The Press Box - Adam Gopnik on Acting in ‘Tár,’ Writing for The New Yorker, and 50 Years of Jets Fandom

Episode Date: March 10, 2023

Bryan is joined by New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. They talk about his role in ‘Tár’ and what it was like to work on the movie (1:50). Then, they discuss The New Yorker and his career in journalism (14:50). Finally, they get into his relationship with sports and sports media (26:00). Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Adam Gopnik Associate Producer: Carlos Chiriboga Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Erica Ramirez, founder of Ili and hosts of What About Your Friends? A brand new show on the Ringer podcast network dedicated to the many lives of friendship and how it's portrayed in pop culture. Every Wednesday on the Ringer dish feed, I'll be talking with my best friend, Stephen Othello, and your favorites from within the ringer and beyond about friendships on TV and movies, pop culture, and our real lives. So join me every Wednesday on the Ringer dish feed where we try to answer the question TLCS back in the day, what about your friends. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to the press box. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Carlos Churaboga,

who's sitting in for Erica. I got to admit, when I first watched the Oscar-nominated movie Tar a few months ago, I was caught off guard, not just by Kate Blanchett's performance as a conductor, or the tricky themes the movie suggests.

No, I was caught off guard by the opening scene where I found myself pointing at the screen like Rick Dalton and asking is that Adam Gopnik? Indeed, it was Adam Gopnik, playing himself or a version of himself, interviewing Lydia Tarr for the movie's version of The New Yorker Festival. The real Adam Gopnik first wrote for the New Yorker in 1986. He's written about art and books and goings-on in New York City and Paris. His book, Paris to the Moon, is one of my very favorite travel books. And on a personal level, Gopnik is one of those writers whose work I reach for

every time I find myself staring at an empty Google Doc and feeling like I've forgotten how to write. Gopnik's sentences remind me how to. In advance of Sunday's Oscars, Gopnik and I talked about journalism, New York Jets fandom, and his turn as best supporting staff writer. Here's Adam Gopnik. All right, Adam.

How did you first hear there was a role for you in the movie TAR? I got a call. I think I first got an email and then I had a conversation with Todd Field, the writer and director of TAR, and he said that he had written a movie for Kate Bonset that had a role in it for a character named Adam Gopnik, and he wondered if I would be interested in playing that part. And I was taken aback, of course,

and then I said no at first, because, you know, I'm a serious kind of writer. I write about the Crisis of America, incarceration and the plague of guns, violence in American life and about the history of liberalism. So, you know, showing up to do a cameo wasn't quite my thing. And then Todd, you know, directors have to be great seduces or they're nothing, said, oh, that's a shame because we would have loved to bring you and your wife to Berlin to shoot it in the fall for a week. And Kate will be so disappointed that she's going to have to work with some actor

instead of this, the thrilling, charismatic, real thing. So I said, you know, hold on a second, let me call Mr. Gopnik to the phone. That's an old Woody Allen joke, but I'll appropriate it for today. And seriously, Todd sent me the pages, and it turned out to be a real scene, not a cameo at all, really,

but a really structured scene that fascinated me. And then I watched Todd's movies, and I saw that he was an extraordinary artist. little children, one of the most complicated, emotionally ambivalent films that one can find ambiguous in the same way that Tar is ambiguous. It's among other things about adultery and a child molester, and you're really not directed to feel something about these people. You're free to find your own attitude towards their reality. And of course, I was interested in mastery, which is the subject of my new book, the real work on the mystery of mastery. And so the chance, frankly, to work with someone as masterly as Cape Bonset was just irresistible.

And also all of those things came together. And I should add to, Ryan, that I am an accomplished and long-preserved ham. You know, I was acting as a kid. I was the Shirley Temple of the East Coast avant-garde in those years. I appeared in lots of avant-garde productions that the great André Gregory directed. Antre was my director and still a dear friend 50 plus years later. And not too long ago, right before the pandemic, I did a one-man storytelling show at the public theater in New York for a week. So I'm a total ham, and I am not a hard man, despite my initial resistance,

