Film Drifter Reviews

Interview with David Salle on the production of Search and Destroy (video review).
Held via Skype call on 30/11/14

FD: I would like to start by inquiring about the very beginnings of this project. Did you at that time shopped for a script to direct, or is the play in question by Howard Korder that prompted you to consider directing a feature film? Were you introduced to Howard Korder's play before this film or through this project?

DS: I had been interested in working in film for a long time. I'd been educating myself - hanging around with people in film business. I had a number of friends who were filmmakers, and I was getting more and more interested in doing something myself. A good friend of mine, a producer named Ruth Charny, had developed a relationship with Scorsese. Marty's girlfriend at the time was the actress Illeana Douglas, and he wanted to produce something for her; he also wanted to produce films with artists. So we started looking around for a project that we could all do together. I'm not sure who saw it first, Illeana or Ruth, but someone had seen the play, Search and Destroy on Broadway. Ruth called me and said we think you should see this play - I went to see it and agreed that it had a cinematic potential, so we optioned the play. Then we set about adapting it. I first met with Howard Korder, the author, and asked him if he wanted to do it, but he was sort of burned out with the material and said: "You guys take it and do what you want with it, I don't have the energy right now to work on the adaptation." There was a young screenwriter, a fixture of East Village underground film scene at the time, named Michael Almereyda, who had made some really lovely, very sensitive small movies, that I admired a lot. He clearly was a gifted cinematic conceptualizer. We hired Michael to write the adaptation, and I worked with him very closely on the script. When it was done, we showed it to Marty, who made only very minor suggestions, and the project got under way.

FD: Did you have any directing experience before this project, like working with actors (theatre), doing shorts (working with cinematographers), video installations, or was this your first encounter with the medium?

DS: I didn't have much. When I was in art school in California I took some acting classes and a directing class, but it was more focused on stage direction, not film. But I was always a film go-er. I was interested in the structure and the form of cinematic language, and did a fair amount of reading. I had been involved in an earlier project which never got the ground, although we got pretty far with it. A friend of mine, the screenwriter Larry Gross, had written a screenplay that he and I were going to direct together. We got all through the casting process and what not - so I did have some little experience of the practical aspect of setting up a film. And during that time, because of the producers involved, I was able to go onto various sets and see first hand the large scale Hollywood apparatus at work, which is quite different from the lower East Side underground filmmaking scene, but it gave me a sense of the atmosphere on a set, and the pacing of it and so on. But my actual film-making experience was cursory, to put it mildly. The producers decided it would be a good idea for me to have a little practice. So I adapted a short story of J.D. Salinger's, "Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut". There was no question of having the rights or anything like that; the film was never meant to be shown, but it's a good two character story about women who had been college room-mates, and I wrote the adaptation and shot it with two actor friends, using my house as the set. And the film was...I don't think we ever finished it because by the time we were editing, we were in serious prep for Search and Destroy. It gave me just enough practical experience of how to conceptualize the shot, make a shot list and so on. But the practice film alone would not have prepared me to make a real film. I was really only able to direct because I had the great good fortune of working with the best story-board artist in the world. Michael said to me: "You might think you're ready, but you're not, because it's much harder than you can imagine. I'm going to give you my storyboard artist. His name is J. Todd Anderson, and if he'll take on the project it will help you a lot." J. Todd, who is a genius of visual film grammar, works almost exclusively with the Coen Brothers; they don't expose a single frame of film that he has not drawn and signed off on. Fortune smiled on us; it turned out that he needed some extra work, needed some money to give a girlfriend or something like that, so I got to prepare the whole film with J. Todd before shooting began. That was my real film school. He's an eccentric genius, in his own way, a guy living a modest semi-anonymous life in Ohio, who comes in New York when there is a project to work on. He understands how the content of a scene is really communicated, shot by shot. Starting to work on a scene, J.Todd, sitting at a table with a pad of paper and his special pencils - he used a metro-card to trace the rectangle - it's the perfect aspect ratio - would ask me, "What do you see - what's in the frame? How big?" And so forth, with more and more detail until we had a shot. We worked together for quite a while to develop the visual vocabulary, the look of the film, and it gave me a lot of confidence when we actually started shooting. I knew what coverage I needed.

FD: How much time did it take from the start of scriptwriting to the beginning of shooting?

DS: We started writing in the summer and started shooting the following Winter/Spring. What is that, maybe 8, 9 months? Pretty fast.

FD: Did Howard Korder see the script before the shooting, was he interested in reading the script?

