Yuri Shevchuk in Conversation with Peter Bogdanovich

The conversation took place at Mr. Bogdanovich’s apartment in New York on November 7, 2005.

YS. What in your opinion is the principal task of film criticism and film critic?

PB. I never was really a film critic. I suppose I have written about films. Critic seems to imply somebody who is critical, and I have always been more what [Bernard] Shaw called “popularizer.” I have been interested in talking about things I like as opposed to things I don’t like. I think I did more interviews with directors and more feature articles about film stars and directors more than criticism. But I have done a little bit.

A critic should know the past and the present of movies. He should have a strong foundation in the past and know the important films from the beginning of movies. His job is to try to make the film more accessible to the viewer and heighten the reader’s or potential viewer’s interest in the work. If it’s a work by a filmmaker who’s been around, to try to connect the work to the filmmaker's larger opus.

YS. Do you think a film critic should be objective or should express his very personal perception of the material?

PB. I don’t know how you can be objective when you are a critic. You are commenting, your commentary is necessarily subjective. Somebody sitting next to you may have a totally different opinion about the movie. There is no such thing as objective criticism. I think it’s all subjective. [Critics] may pretend to be objective, but that’s ridiculous.

YS. Do you have any set of principles or guidelines that you follow when you write about film?

PB. I always chose to write about things I liked as opposed to things I didn’t like. At Cahiers du cinema, which is perhaps the most influential film magazine for the last fifty years, they had a policy that they would sit around and say, OK there’s this new film that came out by [Otto] Preminger. Who liked it? Who didn’t like it? Who liked it very much? Then the person who liked it the most was the person they asked to do the review. The one who liked it the least they were not interested in. So the review always went to the person who really liked the picture. To me that makes sense. That’s positive. Here they try to be objective, and you are supposed to not let your personal feelings come into it. I think that’s absurd, it’s personal.

YS. Isn’t there a danger that film criticism becomes just a subdivision of marketing? When the film industry co-opts film criticism and treats it as just another mechanism of promoting a product?

PB. A lot of it is. A lot of it is that …

YS. And there’s nothing doing?

PB. Movies really become popular because of marketing and because the audience likes the picture. If the picture doesn’t work with the audience, you can have a film that never gets to the audience because there’s not enough market. I had that a number of times when I made films that I think the large public would have liked, if they had had the chance to see them. There are films that get to the wide audience and then the public has no interest in them because they don’t work with the big audience. You find that all the time: A picture opens big and drops dead after the first week because word of mouth kills it. Word of mouth can also make a film, but not if it does not receive enough people in the first week, particularly today when they open films so broadly that you have to have a big push at the beginning for the word of mouth to start generating. You can get a nice word of mouth going with a smaller audience, [but] by the time it gets going, the picture’s gone. It used to be different. You used to open the picture much more slowly than they do now. Pictures just come and go like that and it's insane.

YS. There are also situations when initially a picture goes unnoticed by a larger audience and then gets rediscovered for posterity and for the history of cinema.

PB. Yes, by a smaller audience later. That happens quite often. The most important is to try to get an audience quick, soon for the picture. A cult picture is very nice, better than being forgotten. But it doesn’t help your career at the time. It does later. Citizen Kane for example, was not a success when it opened. It was not a success for probably about twenty years after it opened. Then people started to realize what a success it was. It did not help Orson, except retroactively. I think ideally a film reaches its public when it first comes out, and stays around. If it does not reach its public at the beginning, then you hope that eventually the word will get around that it is pretty good.

YS. You wrote once that writing about movies can change movies. Do you still hold that opinion or does it seem too optimistic a view of writing about films?

PB. The French new wave critics of the 1950s and early 1960s changed movies in France and changed movies ultimately in America and around the world. I think they had a tremendous impact.

YS. That was then. How about now?

PB. The movies are still different because of them.

YS. Do you think writing about film today is still as important as it was then?

PB. It’s hard to tell today what has an impact. In theory writing about film can have an impact on film. It’s less obvious now because there are so many bad films you don’t know what's doing it.

YS. How important for you is the material you review.

