John Leguizamo / Interview / Stanley Moss

John Leguizamo. (c)1991 Edie Baskin.

John Leguizamo

by Stanley Moss

BOMB 36/Summer 1991

Traditionally, Latinos don’t get the juicy roles. Zorro’s always an Anglo under the mask, much like Charlie Chan or Miss Saigon. Richard Kiley got Quixote, Marlon Brando played Emiliano Zapata. Wasn’t Charlton Heston El Cid, and which oddball cast Rita Moreno in West Side Story with all those white folks? The real exception: the Cisco Kid, played by Duncan Reynaldo, but O. Henry wrote the story, so go figure.

Our Cinderella story reads like this: Audaciously versatile Hispanic actor seizes Manhattan by the throat and throttles it as his career reaches rocket velocity. John Leguizamo’s one-man review, Mambo Mouth, continues to wow them at the American Place Theatre, while his images address us daily from all manner of media. Fast doings for a Colombian-born homeboy raised in Brooklyn, who almost fell onto the wrong side of the tracks. At 26-years-old, John already has an idea of what fame means. I began our conversation at El Teddy’s by asking him about the parts he’s played in the past three years.

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John Leguizamo Since ‘87, let’s see, I did two plays at the Public. Bing bing. Then I didRevenge and three episodes of Miami Vice, a film with Harrison Ford which isn’t out yet,Regarding Henry. In it, I have a small but crucial part. I shoot him, run over his body and leave.

Stanley Moss That’s not the part you’re going to be getting in the future.

JL Things are changing, and I think Hispanic people are making it change, and I’m going to do my best to make it change, you know? Not just sit back and wait for things to happen, ‘cause they’re not going to happen by themselves. It’s all business, I don’t even think it’s prejudice or racism. People don’t think a Hispanic can carry a movie and make their money back.

SM There are a few exceptions though, Eddie Olmos.

JL I don’t see the studios banking a big role for him as a lead in something. Stand and Deliverwas ultra-low budget, done with American Playhouse. We’re at an independent film level. That’s the only way we’re going to make our changes. Hollywood does not think that Hispanic people are of interest to a larger market. We have to prove it ourselves. And if they make money and succeed, people are going to start hearing our voices and that way, we’ll eventually take our place where we belong.

SM Is there a message that you’re always trying to put forward in your work?

JL I think the most important message that’s come through is the fact that I’m doing what I’m doing. When I did a performance for an alternative high school, the kids wrote me letters and said it’s so good to see a Hispanic person up on stage like that. And some other kid wrote, “Americans aren’t the only ones that can act, Latin people can act, too.” They felt validated. They feel because I’m doing it, they can do it.

SM So you think that the aspect of being a role model is…

JL I hate the word “role model,” ‘cause I always see role models as this saintly, martyred kind of thing.

SM Martyred?

JL I feel more like a frontiersman, let’s put it that way. A pioneer getting up there and making the waves for other people to come in afterwards, that’s all.

SM I see the major aspect of your work as the heroic quality all your characters possess.

JL They’re marginal characters but they have a strong sense of survival. They had so many obstacles but nothing was going to stop them. They were always going to continue to do what they wanted to do. Like my aunt, who still wants to open up a little restaurant. You meet people in the street, like the transvestites. I went down and talked to them. They were so much more fascinating and full of life. They had so much grace and chutzpah. But you know their lives are different than ours. Just that they projected a sense of humor was really amazing. Self-empowerment, that’s the most important thing and to create our own venues. For PBS, I’m trying to find the reason why, being the numbers that we are, how come we’re not represented equally? I feel the pie is this much, we should get that much of the pie. It seems like I’m gonna get to the place that I want to get to. I mean I just did my first half-hour comedy special for Ha. I always want to portray Hispanic people as witty as possible. And comedy has a lot to do with intelligence.

SM Most people can’t write for themselves, though. They can only portray what’s written for them. You are interested in both performing and writing for yourself, a greater challenge.

JL That’s not as daunting as it seems, I think it’s modern necessity. The other day my mom was saying, “John, the reason that you wrote the plays was because the roles you were offered were so stupid, and so one-dimensional, so ridiculous.” If I had gotten good roles that were juicy and meaty, I don’t think I would have ever set out to write as much as I do. When I go to movies or I watch TV I feel left out. I know my people are funny.

From Leguizamo’s notebooks.

SM What’d PBS ask for?

JL 20-minute piece, whole bunch of sketches. I came up with these bios of my home life, my mom, my aunt and my home boys and home girls hangin’ out together and we’re goofin’. I played Donny Legs, this obnoxious, Hispanic Bugs Bunny type, and then I had all the other people peripheral to the character working with me on location. That’s the thing I’m hopefully doing for HBO, write a couple of specials and make them with all Hispanic casts about Hispanic themes. Pioneering on HBO. Tomorrow I have a meeting with Norman Lear. He wants to develop a TV show, and I have some ideas.

SM Is there some ideological breakthrough that has to be made by the community?

JL Yeah, we have to organize. We have to have a sense of organization and unification.

SM Are you afraid of assimilation?

JL People used to tell me, “John, change your name, you could pass for other things.” And now some other people are saying, “You’re not going to limit yourself to playing Hispanics, are you?” And the word limit, why, you think Hispanic’s a handicap? I see it as a rich mind that I’m going to tap to death. I think we’ve gotten to a point where being Hispanic and Latin and having your inner-urban, inner-city behavior is okay and cool, and accepted.

