The New Yorker Radio Hour - Roger Corman’s Monsters, and a Roomful of Spies

Episode Date: May 5, 2017

This week: Roger Corman, master of monsters; experts in espionage talk shop; and Toni Collette, who’s never played a boring character. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

They're trying to answer questions about upward mobility in America. He was the military strategist. It was profiled brilliantly by somebody. So I think if you could find a subculture of people. With a kind of form of life on this planet that we haven't really seen before. From one world trade center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It's a special show today. We're going to bring you three conversations recorded live

at the New Yorker Festival, our annual bonanza of interviews and performances. The director and producer Roger Corman is a truly unique figure in American movies, and in the history of weird. He talks about how important it is to have a message in your films unless the film in question is called Sharktipus. And Tony Collette shares the secrets of her success with the New Yorker's Ariel Levy. But we're going to start off looking deep into the fiction and more importantly, the reality of espionage. Now, the word spying still has this whiff of the Cold War about it, and it might

still call to mind the work of Ian Fleming, his James Bond character, or the novels of John Le Carre. But clearly, as evidence from the events of this year, long after the Cold War, clandestine operations between this country and Russia have never gone away, and they've completely changed our history. At the New Yorker Festival in 2013, staff writer David Gran sat down with a group of very distinguished spies, and I'll let him make the introductions. Now, I'm incredibly honored to moderate such an extraordinary panel.

Tony Mendez is a decorated American spy who worked at the CIA for 25 years. Known as a master of disguises, he specialized in carrying out exfiltration operations, which involved getting people out of hostile countries before they would be killed. In 1979, he devised and oversaw a daring plot

to liberate six American diplomats from Iran by using the cover of creating a fake movie, which, in an unusual post-modern twist, was recently made into a movie itself, Argo. Jeff Moss is a legendary computer hacker and founder of DefCon, the largest conference and community for hackers. in the world.

In 2009, he was sworn in as a member of the U.S. Homeland Security Advisory Council. Stella Rimmington was a trailblazing spy and the head, former head of MI5. After being recruited by MI5 in 1967, she quickly rose through the ranks, working in every important branch of the agency, including encounter espionage, counter-sabversion, counter terrorism. In 1992, Remington was named the head of MI5, the first woman ever to run the agency. Since retiring from the service in 1996, she has proven herself to be an equally talented writer, producing a memoir as well as several popular spy thrillers. Joe Weisberg is a former officer at the CIA, where he worked undercover in the early 1990s. After leaving the agency,

he went on to become a successful novelist and television writer. He has now returned to the world of espionage as the creator and producer behind the brilliant new FX series, The Americans. The show about two KGB operatives living in suburbia in the United States during the Cold War has been healed by critics and praised for its insights into the hidden world of espionage. So welcome you all.

And so, Tony, we've all seen these movies. read these thrillers, these images swirl in our head about what espionage is like. How much are these popular images that we have seen and that we all carry with us are real, if any?

Well, I like to think that they're all real, and we're all still doing it. Reality is a great mirror for the fantasy world. If we hadn't invented this, we couldn't possibly do it because it doesn't make

sense, but let's go off and do it anyway. Now, Stella, I read somewhere you said something about, you know, we are not right-wing nuts going around killing people like in spy movies. Is this image, what's your reaction to the popular images that we've come to see? I think Tony's right, that behind the popular images is something, but there's something behind is absolutely nothing like the thing on the top, the superficial. and there is a danger, it seems to me, that sometimes people actually believe the superficial, believe the presentation that they're given, and that can be actually damaging to the real stuff that's going on behind.

We've got a series in Britain, which in Britain is called Spooks, but I think here it's called MI5, which indicates that here's MI5, and they're full of kind of elegant-looking women and blokes, and they're all wearing leather jackets and kind of rushing around, and they save the world every week, about five of them, from some terrible thing, you know, using gadgetry that even we have never dreamt up. And I think that kind of thing can be quite damaging, actually, when MI5 is trying to present itself, you know,

as a serious organisation, it's trying to protect the country against serious harm. And there's just lurking in the back of people's minds, hmm, they're those guys in the leather jackets and stuff. Now, Jo, you take great people. in your show, the Americans, to accurately portray the spying world. But I wondered if there is a method that spies use from your own experience or knowledge that we don't see in the movies.

What is the method or methods that we don't see being portrayed that are important? Well, yeah, I have to say in general about this question that I'm one of those people who's always running around saying, look, most of what espionage is is really quite dull, a lot of it is not very useful or important. That's a tough thing to say. when you're sitting 10 feet from Tony Mendes.

I think I have to amend it to something like what Tony Mendes does isn't that much like most espionage. There was a program called Mission Impossible, not the Tom Cruise version, but it was a weekly television show on Thursday night or whatever. We had to assign somebody to watch that every time.

