WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 1301 - Tony Kushner

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

Tony Kushner is one of the most important American playwrights of the past 50 years who is now a creative partner of one of the most important American filmmakers of the last 50 years. Tony talks with Marc about working with Steven Spielberg on Munich, Lincoln and the new adaptation of West Side Story. They also discuss the history of Jews in the Louisiana lumber industry, the pivotal moment of Angels in America that came to him in a dream, and the play he saw when he was six that made him want to be a part of the theater community. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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and ACAS Creative. Lock the gates! All right, let's do this. How are you, what the fuckers? What the fuck, buddies? What the fuck, Knicks? What's happening? I'm Mark Maron.

This is my podcast. Welcome to it. How are you? I feel better. I don't feel 100%. I'm close to, I think, being all better. I don't know. You know, it's hard to know with the COVID situation. My tests are looking good. There's progress being made. I will test again this week and hopefully get a tomorrow, actually, maybe today. Today I'll test again and maybe get the full neg. We'll see.

We'll see. But I am through the worst of it, I do believe. Tony Kushner is on the show. He's kind of a genius, a wizard, an intellect and an artist. He's the Pulitzer Prize winning playwright of Angels in America, the musical Caroline or Change, and a frequent collaborator with Steven Spielberg writing the screenplays for Munich, Lincoln, and now West Side Story. He's also the husband of Mark Harris, the film historian guy who I had on here. We had a good talk, and I asked Mark, I said, is Tony in the other room? And he said, yeah. And now we talked a little bit about Mark this time. Anyways, this is a very

thrilling interview, a very good interview. I was nervous. I never know if I can hang with these intellectual heavyweights, but I'm a big fan of a lot of his work. And it was a, it was a great conversation that's coming up. I've been trying to, uh, to figure out a way that me and Guillermo del Toro can hang out again on the podcast and just, you know, talk about shit. So I had this idea that maybe I would, um, I would ask him cause I'm not a horror movie guy. I just don't, I don't like thrillers.

I don't like suspense. I don't like horror. I get bored, I get frustrated, or I get disturbed. It doesn't seem to work for me like it works for people who like it, okay? I don't, frustrated, anxious, disturbed. I don't need those. I don't need those i don't i don't need that from my entertainment i really don't and that's what people see horror it's primarily entertainment right and i know there's art horror movies i get it but i don't need those those elements you know

frustrated anxious disturbed i i don't i've got that going on now. That that's my baseline. I, that's what I guess maybe for some people, horror and, you know, kind of a slasher movies or a splatter horror and all that stuff. Maybe it has a ritalin effect for some people. Maybe the horror on the screen sort of diminishes or dampens or tempers the feelings that I have, but it doesn't have that effect with me. I watched this movie last night, the last one of the three that I was assigned by Guillermo, Kill List. And by the time that movie was over, I couldn't sleep and I was terrified and I had to keep a minor lookout. I don't think it triggers the proper response. I don't have the correct sense of humor around horror or the correct appreciation of the genre or necessarily the ability to separate myself from the action on screen as being a reality of some kind.

the action on screen as being a reality of some kind, especially that one, because it's sort of grounded in a disturbing reality. You don't know right away that you're dealing with this. It's a fairly traditional horror movie ending. But the other stuff you have me watch, I watched Haxan, which is a 1922 movie. I think it's Danish for witch witch and it's like half documentary half uh sort of cinematic exploration of medieval witchcraft inquisition witchcraft how witches are

treated and then it comes into the current time being 1922 about how mentally ill people are treated and in the past they would have been witches. And now they're institutionalized, which is not great either. It was an interesting movie. And the composition and the narrative storytelling within the black and white stuff, you know, the silent movie stuff was amazing. And apparently there's a 1968 version of it that was narrated by Bill Burroughs, who I love. But I was happy I saw that. Bill Burrows, who I love. But I was happy I saw that. The other one I watched was a barbarian sound studio, which is, you know, a movie about a guy, a British guy who takes a job

as the sound mixer for an Italian horror movie. And then it just gets weird at the end. It's some sort of psychological thriller that takes place during the making or basically the sound edit of an Italian horror movie, I guess, like Argento movie. But I don't know any of those movies. And I think that this movie was just a, you know, you needed that as an index, as a point of reference. You needed to be somewhat of an Italian horror nerd or an Argento nerd. So I don't know that stuff. And I found it a little tedious and a little boring. And I don't like movies generally where at the end of them, you're like, did he die? What happened? What did that light mean? Was he in the movie or was the

movie the one I was watching? Was that the movie or was it the movie that he was in? Did he lose his mind and think he was in the movie? Did he die? What happened? That's not a great feeling to me. It's better than being terrified, but it is a bit frustrating. I can handle it from an art movie. I can handle it, but I feel like I missed most of that movie. So anyways, my foray into horror has made me realize three things I think that in time I could appreciate it but I do not enjoy what it does to me okay frustrated anxious

disturbed I'm on top of that I'm already doing that I don't need more of that okay and if you give me a lot more of it it's not going to make mine feel any less immediate. It's not going to make it feel any less there. You understand what I'm saying? Do you?