PB. I don’t write reviews. I don’t write much about films any more. Occasionally I write about older films. I don’t fit into this category very well.

YS. Has critical perception of your Last Picture Show affected your work on your films that followed? If so, in what way?

PB. People’s reaction to my film had an effect on other people who write about me. That was a highly thought of film and still is. People who write about it consider it a kind of classic I suppose.

YS. Was it paralyzing or scary that you at once set such a high standard you had to meet in you next film?

PB. I did not think of it that way. I had not thought in those terms. I was just happy that that picture worked, and that people liked it, and that it’s still there for people to see. People compare other films to it. But I made different kinds of films, I never tried to make a film like it again. Even the sequel Texasville was not like the first one.

YS. But almost all the cast was the same.

PB. Yet it was a different kind of movie, it wasn’t really the same. It wasn’t in black and white, and it wasn’t about teenagers. It was about middle age crisis. It’s totally different. The tone of the book was different, the tone of the movie is different. I don’t think I ever tried to make a film like The Last Picture Show. My thinking after I made that film was to always try to do something different, something that I hadn’t done before. I was trying to do that when I had ability to do that.

YS. In 1996, Susan Sontag declared cinema as we know it dead, decadent. Do you agree with that view?

PB. I don’t know if it’s dead, but it surely is decadent. The movies became decadent like all the other arts. It was the youngest art, so it took the longest and went decadent last.

YS. What do you see happening to the cinema now?

PB. Well, anyone can see it now. American movies have become enormously stupid by and large, bloated, dumb, stupid, remakes, no original thinking. On the other hand, there are some very good films being made by younger filmmakers, less expensive films. There’s no foundation to it any more.

YS. A fairly pessimistic view of the situation, is it?

PB. I think it’s just realistic. Orson [Welles] said the Renaissance lasted only sixty years. We’re [at a time] when all the arts are in decadence. You don’t have novels being written like they did in the nineteenth century by the Russians or the English. There's no Dickens, no Dostoyevsky, no Tolstoy. There’s no Turgenev.

And there’s no Orson Welles, there’s no John Ford, there’s no Howard Hawks. That’s just the way it is. The fashions come and go. Thing go in cycles. There may be a return to greatness, but right now we are in a decadent period. The whole emphasis on technique, on digital, not digital—it’s all so uninteresting, and has nothing to do with the art of the movies. You see a lot of younger filmmakers’ work is very thin, doesn’t seem to have any resonance. Not all. There’re probably better films being made in China, and maybe Ukraine, where they are not so spoiled as in America.

YS. What would you say to those who maintain that what we see is quite simply the process of a major redefinition of cinema as art?

PB. There were people who said that the abstract artistic movement was also a redefinition of art. I don’t accept that. I think most abstract art is just decadent, decorative and poster art, or less. Most abstract art. But I am in the minority of opinion about that. It seems to me that most abstract art is rather decadent. Andy Warhol was a big hero in this country; to me he is not an artist. To discuss whether a painting of a Campbell soup [can] is art or not, I don’t see any point in that conversation. Some people would say that—what d’you call it? hip-hop or rap?—is music. To me it’s not music. But there are people who love it. There’s always somebody who loves fashionable. There’s no music, no melody. It’s just bad poetry. Not even poetry—a doggerel, recited to repetitive and monotonous, insane-making beat. That’s the kind of thing that could drive you crazy.

YS. Maybe that’s what it’s all about.

PB. Maybe it’s about driving you crazy. They say that there were people in the past who didn’t like jazz, people, who didn’t like rock-n-roll. Yes, but rock-n-roll has a place, jazz has a place. [Rap] is not music, by definition, there's no melody, no rhythm, really.

YS. What would you say to those who say that this redefinition already started with people like Jean-Luc Godard, who famously said that a film should have the beginning, the middle, and the end but not necessarily in that order.

PB. Fine. Godard made some good pictures, but he also made some lousy pictures. He wasn’t consistent. He was shaking things up, he had a certain personality and he made some good pictures.

YS. Do you see a chance for cinema to continue being an art and not just pure entertainment?

