Edward Copeland's Tangents

"Maybe the audience wants to be treated like adults. Maybe they don't want to be spoon-fed pap."

"I think that Jacob Singer imagined the relationship with Jezebel, that the reality was Vietnam."

"I liked the sense of seeing people you can't see now."

"It was a classic movie. I loved it up until the ending when you finally see the alien and it's some wiggly octopus thing. It wasn't scary at all."

"I'm amazed that Tim thought of me. Well, in the sense that I'd never met Tim. I liked his work a lot ... He was one of those guys I said, 'Gee, I would like to work with that guy.' I got a call and he said, 'You are my first and only choice for this.'"

"I met Johnny and loved him immediately. ... We became friends. Generation gaps — nonsense. I mean, Lugosi and Ed Wood, there was a lot of years between them. Johnny became — and is — my pal."

"There is a sweetness in (the relationship between Wood and Lugosi), yet it's got layers ... It's an interesting relationship. You don't see that a lot in film. These are two guys who needed each other and they're two really weird, strange guys."

"I love an actor who comes in, ready to work. It's like a good tennis player. They hit the ball where you don't expect it and it's great."

"The more complicated the character, the better I am. It's the one-dimensional crap that I had to do for years that drove me crazy. If you are in a meaningless, mindless movie playing a one-dimensional character, don't get too clever, because you're only going to dig a hole for yourself ... It's good writing and complicated stuff. When I got Tucker, and there had been a dearth of that stuff coming my way, I said, 'My God, this is a part.'"

"I'd rather hear this talk than the alternative. I've walked off the stage and people have said, 'That was really great. You look really nice in that suit.' It's looks and feelings that you get. People never say, 'Jeez, you were awful."

"I saw (Lugosi) when I was a kid and he scared the life out of me. I literally didn't sleep for days."

"It was a revival of Dracula. I was maybe 8 or 9 years old and there was this incredible creature on the screen. Look at it again. It's startling, powerful."

"It was my first script so I was very, very lucky. I had struggled doing other things for a very long time and wanted to direct it myself and was fortunate to get it into the hands of someone who wanted to make it. Had the movie not done what it did, I would be leading a very different kind of life right now."

"The thing about it that's hard for me as the writer — and I have a problem with it that nobody else does — is that I would never presume to call a film of mine Something to Talk About because I want the audience to make that call. To say to the audience that this film is Something to Talk About feels pretentious."

"Things were just kind of rowdy for a couple of years. It took a while until things got quiet enough that I could hear these characters talking. I just decided that I would really take my time. I was very self-conscious writing this. I just decided I'd wait it out until I was happy with it."

"A lot of times people say, 'We've got a really great script here. Who can we get to rewrite it?' (It's) a psychology that will always elude me."

"I'm in a no-win situation. People's expectations of what I should say or how I should say it — I'm never going to be able to overcome that. If people think that there's no such thing as forgiveness, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who could tell them otherwise. For people who expect me to write a doctrine instead of a movie, they're always going to be disappointed. I'm interested in writing movies and the characters dictate the story; it's not arbitrary ... Somebody's always going to be let down no matter what, so they're just going to have to deal with it."

"At the beginning of this movie, I wanted to start everybody out as a stereotype — have Eddie the cheating husband, Grace the charity league wife, Wyly the overbearing father, Georgia the submissive mother — and have you understand who everybody was by the end of the movie and see the human beings in every one of those stereotypes."

"If I would have called it something, I would have called it Something to Laugh About because I really hope people do have a good time."

When the Academy sent it back after engraving, it was shipped in "those blue bags, like a Crown Royal bottle. So I put the thing on the shelf and looked at it for a while and then I put the blue bag over it. My husband came in and took one look at it and said, 'Ahh! Safe success.'"

"If you think in terms of awards and roles, you're shooting yourself in the foot. I was crushed, but you have to get over that."

"When I'd get to a point where I thought, 'It's not going to happen. I'm not gonna make it,' some friend of mine would say, 'Ah bullshit, of course you are' and I'd be heartened by someone else believing in me, but many times I've been to the wall."

"In this business it seems like, if you've got work, you get work. It jump-started me again and it's been going like that ever since."

"I'm not methodical. I don't sit down and ponder roles. I read the script and if I like it and all things are equal and I've got a shot at doing it, then it's just a matter of learning the lines, wearing the costume correctly if possible, and, as Spencer Tracy said, come in prepared and not bumping into the furniture."