So, Tony Kushner is a, as I said earlier, a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright. Angels in America, both parts were masterpieces, amazing experiences, theatrically, for me. I think I saw the original cast in Angels in America, I believe. Was that Ron Liebman as Roy Cohn? I think I did see that. It changes your life and your mind forever. I did see his musical, Carolina Change, when I was in the city. And I loved it. But he's a very impressive thinker.

He's a very impressive artist. And it's a very specific type of art, playwriting. Writing in general, I believe. And if you think about the movies that he did with Spielberg, Munich, Lincolnincoln now west side story the dialogue's amazing and the storytelling is amazing and munich's amazing and they're all fucking amazing this guy's a you know he's a heavyweight he's a real deal and he's a great thinker and he knows stuff and i i don't i know a few things and sometimes when i don't know things i say i don't know them there's nothing wrong with saying i don't know but you don't want to

necessarily you know interrupt somebody to get a lesson about something you should probably just do on your own later but with tony i don't know what Brechtian really implies. I know Bertolt Brecht. I don't have a conscious memory or understanding of many of his plays. I maybe have seen one back in college, but when something's Brechtian, I know it means something. So I asked. I asked. I think I asked more than that. But it was really a great privilege to talk to Tony. We did this by Zoom. For one, I had COVID. For two, he's in New York. But I did watch both West Side Stories back to back. And you know what? They're both amazing. I don't remember seeing the first one. I must have seen it when I was a little kid because I knew a lot of the songs, but they're both really great. The West Side Story that Tony wrote for Steven

Spielberg is playing in theaters. He's been nominated for a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. And we talk about all of it. You know, the whole thing, the Tony Kushner thing. You can get anything you need with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get snowballs on Uber Eats. But meatballs and mozzarella balls, yes, we can deliver that. Uber Eats. Get almost, almost anything. Order

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Zensurance provides customized business insurance policies starting at just $19 per month. Visit Zensurance today to get a free quote. Zensurance. customized business insurance policies starting at just $19 per month. Visit Zensurance today to get a free quote. Zensurance. Mind your business. All right, here we go. So, Tony, what's happening? What's going on in New York? What's happening right now? In New York specifically?

I don't know. Is it cold? It's cold. The Omicron numbers are going down. They're going up in my house. I have it right now. Really? Yes.

Oh, I'm sorry. Are you okay? I think I'm okay. I mean, I've been a little stuffy and a little tired, and I had to cancel some dates, but I'm triple vaxxed and full of terror, and that seems to have been made. I'm okay. I'll be happy when it's out of me. Yes.

And I don't think you should be full of terror. It doesn't seem to really be up to very much. It kind of goes in and makes your head stuffed up and then it goes away. Did you get it? I have not gotten it. We've avoided it because we don't go anywhere. We stay in our apartment basically all day long and we don't have kids and we yeah are where we were antisocial before the pandemic started so we're so this has been like a literal a heyday

for you yeah in some ways yes yeah what what have you found has evolved over the last two and a half years in your relationship because of the pandemic? I think it's actually been good for our relationship. I mean, we were both in pretty bleak, terrible place when it started, as everybody was. And it was, you know, there were so many kind of apocalyptic warnings about what was going to happen in New York. It did get there. It got pretty close.

about what was going to happen in New York. It did get there. It got pretty close. Well, it got very bad, but there was, you know, in the weeks before it actually really broke out, there were, you know, people saying that the whole social fabric would disintegrate

and people would be murdering people on the streets. There would be no toilet paper. You know, really, things would just be terrible. Mark, who doesn't really like to grocery shop went out uh the weekend before and came home with like eight shopping bags full of meat yeah which we then tried to jam into our freezer because we got convinced that there would be no more meat yeah available i think everybody got convinced that there would be no more something

and they did everything they could to get as much of that as possible. Wasn't there like a moment where there were no Fig Newtons? The panic was crazy. There were no Fig Newtons and then no Grape Nuts. I got concerned about basics. I found myself buying a 10-pound bag of quinoa because I just saw myself eating some sort of quinoa mush for the duration. Yeah. You could probably get by on quinoa.