Because the next thing you know, the phone is ringing. Can you do that? Yeah, I think that's right. You know, on the show, what we try to do is, you know, most of the work that happens at the CIA in human intelligence operations is about recruiting and running spies, right? I mean, you try to meet people, recruit them, manipulate them, and get them to give you secrets.

And what we wanted to do on the show was show more of that on television, show what the human dimension of it is. But if you just do that, even that can get kind of dull. So we're trying to mix that up and at least get some of that in there. Now, Jeff, I don't think too many of us are in this work. And I don't think our parents were encouraging us in saying, you know, I think you really should become a hacker or a covert agent. And so I was wondering, you know, how old were you when you started hacking?

And how did you get into this round? Well, I wanted to be a hacker much sooner than I became a hacker. How old were you? I mean, we're talking young. You look young now, where you were really young. It was about 12 when I wanted to, and I didn't actually meet real hackers to show me until I was probably about 14 or 15.

So I was on the other side, right? I'm trying to meet the people that have the knowledge. Unfortunately, that world was full of a lot of people that didn't know what they were talking about, so they'd pass on a lot of bogus information, and it took you a long time to figure out what was true and what wasn't. Now, Tony, you worked as an illustrator

and a graphic artist. You didn't just, you know, how did you then wind up in the CIA? It seems like a strange leap from graphic artist to covert ops in Iran. I was an artist illustrator working in Denver, Colorado. I was 25. I had a wife and three children. I went to the office one day and saw an ad for, for artists to work overseas with the US Navy.

I went to an interview, I submitted some samples, and the fellow who was interviewing me looked at me and said, son, this is not the Navy. He put a bottle of Jim Beam up on the table. And I walked in the door as a four-year counterfeitor and 25 years later, much intrigue in between. I left for retirement so you're supposed to know. Now, Stella, you were, you went to Indian

with your husband then and what? You got a tap, a whisper? What happened? I come from an era where women were not really supposed to work much after they got married. I got married and one day my husband came home and said that he'd got a posting. He was in the diplomatic service, got a posting to India. So I thought, great, this is the point at which I give up work altogether

and go off and become a wife and mother. So we went off on a three-week sale to India, which is how British diplomats went to their overseas postings in those days. And I began to get rather bored as a diplomatic wife running jumble sales and coffee mornings and that kind of thing. And one day somebody sidled up. to me in the British High Commission compound and tapped me on the shoulder and said, do you want to be a spy?

So there was a tap. It wasn't quite like that. I was kidding. It wasn't quite like that. What he said was, I've got a job as a part-time clerk typist, would you like to take it on? And I said, well, I can't type. But it didn't seem to matter because what he was was the small MI5 office that existed in the

British High Commission in New Delhi in those days. and he was looking for some clerical help. So I started this job as a part-time clerk typist and ended up as Director General of MI5. What did you type? I was just typing his letters home, but it was a great time to be in India. It was really the height of the Cold War.

India was where East met West. The place was full of spies. What MI5's office in those days was trying to do was find out who the spies were on both sides, report back, help the Indians with their security, et cetera, et cetera. And I thought, this is fantastic. Estelle, your career is really interesting because it spanned so many critical kind of chapters

in world history and in terms of changes of dangers and threats you've covered from IRA bombings to the Lockerbie bombing. And I was curious if your methods change depending on your enemy. I mean, do you approach an al-Qaeda cell the same way you would, some, you know, an IRA or some other group? Well, you have to remember I'm a counter-spy. So my job is to stop people like Tony, except they're our friends,

but people like Tony from the other side of whatever it is, from being successful. So MI5's job is to try and protect the country against against any threats to our national security, whatever they are. And you're right that during my career, they changed quite radically because I joined, as I said,

at the height of the Cold War, where the main threat to our security came from the Soviet Union and their allies and their efforts at espionage in our country and the countries of the West and subversion as they tried to undermine Western democracies by spreading world communism.

When during, I suppose, in 1970s and then on into the 80s and ever onwards, terrorism began to raise its head. As far as we were concerned, firstly from the situation in Northern Ireland, with the IRA, it's all about infiltrating these things and we managed to infiltrate the IRA really quite effectively. We recruited a number of them and they were prepared to tell us what was going on, etc. So the techniques were basically the same. It was about understanding your enemy, keeping your record so that you could refer back what you learned to what you already knew, and preventing, basically,

because the thing to remember about British intelligence is differently from American intelligence. British intelligence organizations have got no executive powers. We don't have the power of arrest, we don't have a military wing, we can't kill people, we rely closely on the police service, and differently from the United States, we regard terrorism as a crime.