PB. Of course, there’s always going be somebody who’ll make a good picture now and again.

YS. But not enjoying as wide a popularity as …

PB. Who knows? It’s possible. I’m not making definitive statements here. Anything is possible. Somebody can make a movie tomorrow that’s popular and good.

YS. In your opinion, how important is human language to film, not cinematic language? Would your Last Picture Show be the same if it were shot in French or Japanese?

PB. That’s part of the characters, part of who the people are. Of course, it’s critical. But that’s specifically language. The people [in the film] were from Texas, they speak American English. Obviously that’s what they talk. If you had them speaking in Japanese, it would be a little peculiar. I’m sure it was dubbed in Japanese and they probably did speak in Japanese—a bit peculiar. Language is important to the characters, if that’s what you mean.

YS. I know your actors went to great lengths trying to master and reproduce the local Texas accent. The reason I am asking you is because there’s a heated discussion in Ukraine now about it not being necessary to make films in Ukrainian but instead make all of them in Russian. In a way, I am trying to engage you in that discussion.

PB. I don’t know. Is the Ukrainian and Russian very different?

YS. They are different enough to be mutually incomprehensible.

PB. That’s a commercial consideration, it seems to me. I don’t know—if the characters are Ukrainian, they probably should speak in Ukrainian language. On the other hand, a film like Ernst Lubitsch’s Shop Around the Corner, 1940, was set in Budapest, Hungary, and nobody spoke Hungarian; they spoke English because it was an American film. It was a terrific movie and had a flavor of Hungary in a way because of the way it was really written, I suppose, because it didn’t really matter in that case. That happens all the time when you have Russians speaking American like Doctor Zhivago. You have that kind of thing happening. I don’t know. The answer to that is if an artist is making it, maybe he can make it work. Jimmy Stewart is so American and yet in Shop Around the Corner, he plays a Hungarian and it works.

If I am making an American film and I set it in Germany and everybody speaks American [English] in Germany, because it’s an American film, it’s a little trickier these days, because we are very literal now, everybody’s very literal. For example, in the heyday of musical comedy films like Lubitsch’s early musicals, where people would suddenly start to sing, or Bandwagon, where Fred Astaire gets off the train and sings “I’ll go it my way by myself,” nobody thought anything of it; everybody thought that’s fine, it’s a musical, he’s singing. In the most recent popular musical Chicago, they had to go to quite elaborate lengths to explain why these people were singing. They had to make it a dream or something, remember? They had to alibi it, as we say in the business, create a reason why people were singing as opposed to simply because that’s a musical comedy and they sing in musical comedies.

That’s what people do. The modern audience is unfortunately very literal. The producers were afraid that the audience would not accept somebody just coming out and singing. That’s sad to me that they have so little faith in the audience and that movies have become so “realistic,” so literal that they cannot just have somebody singing. Again, it’s a downward spiral. It’s a perfect example of people being literal. Today if you made a movie in Budapest with Jimmy Stuart or Tom Hanks, they’d probably have to have thick accents, so that the audience could understand that they are Hungarian. But if they had thick accents, it’d be stupid because they are Hungarian and they would not have an accent if they were speaking Hungarian. The only way to do it would be to have everybody speak Hungarian. So then you say we cannot do it, it’s impossible.

I’m just giving you examples. Language is important, but the point is if you are making a film for a particular audience, you have to find a way around this problem. When Marlon Brando played a Nazi in The Young Lions [directed by Edward Dmytryk, son of Ukrainian immigrants], he had a very thick accent, but in reality unless he was speaking English with a German accent, he was speaking English. The thinking is a little off. That’s poetic license. I don’t know the answer to it.

YS. On the other hand, it’s difficult to imagine Indian films without people singing in them all the time. In François Ozon’s Eight Women, all eight of them take turns singing: Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardant, Catherine Deneuve, and others.

PB. Like in the old days in the movies. That’s nice, I think it’s nice. I don’t know why they have to go to such elaborate length to alibi it. It’s a musical and people sing in musicals. That’s what it’s about. That’s what happens.