"I'll act for free. If you don't pay me, I'll do it anyway. Money affords you the time and space to do this passion. I'm happy to have the passion to act instead of for digging ditches."

"Somebody comes along, just when you're at the end of the rope and maybe there's a fork in the road and you're tired and you want to sit there on this rock maybe and think there's no point in going on because either fork I take is going to be the same thing. (Then) someone comes along and says, 'Here. I'm going this way. Come along.' You just need to get going again, to take that other step. Success is very often the very next step you take."

"I'd like to do a mob story or a story about what I know that's on a high level. Where do you go if you want to do this world, the ultimate that they can hope for is what? They're not going to be president of the United States. Las Vegas is the hope, it's the city they created. So I thought let me see what the story is in Las Vegas and see them on that high level."

"I went to Vegas ... and realized that there was a story that ended in 1983 and it was the story of how the mob lost Las Vegas. That's what this is about. I talked to prosecutors. I talked to people. I read clips and some people said, 'You've got to look at the Tropicana-Stardust case. That's a great case. You might find a story in there, because that's the last time the mob was really in a position to own casinos. So I went to Kansas City and got the trial, began going through all the trial records."

"I knew who the players were, but at the beginning none of the players would talk to me; they had no reason to talk to me. What happened is that I then began to talk to everyone who would talk to me and I got all of the documents. I went to Kansas. With that 800-page chronology, I was able to go back to some of these people and say, 'Listen, this is a book. I've got the book.' I showed it to their lawyers, I showed it to Lefty's lawyers. I said, 'I've got the book. There's a lot in here that I know is wrong, that Lefty did not do certain things. I am giving you an opportunity to correct errors. Why not have it right?"

"It was interesting to me because it meant that I would be forced to use more of the story of people than I might have if I was just doing a nonfiction book."

"That was the opening of the book, too. I have never sat down and interviewed a man who told me how his car got blown up. They don't survive."

"You can only write about what you know. Then people say, 'You're always writing about the mob or corruption or cities.' I mean, what am I going to write about, Scandinavian ice fishing?"

ALBERT: "It just made things a little more easier as far as getting things done. Having three armored cars to blow up instead of just one," though he added that the scene was accomplished with only one destroyed armored car.

ALBERT: "We were happy with the switch, because it gave us more time to edit and more time to look for music for the movie — more time for everything all the way around. Also, more time to plan the marketing strategy. It wouldn't have floated too well in the summer because there was too much bullshit out there."

ALBERT: "We didn't feel we'd seen the one-on-one graphicness of war. We definitely went looking for things — violent incidences or gruesome visuals — that hadn't been filmed before."

ALLEN: "We have a fascination with that decade. The music and the look is what we like, mostly with the cars. The '80s and '90s got more conservative and more bland and it's not exciting to make a movie nowadays with contemporary settings."

ALBERT: "It gradually moved that way over the years. He used to act in front of the camera and I'd do camera and then I'd act in front of the camera he'd do camera. It's like when we were kids, who's going to pull the wagon and who's going to sit in it. After awhile, he liked pulling it and I liked sitting in it. We both are qualified to do both jobs."

ALBERT: "We're not opposed to working separately on small projects right now but as far as features go, we still have a career to build as the Hughes Brothers and then we'll think about whatever else after that. We still have to get slammed by everyone out here before that."

ALBERT: "We're just having fun doing what we're doing. We're not politically tied to anything or whatever, just have our own views on things and pretty much not be persuaded by anybody telling us any other story than what we're interested in."

"For some reason, I found (the accent) very easy to slip into a Southern American accent. Of course, the Southern American accent is slightly different from the black Southern American accent, so for me it was more of a question of me getting the African element more richly incorporated into the accent."

"At the time, I was reading a lot of Toni Morrison novels and her characters' dialogue tends to be in dialect. Finally, just reading those pieces aloud, I found I was able to inhabit the physicality of the character."

"In terms of the origins of black America, that's really out of reach in English textbooks."

"As an anthropology student ... the whole issue of slavery, colonialism, the imperialist exploration of the New World, has been something we've dealt with quite significantly."