So we aim to arrest terrorists and put them in court, and try them and hopefully get them in prison. Joe, I was curious, in the America, you decided to set it in the 1980s and not contemporaneous. Was that because you thought there was a clarity or a simplicity to the nature of spying then, or a kind of clear morality?

What was the reasoning behind that? The show was initially inspired by the events of 2010 when a group of Russian illegals were arrested in the United States, and I got a call from the presidents of DreamWorks Television and said, do you want to base a show on this? And I said, yeah, that seems like a great idea. And then I started wandering around the streets and thinking, I don't know, the whole thing's kind of dull, really.

And it took me about two weeks. I don't know why it didn't take 24 hours, but it took two weeks. And I thought, oh, you've got to put it back in the Cold War. And then suddenly it's exciting. And then you have Ronald Reagan. It was really Ronald Reagan. We wanted to have Ronald Reagan screaming about the evil empire

and the Soviets wanting to destroy us. So that was really the reason to put it back there. Now, the stakes, especially when it does come to the NASCAR, are incredibly high. I wonder, I just kind of throw this out, anyone can jump in, but is there a line you won't cross to get information or is there one? Is there, and what's your view of whether agency, Tony or Stella, I think, or Joe, in terms of whether intelligence agencies should be using methods like waterboarding, and renditions. Well, I'll just... Only, I'm the one who should speak on this.

I'll just toss out one thing that I noticed when I was at the CIA that when I was there before any of this came up, the CIA was bound by a lot of very specific rules that, in a sense, I thought everybody took on faith. Of course, you didn't torture people. That barely even needed to be said.

But there were also more specific things like, you know, you didn't use journalists, for example. That was against the rules. You didn't recruit journalists at spies. And what I discovered when I was there was that every one of these things, if you really wanted to do it, you could get an exception. Right?

And that came as a big discovery to me, that any one of these things might have actually been going on if there was a real need to do it. Or you just change the name of it. Change the... My way of thinking about the assassination rule is it was sure that it was sure. more efficient to use a hitman that it would be to fire a cruise missile, which is what they've

been thinking about doing most recently. You're going to probably have a lot of collateral damage and you're going to kill a few kids and dogs or whatever and it's not going to solve anything. It seems so arcane. I have to admit to the guys in my old office that created the predator drone kind of scenarios, they were doing this favor. It's not very moral to do that, but it's a lot more simple to do it that. To do it that way. And guess what?

Nobody gets killed as readily by accident. Can I just establish a difference here between British intelligence and America? Which is that British intelligence does not kill people. This killing to be done, it's done by the military. And that's a clear distinction. But I don't think we call the predators killers. I think it's just... Sorry.

I don't think we call them the drones. We don't refer to them as being killers. they're an instrument of war. Yeah. It's more to your mold than some other mold. I want to come back to some of the bigger questions, but just really, is human intelligence still as important as it once was?

Is signal intelligence more important now, given the day and age we live in and all the technology? From my understanding, human intelligence is still just as important as it used to be. And I mean, I think that you still get the best intelligence from the human being, the agent, who is in the right place and can tell you not only can report what's being thought,

but it can tell you minute by minute what's going on. And he can also give you kind of character studies of the people he's with so that you can get a kind of rounded picture of what's going on in, be it at the terrorist cell or the hostile intelligence service or wherever it is that he's reporting from. I'm quite sure that technology is an absolutely essential

co-part of this, because that can fill you in on other things as well. But it can never give you, I don't think it can give you that kind of personal feel of the setup, who is most influential, who's pulling the strings, et cetera. So I think the two go hand in hand. The bad guys know that your location can be tracked and your conversations listen into and your email read. So I think the technology is going to catch the really dumb ones.

I believe that the importance of human intelligence tends to be overblown. That the idea of these human assets out there providing really important intelligence is largely mythical. There may have been a few and there may still be a few, but there aren't many. I'm working on a theory based on no actual experience that the same may be true for electronic surveillance as well,

but I haven't got there yet. Now, in the age where we have WikiLeaks, there's been various disclosures, Snowden being the most recent, and I wondered in this age when so much information is getting out there, How does that affect intelligence gathering, which has always relied on secrecy? I'm just shocked this hasn't happened earlier. I mean, it's pretty amazing that they've built these systems that hold all these secrets,

and they don't know who's accessed them, or what's been accessed, or are there 10 Snowden's out there, and this is the only guy that's come forward? They can't answer that. See, really. Yeah. Well, that's... What struck me about both the WikiLeaks and the Snowden cases, was the amount of access that these young people had

to what was apparently, you know, the crown jewels. And I couldn't quite understand what had happened to American security. This may get, again, back to the difference between your smaller and possibly more likely to be overseeing intelligence service and are larger and impossible to oversee intelligence service, that while ours is also doing exactly what you said, which is very noble, vital and important work, protecting us from a lot of threats, it's also doing a lot of stuff that really can't be explained.