DS: I can't remember if we showed it to Howard or not. I think not. He made it clear that he really didn't want to be involved, and he probably wouldn't have been pleased by certain liberties we took. The script deviates from the play in a couple of important ways, mostly having to do with certain pre-conditions we were obliged to fulfil. In the play, the role of the girl, Marie, is quite small. She's mainly a conduit, a way for Martin to meet Waxling, and after their encounter she falls out of the story. Our problem was a pretty classical one: the character of Marie was to be played by Illeana Douglas, and it was necessary to give her a bigger part. We had to figure out how to expand her role, to make the story less about Martin as a lone striver, and more of a...a weird fucked up love story. It significantly changed the dramatic structure, the balance, and probably not for the better. I don't know what Howard thought about it. I heard through the grapevine that he wished he had adapted it himself. But he had his chance (laughter).

FD: Did the script passed through several versions and was a subject to requests for changes from the producers?

DS: No, not really. It was much more direct and more collegial than that. Michael wrote, I looked at it, and then I worked on it with him. He way staying in my house, in the country, for several weeks, and basically we were doing nothing but working on the script. The producer, Ruth, was a very good friend of mine; it was not like one of those stories about working with a Hollywood studio where everything is done by committee. Ruth had her suggestions, and we showed it to Scorsese, who would make his suggestions, and then we would go back and work some more. But Marty's suggestions were very minor, really matters of style, not so much matters of structure. He was more concerned with what a certain character would say, the language, the tone.

FD: How much were you involved in the casting process? Did you have any other actors in mind, but they were unavailable at that time? Were you hesitant about some choices that were imposed to you (if that was the case), and were you later positively surprised?

DS: We were incredibly lucky with the casting. All of us, myself, Marty, Illeana, Ruth...we had always wanted Griffin Dunne in the role. It was his part on Broadway, after all, and he's an actor we all admired. He's the perfect "everyman". Marty had of course worked with him on After Hours and I think they have always wanted to work together again. Griffin was very suited to playing that kind of tragic-comic, or screwball-tragic character. He was also willing to work with a first time director. The first actor I cast after Griffin was Dennis Hopper. Dennis was a friend of mine from the art world. I said to him, "Look man, it's a small but very vivid part. It'll take you 3 or 4 days tops. Just do it for me as a favour." I'm not even sure he read the script. He liked my idea about the character: I told him I thought of Dr. Waxling as a kind of failed artist, someone who had wanted to really reach people, but who became a con man instead. Dennis said: "Yeah sure, I'll do it for you." On the strength of having him attached the financing partners released the money. We then called Christopher Walken - would he read it. He asked to meet with us, and Michael and I met him at the bar in The Algonquin Hotel. He was incredibly polite. I think he wanted to get a sense of what we thought the tone was going to be - was it serious. He said, "What the hell, I'll do it." With Chris on board, we were able to entice John Turturro, who basically said: "Well, if Walken's in, I'm in." It happened exactly as I had wished it to. Of course, none of it would have happened without Marty's imprimatur.

FD: How Ethan Hawke got involved? Was he a name back then?

DS: He was beginning to be a big young star. Ethan was part of a theatre company that Illeana was also involved with and they were friends. Ethan is a very bright guy. I had seen him around town, I knew him slightly from here and there. I only regret we didn't have a bigger part to offer him. We had only this one little moment, which he graciously agreed to do. It was nice to have him in the film.

FD: How the process of working with the actors felt for you? Did you have to direct, intervene a lot?