That's what I thought. Yeah. I mean, as we were, we were like, uh, freaked out at first. We,

we have a house in Provincetown and we, we packed up my sister and we fled, uh, Provincetown and, uh, sat out the first few weeks there and then decided we wanted to come back to New York. I feel grateful to him because he gets nervous and also has a kind of a darker worldview than I do and expects terrible things to happen. So he was ready for this before almost

anybody else was. And I think that's one of the reasons we didn't get one of the more severe forms of this. I finally just surrendered to his very strict protocols. So, you know, I married the right guy and it worked out okay. And, you know, we feel like we've gotten ourselves through this together. And, you know, it's not the blitz. It's not, it's not. Yeah. But it was, it has been a tough thing. Right. But that's interesting that you have these two different ways of looking at the world. I, what do you think that is?

Because I'm more like Mark. Like, I was kind of ready because I'm, you know, I'm dreading everything anyways. So when it's time to activate, you know, especially, you know, something that's so rooted in anxiety, you know, I'm ready to go. You know, I'm, you know, I'm on top of it. You know, I'm like, I don't, I don't need paper towels. I'm going to buy a thousand dishrags and we're just, but, uh, but you, what are you able to find hope on a day-to-day basis or what? I think I'm a little bit more optimistic than he is. I think we kind of balance each other out.

I mean, he can get very quickly convinced that we are completely and totally screwed. Can I say fucked? I don't know if I can say fucked. You can say fucked. Yeah, sure. We're really fucked. And I can, I'm not a denialist, but I have a kind of fatalistic sort of optimism. And I feel like things tend to cohere rather than the opposite.

So I sort of believe it won't be as bad as Mark thinks it will be. But I admire people like Mark and you who sort of anticipated. I was doing research a few years ago on a project that had to do with Italian history and the Risorgimento in the middle of the 19th century. And I went to, I was in Siena and I was meeting with a Jewish woman there who sort of ran the Siena. And I was meeting with a Jewish woman there who sort of ran the Siena synagogue.

Her family had left right before Mussolini started rounding up Italian Jews. And I said, why do you think he had that insight? And she said, he was an incredible depressed, he was a clinically depressed man. And he took a train ride back from Germany with a Nazi and came home and said, pack up everything. We're getting out of here. Okay. So sometimes it's a good thing to have that. All right.

So when does Mark say it's time for us to leave then? Well, it's 2016. We've actually had a couple of those. You know, should we be putting we don't have very much money, but should we be putting what we have in a Swiss bank? Is, you know, will we be able to get out quickly enough? Can we, will Steven Spielberg give us a berth on his yacht? I mean, you know, is there a way to get out of here? Yeah.

So far, he hasn't sounded that particular alarm that we have to get in the car and go to Canada. But, you know. Can you guys get into Canada? He's not canadian is he i don't know i always assumed that the canada maybe because i watch the handmaid's tale too much but if we can get across the border they'll let us in well i mean i don't think any of us have tried nor have we needed to try uh to get refugee status so i i like i i imagine that will be the shift in border policy is if you show up with all your vaccines or proof of having had covid and a refugee uh a request yeah and then just like

you know all those brecht poems would be sitting on the border waiting for some asshole to decide whether you're going to get over the border or whether you have to kill yourself. It's scary. My brother is a musician in Vienna and his orchestra, the Vienna Symphoniker, plays during the summer and on the Bodensee in this big opera festival called the Bregenzer Festspiel. And they have to, so he, to get from, to the opera house, he has to cross this border crossing in Switzerland. And it's the border crossing where all of these Austrian Jews tried to, you know, get out of through which all these Austrian Jews tried to get out of Austria after the Angeles.

And so he's, he's called me a few times during the darker moments of the Trump presidency and said, are you sure you don't want to come open up a bank account in Vienna? I mean, yeah. Wow. I mean, you know, there have been moments when you think. Sure.

I know. I know. I'm like, I'm like Ireland. I'm thinking Ireland. I mean, like I'm a Jew and I've got some sort of weird connection emotionally to Ireland for reasons I don't understand. And I fantasize about it, you know, but then I try to, I try to kind of realize it's a fantasy. And I don't know that if I got to, you know, if I go to Ireland, that they're going to be like, oh, thank God

you're here. You know, finally, I'm sure they would welcome you. They seem all right. But I mean, you know, Leopold Bloom, it bloom it's uh yeah what am i going to do there i'm gonna hear a good irish jewish joke yeah so uh uh this uh jewish guy is is uh this is during the troubles and he has to go across the border from the republic of ireland to northern ireland and he he he's nervous and he gets to the borderline and he gets to the official thing. And then he's driving. And suddenly these guys with balaclavas and hats come out on the road with shotguns and they stop his car and they go up to the car, they wrap on the window and he rolls down the window.