And that when the world is now looking, a lot of the Snowden revelations, or infuriating people all over the world, and there's no explaining it. There's no going to the people around the world that are being spied on and saying, hey, I have great explanations for all of this, that once you understand it, you won't be upset anymore. What the intelligence services are doing is damaging our national security in very real ways and in ways that maybe, you know, there's just no other way to look at it. It's doing actual damage. And maybe that there's no way to deal with that except to stop doing a lot of those things. And to ask yourself, are the things we're doing, are we getting any benefit from it?

So if we're spying on country X, Y, and Z, and those countries might have been neutral or might have had a positive attitude towards the United States government. And now that we're spying on them, they're really turning more against us. and you look at the damage to our national security, and you say if on the other side, if we were spying on them, could we possibly be getting anything from spying on those countries that would enhance our national security? And the answer is, I don't know.

I can't think of anything we could get from spine on that country that would actually help us. It may be that we actually might need to think of some more of a sea change in how we approach espionage. I want to thank you all so much for coming, and I really want to thank our incredibly distinguished, panelists. The New Yorker's David Grant. He's the author of Killers of the Flower Moon,

about a real case of conspiracy and murder on an Indian reservation and how the FBI dealt with it. On our panel were Tony Mendez and Joe Weisberg, formerly of the CIA, Stella Rimmington, the retired chief of Britain's MI5, and Jeff Moss, founder of the Black Cat and DefCon conferences. Ahead this hour, Roger Corman, who defined a new era of movie making with Caged Heat, and Grand Theft Auto and dozens more. It's the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

In the 50s and 60s, as the old Hollywood studio system was starting to break down, a generation of young filmmakers came up who wanted to do things in their own way. They'd later be called O'Tours. And among the boldest of them, and certainly one of the most prolific and commercial, was Roger Corman. Corman worked fast and he worked cheap. Again and again, he pushed the boundaries of what you could put into a movie. He did monster movies, horror movies, biker movies, crime, drugs.

He did it all. It wasn't always high art exactly, but he undeniably had a vision for himself. And he helped to find a new era in movies. In 2014, Roger Corman sat down for a conversation with Tad Friend, a staff writer at the New Yorker. One way to introduce Roger Corman is to list some of his many accomplishments. But another, I think, better way to introduce Roger, is just to show what he's been up to. Could we roll the trailer for Sharktipus, please?

S-11 is now totally under our control. Blue Water Corps has just created the Navy's next super weapon. So what are the elements that you'd like to get in a trailer? I think we just saw it, but... Actually, you saw it. The idea is to have the creature, whatever it may be, and there's a fact of life that very few will be. Very few will realize.

Whenever there is a man or woman-eating creature just offshore, pretty girls and bikinis always run into the water. I have no idea why, but they always do, thus setting us up for great scenes. There's also, you want to do it a little bit tongue-in-cheek, because you don't want to be too serious with this. You give them the horror, you give them the shock, but you give them a little excuse to laugh with it. So they're riding with you as if they're in on the joke. Right. Now, I think you told me once that even though you'd already made DinoCroc and for Anaconda, you were concerned that Sharktipus might be too much of a stretch as a title.

Yes. What happened was this. I had made this picture called DinaCrock, and Tom Vitaly, the head of the sci-fi channel, called me and said he'd like to see it. So I sent it to him, and they bought it and got a very high rating. So I was having lunch with the executives of sci-fi in New York, and they said they wanted another one. And I said, fine, Dinacroch 2. And this is where even at my age you can learn something new.

They said, no. For motion pictures, you can have a Rocky 2 or a Rambo 2 or whatever. But for us, we find that doesn't work. We want something similar. And I said, did I say Dinacroch 2? Of course I meant Super Gator. They said, right, we'll make super good. So often with a film like attack of the crab monsters, you would come up with the title first.

That was the first thing that occurred to you, and then you'd kind of fill in all the other details later. And there was one time I think where you actually had just had a title and you went out to distributors with only the title, right? For the student nurses? Yes. And they wanted it, and therefore you decided you could make such a plan. Yes. That was when I started my own company, New World. I was primarily a producer, independent producer director, going through various independent companies. And with all producers, directors, you can interview producers and directors from all over the world.

And every one of them will tell you, I've been had by the distribution company. It was not a fair count. And that actually happened to me. And I said, I'm going to start my own company, New World. And so I talked to theater owners, and they like the title student nurses. And so we made student nurses. Well, diving back to the beginning. After training as an engineer, you went to work for 20th century Fox in the late 40s in the mailroom first and then as a story reader.