DS: Well, everyone is different. Another actor who I want to mention, who doesn't get very much credit in the movie, but who I think is wonderful, is Dan Hedaya, who plays the Italian tailor. He has only one line in the film, the word "Please", which he says a couple of times. This was the power of Scorsese in the New York film world. If Marty's office calls an actor and says... So we were able to get Dan, a big-time actor, a huge TV star, to do a cameo. It just proves the adage - there are no small parts. Dan is a delightful guy, curious about a lot of things, willing to try anything. He's also an amateur artist, well versed in painting. He came to my studio a couple of times to see how I work - we had a very nice rapport. With someone like Dan, it was easy to say, "This scene is really more of a ballet - it's more to be danced that acted. It's about movement, rhythm and the pacing." Which he understood completely, and was able to do without hesitation. Some of the others were more motivationally based, more text-based, and as a result were a little more resistant to some of the things I was trying to do. I learned a lot about actors in the course of shooting, but each one is different. In each case, I tried to come up with an image that the actor could use. I already mentioned what I told Dennis. With Griffin we talked about any number of things, things about life, our lives as men - this fear men have of missing the big chance. He got it so deeply. So much of the film's tone is about yearning to be something one is not. All the characters have a version of that, and it's something all the actors understood. Adjusting their metabolisms and temperatures, one to another and to the scene - that was the fun part. Overall, the actors, once in their protected zones, were incredibly generous and creative. Some things I asked them to do didn't resonate, mystified them. Occasionally there were problems. When we were shooting the tailor shop scene, John couldn't understand what I was going for - he was very literal about it, and challenged me very strongly, thought it was wrong that these hoods would talk about such things in front of a tailor. But when he saw the finished film and realized that the scene was highly stylized, more fanciful than realistic, he liked it a lot. I think Chris Walken is extremely touching in the film. Everything he does, all Chris' work is strange, and uncommon, quirky, but also very moving. There was one scene we shot on the terrace of a house - the scene where Martin and Kim meet and talk about the book. Chris has a wonderfully loneliness to his delivery. I thought the scene went well, but it happened to be an extremely cold night, and the actors' teeth were chattering; in between takes people would rush out and put blankets and coats on them, then we'd do another shot, another take, and then more blankets. It was bad for the actors' concentration. Anyway, we finally wrapped for the night, it was late, I was just going to bed when Chris called me - I think it was 3 or 4 in the morning - and he was really upset. He said: "I don't think I did my best work. I'd like to do it again tomorrow." Everyone wanted to give their best ; they just wanted to do something good.

FD: We shouldn't forget Robert Knepper as Daniel Strong.

DS: Oh yes, Rob. Well, it was New York, and it was Scorsese, so people were willing to come in for a day, or two days, and do some crazy things. There were a few actors we couldn't get because of scheduling conflicts. We came very close to having Amanda Plummer for the role of the cousin. She was in New York and came to my loft to read for the part; I desperately wanted her in the film, but then at the last minute she couldn't come from L.A. to do it. But we were very lucky with all the secondary characters.

FD: Did you have a specific idea about the look of the movie before filming? How well were you able to communicate your ideas and wishes to the cinematographer(s) and were you satisfied with that collaboration?

DS: I had some rather specific ideas. I did a great deal of work developing, not just the storyboards, the shot design and sequences, but also the d�cor, the color palette and so on. I had a very gifted designer, Robin Standefer, who no longer works in movies, as the production designer. Robin has a meticulous, comprehensive sense of visual style, and we worked well together; things like the way color sequences though the movie, the symbolic value of the color, it's density an so on. We really went into it in a deep way. But my central visual idea for the film was quite simple. I think Griffin coined the phrase we used to describe the film: a screwball tragedy. Essentially it's a dark film - about yet another version of the corruption of the American dream. My idea was to shoot this dark little fable inside of a very bright, high-key, sophisticated world. I guess the model for this is Douglas Sirk's color movies of the 50s, Imitation of Life, and the rest. Within our budget and our schedule, with all the constraints, we tried to make something that on the surface was luminous, lushly colored and sophisticated, and in complete contradiction to the film's content.

FD: Where was the movie mostly filmed and how long did the principal photography took?

DS: We had a 30 day schedule, but we lost 2 days to weather. There was a blizzard in New York and we couldn't even shoot interiors - no one could get anywhere. So we were down do 28 days, which is not very much.

FD: Can you tell me something about the post-production part of the project? A great deal of film directors describe this phase as the part when the film is truly created. Do you have a similar sentiment? Were you happy with the collaboration with the film editor?

DS: Of course, the clich� is that films are made in the editing room. I think the film has occasional passages of pretty brilliant editing but, and this is hardly an original thought, I do think that the screenplay determines the film, more than any other single element. And I think that whatever limitations the film has stem from problems in the script. Not to put the blame on Michael Almereyda at all, but there were problems of dramatic structure, and also of just plain logic, that we never really solved. We did not, I think, come up with a satisfying last act. Be that as it may, the editing, for the most part follows my original ideas for the film. Certain scenes, like the tailor shop, the meeting in Kim's office, the train ride - are pure editing. Marty was very involved in the editing and gave some helpful notes. Editing is his real passion, he started out as an editor. But - as I said, we only shot for 28 days. We didn't have lots of coverage or dozens of takes. We sometimes had to shoot 5 or 6 pages a day. There was a lot of coverage we just didn't have. Certain things could have been made much more cogent as drama. Given what we had to work with, what emerged is a pretty stylish looking picture, but not as effective dramatically as I would have liked.

FD: Are there some parts of the Search and Destroy that you would like to change from today's perspective, or regret about some segments of the film that could have been handled differently/better, given the same budget?