And the guy says, are you a Protestant or a Catholic? And the guy says, I'm Jewish. And the man with the gun says, yeah, but are you a Protestant Jew or a Catholic Jew? Yeah. Good question. Yeah. That's funny.

So, yeah, I'm just, I'm still panicky. I can't get a sense of what the world is really like from my phone. And my life is okay. But, you know, when you take in information in information you know how you contextualize it or how big you make it in your mind or what it represents it's very tricky to figure out you know what exactly is happening yeah and you know we're in the we're entering the third year of this um if it i mean if you really if omicron isn isn't sort of the thing that brings us to some kind of normalcy and if people can't congregate and resume ordinary sort of non-digital relationships, I mean, things have already gotten very weird,

and I think they're going to get weirder. It's a scary time. And what's happening in this country is terrifying. So now on a day-to-, how how do you sort of what do you do? I mean, do you do you take in the news as any of this like, you know, with with with covid and with what you just said and sort of being in this moment? Does that inspire you at all? You mean the bad stuff? You mean the bad stuff? Yeah. Creatively. Creatively.

When it's really bad, no. I mean, at least not in the immediate moment. I'm not somebody who can take in terrible, terrible, you know, a really terrible news cycle and immediately process it in some way. I try to pay attention and I try and take notes and I try to keep track of how the reality that's coming to me through outside sources jibes with my sort of fantasies about how reality ought to go and my theoretical understanding of history and reality. I mean, I know that that's a kind of a back and forth process as a dialectic that eventually will result in work. When I write something, for the most part, I'm drawn to subjects that, you know, feel like they're of significance because they involve sort of agonizing questions that I don't know the answers to. Right. And it's very often political questions. Yeah. But I've always been in awe of people like Larry Kramer, who, you know, in the middle of the AIDS epidemic, when things were really,

I mean, you know, the pandemic is horrible and terrifying, and it's global, which is a whole other thing. But it's not lethal in the way that, I mean, even Delta and the first one, Alpha and Alpha, doesn't feel like the same death sentence that AIDS felt in the early years, where if you were a gay man and you had sex and you were sort of sitting around wondering if your number was up and if you'd be dead in six weeks, and dead in a really horrible, horrible way. In the middle of all of that, Larry somehow took all of his rage and his anger and his frustration and having just been fired by Gay Men's Health Crisis and he turned into the normal heart. And I was very close to Larry for a long time and I still don't understand

how that was possible. I don't know how people- How he found the will? how that was possible. I don't know how people... How he found the will? The will, but also the clarity. I mean, you know, Normal Heart is a beautiful play and it's a powerful play. It's also like a pretty insightful,

incisive analysis of like what happens to power structures and also conventional prejudices when they're confronted with a catastrophe. I mean, he really dissects it kind of beautifully in the different characters. I mean, it's the way that different people react to this horrific news and this horrific new reality. I mean, the tracing through that, it's it's done so beautifully and with such incredible honesty and unsparing truth. And, you know, it's Uncle Tom's cabin, Louisa May Alcott.

I mean, there are people who do that and it's astonishing when they do. It seems like that template would be very effective, you know, as a means to to take on even what we've been through over the last six years. Absolutely. I mean, for me, I need a little bit more perspective. I need a little distance. I started writing Angels in America around 87. How old were you? I turned, I was 32 when I started working on it.

Now, like, okay, so you decide to take that on. when I started working on it. Now, like, okay, so you decide to take that on. Like, and obviously the vision that you had was less personal than Larry's, I guess. Correct? And it was a few years into the epidemic. So AZT had arrived already. Right.

And things were a little bit more, not good by any means, but there were tests. There was AZT. Things had that terrible thing at the beginning in the early 80s where you discovered your first lesion and then you were dead a few months later. That had sort of begun to stop when I began to think about writing Angels. And by the time I finished it in 1990, we were already, I think, pretty well on our way to the triple cocktail and real transformation of the way the disease was managed. So in terms of your creative process, what do you see, you know, what needed to happen between sort of you and Larry?

Not as individuals, but in his approach and your approach, how did the picture come into focus for you? Did your brain need to create these characters? Well, I mean, it sort of goes back to what we were talking about and the difference between me and Mark, although this is not, I think, a difference between us as far as writers. There's a huge difference. In Virginia Woolf's Room of One's Own, she talks sort of enviously.