And what happened next? The story editor called me in. He said, Roger, you have never given the idea of the reader. They had a fancy name, story analyst. So we were just readers. We read scripts, novels, short stories, treatments, whatever that were submitted as possible pictures. and he said, you're the only person here who was never given a positive review to anything. And I said, that's because I'm the youngest guy in the department.

You give me all the worst stuff. I'm not going to praise something that's no good. So then they sent me a Western called The Big Gun, of which I knew that they had a pay or play commitment with Gregory Peck to do a Western. I praised it and made some suggestions, and they bought it, and they made it as the gunfighter, which became sort of a classic. classic Western and the story editor got a bonus for my suggestions so I left and I went to England and went to school you don't do graduate work did you learn anything

from your studio experience or did you feel like you learn one not to do or did you learn anything to do as actually I learned a number of things first you have to sort of accept the fact that you're part of a team you're not functioning individually but I did get an appreciation for how hard everybody really worked to make the films. I hadn't realized the intensity with which everybody makes films. And you were then later famous for your intensity in terms of just producing so many films so fast. What was your route from England to becoming a director? How did that happen? I came back to the United States and started writing, and I wasn't making any money,

and I got a job as an assistant to a literary agent, and I wrote a script, put a different name on it, and the literary agency sold that script. So I explained what happens to the head of the agency. He said, he just laughed. He said, sure, why not? So I paid them the commission. And then I said to the producer I'd sold the script to, I would like to work as your assistant on the picture,

and I don't want any more money, but I'd like to get a credit as associate producer. And he said, certainly. Because in Hollywood, your credits are very important. So I was able, when that picture came out, to state that I had a credit as, I said producer, associate producer, and writer, and I raised a little money and made my first picture on my own.

So one of the best known of your early films was The Little Shop of Horrors, which you shot in two days and a night, which is probably a record of some kind. In fact, I've never heard of anything shot that fast. Why did you move that fast? Why was, you know, what was it? It was almost a joke. There was a standing set at this studio. I was working out of a small rental studio in Hollywood.

And they built this fairly good set. And I just thought that I'd like to gamble and do something. And I thought, why not deliberately set up a comedy horror film? So with two days in the night, I tried The Little Shop of Horrors as an experiment, and the thing went way beyond my belief. Let's take a look at a clip from Little Shop of Horrors. This is going to hurt you more than it is me. Oh, goody, goody, here it comes.

Well, I made a lot of holes, and now I've got to fill it up with this here silver story. Well, aren't you going to pull any? Well, uh... Oh, go on. Well, it's your mouth. In case you didn't recognize him, that was Jack Nicholson, as a young man. Is it, was it bittersweet for you to think that the people who you brought to notice and who did well would then go on to leave you? I think you told Ron Howard, who directed Grand Theft Auto for you, if you do a good job on this, you'll never have to work for me again.

What is the dynamic behind that? Is it just sort of the parents sending the kid off to school and waving goodbye? How do you feel about knowing that someone who's really terrific is going to probably want to do a bigger budget thing after that? I think it's inevitable. I would think of it as being somewhat equivalent to baseball, have a good minor league team knowing that your best guys

are going to go on to the majors. I wish them all well, and with almost every one of them I'm still friends. So it's been a good relationship on both sides. Well, in proceeding a little bit carnologically, in 1962, when Hollywood in general actually hadn't even begun to start making the sound of music, you released the intruder, which was an extremely raw look at segregation. You shot the film in a small town in Missouri, in the Boot Hill, Missouri, you were saying. Tell us about how you filmed that particular scene.

Well, that was incidentally Bill Shatner in his first Hollywood picture. I wanted to shoot the picture in the South because I was only going to have, I think, four actors from Hollywood. I wanted the authentic look of the South, and I knew I was going to have townspeople playing the supporting roles, but he didn't want to be in Alabama or Mississippi where I felt people were getting killed. So I was in the northern South. I had the look of the South, and for the townspeople, I had the right.

accent, and I felt because I'm in Missouri, I'll be under the laws of a Midwestern state. The first part work, I got the look at the South, and I got the accents. The law didn't work. I was thrown out of three towns by the sheriffs, and we had death threats. It was pretty wild. This is a really riveting film, and it was also the first one of your films to lose money. And I think you've said you've learned a lesson from that, which was a lot of Well, the lesson was this.

You can't lecture to the audience. The reviews were spectacular. I think one of the New York magazines, I still remember it, if we shot the picture in 1960, you said, this motion picture is a major credit to the entire American film industry. I think Jonathan Demi suggested approvingly that the formula behind your films was

a good degree of sex, some violence, a bit of nudity, and perhaps a subtle social statement. On some of the films, it's pretty hard to find the social state. Shark who's does not have a major social statement, other than that beware of a mutant shark. Which is important.