"I really do want to leave academia behind for awhile. I need to remember how I felt about things because I've been looking at everything from a clinical, academic point of view and just playing devil's advocate ... and I really want to wipe the slate clean and get back in touch with how I instinctively feel about things. With anthropology, I've become quite disillusioned with the human race. ... You look at people as masses and gross generalizations ... I don't want to save the world anymore. It's too big a project."

"With all due respect to people I've worked with since, after (Jefferson in Paris), I really felt that if I never worked in another film again, ... it would be OK because I'd done this film. It was that important to me and I respected it that much. I enjoyed the experience that much."

"He's the best actor I've ever worked with. I have worked with a few, very fine actors and Nick's incredibly receptive and very malleable; if you change your performance or want to do something new or different, he'll change with you."

"I like (The Scarlet Letter) because Arthur's inherently a good guy and it just makes a change playing someone like that instead of just going in with a big gun and killing a bunch of people. You get a little tired of that and I've done enough of that in my time. It appealed to me. It's not a light, romantic comedy, but it's lighter than a lot of the stuff I play."

"When I played Arthur, I was in the thick of it. I didn't go and clean up until after the film."

"Demi was instrumental in saving my life. In a sense, it was the gods or something that put me there in this film with Demi. There are only so many days you can come in with an inner ear infection and a tummy bug; there are only so many mornings you can do that. She just went, 'Oh, yeah. You've got to go away. You've got to stop. You've got to come back.' I think I may have reached a point where I gave up hiding it. That's a really sad point when you get to that because you do a great deal of lying when you drink. I think I got to the point that she was there working with me every day so she was the closest to me. She was seeing it every day."

"Alcohol addiction is (an) ... illness that you just have to want it to leave. You must make a decision ... it has to come from you. A relationship won't help it. A good film won't help it. A role won't help it. It's got to be independent of all that, because you ultimately have to stand back and say, 'Do I want to live or do I want to die?'"

"I was 36 years old when I made Scarlet Letter and when you're waking up in the morning and crawling across the floor like an 80-year-old man, when your tongue is discolored and you drink three vodkas and you vomit up the first two to keep the third one down so you just level out and feel normal, I think you have a problem. I think you have to say, 'This is not normal. Normal people do not start their day like this.'"

"I talk about it only because ... one person might read (an) article and go, 'That's me' and it might just inspire someone to say, 'Maybe I should do something about it too.'"

"I called (Van Sant) and we spoke about an hour about it, and I said, 'Please, just give me this chance. I won't let you down.'"

"I think sometimes you read a script and you just go, 'Wow! I would so much love to play this role.' The way that Hollywood works a lot of the time is that whoever is the highest earning actress at the time gets the role. That can be very frustrating because you may have an idea on how to do it. To have the opportunity to do a Buck Henry script is one of those great opportunities because he's a brilliant satirist and a great writer. Almost every line in To Die For has his genius behind it and they're so Buck."

"It's a distraction for the other actors and when you're creating a particular character if you have that person who knows you so well there and watching, it can make you self-conscious. The role meant so much to me that it was one of those things where I said, 'No, I can't have you there,' and it wasn't like he was going, 'No, I have to be there.'"

"When we're in London, we tend to be followed more. When we're in America, we tend to be left alone. It's sad when there is so much attention on so many silly things when there are crises all over the world, from Bosnia to whatever ... and they're putting Hugh Grant on the cover of the paper. To me, that is ridiculous and stupid and that's what it's like in London."

"I don't think you have to be like (Suzanne to make it in Hollywood), and I think that is something that television now is making a different moral code, for particularly a younger generation of people. I think so much of having a career and being an actor is maintaining your integrity, maintaining your relationship with your emotions and your experiences so you have the capability to put them on screen and have access to them. It doesn't become about blind ambition trying to achieve something."

"I went to television. I basically spent three days in bed. I checked into a hotel and watched television all the time. It was amazing because it becomes so hypnotic and the effect of just flicking channels — you can watch talk shows forever, 24 hours a day."

"To play Suzanne was one of those things where you just get to go completely wild and crazy, but you ... can't make it into a caricature. You have to find the reality and the emotional reality that it is grounded in, otherwise it becomes ridiculous and it loses the disturbing quality. I had to find playing her, the things that I liked about her, so that it wasn't me sort of winking at the audience going, 'Isn't she awful? ... '"

"I do hop around a lot from cable to Hollywood pictures to foreign independents to American independents to the stage to network movie of the week. I suppose I prefer that because that's where I get the widest range of opportunity."