SM How do you develop a character?

JL I can’t work with tape recorders. I haven’t learned the method. What I do is jot down tons of stuff in longhand. I carry these little pads, and I write lines and lines. Later I go through all of them and put it in my computer. I do a little free association, and I keep writing things that come to my head whatever blah blah blah. Later on I’ll look at it, add to it. Then I stand up and perform it, and when I start reading, that’s when it starts to change. I sort it out intellectually and visually.

SM Do you watch yourself on video? Do you use photography?

JL No, it’s my ear and what I feel.

SM In the movie, Hangin’ With the Homeboys...

JL When’d you see it, Stanley?

SM I saw it the night that the director got busted.

JL (laughter) Oh, that night!

SM I loved the moment where you did that swaggering walk…

JL Oh, that little bop?

SM Yeah, I’ve seen so many people do that walk.

JL Put down that bop, they do that bop.

SM It was so familiar, so right on the money. You said it was a tough role for you to do.

JL Every time I have a role I always relate to it somehow. But I have attributes that this character did not have, so it made me uncomfortable giving up a lot of my own personality.

SM He was very mild, humble…

JL That was difficult for me because that’s not the way I see myself. I had to block a lot and be this simple character who’s moralistic and it was depressing. During the movie I had to try to get through it, I will get through this, I will make the best I can.

SM And yet, it’s such a successful performance. In your Broadway show, Mambo Mouth, you moved from a very small theater that had 80 seats, to a larger theater and a larger stage. What’s the difference?

JL Big, big difference. First of all voice, man. I have to project everything so much louder and that changed my performances. The response of the laughter, if it starts here, it sometimes builds and picks up waves so I have to wait longer to speak. It changes the rhythm. The way I used to do things in that little space, I could get away with more profile, more talking this way. Now everything has to be larger and more facing this way.

From Leguizamo’s notebooks.

SM You perform in several different media.

JL Yeah, totally different. TV, film, and theater. With theater you have to try and make it fresh each night which is easier because you had a whole day to forget. And film you’re doing it right then and there, over and over. You can allow smaller feelings and the camera will pick it up. On stage, things that I do that are great, some people don’t see. Theater is an actor’s medium, film is a director’s medium.

SM And TV?

JL TV is a producer’s medium. It’s all about “quick, quick, fast, fast, O.K. that’s not enough time to rehearse, just get this quick…” Your personality has to cover all the inadequacies. The lack of rehearsals, the sloppiness of the material.

SM Do you foresee staying mostly in the performance arena?

JL When I’m 35, I want to be a director. I don’t want to be an actor after 35.

SM Do you see any hazards on the horizon? Like are they going to try to make you a sex symbol?

JL I’m scared in a lot of ways. I want to have the control over what I do but how do you have the wisdom if you haven’t been through it? I don’t want to be manufactured or shaped into something. But now things have gotten bigger so other people are helping me make my choices. It’s turning over my power because it’s too much for me, I can’t read every script that comes my way because I don’t have the time. So I allow somebody else to say, “This is what you should do.”

SM Are you more stressed now?

JL Oh, absolutely. During the Ha special, I almost lost my voice because I was over-rehearsing. I was tired and beat-up looking. But it was a thrill. I did three new characters, Mambo Mouth, Futuristic, but TV… let’s not say it’s a sequel because it’s more TV. I tried to put depth, but TV doesn’t want too much depth, depth annoys it. TV is this monster that wants to please everyone. And once you want to please everyone…

SM Cuisinart culture, you just put it in and flip the switch and mrrrrrr.

JL It’s disgusting, but I overcame it. The challenge was so fantastic, and it was hysterical. I was amazed with the characters that I created and how funny and how sick they were. You always have that question, can I top myself?

SM On a higher, philosophical plane, have you achieved any kind of equanimity?

JL Some things have improved in my life, and some things haven’t. But I am a lot more peaceful with who John Leguizamo is. I am more able to be alone.

SM Was that a problem before?

JL I always felt that I was missing out on something or that I should be out socializing. Now I realize that my time is valuable.

SM Is there anything more that you want to add?

JL Well does BOMB have any Hispanic readers? (laughter)

SM Yes, hell yes.

JL I would say, it’s about support. We have to lean on each other and support each other because that’s the way to make a world where race, color, nationality, language doesn’t matter. I don’t want to put myself in a ghetto with all Hispanic people. I love my people and I want to do something for them but I don’t want to deprive myself of all the other wonderful people out there either. It’s necessary for my people to support each other. I try to go to Spanish restaurants more than other restaurants, to put the money back into the community. Instead of running out to all the other places, just for now, while we’re a little weak. And when you’re stronger, then you can always be generous.

http://bombsite.com/issues/36/articles/1459

Tobias Wolff / Interview / A.M. Homes

Tobias Wolff

Tobias Wolff

by A.M. Homes

BOMB 57/Fall 1996

His is the taut, trim, prose of an athlete. Intricate and highly compressed, Tobias Wolff’s explorations of our emotional and moral infrastructure are psychological travelogues, beginning in one place and ending in another. His first story collection published in 1981, In The Garden of the North American Martyrs was the handbook for aspiring writers. Tobias Wolff was the man who had mastered the story, who knew how to contain and control it and simultaneously, when to let it run. I studied that book top to bottom, backwards and forwards, along with the volumes that followed: Back in the World (1986), The Barracks Thief (1984), and his two stunning memoirs This Boy’s Life (1988) and In Pharaoh’s Army (1994). The Night in Question — Wolff’s newest collection of stories just out from Knopf, once again puts us in the hands of a master-craftsman. Tobias Wolff watches himself and the world from a certain distance—always observing, taking it in, piecing things together. The result is an intensely compassionate, rich and wry prose style that shows us ourselves in all our graceless glory.