When you look at like a big budget Hollywood film, other than the fact that the budgets are bigger and maybe the stars are sometimes more recognizable, are they including kinds of scenes or moments or thematic stuff that you feel like you don't have in your films or is exactly the same thing, just multiplied 20x?

Marty Scorsesey once said, Roger never saw a film he couldn't cut. After shooting more than 50 films in about 15 years, you basically retired from directing in 1971, with one or two exceptions. What led to that decision? I was shooting a picture called Von Richthofen and Brown, a World War I flying film in Ireland,

and I was just tired. I'd made too many films in too short a period of time. I intended to stop just for a year to take the traditional sabbatical and come back. But I started my own company, New World, and it got off to such an amazing start. I just ended up staying with one or two exceptions running New World. Joan Didian once said about The Wild Angels, which was the first biker film, that she'd gone to see it because there on the screen was some news I was not getting from the New York Times. I began to think I was seeing ideograms of the future.

Did you consciously try to stay abreast of or ahead of the culture with that part of your thinking to try to be? Yeah, that was the first film I did after the Edgar Allan Poe films. All the Edgar Allan Poe films were shot in studios, and I wanted to break away from what you might call the artificiality of the studio, and particularly the period pictures, and I wanted to go out in the streets and shoot contemporary life. And at that time, the Hells Angels were very famous. As a matter of fact, I got the idea. There was a picture in either time or Newsweek of a funeral of a Hell's Angel. And people were carrying the coffin, and the angels were all riding their bikes, their motorcycles.

And I started with that picture, and that was the climax of the film, the death of Bruce Dern, incidentally. I used the real Hells Angels in the picture, and Chuck Griffith, the writer and I went to the Hells, angels parties. We were always welcome because we were the guys who brought the marijuana. So we were on them. And everything in the picture was based on things they told us leading up to the funeral scene. And that's why I wanted to, as I say, step totally away with what I'm doing and start shooting what was going on in America in the 60s. Right. And then there was also the acid film. So you were, and you came from your own, partly from your own experiences with LSD. right? So you were actually kind of living the life that you were putting on screen

in some ways. To a certain extent. What some people may not know is actually in the 70s in addition to making films and producing them, you were New World Films, your company was also distributing foreign masters people like Fellini and Truffo and Corrissawa in America. And in 1974 you could actually go see

a double feature of Ingmar Bergman's cries and whispers and your women in prison film, Caged Heat. Which, I was wondering what was the sweet spot of the viewer who wanted to see both of those whacked the back? That was just a wild idea. The whole thing started with this. New World grew incredibly to the point where within two years, we were the biggest independent distribution company in America. And I'd always loved the films of Bergman, Fellini, Truffaut, and so forth.

And I felt they were not getting good releases in the United States. They were being distributed by small companies who were really aficionados but couldn't effectively get the pictures into theaters on the right terms. Or they were being distributed by the majors who really know how brilliantly to distribute a big budget film but didn't quite understand how to distribute these films. And it simply I wanted to get the, I wanted to bring these films to the audience. It wasn't charity. I didn't plan I'm losing money.

But I thought if I can at least break even on this, I simply want to do it as a personal thing. And the first one was cries and whispers, and it got an Academy Award. And it was the fall when drive-ins were closing down. But they were still trying to pick up some product to play. And I knew nobody wanted to give them important pictures because the weather was turning on them. And I thought, why not put cries and whispers in a drive-in? And I did, and I didn't remember the cage heat was with it. I just remember we put it in a drive-in, and it did average business.

And the drive-in owner and I were delighted to one of the few times we were delighted to do average business. And I got a letter from Bergman thanking me for bringing his picture to an audience he had never anticipated the DC. I just wanted to ask one more thing. In your autobiography, you wrote, art was not something I consciously aspired to create. My job was to be a good craftsman. Did you ever think about, hey, what would have happened if I unleashed all my artistic impulses? Did you ever decide, you know, like wonder, could I have gone another way? Well, after the intruder, several people told me, despite the fair commercial failure of the intruder,

I should have stayed in that bracket. And maybe I made a mistake in going the other way. But what I tried to do, the statement about being a craftsman, I felt with the films I'm making, and I think with almost anybody who's working creatively, to say that I am an artist, I am creating a great work of art, is to be putting yourself sort of ahead of it. I think the thing to do is to be a craftsman, to do the best possible job you can do on what you're doing. and if occasionally it rises to the level of art, that's great. But essentially, you're a craftsman.