to talk into appearing in on-stage or in a movie. How did you perform, as you called it, a self-impersonation? Well, what was interesting about it, Right. And marginally fresh, the whole experience is wonderful, but, you know, marginally frustrating in a way is, of course, I was not myself. I was playing a version of myself. There's a certain part I play on stage when I'm doing that kind of conversation, just the way you do, right? It's related to me, if I'm interviewing, having conversation with Stephen Sondheim or Steve Martin or someone on stage, that's me, but it's a part I play. I reach out. I bend forward. I smile. You know, you do all the things you do. when you're inviting somebody into a conversation, particularly when you're inviting somebody celebrated to be a little bit more open than their natural guardedness might make them be. So that's a part I play. So I was playing that part. So I was playing myself, playing myself. And not only that, because I was sitting in a theater in Berlin, pretending to be in a theater in New York, I was playing myself, playing myself, playing myself.

And that was the job. So it's not me. It's a part. It was a scripted part. I wouldn't have said the things that the character in the movie says. I would have said similar things, but they would have been different. I would have been a little swifter, for instance. And when I read the script, if you remember, she talks about being a protege of Leonard

Bernstein, great conductor. And I said to Todd, help me with this a bit, Todd, because she couldn't have been a protege of Leonard Bernstein, because the dates don't make any sense. Leonard Leonard died in 1991. I actually met him once. And she would have been four years old. And Todd, like all great directors, sort of gave me a steady, opaque look. Like, that's not your problem. That's not your issue. And so I realized that that was part of the story, obviously. So if I had been playing myself, rather than playing myself, playing myself, I would have raised that. I would have thought of that.

But I was playing a part in a movie, and that was what the lines were. What kind of direction did Field give you when you were filming the scene? Very little. You know, he's a fantastic director in part because he's one of those directors who creates characters in an environment and then gives it just wants to watch it and see what happens. I sometimes think, and I have just limitless admiration for Todd, that that's what makes him a wonderful director and what sometimes puzzles critics

is that he's not making editorial cartoons. He doesn't tell you the meaning of this scene is this. He brings plausible people together and wants to watch how they interact like real people. And I think that's part of the magic. Magic is a funny word. Part of the spell that this movie casts is exactly that we don't know how,

we're not told how to feel about Lydia Tar. Is she a flawed heroin? Is she a villain with some admirable traits? She's a human being, and we experience her the way we experience other human beings. How many takes did field shoot until he was satisfied? You know, I honestly don't remember. We spent two days filming it, so it was, you know, time. What did you notice about Kate Blanchett's acting while watching her do the scene up close like that?

What I noticed is that I know this sounds so weak, Ryan. it's like the weakest thing you could possibly say, is that she was astoundingly professional. And you think, well, of course she's professional. But I mean by that she was professional like a great dancer is professional. Every single moment in our interaction. My wonderful wife, Martha, was running lines

and we thought, wow, this is so wordy and so many, such a long narration she's got. How will, you know, very hard to make this work. When we got to Berlin and we were doing it, Kate had the entire monologue so sculpted psychologically. Every line made sense. Every line propelled the next one. She found a psychology within it that would have been invisible to me as a reader,

was invisible to me as a reader. And she not only found it, but she kept it consistent through all of the many, many takes that we had to do because we were not only doing takes for quality, but we also had to do what's called, I learned, plating it, which means making it work because they had a limited number of people to be extras, and the extras had to move around the theater. So I just was stunned by her craft, which is the subject of my book. So I was fascinated to see what a great artisanal actor works.

She's obviously an inspired and artistic performer, but there was an artisanal basis of what she was doing that was hugely impressive. I love the detail you shared in The New Yorker that the German audience had to be prompted to laugh at certain points during the conversation? Yes, I did a couple of improvs. There's a line in it. I'm trying to remember where we talk about, she has a new book coming out, big book, and I said it'll be a great stocking stuff for very large stockings. And Todd said, oh, that's good, keep that. But then the German assistant director had to instruct all the Germans and stern jatonic tones. You must laugh every time he says that, because I had to say it over and over

again. So now we know how to be a great stand-up comic is go to Germany because they absolutely instruct you. You must laugh when he speaks. Some critics have said Tar was shot like a documentary. Do you agree with that? No, I don't think it was shot anything like a documentary. It's weird that people say that because it's a very finished, very polished, very made work. You know, my wife worked in documentary for many years. And documentary has a, you know, you do it on the run with handheld cameras and the rest of it. No, our scene couldn't look less handheld, couldn't look less documentary.