Tobias Wolff and I met for the first time during the telephone calls that were this interview. When we spoke we were each on summer vacation, each by a lake looking out on the water. Liberated by the anonymity of the telephone, I felt I could ask Wolff all the quiet questions about what it means to progress as a writer, to mature. Our conversation left me feeling that what seems impossible might actually be possible—gaps can be bridged, progress is constantly being made.

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A.M. Homes How has the process of writing changed for you over time?

Tobias Wolff I’m not sure it has. No, it probably has. Let me say that I am now a little more reconciled to my peculiarities as a writer. When I first started writing, in my teens, I could write eight pages a day. And I believed that all eight pages were deathless prose. Now I am reconciled to writing a paragraph or two that I’ll end up keeping.

AMH I wonder whether it gets harder and harder on some level.

TW Every successful piece of writing you do, I mean successful as art, illuminates even more greatly the difficulties of what you do. You’re always trying to top yourself. You don’t want to do what you did before again and again. You get tired of certain conventions. You want to do other things, so you’re creating the difficulties as the very condition of your art. It’s a way of keeping it exciting for yourself, but it also makes it increasingly harder.

AMH How do you know when you’re finished with a story?

TW When everything necessary is done, and I feel as if even another word would be superfluous—would, in a manner of speaking, break the camel’s back. That sense of completion comes about in different ways, and plot is only the most obvious of them. You should feel, when you’ve finished a story, that it has achieved a life independent of yours, that it has somehow gathered up the golden chain that connected you. This feeling is not always reliable. I often go back and revise endings that I was pretty sure about when I set the last period to the page. In writing, of course, everything is subject to revision. But I am guided, however roughly, by inexplicable instincts like the one I have just attempted to describe.

AMH In your story “The Chain” and in “Bullet in the Brain” events spiral and flip out of control, one bit of wrong thinking folds into the next in an effort to clarify or correct the last. Is this a recurring theme with you?

TW Some of my writing is about folly, and the capacity folly has for reproducing itself, how it multiplies. How a bad idea becomes ten bad ideas, becomes a hundred bad ideas. Stories are a good kind of theater for folly.

AMH A minute ago you mentioned your peculiarities as a writer—how would you characterize them?

TW Oh, I’m not the best judge of that at all. I can say something about my intentions, though even those are finally beside the point when the work is finished. But I’m looking at the story or the book from inside, and I’m often unaware of what is plain as day to people regarding it from the outside. For example, a graduate student at SUNY/Albany sent me an essay of hers concerning the terrible fate of dogs in my work, together with some speculations about my motives in writing about them in this way. She had plenty of evidence from my work—dogs shot, burned, even eaten. Yet in all honesty I’d never been aware of this . . . pattern, if you will, or peculiarity. I guess you’d be justified in calling it a peculiarity. And I’m glad I was unaware of it, because otherwise I might have avoided it and not written some things that I’m pleased to have written. That’s the danger of excessive self-consciousness—it either becomes very constricting, or leads to self-parody of the worst kind. Like X.J. Kennedy’s poem about the goose that laid the golden egg. She sticks her head up her rear end to observe the process, then gets stuck in that position. His poem concludes, “If you’d lay well, don’t watch.”

AMH I’m interested in the idea of writing from a moral point of view. In one of the In Pharaoh’s Army interviews you said, “It seemed to me that I was responsible for a moral accounting. A book like this has to be a personal moral inventory.” Concepts of morality come up a lot in your work.

TW When I talk about the “personal moral inventory” its not so much about the immorality of the war itself, but the sense of how an ordinary person is complicit in the ongoing folly of his time. Even with honorable intentions and a certain measure of innocence, you can become a part of the very thing you fear and despise. And this shows up in my fiction. It isn’t a question of the stories being moral fables. “Don’t do this because something terrible will happen.” It’s more an exploration of the moral sense that dominates our lives for better or worse, the constant effort of trying to find the right thing to do in complex situations. I can’t imagine not having that kind of reckoning in my work because it’s at the center of our lives. Everyone I know is puzzling things out, trying to figure out the right thing to do. We’re all in a web of connection to friends, family, community, and the moral sense is what determines how we honor those connections. To leave that out of one’s fiction seems to me to be impossible. It’s going to be there, so it’s better that it not be there by default, but that you have some edge of consciousness about its workings.

AMH We were talking before about how events in your stories spiral, how wrong-headed thinking multiplies, for instance, in your story “The Chain.”

TW Here’s a man who’s trying to find the right thing to do. He isn’t just trying to get even, he’s trying to do what is right in this situation. He acts out of love for his daughter, through rage at the wrong done by the indifference of others, and from a sense of the wrong of being too timid in the face of evil. All these good motives are at work in what ends up being an absolutely catastrophic mistake.

AMH One of my favorite stories in the new collection is “Casualty.” I was fascinated by the structure, the nurse who essentially ends the story isn’t there at the beginning. This is very conservative of me, but I always think the people in the beginning of the story must be the same people around at the end of the story.