She talks about the Bronte sisters, I think, and Jane Austen and Shakespeare. And I think I'm maybe misquoting her, but I think that what she says about Austen is that there's this kind of, that the Brontes, there's a rage in the novels of Emily and Charlotte Bronte. And that Jane Austen's work, I think she says is miraculous because it seems to have been written without any anger at all. And then she says, that's actually maybe one of the things about Shakespeare that makes him the greatest of all is that it's written without anger. I have a lot of anger, but I don't know that i find anger um an enormously useful tool um in in writing plays larry was an anger artist i mean larry was he could be delightfully he could be very sweet he could be very funny i talked to him once i talked to i i when i was at air america you know when he i he wasn't ill or anything he was old i can't remember when that was at Air America, you know, when he, he wasn't ill or anything. He was old.

I can't remember when that was. It was probably 2003, I guess. And it was great. It was a great afternoon to talk to that guy. Yeah, I know. I mean, he was amazing. He had great stories. It was for that book, Today's Gay Man or Today's.

The Tragedy of Today's gays yes that's where we're without my permission he took an email that i had written to him oh um and used it as the blurb in the back of the book no kidding did you do that all the time you could never write to larry with any any certainty that what you were writing was private it would almost certainly if it had any if you thought it had any sort of like propagandistic proselytizing value he he would uh he would use it and and uh um he lives life in a very public way so yeah yeah i'm familiar with it i think i'm that kind of jew uh myself you know the angry guy but so you learned at some point that anger was not a good tool for you because like when where did you get your chops

i mean when how do you when did you start working out as a playwright i i think i you know i i grew up in louisiana and i came to new york as a to New York to go to Columbia as an undergrad. And the minute I got here, I started seeing every play I could see. Was that something you grew up wanting to do? Yeah. My parents were professional musicians. What kind of music? My father is a Juilliard-trained clarinetist, and my mother was an Eastman-trained bassoonist.

She was very successful. She was the first bassoonist of the New York City Opera when she was very young, one of the first women in the country, I think, to have a principal chair, and she recorded with Stravinsky on two occasions, and she was a great bassoonist. My father was a really wonderful clarinetist, but he had the misfortune of being the same age as Stanley Drucker. So when Stanley Drucker was emerging as the world's greatest clarinetist, he was taking all the jobs in New York. And my father wasn't getting enough work. So my sister, who's a year and a half older than I, was born deaf. And my parents freaked out about that a little bit, I think. And my father decided that he would move the family down to Louisiana where he was born. And our family had a little lumber business.

And so we grew up in Louisiana. And then... In the lumber business. In the lumber. And a lot of Jews in the lumber business in the lumber and a lot of jews in the lumber business in louisiana it's it's a weird but true thing have you have you sort of done a a kind of personal history do you how did the jews get to louisiana uh jews got to louisiana um through the rag trade i think i mean they well there are two ways. One was they arrived in New York and got a big bag of trash, of rags, and started peddling it, or pots and pans. And then all along the way, what they call the Southern Crescent, one of them would find a congenial town and eventually get a little department store, and it would turn into a big department store. And so like Maison Blanche in New Orleans, there's a chain called Muller's, Neiman Marcus in Houston,

and all the way through the South, there are these big department chains that were run by, owned by Jews who had started out as rag peddlers. And I think they arrived in Louisiana that way. Also, they came through Galveston, some came through Galveston, Texas, which is near where I grew up. I've been told, I don't know if this is true, that the Polish aristocracy, which really severely limited what Jews were allowed to do in the 18th and 19th century, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, you could make vodka. You could be a tailor of some kind. You could lend money, of course. And supposedly they allowed jews to mill lumber uh-huh and i found a couple of references in polish literature from the turn of the century of jewish lumber mill owners that's interesting so it was either is either

banking or lumber banking or vodka it used to i don't know if it's still true but if you go to any polish city you could find a bottle of vodka called Jid Vodka. Yeah. Jid Vodka, basically. And it had this sort of anti-Semitic caricature of a Jew on the label. And it was, you know, Poles would tell you, oh, this is the Jew. When there were Jews here, they used to make the best vodka. So I think, you know, like all the Swedes came to New York and then they went to Minnesota because they somehow knew that that was great dairy country. I mean, people found places to replicate what they had come from. So maybe

there are a lot of pine forests, maybe there are three or four big lumber businesses in Louisiana that were founded by Jewish families and a very, very tiny one that was founded by my family, which no longer exists. But it's sort of interesting though, because like, you know, the film business too, it's always junk men or rag rag men it's a very vague title and you kind of get a sense of it but you know how do junk men and rag men ultimately open all the department stores and create hollywood you know it's kind of amazing yeah ferocious determination and intelligence and yeah it's amazing so all right so you grew up in lumber but was your dad a bitter man or no no um he wasn't like me he had a uh i think i got my fatal optimism from him fatalist optimism yeah you know he uh he never gave up the clarinet and then about

10 years after we moved down there uh to lake Charles, he was offered a job conducting a symphony in Alexandria, Louisiana. And he found his true calling, I think. He was really a conductor. Oh, really? He conducted both the Alexandria and Lake Charles symphonies. And he was great. He did a beautiful job. They were really wonderful orchestras.