It's a credit to Todd's artistry that it has so much authenticity in it that people felt that way, but as a work of craft, as a work of film craft, it couldn't be less documentary. It's very layered, very artful.

one of my favorite scenes, and I saw it with everybody else. I had no idea what the movie was about when I did my little bit. One of my favorite scenes is when Lydia and her wife are having a glass of wine together in their apartment in Berlin, and we hear this wonderful Count Basie music suddenly appear like a cloud around them. It couldn't be a more, you know, classic sort of movie scene than that. People can skip ahead a minute if they don't want spoilers, but how did you interpret at the end of the movie that finds Lydia Tar conducting in Asia in front of video game fans? So, very funny. So, as I say, I taught arranged a screening for just my little family.

So we went, my son, Luke, Martha, my wife, and myself, and Olivia, our daughter, was at school. But we watched it. And when we got to the end, we were very impressed with it. I had no idea what was going to happen in this movie. And when we got to it, as soon as we left and said, well, what did you do? you make of the ending? Luke thought it was a complete vindication of Lydia Tar because she's a conductor has one instrument, her orchestra, and she had an orchestra again. It didn't matter that it wasn't the Berlin Philharmonic anymore. She was working. She was expressing herself.

As long as I've got a keyboard and I'm writing, I'm myself. I read it maybe because I'm a more panicky sort of person as depressing. It's, kind of degrading in a way, you know, that she had been forced into this, you know, this terrible thing. And Martha read it as both ennobling and degrading. She had been forced to do something she didn't really want to do that was beneath her in a certain sense, but it meant she was persisting. You know, it was the way we all have to deal with setbacks in life. One other funny note about it is I have a dear friend, wonderful film and theater composer, David Shire, with whom I write musicals. We've written 60-some songs together. And David, of course, is a genius of film scoring.

Won an Oscar for, I don't even remember now which film it was. And he was a little offended by it because it made it seem as though writing the score for, in this case, it was a video game, but it was applied music was somehow less significant than writing concert music. So everybody sees it from their own point of view. But again, it's a tribute to Todd's artistry. that that kind of ambiguity, that range of response was possible in responding to the movie. We're in sort of a boom time for fictional New Yorkers in the movies. There's this and then there's Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch, which came out two years ago. Why is the New Yorker a fertile subject for movies? I honestly don't know. I will make a terrible confession. Wes is someone I know a little bit. I have not seen the French dispatch yet.

My son, Luke, he's got to see it there. And I haven't. No good principle. and everyone tells me it's delightful. Just maybe because it's sort of a little too close to home. You know, it's like, you know, the cobbler's children have no shoes and the New Yorker writer doesn't see those movies. I think in the, in a way that's, you know,

I can't pretend it's displeasing. The New Yorker stands for a certain kind, however rightly or wrongly it has for a very long time, for a certain kind of cultural authority. So when people want to evoke that kind of authority, they call in us, I don't think that's what we do. I mean, I don't think that's our role. We're a magazine of criticism and reporting and humor, and that's what the essays.

But that's, I think it's a tribute, frankly, to David Remnick, who's kept the magazine vital and relevant over these past 20-plus years. And so people continue to pay attention to it. You started writing for the magazine in 1986 and became the art critic a year later. What was the New Yorker like in the 80s? Well, the New Yorker went through a lot of changes. And I started writing. My first two pieces were for William Sean. It was the legendary long-term editor of the New Yorker. And then I wrote for Bob Gottlie, who took over from Sean in a somewhat

emotional and intense period. And the New Yorker at that point was still very much, was still in its original offices and still had very much the tone that had made it sort of legendary. Every writer had an office. The office doors were always closed. It was like this amazing Advent calendar because you'd knock on a door in the empty and silent hall that you had been assigned to. And the door would open and it would be Brendan Gill or it would be the legendary. Truly, legendary is a cheap word, Joseph Mitchell, who I wrote about in my book at the Stranger's Gate. Or it would be Philip Hamburger. And then once in a great while, John Uptite would descend.