TW It does seem unfair, to spring a new character on you at the end. In the case of “Casualty,” I had her in mind from the beginning. I didn’t want too narrow an understanding of who gets hurt in this war. The word casualty usually refers to soldiers, but the damage ripples out in every direction, and touches all these people and harms them deeply . . . I had her in mind all the time I was writing that story, but how could any reader know that? Now if I had done that to evade the consequences of the story for the characters who were there at the beginning, B.D. and Ryan in particular, then I think her late appearance would be a mistake. But their stories are pretty well settled when she shows up.

AMH It’s interesting that she was always in your mind—it works that she doesn’t appear to us until later, it makes the story keep going.

TW She is very much a part of their story, but she isn’t present until their circumstances compel her to enter. Then the story becomes as much hers as theirs. At one point I was thinking of calling it “The Nurse’s Story.” It would give people some sense that this was coming. I did realize that it was a gamble to introduce her so late, and give her so much weight. But her presence brings something essential. There’s an almost romantic obsession with soldiers in most writing about war. It may not mean to be romantic, but it ends up that way because it views soldiers in isolation from the consequences of what they do and what is done to them. You don’t see how they’re situated in a web of relations, how one person’s suffering bleeds into other lives. That is what is missing from so many of these war narratives, and why the nurse was so important to me.

AMH I love the part when she slips the one dying guy’s hand into the other’s, that’s just so lovely.

TW Good.

AMH How has the way you write about Vietnam changed over the years?

TW I couldn’t write very much about it in the beginning. I have one very short story in my first book which touches on it. I’m still hesitant to write about it.

AMH Why do you think?

TW It’s one of those things you just don’t want to get wrong. There’s a way of writing about Vietnam that is extremely stale: the helicopters; the jazzed-up soldier lingo; all the acronyms; deadpan talk about killing. There’s a strong pull exerted by the conventions of war fiction in particular. That’s why I ended up writing about it in a memoir, because I thought I could resist those pressures more successfully by being faithful to my knowledge of my own situation, of the effect of that situation on my character and nature. I wouldn’t just be writing about what everybody already knew about.

AMH I’ve always been fascinated with the Vietnam War and I wonder where people who’ve been at war put the experience?

TW What do you mean?

AMH Where does it fit inside you? How do you reconcile it? Does everybody who has been in the war have side effects from it?

TW I don’t have post-traumatic stress syndrome. But I have no question that others do have it. It comes about through prolonged exposure to combat, which I did not have. I had some, but not very much, very little, compared to most of the people I knew. I got lucky—the place I was sent that year was quieter than many other places. The luck of the draw, really. It was bad enough for me. I had my stomach full of it and then some. But nothing like what happened to others. I was very lucky, and lucky not just in terms of surviving it, but lucky in that when I got home I was still healthy enough psychologically to have a reasonable life. But a lot of people weren’t.

AMH Are you by nature very aware?

TW Cautious you mean?

AMH I’m thinking about situations in which a person has to be aware of their surroundings, of their safety, and then about being a soldier, where something could happen at any moment, a sniper, something falling out of the sky, a land mine—and what that does to you.

TW It had effects, there’s no question about it. Nobody gets away scot free from something like that. I certainly have a healthy sense of the dangers of this world. One way I do notice it is that I worry about my kids. One of my boys just started driving and the other will start driving in another month. I try not to think about it or else I’ll go crazy. Nevertheless it’s there. One of my boys likes to go for long walks at night, and although we live in a reasonably safe neighborhood, it’s bordered by an unsafe neighborhood. I hear myself Mother Henning him all the time on this.

AMH I have the feeling that you are a wonderful teacher and a good father. How have you transcended the experience of your own father?

TW How do you learn to be a father without being your father?

AMH Exactly.

TW It has always come naturally to me to be affectionate with my kids and to enjoy them. They certainly make it easy. I have great kids. They’re funny, they’re good company. They always have been. It just hasn’t seemed like hard work to me, to tell you the truth. One thing of course that makes it easy is that I have more time than other people do. I teach, and I work at home. When my kids come home I’m there. They can come up and talk to me. I’m not under the kind of pressures that make it hard for most people to be the kind of parents they want to be and just don’t have the time to be.

AMH But you also remade your experience of family.

TW Oh, I was always pretty nervous about the whole idea. It’s sort of like writing. You approach it very warily and then when you’re in it, it teaches you what to do. But yeah, I had real doubts about my abilities to pull this thing off. But the moment children arrive, you’re so busy with them, you find yourself doing the right things. Most of the time, anyway. I hope.

AMH I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the differences in your experience of writing nonfiction and fiction?

TW I hold myself to very different standards when I’m writing fiction and nonfiction. I have to be able, with a straight face, to tell myself that something is nonfiction if I say it’s nonfiction. That’s why, although there are autobiographical elements in some of my stories, I still call them fiction because that’s what they are. Even though they may have been set into motion by some catalyst of memory.

AMH Why do you think people want everything to be true?

TW They’re uncomfortable somehow with imaginative reality, which is a very powerful reality against which we have few defenses. They’re perhaps unaccustomed to art and the assumptions of art. I’m not really sure.

AMH Do you think it’s an American thing?