Great. Well, thank you all very much for coming on. I just want to thank our guest, Roger Corman. The New Yorker's Tad Friends speaking in 2014 with Roger Corman. Corman's latest film is Death Race 2050, which he produced with his wife, Julie Corman. I'm David Remnick, Mortico. I'm David Remnick. Next week on the show, I'm going to talk with Michael Anton.

a senior national security official in the White House. Now, during the presidential campaign, Anton wrote, and he wrote them under a pseudonym, a series of influential articles arguing for Donald Trump's overthrow of politics as we know it. Now Anton is in the White House helping to articulate the administration's approach to foreign policy. That's next time. Today, we're bringing you some of the best of the New Yorker Festival, our annual weekend-long blowout of events covering politics, culture, and technology. A couple of years back, staff writer Ariel Levy sat down for a conversation with Tony Colette.

The evening was called I Contain Multitudes. The name was a reference to both Walt Whitman and Colette's resume, which is huge. She's done comedies and dramas and horror, indie favorites like Little Miss Sunshine, and blockbusters like The Sixth Sense. But I Contained Multitudes was also a nod to Collette's role in Showtime's United States of Terror. You might remember the show was about a woman suffering from dissociative identity disorder, what was once called a split personality. It was a claim for its really incisive view of a mental health issue,

and it was a very demanding role for the star. Here's Colette with Ariel Levy talking in 2013. Would you be generous enough to tell us the infamous story of your dubious early success as an actress with appendicitis? Oh, Jesus. It's so embarrassing, but yes, it's true. My mother made the mistake of telling me what it was like when she had appendicitis. She told me she was 11.

She told me that it was odd because when the doctor pressed in, it didn't hurt. It was when they released the hand that she felt pain. So when I was 11, I kind of had a little bit of a pain in my belly. I thought, I don't give this a crack. And I ended up in hospital having surgery. She didn't have appendicitis. She acted. She's such a good actress.

They had no choice but to cut her. It's her stomach open. It's mortifying and... I think it's kind of great. No. So tell us a little bit about how you got your first movie role when you were 17 with Anthony Hopkins in the... Spotswood, it was called in Australia, which is a suburb of near Melbourne in Victoria, but I think it was... The Efficiency Expert.

Which is very enticing. I definitely want to see that movie. First of all, I didn't think I was going to get the role. I just went along and things, my life has kind of been like that, but, you know, it's one foot in front of the other. It just, it just seems to flow. But I was working with Anthony Hopkins, which was pretty fantastic and slightly intimidating.

And I was away from home. I was still living at home with my parents. And then I had my own apartment in Melbourne. It was, you know, being taken out to dinners and clubs and, you know, hanging out with exciting people and having wild conversations and suddenly I was, you know, in the world. That doesn't sound that bad.

No, it wasn't bad. It was pretty fun, yeah. For a 17-year-olds? That's right. Oh my god. After doing the first film that I did, I did another couple of plays, a musical with the STC, Sydney Theatre Company, and then I went to drama school for a little while. I left and did some more plays. I dropped out. I dropped out of school, then I dropped out of drama school. I'm just like a professional dropper.

And it's been good, but I really should go back and finish school. I wouldn't, yeah, I wouldn't advise it. I mean to leave. I want my kids to leave. Right, look at your life. It's a mess. Actually, I think there are other ways of learning. I've had my own education in my own fashion.

And then Muriel's wedding came along. I remember when I was trying to decide whether to leave drama school, and when I was asking my agent, you know, should I leave? She said, oh, there's this project. I think you're right for it, but, you know, they're still getting the money together. And that, in fact, was Muriel's wedding.

So I took that information. And, like, it must have been a year and a half later or something, I rang her and said, you know you mentioned this a while ago, what's going on? And that day, she said, actually, I was just about to call you because it was just come back. I was so innocent. Oh, my God. And when you read the script, did you feel,

okay, this is for me, this is right for me? Yes, absolutely. What about it? Everything. Everything. Yeah, I mean, she just goes through so much and I, as a young woman, could really identify with it.

and even though it has, it's a kind of genre that I gravitate towards. It's very, very funny, but it's also quite dark. It seems like you've played a lot of characters in your career that are sort of just east or west of more than all. Yeah, I agree, yeah. You're naturally attracted to characters on the margins? I think I am, yeah. That's right.

Yeah, I really am realizing I have a little. little bit of something that I keep going towards, which is that you might not feel like you fit in and someone coming to learn to accept that that's okay. You know, we're all so different and it's all okay. That's really it. That's what I keep coming back to in terms of themes. I wonder if after Muriel's wedding came out, if you got dozens of scripts about like plucky, chubby girls?

I got a few, I have to say. and some of them weren't bad and I don't know where I had this idea but I knew that I shouldn't just keep repeating that kind of performance and so I didn't and I'm so glad that I didn't

because I think it allowed me such variety in an unexpected career I think as an artist you should push yourself and try, you know you don't want to repeat yourself, you're creating and creativity is change and so I just

I have never wanted to play the same kind of character. I read that one of the roles that you were offered then was a plucky chubby girl was Bridget Jones. You were offered that role. Yeah. And you couldn't take it because you were committed to do Broadway. Yeah. But it's interesting because that is of that mold in a way.

