The Men Who Would Be Kings

“I was from the beginning thinking: I want John Huston’s career,” Steven Soderbergh said four years ago. “I want a lot of movies over a long period of time. And then we’ll go back, if we want to--I don’t want to, but somebody else can--and sort it all out....”

It seems the smart young director may, if he stays a long course, realize his wish. His career is only 13 years old, but it already demonstrates Hustonian range. His films have been small and intimate, large and bustling; they have been memoiristic, moralistic, melodramatic, comedic, and they have been slippery stylistically. It is impossible to find in them a readily identifiable personal manner because, like Huston, Soderbergh slyly adapts himself to his material, instead of the other way around.

These thoughts on seemingly disparate talents are occasioned by a felicitous coincidence, the appearance, in the same month, of volumes about Huston and Soderbergh in the admirable “Interviews” series, published by the University Press of Mississippi. There are 20 of these valuable little books, with more on the way. Evenly balanced between old movie masters and Young Turks, they are collections of interviews the directors granted, through the years, to eager journalists.

Some of the pieces (generally the least interesting) are interviews with mainstream reporters, who worked the material into Sunday articles, usually pegged to the release of new movies. Many are lengthy question-and-answer passages between the director and earnest, knowledgeable cinephiles writing for the handful of serious film journals that are scattered about the world. The interviews are occasionally repetitive, as beginnings are re-explored or the director repeatedly retails his handful of key anecdotes and insights. But that’s a small matter--you can always skip ahead--compared to the larger virtues of these books. Their editors invite us to what we might call participatory biography. We hear the director’s voice talking about the only thing that legitimizes our interest in his work. (No women are as yet included in the series.) Except in their modest introductions, the editors don’t exercise the biographer’s obligation to tell us what we ought to think about their films. Similarly the directors themselves are not allowed the autobiographer’s privilege of retrospective rationalization. The reader is stuck with what these guys said, more or less on the fly, in 15 or 20 half-forgotten journalistic encounters, and he is implicitly encouraged to create his own narrative from this raw material.

Sometimes the results can be astonishing, as they are in Gerald Peary’s volume on John Ford. Ford was a notoriously difficult interview--abrupt, ungiving, often downright hostile to his interlocutors. In particular, he could not or would not describe the processes by which he achieved the starkly beautiful imagery with which he wowed generations of cineastes. Similarly, none of his many biographers has ever solved the mystery of how this churlish and alcoholic man achieved the sentimental warmth that animates his best-loved work. Mostly, they have fallen back on awed, useless dithyrambs. But reading Peary’s book, one comes to a rather different conclusion. For all the honors that were heaped on Ford, the man was clearly ashamed of himself: perhaps not for the shifty and self-aggrandizing way he fictionalized his personal history but because he remained in his own mind an ignorant and inarticulate lowbrow, unable to keep up with his knowing questioners and angrily resentful of their learned ways.

The son of an immigrant Irish saloon keeper, Ford had perhaps a week of college before drifting west to follow his actor brother into the movies where, more or less by accident, he became a director in the days when no particular prestige was attached to that profession. His success was slow to come, and much of it derived from a natural, therefore inexplicable, gift for composition, an unerring sense of exactly where to place his camera for maximum impact. Like most people who find it easy to do something everyone else finds difficult, he undervalued that talent. In particular he could not explain it to those who gathered worshipfully around him (often enough at a sickbed) seeking his wisdom. He answered their affection with lies, evasions, dubious generalizations. The drama in many of these pieces derives in part from the fear that Ford would soon angrily terminate the talk and send the kids scurrying, in part from the sense that he would like to respond kindly to their respect but could not find the words to do so. Yet, paradoxically, I emerged from this book more sympathetic to Ford than any of his inflated biographies ever made me. There is something very touching in the spectacle of this primitive and outrageous old man, so out of touch with his own work, feelings and audience, groping for some common ground with the latter, failing to find it and then retreating back into silence and isolation.

Nothing quite so emotionally raw arises out of the publication of the Huston and Soderbergh books. But taken together they say something interesting about the way similar talents manage to prosper in wildly different Hollywood climates. Huston was a romantic drifter as a young man--boxer, horseman, slightly feckless charmer--who eventually settled into screenwriting, then directing. In his waywardness he was more like Ford’s generation than Soderbergh’s. These interviews reveal him as a well-read man who loved to live large. Indeed, his excuse for making so many bad movies from the mid-’50s through the early ‘70s was that his estate in Ireland, with its 13 full-time servants, kept him hopping. In the eyes of cinema’s purists, his repute will never entirely recover from the likes of “Sinful Davey” and “The Mackintosh Man,” though he himself took a chipper practical view of them. They served his economic purposes and, besides, he also made “Fat City” and “The Man Who Would Be King” in that period.

A serene and genial guide to his own career, he stresses his unobtrusiveness as a director of both camera and actors. Somewhat offhandedly he concedes that there may be some truth to the standard critical take on him: that his best movies are all about doomed criminal enterprises undertaken by ruefully romanticized outsider figures who gallantly accept the failure of their plans. There were enough of them to constitute an authorial obsession, which in his cool elegant fashion he refused to convert into a grand vision. It’s better, as Soderbergh suggests, to discover large themes after the fact of a movie than it is to self-consciously pursue them going in.

Soderbergh is quite a different character. He shares with Huston a lack of formal education and a taste for wandering. But he was always a movie geek, living hand-to-mouth as he made his little amateur short subjects, trying to break into the movies, which he did sensationally at 26, with “sex, lies, and videotape,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. The interviews show him to be both self-conscious and fighting self-consciousness, as he tries to develop his own cinematic vocabulary. They also show him to be a man plagued by “the anxiety of influence,” something that never bothered Huston or Ford or any of the old-timers.

How can it be otherwise? We’ve all, by now, seen too many movies, absorbed too many influences. People like Soderbergh are obliged to work in a climate where no one gives a hoot for the movie past and where directors, having been indulged their “Kafkas” are faced with a stark choice--remake “Ocean’s Eleven” or head back to the margin.

This climate could eventually turn the “Interviews” series into a dismaying record of early promise blighted. In the meantime, though, this series is the most provocative cinematic publishing enterprise now on offer--a seductively readable guide not just to our movie past but to its future.