TW I think Americans are more accepting if they think it’s nonfiction. Is it an American thing? No, my guess is it isn’t. Writers and artists have always done what they could to seduce the audience into a sense that what they’re looking at is genuine. That’s the great power of movies, isn’t it? They give you the feeling that what you are looking at is life happening before your eyes. Writers invite that kind of approach to their work. We want people to believe it while they’re reading it—we want them to enter our world fully.

AMH I’m curious about how we grow up, the progression of things. You’re 51 now—you seem incredibly stable—what about a midlife crisis? Are they inevitable? Do you have to have one? Do you feel one coming on?

TW I had mine when I was in my teens, that was my midlife crisis.

AMH Right, precocious.

TW I’m grateful to have had the life I’ve had. First of all, I feel lucky to be alive. I feel lucky to he sane and whole, to have a life as a writer. What a privilege that is, and one that for years and years I thought I would not have, that this would be something I would just do on my own all my life. That I would probably have to end up doing something else, and do this when I could. It still astonishes me that I’ve been able to have a life as a writer. I don’t teach a lot, but I love the teaching that I do. And I meet people like you. What’s to complain about?

AMH I don’t know.

TW I do feel sometimes—which may be the kind of propellant for a lot of these absurd chapters in the lives of people my age—a sense of having become too comfortable, of being an old shoe and wanting to push myself to thinner air. But I find ways of getting around that. I drive too fast. I ski the black diamond slopes, and I play cutthroat softball. I’m being facetious. But that restlessness is still there. I don’t think it’s in a virulent state, I don’t think I’m going to destroy my life in obedience to it. It isn’t at its deepest level philosophical. I know I have found the ground on which I must make my peace, through these people I live with and not through change of circumstance or a dramatis personae.

AMH In In Pharaoh’s Army you write about joining the military to get at an experience. And I think about you having settled down, teaching and living this seemingly stable life; from where do you get experience now?

TW In The End of Alice you write very powerfully and persuasively from the point of view of a pedophile. Am I to think therefore that you must have experience with pedophilia?

AMH I actually know nothing about it, which is the funny thing. I did a lot of research.

TW You know that old chestnut of Flannery O’Connor’s, about anyone who survives adolescence has enough to write about for the rest of their lives. There’s a strong, very early story of hers in DoubleTake magazine called “The Coat,” written from the point of view of a black woman. She wrote it when she was in her 20s, at Iowa. How the hell did she know to do that? In the end, the writer’s task is not to accumulate experience, but to develop a consciousness that can see the world with some accuracy and fitting sense of drama.

AMH You went to boarding school, and then into the army, and then off to study in England; did you feel comfortable in all those settings or were you an outsider?

TW I I felt right at home when I went off to that boarding school because I had wanted so much to go there. It was funny to be happy in this place where all the other kids wanted to be home. But it was much more peaceful than my home life. And it was intellectually alive, there were people talking about ideas and books in a way I’d never even known you could, except through my brother in the brief time we’d spent together before I went off to school. So I was quite happy and at home in that place. But God knows there were transitions to be made. I was aware of there being class tensions at Oxford, but as a Yank I was outside of those considerations. And I really felt as if I belonged to a community when I was there, an artistic and intellectual community. Those were the people I knew at Oxford, and they were not consumed by questions of class. Artists and intellectuals are their own class. These were people who were committed to writing, and reading, and understanding. And we talked incessantly. My real education came not so much through the classes and tutors, as through my time with my friends. The pubs closed at ten, so we’d buy some booze and sit around somebody’s room and just talk, talk, talk, talk, and I’ve never forgotten that. The sharpening effect on the mind, the awakening, was so exhilarating that questions of class and economic status really didn’t play much of a part. I started writing in a disciplined way, as soon as I got to Oxford, and that was very important to me. I was reading, making friends, traveling—it was a God-given time.

AMH Were they amazed that you had been a soldier?

TW We didn’t talk about it very much. First of all, I did not have a way of talking about it that did not make other people extremely uncomfortable. I had this compulsion to rub peoples’ noses in the horror of it, to tell them the worst things. But I would tell them in this cruel laughing way. Because the minute I started on that subject I’d go back to being a soldier, and that’s the way soldiers handle it. I began to see how discordant a note this struck whenever we started talking. Most of my friends learned not to talk to me about it, and I never brought it up, I never brought it up.

AMH But that in itself is fascinating. I’m always amazed by splits in people.

TW Well, I still have plenty of those.

http://bombsite.com/issues/57/articles/2004

Steve Buscemi / Interview / Quetin Tarantino

Steve Buscemi© 1992 Shannon Greer.

Steve Buscemi

by Quentin Tarantino

BOMB 42/Winter 1993, FILM

I first became aware of Steve Buscemi’s work as the young man living with AIDS in the late Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances. The memory of this too-cool-for-school New York underground rodent, sitting on his lover’s lap, silently saying, “I love you,” as his hand comes up snatching the unsaid word out of the air, has stayed in my heart to this day. However, as much as I enjoyed his work, I didn’t expect to ever see him again. Actors in these underground movies aren’t often heard of again. I wasn’t even sure Steve Buscemi was an actor. His acting was so real. But in the real world, Buscemi was a former fireman, and is a current husband, father, and most definitely, an actor. As a matter of fact, not only did he find work after Parting Glances, the guy works all the time! Most recently he surfaced in my friend Alex Rockwell’s In the Soup, and my own Reservoir Dogs, where, as the motormouth Mr. Pink, (a part I wrote for myself), he gives a performance that my executive producer, Monte Heilman, calls “flawless.”

