience which, for me, is obviously
primary. So the shots are composed for the big screen and the film is
designed to be effective for theater audiences. And if it does that job,
then it's going to also do well on TV With bits chopped off. Yeah. But commercial reasons aside, I'm interested in the theatrical
experience, not in the small-screen experience. Of course The Keep isn't
just a film with human heads, it's got Special
Effects as well. Since there are a lot of pyrotechnics and elaborate technical
challenges in the movie, are you storyboarding? I storyboarded everything. Then I threw it all away. When you get on
the set and the light is doing something different and better than you
thought, you start moving your actors – and there goes the storyboard right
out the window. In this picture we used arc lamps that date from the
Twenties and Thirties to get a certain kind of hard blue shaft of light
coming through all the openings in the keep. And it usually comes from behind
people and makes shafts across them, creating a kind of Albert
Speer-Mussolini monumental quality. You make a film during a year of your life. You grow and you change.
And if you're lucky, the film has increased in magnitude. By then, the effect
you thought of a year ago can seem pretty thin. So there goes the storyboard
again. There are two poles in the movie: the village and the Keep. And
whatever is happening in the village is completely different from what's
going on in the Keep. So everything in the village is very bright, very
white. It's got a basic innocence – with enough realistic textures like dirt
to make it believable – and a slightly sinister overtone, which comes in the
shape of the crosses. Rooftops are never symmetrical,
they're always twisted a little bit. Basically we exposed for shadows, and
let the highlights bum out everything for it to be sunlit and brilliant
inside the village. Then when things start going bad it's still sunlit, and
things happen in a very scary, overexposed way. In the Keep everything is very dark. We exposed for the highlights and
let all the shadows go. Instead of a flood or a wash of light, there are very defined shafts of light. It's only in those shafts
that we can see things. The lighting was designed in a very integral way, very
closely between myself, Alex Thompson [the cinematographer], and John Box
[the production designer]. ● We're living in an age where there are nuclear factors contending and
the planet is in jeopardy. So is this film an escape
from or a confrontation with that reality? It's both, I think. It's a reality that's not part of everybody's
everyday reality; it's a dream. You bet it's an escape. The whole movie is one huge dilation of space and time into a dream reality,
so it's a huge escape. But in dreams there are a lot of hidden themes. With
the themes, and how they affect an audience, I attempt to make the film very
meaningful. Not meaningful in a two-dimensional way like a message. You know,
"Those guys' politics bad: these guys' politics good." Nothing as
specific as that, but rather a penetration of psychological realities. How do you think audiences will feel after seeing your film? Disturbed,
frightened? Will they be thinking? If the film works, they'll come out emotionally exhausted. The film is
uplifting in the end, the way it turns out. But then the next day the
audience will start thinking about it and say, "Whoa!",
The best work in Thief was immediate in that sense, in that people
would come out either loving it or hating it. And some loved it and hated it
at the same time. A friend of mine called and said, "The film was
fabulous, l just hated it."
When I asked why, he said, "Because I like to feel that I control my
destiny, I control my life, and the film made me think that I didn't."
As far as I'm concerned, that meant the film just hit a home run with the
bases loaded. The Keep is less
immediate than that, but emotionally deeper because it tries to get at the
way you think and feel in the way dreams work. A Jungian interpretation or a Freudian? Freudian. But not a slavish, doctrinaire, mechanistic approach. Any
mechanistic application like that is not artistic, and a dead end. You're using the music of Tangerine Dream for the film. Why? Because we have a terrific relationship. I think their work on Thief
was very successful. This music is very different. This is much more
melodic, there are different influences. We're using Thomas Tallis, we're
using a lot of choirs processed through a vocoder. I've got in my brain maybe
seven or eight hours of their music. The cinema seems to be bringing forth or giving birth to a new trend;
myths, fables, fairy tales. Why? In the Thirties and Forties people saw a movie once or twice a week.
Now people see moving pictures six hours a day. So what's the motivation to
go to the cinema? It has to be to have a different order of experience.
Otherwise stay home and watch the idiot box. Cinema has to be more
experimental, it has to transport people away, it has to provide them with a
suspension of disbelief, a feeling they've been swept up into another
reality they can't get when they're bigger than the image. If there is a single trend right now, I think it's to people making
very emotional films. Even hardcore Marxists like the Taviani Brothers are
making very emotional films. Their film The Night of the Shooting Stars is a very political film,
but it's political about emotions. It's simple and poetic, yet it's a
cleavage right through modern man in a strange way. What other films or filmmakers have impressed you or influenced you? You're influenced by who you like. I like Kubrick, I like Resnais
immensely. I like Tarkovsky, although there's very little in Tarkovsky I'd
want to do myself. In fact I fell asleep through half of Solaris, but I still love it. And Stalker.
He has a Russian, suffering nerve of pace that it's hard to relate to,
but you can't help being impressed and moved by what you see. Do you want to produce films? Yes, because there are more pictures I would like to see made than I
can make or want to make. A case in point is a screenplay I wrote called Heat, which I love. As a writer,
I really want to see this picture made. But as a director I don't want to touch
it. COURTESY T.P.
MOVIE NEWS. THIS ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE DECEMBER 1983 ISSUE OF FILM COMMENT. ©HARLAN KENNEDY. All rights reserved. |
|