YS. Do you think in the globalizing world and with the ever-more-pervasive influence of Hollywood, the national cinemas and their culture-specific content will eventually become irrelevant? Or do you think that on the contrary, a film is interesting in large part because it is culture specific?

PB. I asked Hitchcock if he thought that the American films were the most vital. He said yes, because when you make a film for America, you automatically make it

for the whole world because, as he said, America is full of foreigners. Look, why is your name Bogdanovich and why is my name Hitchcock? Why aren’t we Smith and Jones?

It’s a good example. American films are generally made for a bigger audience, for the world, as opposed to French films, which are made for French people, or Italian films, made for Italian people. I would hate to think of French films being made in English because then you loose the quality that’s French about it. I have been looking at a lot of French films lately for some reason. I looked at some films made by Jean-Pierre Melville—Le samurai, Le circle rouge, Le flic, Bob le flambeur—and I also looked at some Jacques Becker—Touchez pas au Grisbi, Casque d’or—I’ve seen them in French. To think of them being dubbed or spoken in English would be awful. I am all for keeping the ethnic, national [quality], whatever it is you should stick to it.

YS. It is also curious how some actors from other countries, for example, the Spaniards Penelope Cruz or Antonio Banderas, who were very intense and interesting in the Almodovar's films, disappear, vanish in Hollywood films. I don’t know if you’d agree with that.

PB. I have not seen them in any film. That used to not be the case. American movies used to be able to assimilate foreign stars rather well, like Charles Boyer or Maurice Chevalier or Dietrich.

YS. What do you know about Ukrainian cinema?

PB. Nothing.

YS. Nothing at all? Does the name of Oleksander Dovzhenko ring a bell?

PB. Dovzhenko? Well, yes. Is he Ukrainian?

YS. Very much Ukrainian.

PB. I would have thought that he was a Russian director.

YS. That’s part of the mission of my Film Club: to return to Ukrainian culture all that was co-opted into Soviet and now Russian heritage. Dovzhenko was born and grew up in Ukraine, was consciously Ukrainian, spoke Ukrainian all his life and wrote in Ukrainian. How about Sergey Paradzhanov's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, Yuri Illienko?

PB. I don’t know them.

YS. In your book Who the Devil Made It?, you are writing about Edgar Ulmer.

PB. He made a Ukrainian film.

YS. Yes, can you tell me more about that?

PB. Whatever it says in the book. I don’t think I ever saw it. Na-tal-ka Pol-tav-ka. I think its available now. I think they found it. His daughter found the film, and I think it exists on DVD or on tape.

YS. The film that he was unknowingly competing with was made by Ivan Kavaleridze, a famous Ukrainian Soviet film director of Georgian provenance. He was also a famous sculptor. I remember Ulmer saying to you how Soviet Sovkino started playing Kavaleridze’s  Natalka Poltavka against his film as if to say that Ulmer’s film was a capitalist distortion and ours is the real stuff.

PB. Oh? I didn’t know.

YS. Do you know anything at all about Ukrainians, people of Ukrainian origin in Hollywood, people who were born in Ukraine and went on to make their careers there.

PB. No, not particularly. Like who?

YS. Dmytryk.

PB. Edward Dmytryk?

YS. Right. He is Ukrainian. And that’s a very typical Ukrainian name.

PB. Well, I don’t know him. I know who he is. He made some early films that were quite good. He was blacklisted, and then he talked to the un-American Activities Committee and he was allowed to make films. His films aren’t very interesting after the beginning. I didn’t know he was Ukrainian.

YS. Going back to Dovzhenko, you quote this now-famous saying by Orson Welles: “I want to use the motion picture camera as an instrument of poetry.” Dovzhenko is considered to be the father of the esthetic school in cinema, which is called poetic cinema. So there’s this uncanny, completely surprising parallel of consonance regarding camera as an instrument of poetry. Except that Dovzhenko’s poeticism was different in that he used Ukrainian ethnic cultural material and rethought and reinvented it in a very modern kind of way as his most influential film Earth is made.

Now that I’ve told you about Dovzhenko, can you think of any influence he had on people that you know or spoke with? Was he taught, were his films taught?