And my mother was his first bassoon. Wow. That's how it worked out. They had a pretty good life. That's it. And they just stayed in the lumber business and played music. Yeah. I mean, he went to the lumber business and added up numbers and came home.

He really didn't care about it at all. And I think he was relieved when he finally could just sort of walk away from it the black family in lake charles that had been the foreman of my great-grandfather's uh company when he founded the lumber company and then the foreman of my grandfather's company were the father and then son of a black family called the berard family yeah and then their son uh was my father's foreman. And my father eventually sold the lumber business to him. And it became the Kushner Berard Lumber Business. And then I can't remember which hurricane it was. It wasn't Katrina. It was Gustav, I think, flooded Lake Charles and destroyed the lumber business.

That's a classic american tale yeah it's weird my hometown has sort of become the poster child uh globally for climate change it's it's it keeps getting hit by one super storm after another and uh and it's having a terribly hard time you can't you can't insure property down there anymore. Do you have people down there still? No, my father died in 2012. Yeah. I have a few friends, but they're still there and they're struggling through. But it's a hard place to be.

Lake Charles is one of my favorite Lucinda Williams songs. Yeah. She's one of our star alumni. What yeah star alumni what a song so okay so you leave you get out of louisiana you go to columbia and you start just taking in theater i was the reason i went to louisiana is because when when my parents got there my mother continued to play the bassoon but she uh she had a very uh sort of large creative soul and she decided to try acting. So she became an actor and that's I think when my fascination with theater all to do with Oedipus. I loved her and I loved watching her on stage and she was a sort of tragedian of the local little theater,

community theater. And I fell in love with theater I fell in love with theater, I think, because of seeing her play Linda Lohman in death of the salesman. Was she great? Thanks. I thought she was great. I really remember, uh, death of the salesman. I was six years old and I remember it really vividly. It's just a brutal play too. It is. And I had no idea what was going on woman who plays uh willie loman's chippy um the lady in the hotel room yeah biff meets briefly

the the young woman who was playing that part had slipped and broken her arm so she had her arm in a cast and i i thought that's why everybody in the play was so upset. I didn't know that Willie had died or anything. I thought they were really freaked out that she had broken her arm. A child's interpretation. Yeah. It's very literal. They did it in the round.

And so I could see the adults on the other side and when my mother came out and did the speech by the graveyard you know attention must be paid you know yeah and then you foolish man why did you do uh i could see all the people on the opposite side i mean people that i knew who were grown-ups it was the early 60s so they had they didn't have waterproof makeup. And everybody had raccoon eyes, just like sobbing. And that made an impression. I knew something. I didn't know what it was. But I knew that she was doing something to these people that was pretty extraordinary and powerful.

And I got, I think, turned on by that. That was it. Yeah, that was it. I want to do that. A room full of running mascara a room full of weeping women with raccoon who could ask for anything more oh god so when when you're coming up in new york i mean who like who are the playwrights that you found were modeling your perception? I arrived at a really good moment.

I came to Columbia in 1974, and it was, I think, there was this sort of extraordinary explosion of incredibly brilliant avant-garde theater artists. It's when robert wilson letter to queen victoria and einstein on the beach yeah with philip glass was at the med and in a broadway theater yeah um uh richard foreman oh yeah joanne acolytis the theater group mabu minds with lee brewer and joanne acolyis, the performance group with Elizabeth LeCompte and Spalding Gray and Willem Dafoe before he became a movie star. And a whole bunch of other people who were just

doing absolutely mind boggling, brilliant, radical things. And I think that that's where I was first drawn. I was a very political kid and I was not sure that theater was a dignified profession for somebody who really wanted to. I went to Columbia because I wanted, you know, I had been obsessed since 1968 with those pictures of the students taking over the president's low library and everything. And that's what I thought I was coming to. It wasn't like that by 1974 um but I I was I think apprehensive about a life in in the arts and in theater because it seems sort of trivial and uh uh well that's interesting though if I can stop you like it because at some point you didn't have any romanticization of like the people's theater or anything of the socialist theater of the i guess it would be the 30s that there that there was a relevance that

that that could have impact you never thought that really it's well that's a complicated question because i you know i mean they had they had and hadn't had impact i didn't feel in any in anything that i was reading that that um you know clifford odette's or uh the group theater i mean they had sort of radicalized uh they had revolutionized theater certainly in a way i've only had a big problem with clifford odette's plays i mean i i hate to say that but what is the problem i don't think they're very good i feel i shouldn't say that i mean i just i feel bad saying um i really like heavy-handed heavy-handed and not you know if you i i think if you're going to write about politics your politics have to be really really good they have