And you would see John Uptight, the CEO of literature, walking through the hall. So it was still thrilling. that's still very deeply attached to its past. Then we moved from those offices to four times square, which was a very different experience. And then after that, we moved down to the New World Trade Center, where just because it's a long subway ride, I hardly ever go. But the New Yorker, when I first joined it,

it was still very much Sean's New Yorker, although Bob Gottlie was the editor. And I just learned an insane amount. I wrote Talk of the Town when it was still anonymous for six years, and it was like the best boot camp anyone would ever have in learning how to report, learning how to listen, learning how to pay attention, learning how to sculpt characters. You know, of all the traditions the New Yorker represents, it's the tradition of poetic reporting, the kind of thing, Calvin Trillen, or Alec Wilkinson, or Joseph Mitchell, or Joseph Mitchell, or J. Liebling, above even Joseph Mitchell, stands for it that makes it stand out. And to get an immersion in the mechanics of that kind of poetic reporting was the great inestimable gift of my life. I loved hearing Gottlieb talk about editing and the documentary Turn Every Page.

What's Gottlieb like as an editor? Astonishing, I haven't seen that documentary yet either. Bob had an incredible tenacity and a capacity to wholly absorb. I worked with him for a little bit when he was a book editor, and he could absorb something like one of his great triumphs is editor of the New Yorker, I thought, were the John Cheever Diaries. And that required you to take in this unimaginably immense, sheer quantity of writing and shape it into something that would work as a magazine, a series of magazine excerpts. And that was, he had an astounding gift for doing that. How did you convince the magazine to let you go to Paris in 1995?

It was one of those things. We had just had our first, Martha and I had our first child. Luke in the fall of 94, and we had made a resolution that we would go live in Paris someday. You know, it's like that, what's that beautiful Judy Collins song? My father always promised me that we would live in France. So we had promised each other that. And with Luke being newborn, everyone told us, if you don't go now, you'll never go because then school starts and the world closes in around you. So I said to Tina Brown that that was what we had, we're planning to do. and Tina by then had become the editor of the New Yorker, obviously. And she said, because she's a delightfully, wonderfully,

I hate the word supportive, but I can't think of a better one. She said, great, go to Paris. That'll be interesting. We'll have you do what Janet Flannier did, write to us from Paris. And I think she thought it was interesting and curious, because as you recall, in the 90s, London was the place. It was the height of new labor in Cool Britannia and so on. And Paris was very much a backwater.

And that was exactly what made it interesting. to me, I mean, apart from my deep love of French civilization, Paris was not part of the, you know, that great Anglo-American belt that runs and certainly then ran around the world. It was like the little Gaulish village in the Esterique's comics. You know, Rome was everywhere, except in that one place. So it was, it was wonderful to go, and Tina couldn't have been more, more positive about it. And then it worked out, you know, it was, you know, every writer, I think, every artist of any kind, has some moment when you know you found your voice, you found the thing you were meant to do. And I felt that enormously in Paris. I knew it's a funny thing to say, Brian, but I knew I was writing well and I knew people were enjoying it. And it's that good moment, you know, it's a wonderful moment in a Garrison Keeler story where he talks about hitting a triple in Little Lee when he was 12 and he said, and I hit it and everybody knew it was good, and even the people who didn't like me knew that it was good because it was. And that's a, that, you know, you get that once or twice in a lifetime's work. Part of your career has

consisted of writing reviews and essays, and part of it has been putting a notebook in your pocket and writing stories about Paris or New York City. Do you get a different satisfaction out of writing those two types of pieces? It's a nice question. Yes, and as I said a moment ago, I love reported. I know it sounds odd because so much of my work, particularly in recent years, has been taken up with writing, you know, on seven books on World War I or six books on the Suzuki method or 24 books on the crime decline in the United States. And I love doing those pieces. They're part of my, you know, good citizenship, if I may. But my heart is in the chance to go and do a piece about anything from, you know, a table hockey tournament in Flatbush to, you know,

a gym in Paris or you know, not long ago I got to do a long piece about an extraordinary man named Sam Rivera who's a kind of hero of post-incarceration. I was never supposed to call it halfway house, a place called the castle in, and just spending time there, just hanging out, observing, taking notes,

trying, it's like making a documentary film, I find thrilling. So if I have a favorite kind of piece to write, I love writing, But it would be those pieces, the ones that are collected in Paris to the Moon or through the children's gate. You've written a lot about food in your career in Paris and elsewhere. Why has food writing become such a giant category of journalism? It's a good question.