DS: I think that would be inevitable. A movie, especially a first movie, is such a tremendous learning curve. There are many thing I would do differently if I could. While you're shooting, there are things that seem so terribly important, moments that you think are going to define the film, and in the end they barely show up on the screen, or they end up being cut out all together. I think that happens in every film; I never heard of a film where that wasn't the case. The version that was released was very tight. I can't remember how long, but I don't think it's even 90 minutes - it is very, very tight. And that was really at Marty's insistence. Marty is very impatient. You can look his own films and see the way they are cut. First shot - man at the bottom of a flight of stairs. Second shot - he's up at the top of stairs. There's no following him up the stairs, no P.O.V; he just goes from the first shot to the last shot, without anything in the middle, sometimes just a quick dissolve as a bridge. He can't bear to wait. He really pushed us to trim, trim, trim. Sometimes I would drag a shot out, put a lot of air in a cut just to bug him. I think it probably got excessively tightened and ended up losing some of its savour. I have a version that's about 15 - 18 minutes longer, with some scenes that we ended up discarding, and some scenes let to play out a bit longer - more atmosphere, different timing. I think it plays better, and is certainly closer to my intention. But I never had the chance to test it with an audience.

FD: After the film was completed were you content with the final product at that moment of time?

DS: Yes and no. I felt that certain scenes play wonderfully, certain scenes struck me as funny and strange and not like other movies. The movie has some original flavour. It also has an interesting dynamic between Chris Walken's character and Griffin Dunne's character, and then later when John Turturro comes in, there's an energy, a weird hopped-up feeling that to me feels wholly imagined, original in its dynamic. We made something out of scratch, if you know what I mean, shaped the material to some unexpected place. You can feel it on the screen. However, there are many other things in the movie that I don't think work at all.

FD: How do you feel about Search and Destroy today? Did you opinion change?

DS: I haven't seen it in long time, but I doubt if the failed scenes look any better.

FD: How much were you involved in the distribution and the promotion of the movie? Were you worried about the performance of the movie at the box office, and was there a pressure for the movie to perform well financially at all?

DS: I didn't have a lot to do with it. The distribution deal had been made as part of the overall producer arrangements. A certain amount of money was committed to advertising, etc. One does what one can, shows up to press conferences and whatnot. The movie was very poorly distributed in my opinion. I had no control over it. The marketing people asked for my help designing the campaign, the poster and so on, then did whatever the hell they wanted to, ignoring my ideas completely.

FD: Was the movie shown on festivals? Did you have much opportunity to talk about it during its initial release?

DS: It played at some of the festivals and won a few prizes. It won a prize in Locarno, and at Biarritz I believe. A lot of movies win prizes at those festivals, it doesn't mean anything. Janet Maslin wrote a quite nice, favourable review in New York Times. We had a very nice reception at Sundance, the only time I've ever been there.

FD: What do you think the story is really about? Does it contain a message in your opinion, or is it a commentary?

DS: I think the story is fascinating. It's a very American story, possibly more relevant now than ever. There is in America, and probably now in the rest of the world, this feeling that everyone has been put on Earth to do something special. The most ordinary people, everyone really, feels like they have some special gift, some special talent. And of course, it's mostly not true. But that belief has inspired all kinds of crazy behaviour. Sometimes wonderful, successfully eccentric behaviour; sometimes just desperate, destructive behaviour, and sometimes criminal behaviour. But everyone feels that if they don't do something extraordinary, there is something wrong with them. And our protagonist is one of those people. There is nothing at all special or unusual or particularly interesting about him, except that somehow he believes that there is, or ought to be. It's really a story about self-delusion, the propensity of people to indulge in self-delusion. All of the characters are self-deluded in various ways. Their self-delusions become intertwined, and the more intertwined, the more destructive they become. The joke is that ultimately this guy's self-delusion is rewarded - there is no comeuppance. It's a very black comedy.

FD: I've noticed some objectivism undertones in the movie. Like when Chris Walken's character says: "Bless the businessmen. They are the agents of our hope." Or when Waxling says to Martin: "You are not a threat here, you are not a threat. Show me money!" What do you think of that aspect of the movie?

DS: "Just because it happened to you doesn't make it interesting." It's the inverse of the fantasy that Martin has about himself. These are not just my themes, or even Howard Korder's themes - they are pretty universal at this point. Just as an aside, to give you some perspective, one could say that another version of this movie, in a way, is Magnolia. It is quintessentially an American theme.

FD: Who did the book cover of Waxling's novel in the movie?

DS: I think I did. I can't remember. We did it with the production design team. We had some fun with that book cover.

FD: Would you be willing to do a movie commentary for a more elaborate DVD/Blu-ray release if approached?

DS: I would be happy should the opportunity arise.