I agree, yeah. I think that's probably why it was offered to me. Yeah. So it was, of course, I mean, I would have loved to have done it. It was, I love that movie. Yeah. But I also loved what I was doing at the time. I mean, life is not just about work.

I think you experience what you're meant to in whatever context or field. So I've never had weird regrets where I should have done that or I shouldn't have done that. I just think life happens as it should. You have choices and it all balances out. So are you fairly relaxed all the time because you're like it's going to be the way it's supposed to be?

No, I can get worked up. But I think I am pretty relaxed, yeah. I want to talk a little about your amazing work on the United States of Tara, which I just can't get over. I mean, it's just a mind-blowing thing that you were able to play this one person who has all these alter egos and make them each their own character, but each clearly a component of this one central character. And I wonder, what was the research that went into that role, to how much?

How much did you research what life is like for people with multiple personality disorder? What's the new diagnosis? She says. It's called dissociative identity disorder? Well, I read as much as I could. We had a woman as a consultant with the writers and who would visit the set who did have DID. And everyone wanted to make it as true as possible. you know, it's kind of a serious, horrible condition.

So we, you know, at first I was like, I heard about it and thought, how can that possibly be funny? They were calling it a comedy, but I think that the writers just struck such a beautiful balance between all of those emotions and characters. I loved it. I miss it. It was such a great job. What a gift as an actor.

Was that the first TV show that you'd done? And what was that like? What was the transition and television like? I don't think it was a normal television job because, I mean, I was in every frame. I had scenes with myself. It was just so much work. And it was full on. But if I didn't love it as much as I did, I probably would have died. But I just felt so, I was so in love with the story. And with everyone that I was working with, and it somehow felt important. and yeah, just really turned me on, you know.

I was happy to get up and go to work at 4.30 in the morning, even though I had a three-month-old baby. You know, it was a crazy time that I loved it, yeah. Was it ever a conflict between, you know, for everyone, not just for you, but for the people writing and making that show, was it ever a conflict between trying to make it engaging and amusing and trying to make it true to the reality of that mental illness, or that those things aren't in opposition?

I think they were always true to Tara and her plight, but, you know, they knew that it was on TV and it was entertainment. So, you know, it was, that's what I mean, it was a fine balance, but I think that they kind of, I think they did it really well. It strikes me that, I mean, and this has changed with recent work, which we'll get to, but it seems like so many of the really interesting roles for women are sort of one step over. I mean, it's being a supporting actress

as opposed to the leading lady so often where you get to do the most interesting stuff. Is that fair or not really? I would say it's fair, yeah. Unless you're working on a low-budget movie where people have less money to lose, I think there's a certain need to make things safe and to make them as appealing to as many people as possible

which means it's completely watered down so that somehow gets through to the masses. And I think that perhaps the supporting roles can be a little bit more challenging or real... Risque, yeah. Yeah, maybe. I read you say in some interview that you only recently started thinking of yourself

as a feminist as well as a humanist. And tell us about what changed. What was that evolution? I think I'm still a humanist. I just, I think I got to the point where I was kind of, I've always been really happy with the work that I've been offered and the experiences that I've had. But then I was looking around my industry,

I started asking a few more questions. And yeah, and that's when I kind of thought I need to get a bit more involved, maybe. Well, I think you are, I mean, I would say that playing this many interesting, characters, this many different characters, this many characters that aren't safe and that aren't in any way, rarely, except for maybe Alice of the multiple personalities who's like a psycho 50's housewife. I mean, very rarely have you played women who are just confirming any kind of stereotypes about women or about, and you've never played anyone who wasn't interesting, who was just there as, you know, decoration. And that's, I mean, how many actors do you know, I love. You say that about. That's so nice. Real, right? All right.

Well, that's what I try to do. I mean, that's what I've tried to do. So thank you. That's lovely to hear. Thank you so much. Thank you. Mario Levy talking with the actress Tony Collette. Next week, a Trump insider talks about the administration's approach to foreign policy.

And we'll hear about the sequel to a play that's well over a century old, Ibson's a doll's house. Rebecca Mead talks with the playwright Lucas Naith. Till then, you can find us on Twitter at New Yorker Radio, and you can always listen to the show at new yorkeradio.org. I'm David Remnick. Have a great week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado.

This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Rian and Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Furb. Billman, David Krasnow, Sarah Nix, Michael Rayfeel, Mithely Rao, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Rhonda Sherman, Sarah Edwards, David Ohana, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment Fund.