TheFeuddirector imagined a reality where the brothers documented the legendary Black and White Ball.
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(That title eventually went to non-socialite and WashingtonPostpublisher Katherine Graham.)
Its a directorial version of character-acting Van Sant traces back to his shot-for-shot 1998 remake of Alfred HitchcocksPsycho.
What are we looking at in episode three?
Its not a recreation of theMaysleses real documentaryfrom 1966.
And in the end, hes deciding justnotto do it.
The Maysles brothers did something else with Truman, never the party.
They went out to Long Island with him.
They never shot the ball and Truman never had editorial control.
That idea was established in the series so he had the ability to cancel it.
It was a way to say, He wanted to write about this instead.
We were also supposed to notice that Truman was not being a good guy.
The filming was making him look bad.
That was also in his head.
There was also D.A.
Pennebaker, and Frederick Wiseman and Richard Leacock.
The films they made were always fascinating to me.
Interesting that it ultimately became a style.
Leacocks mentor was the director ofNanook of the North,Robert Flaherty.
The result was ultimately a documentary-style portrait of a place and a people.
If you construct that reality properly, it really doesnt matter where you put the camera.
Or theyd venture to run over there, though sometimes they werent able to do that.
A lot of times they got a bad shot.
But it was the action you were looking at anyway.
Get whatever you could get.
And it would look great and wed go, Okay, we got it.
Or wed change it.
If the Maysles could put a camera on a tripod, theyd put it on a tripod.
Sometimes our references were our parents: How they moved and acted and how they spoke, even.
We were all chipping in as far as what those things would be.
And there wasa bit of a Charles Kuralt piece from CBS, in the hallway showing the guests arriving.
There just werent very many moving-image records of her from that time.
I say strangely because her husband was Bill Paley, the head of CBS!
I think somebody just took a publicity shot of her that way.
I also never saw moving images of Slim Keith or C.Z.
You know, sometimes Im not doing anything because what weve got is already working!
I said, Oh, is that where you want the camera?
Why did you pick that spot?
And he said, Oh, no, no the camera just fell off the truck here!
Sometimes that would happen, and wherever the camera happened to be, that was where wed put it.
Which is always an attractive notion, that its random.
That means its unexpected.
So wed opt for lens and say, Lets just leave the camera here first.
And see what happens?Yeah!
Just go ahead and use the solution thats right in front of you.
Did you follow the same line of thought when you were directing the third episode?
There was a limited amount of money at that time from Disney.
But I had to give myself a method with which it could also be something original.
Thefirst scene I shotwas Slim Keith giving C.Z.
is walking the horse as theyre talking.
The first shot was in the morning.
We were out on Long Island.
We were testing how fast we could do things.
We planned it because we had the right equipment to do a shot like that.
It all worked like wed planned it.
Wed always see to it to have that master initiate the entire length of the scene.
Did you ever get to meet Truman Capote?No.
I wish I had.
He and Tennessee Williams would have been interesting just to see them speak.
I did seeTru, starring Robert Morse, which was probably very close to seeing Truman speak.
Morse learned the voice by studying recordings of Truman.
He was a somewhat foreboding character.
WhenLa Cote Basque, 1965was printed inEsquire, I had a subscription, so I read that.
There was no script yet.
There was just this concept.
Were you involved in the structuring of the story?No.
I wasnt really involved except for reacting to Robbies drafts.
One of the first things I did was get ahold of the four stories fromAnswered Prayersand read them.
I realized,Oh, this could bea P.B.
Jones extravaganza, which is an idea that doesnt really surface until later episodes.
When I first started out withDrugstore Cowboy, I was putting so much emphasis on blocking.
OnDrugstore Cowboy, the crew was slower, so what Id storyboarded just wasnt gonna happen.
After that, I started working in that manner.
People might enter and exit before they even do anything!
Odd things happen all the time.
I remember Frank Capra talking about directing his extras on the street forMeet John Doeor something.
He tried to give them specific directions to make the scene come alive.
To what extent has your career been driven by the desire to experiment with form?A lot.
I think just the idea of a given form is enticing.
Where it came from and where it went in somebodys career thats always interesting to think about.
There were things Bela Tarr would do that I was trying to conform to.
He wasnt intercutting at all.
Hed do single shots that would move, or move and then stop and then move again.
His shot list would be a single shot.
I mean, the audience had to betaughtthese ways of making cinema that originated in the silent era.
You know how silent filmmakers would use a vignette for a close-up, like this?
[Curves his hands around his face to approximate an iris matte.]
That was so the audience would know,Oh, this is a special shot.
Its not like they dont have legs!
Those vignettes looked like portraits of the time.Like the portraits they might have had at home on their walls.
What was the point of it?To see what would happen.
Instead, you have Batman, and the audience is like,We know Batman.
We know his history.
We can get on with the story.
Remakes became a way to do that.
Later, comic-book movies became another way.
Had you pitched a shot-for-shot remake ofPsychobefore that point in your career?Yes.
Then suddenly, one day, they said, Yes!
And I asked myself:Do I really want to do this?And I did!
What was in it for me was the chance to see what would happen.
The film I chose to remake was one I knew very well.
WithPsycho, I wasnt working in my medium, I was working in Hitchcocks medium.
It was an experiment.
We were emulating films that existed.
Their chaos was inspirational.