to you have to really think through what you're doing. His analysis is not particularly, I mean, they're sort of allegorical in places where political theater should never be allegorical, I mean, or metaphorical or something. I mean, you know, he tries to represent economic processes through a boxer who was also a world-class violinist. And, you know, it's like, okay, I get it, but it's a little corny and once you figure out what equals what you know as opposed to let's say death of a salesman which is shatteringly great and is a play that is absolutely about economics but what he what miller did was to find um you know a circumstance that was sitting out there for everybody to see, a salesman who's about to be, you know, let go because he's not of use anymore.

And he exposes the savagery and the cruelty of the way working people are treated, of the way that we're all treated, the way that we're victimized by this artificial system that we've created. And death of a salesman touches on many, many other, you know, really fascinating political economic questions, but he does it by being absolutely true to what he's writing about. I mean, you know, it's that family is, except for the fact that they're Jews and they seem to have come from the West to New York, that's the only slightly odd thing. I just saw that one.

I just saw before the COVID, I saw the, what is it, View from the Bridge? View from the Bridge. Oh, my God. It's so great. Oh, my God. I saw that with Letts. Tracy Letts was in it right before the plague. And it's devastating. Oh, it's astonishing. And it's one place where Arthur really digs into issues. I mean, it's very political. It's also sexual in a way.

Yeah. and gets into some really scary stuff. I love you from the bridge. I think it's great. I mean, when he decided it was time to write Death of a Salesman, he took his last nickel and bought some lumber. He had purchased a little from writing TV things. He had purchased a tiny piece of land in Connecticut, and he built a little house and then went into the house and wrote Death of a Salesman. And that's the thing about Arthur Miller is he was also, I mean, he was a great writer.

And just as a playwright, a spectacular craftsman. I mean, in almost all of his plays, the minute they start, you sort of know you're in great hands. You know that, you know, you just know. Not so much so with Clifford Odet. Right. So Miller had a big effect on you. Yeah. Not, not initially. I mean, he did when I was a kid. All those guys you were talking about, like Foreman and Wilson and, you know, I, I've seen those plays and I've seen Foreman stuff and I've seen, you know, some of the like Spalding Gray

stuff. I mean, yeah, I guess when you're younger and you see that stuff, it makes you realize that there's no no real you really decide your own limitations. Yeah. Yeah. And that I mean, all of those people worked in an incredibly complicated way in relationship to forms that had gone before them. I mean, there are, you know, all those plays that Spalding Gray did with Liz LeCompte, where each one was based on a great American, A Long Day's Journey Into Night, or, you know, they had direct reference to specific works of American theater, and Spalding always presented himself as just a New York actor. always presented himself as just a New York actor. I love Miller. I think the first person,

the first playwright that I kind of fell in love with, I read him in a modern drama class at Columbia, was John Guare. I read House of Blue Leaves. Yeah, I met that guy. I kind of know that guy a little bit. Yeah, well, I think he's- He's still around, isn't he? Yes, he is.

And he's a very, very great playwright. I think one of our best. And then Tennessee Williams came next. And then I think Eugene O'Neill and then Arthur Miller. My big obsession during my college years, and to some extent, I'd still say next to Shakespeare, probably the playwright I have the deepest abiding affection for is Bertolt Brecht. I just... Yeah, I don't know if I understand him or know exactly what characterizes Brechtian things. Oh, at some point we should... I mean, we probably don't have time to do that now, but I'd love to talk to you about it.

Well, no, he takes the fundamental truth of the theater, which is, I think, in everything that Shakespeare does, that you're confronted with a, I mean, theater's power is that it is bad at making illusions. So you're watching something that isn't really believable. At the end of Hamlet, everybody's dead on the stage, but two of them at least have had a sword fight. So they're panting hard yeah and that but if it's a great production of hamlet you're kind of annihilated at the end right

emotionally yeah and that doubleness uh of of complete investment in the reality that you know to be artificial um is critical consciousness It's what Marx is writing about. It's like, how do you see beneath the apparent surface of things to what really lies beneath? And, you know, Marx is poor. I mean, Freud would say it's the workings of the unconscious. Right. Marx would say it's the relations of capital.

