Arthur Penn: New Edition

Filmography

An Interview with Arthur Penn Richard Lippe and Robin Wood, Cineaction 5 (Spring 1986): 15–26. I first met and interviewed Arthur Penn in 1970, during the making of Little Big Man; the interview was first published in Movie 18 [and is included in this volume]. At that time, Penn’s career seemed to have developed an irresistible impetus that would secure him a prominent place in the American cinema of the next decades: The Chase, Bonnie and Clyde, and Alice’s Restaurant (the films that, with Night Moves, represent the summit of his achievement to date) had followed each other in rapid succession, establishing their director commercially as well as artistically. In the fifteen years that have ensued, however, Penn has been able to make only four films, of which only Night Moves can be judged a complete artistic success (it was a commercial disaster). This February, Penn was in Toronto as executive producer of Dead of Winter, a Gothic thriller scripted by two school friends of his son’s (he has since taken over the direction). Richard Lippe and I seized the opportunity to invite him to our apartment for dinner and an interview that proved to be more like a conversation (we have tried to preserve its informal and relaxed tone). We wanted to discuss his work since Little Big Man and, especially, the problems faced by filmmakers of ambition, intelligence, and integrity within the contemporary Hollywood situation. RW: I thought we might talk first about the conditions of working in Hollywood. . . . There seem to be so many problems in getting interesting projects set up . . . and a kind of narrowing An Interview with Arthur Penn 203 of the traditional genres to a few very stereotypical plots and film types. AP: Absolutely—well you know it’s really an antiquated medium in the States because the studios which had existed under another environment—economic, cultural, etc.—had been signatories to contracts with the unions which are now proving to be onerous . The cost of labor is so outrageously high that ordinary average films are slipping upward into the twenty million–dollar bracket very easily and, given that, and given the demise and retirement of the sort of patriarchal figures who used to run the studios, they’ve now become sort of relatively minor possessions of these conglomerates and multinational companies. you know, as Coca-Cola, Gulf and Western, Rupert Murdoch at Universal. Every studio you can really talk about is really one of these sort of relatively minor income-producing units of a great big multinational conglomerate. And what they then do as a result of that is instead of being studios with an ego all their own, they become this kind of corporate entity, and then the natural progression is that the executives who are put into those companies are essentially company men. They’re business school graduates, they’re cost-effective, and you begin to have that kind of thinking. Whatever one may think about the old moguls, there was a certain passion, a love for movies. And whether it be Goldwyn or Warner or Harry Cohn or Louis B. Mayer, there was something, however dreadful they may have been individually, there was at the heart of it that movies were their life. And that’s not true of these people; these people could just as well be selling cereal or automobiles or whatever. And immediately you come there with an idea; their first impulse is to categorize the idea: What is it most like? What did that do? What’s its market expectations? And with that kind of thinking, you’re automatically filtering and censoring the aberrant, odd film, the one that we all love, you know the one that is not like 204 robin wood every other film or every other automobile we drive that one sees on the street. And that’s the nature of it now, so there is this kind of a priori censorship. It’s not the right word, but it’s not the wrong word either. you know there’s something inherent in the American phenomenon. Capitalism has reached the point where there is this a priori censorship which is in effect—it’s in effect in this peculiar way, which is, if you want to be paid well to make your movie, you are automatically a participant in this structure. As a participant in the structure...