PB. Yes, I think his films were taught the same way Eisenstein was taught. Dovzhenko was one of the giants of what was considered the Russian cinema, now you tell me it's Ukrainian cinema. It was all part of the Soviet Union at that point. I think people didn't make distinction. Dovzhenko, Pudovkin, Eisenstein.

YS. You made a point writing about Edgar Ulmer that he could make a great film …

PB. I don’t know about a great film, but he could make a good film with really lousy resources.

YS. That seems to be speaking right to what is hurting young Ukrainian filmmakers now. The government doesn’t fund them any more. Private business is not interested in film as a form of investment, and yet they are making films, they are winning prices like the Palme d’Or du court métrage this year, prizes at the Berlin Films Festival, at Clermont-Ferrand. Can you tell people who are talented, who have a vision, who want to make films how they can create in such a situation?

PB. It’s not easy but. The great French artist Jean Cocteau once said that only when the tools for making a film were as inexpensive as a pencil and piece of paper, only then would we see really personal cinema. Well, that’s where we are because you can for very little money—maybe not as inexpensive as a piece of paper and pencil, still pretty inexpensive considering to where it all started—get the tools to make a film, you can do it on digital and get a small digital camera and you get sound with it, and you can shoot it probably for a thousand dollars or so. You can get equipment to edit it for very little. Movies can be made for very little money today. Very little. If you are really desperate to make a movie, you can probably make it for almost nothing. A few people could chip in to get a camera and pass it around. It depends on the hunger, if you are really desperate to do it and if that’s the only way to do it, that’s one way of doing it. They have an advantage today that you can make a film for virtually nothing because of the digital. We could not do that when I was starting out. Now you can.

YS. Is there a system that can help these people reach a reasonably large audience, or are they just doomed to remain within this little nook of art-house film even though some of their films can potentially appeal to a large audience?

PB. I don’t know; that’s a question of distribution. It’s very difficult to break out of that place, unless you have a distributor who wants to spend the money. But there’s this ridiculous mindset that if the picture doesn’t cost much, it’s worth spending a lot of money trying to advertise it, which is absurd. If on that principle Last Picture Show would have never been seen because it cost hardly anything, and yet it was distributed like a regular movie. I don’t know. I am not a mind reader. I am not a fortune teller. I can’t tell what’s going to happen. Right now the climate is not great. Films are doing badly, the attendance is low, the interest in movies is waning a bit. Which is a pity.

YS. What took away the interest?

PB. Bad movies, so many bad movies. People spend twenty bucks to go to a movie, and it’s crap. Most films have been bad, particularly the American product, the big American product.

YS. Can you think of good movies, the ones that you liked made over the last ten years? The directors that you think are interesting.

PB. Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino made some good pictures. They are very different but they made some films that are worth seeing. I think there was a Chinese director [Zhang Yimou,] who made Raise the Red Lantern [1991] that was quite good. I saw a Japanese film called Shall We Dance? [director Masayuki Suo, 1996] that I thought was very charming. Here and again, you see a film that’s pretty good.

YS. Your films have launched the careers of a number of young actors. Do you see young actors now who have promise?

PB. I think there’s a lot of actors. There are more actors today that are interesting than there are directors or writers.

YS. Can you name names?

PB. I don’t know I can never think of anybody, I never think of the names, but I've noticed acting is quite good in movies, generally speaking you have a lot of good acting, better than the writing and better than directing. Joaquin Phoenix is a very good actor, Jake Gyllenhaal.

YS. Do you like Tilda Swinton?

PB. Oh, she is brilliant.

YS. Do you think it is good or bad that she is not a star?

PB. She hasn’t had a picture that has done it for her.

YS. Do you think it would ruin, cheapen her as an actress.

PB. I am not one of those snobs who think success destroys people. It does sometimes, but it isn’t automatic. Tilda is a wonderful actress. She is in this new big Disney picture, the one that’s coming out in December, The Chronicles of Narnia:The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I think she is a wonderful actress.

YS. What are you working on now?