You know, I wrote a whole book about it. I was trying to answer that question called The Table Comes First, which is a collection of all my food writing, but also tries to explain it. You know, there are lots of explanations. there are some cynical ones that because we no longer can afford big houses we have to all we can afford is good food right and then there are other ones food has become kind of the material through which we express our values more than more than anything else you know in a secular age you still need a way to express your spiritual values and for many of us food is the way to do it whether we shop seasonally organically the idea that you know we of having a family dinner every night is

increasingly important in the age of screens, you know, the moment when you say, no screens at the table, I'm making, you know, slow-cooked, whatever tonight. So I think we express a lot of our values through the food we offer and the food we share. It's a way of, you know, it's all the drama of feminism is on the plate. Women, like my mom, for instance, who were became, you know, she was a college professor, but also a terrific cook. Calvin Trillen called that the domestic deviation. It was true of his wife, Alice, who's my mother's age or would have been, that they managed to express their mastery of so many things by being both intellectuals and cooks. For me, I do all the cooking in our family. My wife has never cooked a meal, and it's a way of taking on a traditionally

feminine, what my daughter we call a gendered role. But it's the same time the secret sneaky truth is that it's the easiest form of domesticity because you get enormous credit and cooking is actually fun. So I think all of those reasons, you know, food, I say in the book, you know, mouth values are inseparable from moral values. We express our moral values through our mouth values, through the things we eat, always have done. And I think that's why it's so central now. the last decade and change, we've seen generalist magazines shrink, or in some cases disappear entirely. What's the case for a generalist publication in 2023? Well, it's a great question. First of all, I'd say, I don't think of the New Yorker,

and that this may be my own, you know, illusion from living inside the building, so to speak, and others may see it differently from outside. I don't think of the New Yorker as being generalist in the sense that we do everything. People sometimes think we do, but, you know, the truth is where the Atlantic, for instance, is always doing sort of social policy pieces, and they're terrific, you know, and I learn a lot from them. We don't really do social policy pieces of that kind. At the New Yorker, we're a magazine of criticism, of reporting, and have humor, and always have been. That's the core of what we do.

If I do a piece about World War I or the nature of the American Revolution, so on, it's usually rooted in an act of criticism. I'm talking about four or five new books trying to evaluate those ideas. I don't think in the 40 years I've written for the New York or I've ever done a piece about an idea, if you follow me, where, you know, trying to make the case for an idea. I do a piece in which I try to evaluate, sum up, consider the state of play within a world of ideas. That's what criticism, good criticism should do. So I think we are more specific in that way, entirely generalist. But, you know, if the New Yorker not only exists as a tradition of subjects, but as a tradition of style, and it's one that has been close to my heart since I was seven years

old and read James Thurber for the first time. And it's a style that's simultaneously, well-wishing, simple, struggles to be direct, anti-academic, but at the same time tries to encompass the world as best, we can't. You know, my heroes, A.J. Liebling wrote about war and food and boxing, and he did it from a position of amazing erudition. He, you know, could relate a, you know, medieval Arabic poet to what Floyd Patterson was doing in the ring with Ingeo Janssen. But he did it in a tone of delight rather than an tone of didacticism. That's the New Yorker. I want to close by talking some sports with you. How much sports writing and sports talk do you allow yourself to consume? I am a total addict of sports writing, sports talk, and now increasingly of sports podcasts.

And I will say without absolutely any flattery intended, that the Ringer NFL podcasts are my favorite pastime. My daughter has convinced me to try and walk 12,000 steps a day. And you will find me in Central Park doing my steps listening to Ben Solac and the boys talk about the NFL. I love the Ringer. football podcast. I read an enormous amount of sports writing. It's my, when I need a break, I read Liebling and Schollberg and Roger Angel, of course, who we just lost. I've always loved sports writing. I would hope that someday I'll have enough pieces to do a sports anthology the way I did a food anthology. My proudest boast is I was once actually in Best American Sports Writing with a piece

about the World Cup in France. And that tickles me more than I can say. I'm a total, as I was telling you before, I have one of the few people I know who has seen every single Super Bowl. I can give you an account of every Super Bowl from the Chiefs and the Packers to this last one,