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Quentin Tarantino I’ve always joked about you being in the top two percent of the Screen Actors Guild. However, this is the first time you have starred in two movies that a lot of people are waiting to see: In the Soup and Reservoir Dogs. Do you feel your career changing?

Steve Buscemi When I did a movie, I used to wait for it to come out as if it were Christmas. But then, some of them have gone straight to cable or video, or they come out and it’s no big deal; reviews are lukewarm and no one sees them. So, I am really excited—these are the best films I’ve done in a while, but I’m just a little cautious about getting too hyped up. But I like these films and that’s enough for me.

QT Yeah, but Steve, it’s like a one-two punch.

SB What does that mean? I’m not going to move out to Hollywood and try to play the lead in a commercial film. I’m not saying I wouldn’t do that. I’d play any part that’s interesting and if it is a lead that’s great. But I have had most of my luck in supporting parts and character roles. Both these films are not your typical leading man roles. If more people are aware of my work from these two films, and interesting filmmakers, such as yourself and Alex, or filmmakers I haven’t met yet, who are about to make their first feature or their third or fourth, have a good script, well then, that’s what I want to be involved in.

Quentin Tarintino directs Harvt Keitel in Reservior Dogs.

QT You’ve worked in low-budget independent films and big budget commercial films. In the Soup, cost $800,000 to make, but when you were actually shooting the budget was $300,000. And you had just come from doing Billy Bathgate, which was this $50 million production. What was the difference between the two?

SB In Billy Bathgate, Dustin liked to rehearse on camera, so we’d end up doing a lot of takes. Before we’d even do the take, we might discuss the scene for a long time. The crew would be waiting around outside and we wouldn’t even be rehearsing the scene, just talking about it. Not like I had a lot to contribute to these discussions: I was a fly on the wall. Dustin Hoffman, Robert Benton, Nester Almendros, it was fascinating to be there. They really took their time. Of course, the sets were elaborate, the food was excellent, the dressing rooms were nice. But, I don’t know if all that stuff makes a better film. It makes it all more comfortable, it’s nice to have the time to do it. In In the Soup, we tried to get things done in two or three takes. We did all our rehearsals on our own before we got there. We had to work long hours, there was no going back. When you are shooting a film like In the Soup, it gives you this incredible energy, this excitement that comes from knowing that we have to get this now. Sometimes the pressure of that bothers me. But other times it inspires me, you can’t stop and think, you are just forced to do the scene and do it right. You are forced to go on instinct more. To me, it’s a valid way to work.

QT You have worked with a whole slew of directors, let me throw out some of their names and you give me little takes on them. Let’s start with the guy who more or less discovered you on film, the director of Parting Glances, Bill Sherwood.

SB Bill was a funny guy. He would give me very specific directions, almost line by line. And then say, “Steve, can’t you have a little spontaneity?” (laughter) Then we’d do another take and I’d be seething. It worked for that character. I don’t know if he was manipulating me intentionally, but it really did work.

QT Okay, Abel Ferarra’s King of New York.

SB I was the last guy cast for that. I remember calling the costumer to go over what I was going to wear. I said, “What do you have in mind for me?” and she said “Well, we had in mind that you were black.” I was like the token white. I would try on all these hats and Abel would come in and say, “Try on another hat, that’s not working.” We finally came up with something, but I don’t believe that he was ever really satisfied. As a consequence, I think he would position me in the back of the room.

QT Wasn’t there one shot in King Of New York that you didn’t know you were being filmed for?

SB Yeah, Christopher Walken’s character was just out of jail. I thought Abel had placed me on the side of the room so that I was out of the frame. I don’t even remember being in character. And then I saw the film and I was like, “Oh my God, I was seen that whole time?” (laughter)

QT How did he direct you and Larry Fishburne and choreograph the action?

SB He lets you feel it out for yourself. He says, “What’re you gonna do here? What’re you gonna do?” “Well, I thought I’d do this.” And he’d say, “Yeah, yeah, all right. Good, good. Do that, do that,” or, “Don’t do that. Do that other thing you were doing.” He’s always moving, he’s like a kid on the set. He gets excited. He says, “All right! This is gonna be great!” I mean when he first called me about doing the movie, I was on my way to L.A. to see what was happening out there. I had my ticket; I was leaving like the next day. He called me the night before and I hadn’t read the script. He described to me that first scene and that’s what made me want to do the movie. (laughter) It’s just the way he is. He’s just fun to be around, you know?

QT You’ve worked two movies with the Coen Brothers: Miller’s Crossing and Barton Fink.

SB I auditioned for Miller’s Crossing twice. The second time they said, “Well, you still say it the fastest.” And I was hired. (laughter) They’re really fun to work with. Joel always gave the first direction. But Ethan is right there and adds to it.

QT Does Ethan talk to you or does Ethan go through Joel?

SB He tells it to me with Joel there. The two of them are always together. I didn’t feel like I was getting conflicting information. They really complement each other. They get such a kick out of actors. In Barton Fink, I was doing this scene where I was picking up the shoes to put on the cart, you know, and then like I hear a noise and kind of stop, and then continue. They had me do that six or seven times because they enjoyed that scene: (laughter) “Well, we got it but let’s do it again.” And after that, “Let’s just do it one more time.”