PB. I have four films with four different sets of producers. They were all scripts that were sent to me. Would I direct them? Yes. So we are in the process of trying to get a cast for each one. Once the cast is assembled, once we have so called packages, we can then get the money. So I am hard at work trying to get actors to agree to do certain films. 

I have a thriller called Vanished, based on a Cornell Woolridge story, set in Paris and in New York. It’s a good script. Nick Cassavetes co-wrote it. I have an English drama, called A Map of the City. It was written by an English playwright Paul Godfrey. It’s a family drama. Very touching, about a woman who in her twenties gives birth to a child. What happens to that child and what happens to her. She is not married. She has no money. She dies young. What then happens to the child. It’s an interesting story, rather sad. There are all these movies that are rather sad.

Then I have an American story, a Hollywood story called Star Crossed. It’s about a triangle, a love story based on real story. Based on what happened with Jennifer Jones, Robert Walker and David O. Selznick. Walker and Jennifer Jones were married, then David Selznick broke up the marriage basically by making her a star and falling in love with her.

YS. Is there a personal resonance in that story, something that hearkens back to your own life experience?

PB. Well, there is a personal resonance in all of these pictures; otherwise, I would not be interested. I am interested in the stories because they have some reverberation for me. There is another one, Killer Joe, based on an off-Broadway play that was very successful, about a very dysfunctional family. A father and his son plot to murder the mother to get the insurance money. It’s a very dark thriller. They are all different.

YS. They are all in the initial stage?

PB. We are casting. Scripts were all sent to me. Could I direct them, you know? Then we are looking for actors.

YS. You have not yet finalized the casting for any of them?

PB. We have some actors, but I don’t want to announce that yet.

YS. No? We won’t be the first ones to carry that information.

PB. I don’t want to announce them, but we are in the process of getting actors.

YS. What studio is going to be producing it?

PB. I don’t know yet.

YS. I see. But you have the producer, or not?

PB. The producers came to me and asked me if I would direct the pictures. It’s a new way of going these days. You get a cast together, then you have a package. Then you go and say we have this package, this is the cast, this is the director. We need this much money, or could we have this much money, and we want you to distribute. Each one is a different story, but that’s sort of the way it’s done now. You kind of get the whole package together, then try to lay it off, as they say.

YS. You mentioned that one of them will be shot in Paris and New York. Do you know where the others will be shot?

PB. Well, Killer Joe will probably be shot in Texas because it’s a Texas story. Map of the City will be shot in Europe, certainly part of it in England, Exeter, because this is where it’s set. The rest of it, the interior might be shot in Munich, Cologne or London, that depends on where the money comes from. Vanished will be shot probably parts of it in Canada, Montreal, and parts of it [in New York], parts in Paris. Star Crossed will be shot in Los Angeles.

YS. Talking about location for shooting, Prague seems to be a big discovery for Hollywood. Why, because it’s cheap?

PB. That’s why they go there, because it’s inexpensive, and they have good facilities and the city is adaptable. I shot many things in Toronto because it’s cheaper, and Vancouver. So, we make New York in Toronto, make Poland in Toronto, France in Quebec and Toronto, Hollywood in Vancouver. We shot a Hollywood story that took place entirely in Los Angeles in California, and we shot it in Berlin and Greece because that’s where the money was.

You go where the money is, not necessarily where the location is. You can adapt the location to suit the money. Did you see The Cat’s Meow? It’s about William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies set on a yacht. We shot the interiors in Greece and in Berlin because that’s where the money came from.

YS. Interesting. I very recently saw The Last Picture Show, and I was completely carried away by it. It resonated with me. I grew up in what one can call a similar Ukrainian setting. In a little village where strange things were happening, and nothing to do.

PB. People tell me that in Australia, New Zealand, Italy, I get the same reaction from people who grew up in small towns. The small town experience changes from place to place; the profound, the basic thing does not change.

Edited by Michael Fischer

Copyright: Ukrainian Film Club of Columbia University, 2005. Reproduction of the text is strictly prohibited without the prior written permission of the copyright holders.

For E. Dmytryk’s short biography visit: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0229424/bio