FD: Did your experience as a painter influenced the creative process of making Search and Destroy? Was any of it intentional? Can you draw a parallel between your other artistic endeavours and this film, or do you consider your various creative outputs to be completely different animals?

DS: I think it influenced the film quite a lot. It was an extension of what I was doing in my painting, and vice versa. I couldn't necessary point the specific things, but I felt overall the two things were working in tandem.

FD: Was this connection unconscious or intentional?

DS: I think it was probably intentional. I think people on the production team had certain expectations. People wanted to work with me specifically to see what I would do, what I would bring to it. There was a kind of implicit dare - would I would bring elements of my painting into the film.

FD: How would you describe the whole experience of directing a motion picture, compared to your other work, namely painting, where you don't have to rely on other people's skills/tenacity?

DS: Making a movie is hard work. Anyone who says otherwise is not telling the truth. It's also extremely gratifying. I would do it again under the right circumstances. I have actually spent years developing other projects, none of which have so far come to fruition. But the process is seductive. Once you experience it, you want to keep doing it. On the other hand, it's unbelievably frustrating. You don't always get what you want. As a painter, you work alone in your studio. Whatever happens, for better or for worse, is a result of your own energies. A film set couldn't be more different. And because of that, filmmaking is a very recalcitrant medium; it's hard to get from what your see in your head to what you see on the screen. I'm not sure that I have the right personality for it. But filmmaking as such - the act of creation involved in it - is pure pleasure.

FD: Were there some other projects after Search and Destroy that you developed after but didn't come to fruition?

DS: I worked for a long time on the script for the Jackson Pollock movie that Ed Harris directed. I worked with Ed on the script, but in the end it was essentially not really dramatic enough - following around a painter or a drunk is not really a story. There were other scripts, some quite interesting things. All I can say is: we'll see.

FD: Besides these projects, is there some theme, person, story that you would like to explore and put on the screen?

DS: I have a few pet projects and they are all quite different. But thematically I guess you could say the are about different forms of extreme behaviour. I would love to do a musical at some point in this life. I would love to try to do something with song and dance. The issue for me is really time. The amount of time it takes to go from an idea to start date for a film - it's a brutal time equation. It's very hard for me to take two years off from painting and devote myself to developing a film. But sure, I have some ideas for things which I think would be great films.

FD: Can you tell us something about the music in the film?

DS: This was a pure gift from Scorsese; Marty had a close relationship with Elmer Bernstein, who was at the time probably the pre-eminent film composer in America. Certainly one of them. Elmer wrote the music for The Grifters. It was one of my favourite scores. I loved the bitter sweet lyricism that he used to underscore yet another film about self-deluded criminal lowlifes. I mean, it's a much more vicious film, not to mention much better, but not dissimilar. It's a film I've always admired. When Elmer saw the rough cut of my film, he called me and said: "This movie has the feel of The Grifters." I said: "Well, Elmer, that's interesting, because that was sort of my model for the movie and the score of The Grifters is what I hear in my head." So it was a very good fit. I think the score is wonderful. He was great guy to work with, very unpretentious. Not at all what you would imagine for a Hollywood composer. When I was in LA, I called him and I said: "How do you want to work?" He said: "Come to my studio. I have all the equipment there. I have everything all setup." I thought, I'm going to some fancy recording studio. It's going to be acres of dials and buttons and amplifiers and technicians. I went to his house in Santa Monica, and by studio he meant his garage, and the equipment he had was a little black and white monitor and a little tiny console, a reel to reel tape-recorder, a metronome and a stopwatch. That's it. And we just went through the film scene by scene with a stopwatch, just the way you would in your basement studio.

FD: Do you have a filmmaking inspiration you would like to single out?

DS: There were so many - all for different reasons. Douglas Sirk has been a tremendous touchstone over the years, and I think you can see little echoes of Douglas Sirk. And of course you can see echoes of classic 60s Goddard in the film as well. Echoes of Goddard in the way things are staged, and echoes of Sirk in the way things are shot. They are two different vocabularies. And then, this is maybe an unlikely one, but I think you can see influences of Vincent Minnelli - that Americana rendered in a deceptively bright palette kind of thing, also related to Sirk. Minnelli was an interest that I shared with Scorsese, Minnelli was almost an obsession of his. And I had been looking at Minnelli a lot - I sort of grew up with him, had him in the back of my mind in terms of tone. Those are three obvious examples. There are dozens of others, too numerous to mention.

FD: Once more, thank you for your time to do these questions and share these very detailed insights in the production of the movie with a fan, after so long time.

DS: I appreciate your interest.

Copyright by Film Drifter 2015