"I asked (Campion) if I could audition because walking into a room, what is there about me that's like Ada? Nothing. I felt I could do the part. I knew I wanted the shot at doing the part ... "

"(Ada) treats people somewhat anonymously. They become invisible to her. It's not just negating men, it's negating anything that's going to get in the way of her fulfilling her own needs. That is one of the disturbing elements of Ada in that she is a woman who knows her own desires and pursues them. This is still a shocking aspect to Ada and I think it makes her a not-nice woman. I'm also not really that interested in nice. I mean I am, as a Southerner, because we're brought up to be really nice — so I am."

"For a while, you get left with the feeling it's a loss, that you had something taken away from not speaking. ... then things came up, alternatives came up, for me to be articulate, to be expressive. As a matter of fact, I thought it was a great opportunity."

"When I get nominated for an award or if I win an award, it's a lovely thing. To speculate about it, ... that's a waste of time."

"I can't say that anything inspired has come my way, but more money offers have come my way. It's a business, you know. That's kind of nice but almost neither here nor there to me. I'm sure to disappoint. Wherever I am, I'm probably not going to stay there for very long."

"Doing something like The Mask is kind of a nice deviation because it's more like doing a cartoon and ... that was a lot more entertaining than making the ass of a reptile jiggle for two years."

"The interest, which was attractive, was that it had all the Avery-type things in it and then I found out Jim Carrey was going to be in it and he's a biological cartoon anyway. All we did was pick up where he left off."

"What scares me about it is the projects that we're getting now ... We're becoming a birthing shop over time. We're not really an effects shop. We're being asked to inject personality into what they hope will be stars without addictions or morals or even requiring paychecks or trailers. It will happen. People who say there will never be digital characters just don't know what they're talking about. Man is just obsessed with trying to duplicate himself synthetically. The computer's a bad attempt at it, to begin with."

"I don't know why all of a sudden I got religion about the whole thing, because I was so driven to try. Lucas, I think, has kind of built a bit of a machine that's out of control, a monster of sorts. He wanted the best, he got the best. The only reason I'm scared is 'cause I know it's going to happen and I haven't been wrong yet when it comes to anticipating."

"We will never, ever shoot Cleopatra-type shots again with 150 or 1,000 extras; we'd just replicate them. That's the easiest example right there."

"If you can take any image and freeze it in time, you can duplicate it, from an actor to a rock. Again, you're only dealing with a certain spectrum of colors and it's just a matter of time. "Ariflex is testing cameras that do not shoot directly to film but shoot directly to memory, to run like decoded files. ... The real power of this is that we can now start using pre-stored images of characters, mountains, rain and we're piping it through the view plane, the camera, so the whole post-production process becomes pre."

"It will happen. It's a bad thing. The most powerful weapon in the house is the television, unfortunately. I get mothers coming up to me saying 'I bought my 7-year-old son a Macintosh. Isn't it wonderful?' and I say, 'No. Take it out in the backyard and bury it. Give him a block of wood and a knife. He'll learn a lot more.'"

"I was kind of interested in seeing (Natural Born Killers) for awhile, with all the pre-release hype around it ... and kind of got caught up in that, but then I ended up leaving the country when it opened. I was doing press in Japan. Then I came back, and went and saw Color of Night instead."

"The only thing I don't like about motion picture violence is talking about motion picture violence. The only danger is that you could die of boredom talking about it."

"It's a drag being rejected out of hand, pigeonholed or misunderstood just because of one element of my film. It gets to be a real drag when I think I've tried to put many elements in my movie, having one magnified. Just talking about it analytically gives a false impression that I'm thinking about it that way, but I'm not — I'm telling stories. I never think in terms of violence in my stories, it's just what happens, where the characters go."

"I've never bought that argument about desensitizing ... did the reign of the Borgias desensitize the peasants in Italy? It's one of those things that happens through the decades — 'There's crime in the streets, There's blood in the streets, murder — blame the playmakers.'"

"I don't think anyone in Rwanda has seen my films, yet 500,000 people were macheted to death."

"That's just the price you pay. If sex is part of your deal, or violence is part of what you do or things of a political nature are part of what you do. If you have one of those three elements in your movie, you know going in that everything else you are doing is going to be talked to secondarily compared to those three volatile things."

"(It was) more just lack of interest. It's been quite painful for awhile and now it's not painful, it's just kind of there."