you know, to the Chiefs again. So I'm a crazy sports fan, and I have a whole chapter in my new book in the real work about learning the box. And boxing is still something I love for. very much. So for a short, sedentary Jewish intellectual, I'm a, I'm a sport and fellow. So what do you remember for Super Bowl 1? Well, what I remember is rooting for the chiefs. And I'm trying to remember why. I think it was just the feeling was that the Packers in those

years, even I understood, were this Bayameth, this, you know, overrushing powerful force. My real hero still, and to this day in football, is Bill Walsh. I've got all of Bill Walsh's books. He wrote an extraordinary book called Finding the Winning Edge, which is this crazy encyclopedia of coaching. And then a very good book called The Score Takes Care of Itself, which is one of my favorite aphorisms. The score takes care of itself, meaning that if we do the things we set out to do as a team,

the score will take care of itself, which is such a Zen idea, right? don't think about what we have to do to get to the end zone. Let's execute and we'll get there. And I've always found Bill Walsh to be, I loved watching his teams. I, you know, I still think that those 49er teams of the 1980s were matchlessly thrilling. And I love reading Bill Walsh on football. I'm talking about football, but the truth is I'm a big baseball fan. In fact, my first piece in the New Yorker was about baseball. It's called Quadrucento baseball back when I was a Montreal Expos fan. And my true passion in life is hockey. Because I grew up in Montreal, and I have lived and died with the Montreal Canadiens since 1968 and still do.

And fortunately, I've fed the bug to my son, Luke. And our number one conversational topic is the haps past, present and the future. Another one of your teams is the New York Jets, which you told me you'd been a fan of since 1966. How do you sum up 57 years of Jets fandom? It's an exercise. Well, it's an exercise in future. but what you have to remember, I'm going to say that you're too young to remember. In 66, I remember watching there was a weekly show called This Week in the AFL, and they had just highlights

of Joe Namath and Don Maynard, a great passing combination. And I fell in love with Namath skill as a quarterback. People don't remember now. In my mind, he and Dan Marino are the two greatest passers I've ever seen. So I fell in love with Namath and I fell in love with the Jets. And of course we had, it was like the world's worst marriage, right? We started off with such a high, Namath and the upsets. said in Super Bowl 3. And clearly it must be true that Namath didn't sell his soul, but he sold the soul of the Jets to the devil. He said, if you let me win this game, you can be sure that no jet quarterback will ever be any good in the future. Doesn't matter who it is, doesn't matter where he's drafted. It can be Ken O'Brien, who we took before Dan Reno. It can be poor Sam Darnold. It can be

poor Zach Wilson. They will never be another good quarterback for the New York Jets. It's unreal. It's unreal the trail of utility the jet quarterbacks have blazed there can never be another great jet's quarterback but what about Aaron Rogers who may join the jets here at any second I have zero confidence that this will work out remember we lived through bet far right which is exactly the same thing right coming from the Packers at the end of his career and he played some good games and then it all came apart and in all seriousness I think that Rogers decline is real, not just situational. I thought when watching him last year, I thought you saw a much less effective quarterback. And I think he will join and there will be an explosion and they'll win a

game or two. Then he'll get injured. They'll have a nagging injury all year. The Jets will make the playoffs by the skin of their teeth and lose in the in the first round. You want my prediction? That's what it is. And then Rogers will retire and we'll have nothing. And meanwhile, Zach Wilson will be totally demoralized. We'll go off the XFL. I have zero. I'm a jet fan. But I'm a jet fan, I have zero confidence that any of this will work out. Spoken like a true jet fan. Adam Gobnick, thanks for coming on the press box. Delighted to talk to you, Brian.

That's the press box. I'm Brian Curtis, production magic by Carlos Churaboga. Thank you, Carlos. We have got a very, very fun month coming up here on the press box podcast. I believe we'll have one of the big names from Network News on this podcast. I can't wait to talk to her. hint, hint. We'll have a baseball announcer here to talk about the new fast-paced season coming up, and we'll even have an emissary from the world of professional wrestling.

You know I love to talk to people from pro wrestling. Thank you very much for listening. That's something I don't say nearly enough. Let's meet back here Monday when we will have more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then.