QT Martin Scorcese.

SB I felt like I had already worked for him because on Last Temptation he brought me back four times. He had already cast that movie but there was a question of whether all the apostles were available. Each time he had me reading a different apostle. Then I did New York Stories. He gave me a lot of room. When people see New York Stories, they assume my character, a performance artist, is an asshole because of what Nick Nolte’s character says about him. But I didn’t play it that way at all, and neither did Scorcese. That whole monologue I did was something I wrote. I wouldn’t do my own material in a film if I thought it was going to be made fun of. It was funny, I never quite knew where Scorcese was on the set. I would hear him yell, “Action!” but I could never find him. He’d come over after each take and maybe say something and then disappear. Next thing I knew, “Action!”

QT Okay now, Jim Jarmusch.

SB He used to come see my partner Mark Boone Junior and I perform at these small performance spaces and clubs.

QT So you were already friendly with him?

SB Well, we weren’t really friends at that point But he would come to the shows and we would hang out. Working with him on Mystery Train, I got to know him a lot better. He would make up scenes that weren’t in the movie for us to rehearse, to explore our characters. Stuff would happen in those improvisations that he would incorporate into the film. He trusts actors and casts people because he wants them to give more. He wants that input. Even on the set, we would do the takes as written and then sometimes have a take where he’d say, “All right. If there’s a line you want to change or something you want to add, do it.”

QT Let’s talk about Alex Rockwell. What was he like to work with on an actor/director basis?

SB In the Soup was the first film that I had really worked with a director that closely because my character was so important to the film. Alex gave me a lot of responsibility for that character. Not that he didn’t have his ideas about this guy—which I tried to fulfill—but we were constantly discussing ideas. He’s very much an actor’s director, and a brilliant filmmaker.

Harvey Keitel and Steve Buscemi in Reservoir Dogs, photos by Linda R. Chen, courtesy of Miramax Films.

QT We did a workshop together of Reservoir Dogs at the Sundance Institute before real filming began. How was I to work with there, and was I different when we were actually making the film?

SB At Sundance you were bursting with energy, so much so, that it freaked out the crew. You wanted to do a whole bunch of shots, tracking shots and other stuff, and they had something more simple in mind. When we were really shooting the movie you still had all that energy, but you were much more focused.

QT Now, explain to the people how you came into acting. You were a fireman. When did you know you could quit firefighting and start acting full time?

SB It wasn’t until after Parting Glances came out and I was able to get an agent and then start to make a living.

QT You took a leave of absence and then decided not to go back? You put all your eggs in the same basket?

SB Yeah, my time was up and I had to go back, and the movie hadn’t been released yet, but I thought I just can’t go back. I really felt like Parting Glances was an important film. The character I played in that was probably the best character I will get to play. I just couldn’t imagine that this film wouldn’t get attention.

QT That happens in a lot of these independent films, especially if you have never heard of the people who are in them, they make the directors known, but the actors don’t get anything. No one’s ever seen those guys who were in She’s Gotta Have It again. No one’s ever seen anyone else in Parting Glances again.

SB That’s not true. Just because you haven’t seen them doesn’t mean they’re not getting work.

QT It was a spring board for you, but that is not the norm.

SB It lead to other work in independent films and some TV stuff, Miami Vice.

QT When I saw you in Parting Glances, you made a total impression on me. But I didn’t think anyone in that movie was an actor, I just thought everyone was…

SB ...friends of Bill.

QT Yeah, and then I saw you as a fight promoter in a movie with Brad Davis called Heart. My first impression was here is this gay guy running around as a fight promoter, because I thought of you as the guy in Parting Glances. I thought of you as part of this underground group of personalities, but that wasn’t the case. You guys were all actors. It was a testament to you guys. You were very realistic. The same thing happened to Harvey (Keitel), in Mean Streets. Everyone assumed that Harvey was this street kid that Scorcese had found and put in the movie. They didn’t understand that he was acting. He didn’t get any offers after Mean Streetsuntil Scorcese put him in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, in a completely different part. And he had to fight to get him in it. Harvey almost had to go back to being a court reporter. You worked on big scenes opposite Harvey Keitel as well as the whole ensemble in Reservoir Dogs. People ask me all the time, was this a hard group to control? A lot of wild guys, a lot of violent actors. I have always been saying, “Well all the actors left their egos at the door.” But there were a bunch of big egos with big cowboy boots clomping around.

SB If you had been an asshole director, or somebody we didn’t respect; if it was a good script but, “Oh no this director is really fucking it up,” you would have had the guys there out of control. Because then people don’t care as much and it’s like, “Fuck it, I am going to do what I want and I am going to have fun doing it!” But everybody there was so committed to the work and trusted you so much that they were on good behavior. There were maybe one or two exceptions, but for the most part everyone wanted to give it their all.

QT The picture comes first. What our characters would or wouldn’t do under these circumstances—was second. Then as actors, as far as dealing with our moods—that was third, “Take care of me but take care of those two things first.” That’s rare. Harvey said along with being with the apostles (in The Last Temptation) it was the closest group he had ever worked with.

Steve, do you have any parting shots as far as the past year and a half?

SB This is an exciting time. My wife and I had a son. That’s the biggest thing for us. I don’t think of myself as having a career. I think of having jobs. When I work, I want to have good jobs. I want to do interesting films. I also want to make a living. You don’t always work on the things that you can put your heart into, so it’s good to work on things that you can get into one hundred percent.