"Actually, to give the devil his due, he was very cool when I said I wanted to take my name off the screenplay. He facilitated that to happen. He could have caused a big problem, but he didn't. When it comes to Natural Born Killers, more or less the final word on it is that it has nothing to do with me. One of the reasons I wanted just a story credit was I wanted that to get across. If you like the movie, it's Oliver. If you don't like the movie, it's Oliver."

"I guess it's always when you dread something ... I was just surprised by it. It was like a circus. I just couldn't believe that nobody had used that, had made a film of that milieu. I found out why. It's very difficult. I spent 10 years trying to find out what kind (of film to make) and it ended up as you've seen it — a farce, essay material."

"A lot of attention is coming off of The Player. This thing was started in my mind eight years before I even thought of The Player. I wasn't trying to re-create The Player. It's not that type of a film. I think it's a very soft kind of farce."

"We did the script and at the same time, we cast people when I didn't have them in the script. I remember somebody told me, 'Tracey Ullman would sure love to play in a movie with you' and I said, 'Oh, great.' I had no idea what I was going to put her in."

"Stephen Rea was kind of the same way. I didn't have that plot stuff worked out for him for a long time and I was quite worried that there wouldn't be enough for him to do. Sometimes you create the characters to fit the people you feel go into the ensemble and make it good, and some times you just fill the part."

"I'd say yes (that Ready to Wear was the film he felt least in control of while making), but if you could push me back in time to Nashville or some of the others I'd probably say no. Pain doesn't have any memory. You just remember that you didn't like it, but you don't experience the feeling of it."

"I'm not prone to ulcers, thank God, but this was very tough. If we'd written this meticulously and tried to get everybody to stick to their lines, it would have been a stiff disaster. Ultimately, it always ends up in the hands of the performers."

"We had some very set pieces. The structure of Julia Roberts and Tim Robbins — that was a little short story that was fairly concise. Somebody like Tracey Ullman I can kind of turn loose on her own and know that if I can use two out of every 10 gags she comes up with that I'll be all right. Stephen Rea ... really thinks out his part and is consistent with it, and that grew into a very terrific character."

"I told Lyle, 'I want to waste you in this film. I want you to be like the leading man used to be in Flying Down to Rio and all those pictures.' There was always some guy who really was a nebbish. He was always the rich guy who was there, but really had nothing to do. I told him that I was looking for bad acting or nonacting. He was very courageous to tackle it and he did it well."

"Sophia, Marcello, Julia and Teri Garr are four of the easiest actors, the most creative actors I've ever worked with. That's not to say the others were difficult, but they do get concerned about themselves. Those four people I mentioned though, when I looked on the schedule and that's who I had that day, then I had a nice day ahead of me."

"I think it's a lot better film than anyone will discover until about a month after it's opened and played," Altman said. "I find that all of these films are like your children and you tend to love your least successful children the most, but they're finished and the cord's cut and it's out there and it ... doesn't belong to me anymore."

"The making of (Before Sunrise) was very intimate. I worked very closely, very intensely with two people, but I was up for that. I was looking forward to that. I felt I needed to do that next."

"It's really not the budget, but how much each film needs to be made the right way. I felt I got everything I wanted."

"The Austrian government was very accommodating. They were open to us filming there, unlike a lot of cities. I liked the city. I wouldn't have used it otherwise. I just thought it was an interesting, kind of classical backdrop. It could have been other cities, but once it was Vienna I really wanted to make ... a movie that couldn't have been anywhere else."

"I think everyone's had an experience like this, in some way or another."

"When I first set out to make films, I didn't know if they would be funny or if people would relate to them. You never really know. I guess it was surprising to see my sensibilities hooked up with more people than I thought they would have. We all imagine ourselves way off in the corner, doing something really weird, but I have to admit that there's something kind of common about me. I kind of tap into a common experience."

"It wasn't until later that I got interested in films. I guess the most fascinating film of my childhood was ... watching 2001. I think I was in first grade. I thought, 'My God.' It really intrigued me, and it still does. It's really amazing, the power of the medium to appeal to a 7-year-old or an older person, same film. I think films communicate on a deeper level that way. It was in college I really started watching films more seriously, or thinking of them as an art form. I was just coming in contact with great films, not just the entertainments that opened that week, but the classics."

"It'll be yet another big change, but I think it will still be very character driven."