QT You just finished directing your first film, a short called, What Happened To Pete.

SB It played at the Locamo Film Festival in Switzerland. I only had a few days to shoot that. In a way, that was good because I didn’t have time to worry about my insecurities about directing, I just had to do it. It was really a crash course in directing because I learned what else goes into it. My assistant director would come up to me and say things like, “The grip truck is leaving at 10, we’re running out of film, you have to start condensing shots.” You find yourself fighting for all these things and spending a lot of energy on all this other stuff that you had no idea you were going to have to do. But I’m ready to do it again.

http://bombsite.com/issues/42/articles/1614

Lady Gaga / Nude

Lady Gaga
NUDE
La cara de Leo Di Caprio al ganar Lady Gaga es un poema

Fernando Charry Lara / On the Writing of Eduardo Cote Lamus

Eduardo Cote Lamus

On the writing of Eduardo Cote Lamus

By Fernando Charry Lara

Translated by Laura Chalar

A certain type of poetry shows its most typical stealth in the gravity of the word that struggles, from a dark inner source, to manifest itself in its original nakedness and suggestion. Gravity: not the shine or the richness. We perceive the weariness to which poetic work leads when the word is solely an embellishing resource. We hope to find in it a subtler, more disquieting intention. When it is barely an insufficient stammer, or when it is lost in a verbal overflow due to lack of control, we are unmoved by its call. The poetry of Eduardo Cote Lamus (1928-1964), in which the shine of verbal felicities would hint at the possibility of the author delighting in them too much, is an example by contrast of the way in which language is an efficient weapon when it faithfully answers to a desire to express. It could be said of Cote that, tempted in different ways and by dissimilar subjects, he conquered a poetic language of his own. The evolution of his poems gives us grounds for supporting this opinion.

After Salvación del Recuerdo, which was awarded the Young Poetry Award in Spain in 1951, he published another book, Los sueños, in 1956. In a review of the latter collection, Ramón de Zubiría emphasized the intellectual mastery which the author wanted to exercise over his poems. He referred to their symbolism, their abstractions, the consequent obstacles which their complexity might entail for the reader. He pointed to the “markedly conceptual nature of this poetry, written at the level of intelligence rather than that of sensitivity”. From the teenage infatuation of his first verses, that poetry prolonged itself into the tone of lyrical meditation of Los sueños, which would also be the tone of his next collections: La vida cotidiana, published in 1959, and Estoraques, published in 1963. This succession showed the way in which his poetry gradually purified itself, achieving an increasing intensity and maturity, fatally cut short by the poet’s early death.

Some Colombian poetry scholars (such as Hernando Valencia Goelkel, Eduardo Camacho Guizado, Jaime García Mafla and Guillermo Alberto Arévalo) have highlighted different aspects of the poetry of Eduardo Cote, especially of his last stage. This article will limit itself to an aspect related to these. There existed, in those final poems, a perceptible struggle between that language which could be taken to be spontaneous or colloquial, and the one arising from literary tradition, or poetic phrasing prejudices – not to speak of the doubt which the poet surely experienced about which of these two modes of expression to employ. But if there is (as we believe) any problem which Cote attempted to face in these poems, it is that of whether to portray everyday life in everyday voices or, by contrast, to portray it with a certain inscrutability which he was neither completely fond of nor, on the other hand, a stranger to. Or maybe the issue for him was a different one: to merge intuition and poetic thought, however intricate, with common parlance. In any case, the natural key which he achieved in his verse was (just like the symbolic or abstract one) the result of a thorough process which culminated in the balance he desired for his mixed tone of self-absorption and vivacity:

It is something that happens under the rain.
And difficult to say: how the young Bride
tenderly washes the chaste wedding night
bleached in her hands by the following morning.
Behold my shoulders where the air weights
that which a light law takes from mortals.
But the weight comes not from the outside: conscience weighs, and the shadow
like lead.

The shadow is necessary for going into the deep.
That is why here, in this body, there are many journeys
to begin. If the map of only one
desire was extended, there would be no extension
to contain it in. Hence the depth,
density and mystery of one breast’s repose.

         There can be perceived in Cote’s poems the influence that the realm of ideas exerted upon them. The evolution from his early to his later work shows the gradual abandonment of issues which in the beginning, as mentioned above, restricted his poems to a sentimental atmosphere. He increasingly searched for an emotion that was not obedient to the stimuli of the heart or the senses. Mental passion, heightened in its purity, began to prevail. And it made of his poetry, not only through a certain reserve in its accents but also by its sense of exploration and of spiritual conquest, a body of work that aspires to interest those who look for something other than rapturous effusion in a poem.

The “preliminary note” which introduces Estoraques, by Hernando Valencia Goelkel, is among the more felicitous pages of this writer. “It is he who, in a certain sense, is right,” says Valencia in a passage of his text, referring to Robert Graves. And what gives rise to the controversy or the doubt is this frank admission of the Englishman: “I write poems for poets, and satires and grotesques for wits. For people in general I write prose, and am contented that they should be unaware that I do anything else. To write poems for other than poets is wasteful.”

I think about the accuracy of the last sentence. And I think of it, if written by a poet like him, as devoid of all vanity.

Postcard / Dragon 2014

Otavalo, Ecuador, 2011
Photo by Triunfo Arciniegas

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