It's the relations, human relations that have gone to produce commodity forms. Right. And what Brecht is all about is, I mean, he's basically just a very great playwright, but his theater is about sort of privileging that moment of belief and disbelief so that you're always, you know, you're in it and you're out at the same time. I mean, I always think like a great example of it is just Jack Nicholson's entire film career because he's, he, I just saw this outtake I'd never seen before online from the shining where everybody's getting ready to do the scene where he's

breaking through the door of the axe and all these ADs are running around saying, you know, talking to Kubrick on walkie-talkies and Nicholson is behind them looking completely insane jumping up and down going, it's murder day, murder day and then he reaches over and he picks up this huge

axe and starts swinging it and they're all ducking while they're trying to get the set ready for the shot. And Shelley Duvall just sort of walks through, rolling her eyes, and goes into the bathroom and shuts the door. And he looks completely nuts. But the thing that makes him so incredibly great is that he has this weird ability. He's always in it and out of it at the same time. He's always in it and he's also commenting on it yeah right yeah interesting yeah and it's uh how an actor does that there are just

some actors that that really do some people lose you know go away completely and there's not too many actors really that do it no no but i think i think a lot of musical theater performers. I never got to see her on stage. I saw Zero Mostel briefly do one old revival of Fiddler. I never got to see Ethel Merman on stage. But when I listened to her recordings, she has that. Well, I think it's necessary as a musical theater star in a way. Yeah. Well, there's a formalism. There's an artificiality.

Yeah. I saw your musical. I saw Carolina Change. Oh, great. Yeah, it formalism. There's an artificiality. Yeah. I saw your musical. I saw Carolina Change. Oh, great. Yeah, it was great. I enjoyed it a lot. You know, but that sort of like, it seemed a very personal thing. It's the most, closest to an autobiographical thing.

It's dedicated to the woman that, her name is Marty Lee Davis. She's still alive. She lives in Lake Charles. And she worked as a maid for my family when I was a little kid, all the way until I left for college. And then she continued to work until my father died. And she's retired now, but I dedicated the play to her because Caroline is sort of loosely modeled on her.

It's not a documentary. Sure. But there are certain things that happen in the play to her because Caroline is sort of loosely modeled on her. It's not a documentary. Sure. But there are certain things that happen in the play that happened to me and to Marty. So, yeah, it's very personal. Did she see it? Yes, she did. When I finished writing it, I was nervous about it. So I sent it to her.

And I sort of wasn't sure that she'd ever read a play before. And but I called her and I said, money, I'm sending you this thing, and I'd like you to read it. It's sort of it's not about you, but it's loosely based on you. And I want to dedicate it to you. But and she said, Well, that's so nice. And oh my God. And she said, well, send it. So I sent it. And she immediately sent it to her daughter, Carolyn. Carolyn read it for her and then called her and said, it's very, it's very touching.

And Carolyn really liked it. So then Marty said that she was honored and pleased. And then when it was opening at the Public Theater, I flew her and Carolyn to New York, and I was terrified. I didn't know. Tanya Pinkins, who played the part who created the role, when Tanya had her wig on, her 1960s wig on, she really looked like Marty.

Yeah. And that wasn't deliberate. It just happened to be that they looked a little bit alike. Yeah. And I thought, oh, my God, what if she's really up? I mean, because I made this character like I remember Marty being. She was different from a lot of the other African-American women who worked as maids. They put on this, you know, friendly mask because you had to she didn't really do that she was

a kind of a tough uh and often very angry person and um so that's i was fascinated by that then and i wrote her that way um after we she she cried and she really loved it. She met the cast. Then we were in the cab going back to my place and she was in the middle and I was on one side and Carolyn was on the other side. And I said, so what did you think of, she talked about the play, but she hadn't said anything about the character. I said, what did you think of Carolyn? She said, well, I liked her. She would do anything for her kids.

And I liked that. And I said, right. I said, but, you know, what about the angry stuff? Do you think is that fair? Do you feel like that has any relationship to the way you used to be before you turn into this very sweet old lady? And when he said, oh, no, no, I was never like that. I was never angry like that. And I could see on the other side, Carolyn was looking at her. like that and i could see on the other side carolyn was looking at her so i didn't know oh good you chose a musical to do that to to explore yourself like that yeah i was it was one of the first when i was a sophomore in college i decided that maybe i wanted to be a playwright

i didn't want to own it but I began to get interested in the idea. And I keep a journal and I wrote in my journal, if I can come up with 13 ideas for plays in one hour, 12 ideas for plays in one hour, I think maybe I can be a playwright. So I came up with 12 ideas and I don't remember what any of the others were, but one of them was, they're really short little paragraphs. And one of them was an African-American woman who works as a maid in the deep South and in some way is also president of the United States.

And that's the only thing I wrote. And that stayed with me. And that sort of San Francisco opera hired Bobby McFarlane to do, to write it, to compose an opera. And he asked me if I'd do the libretto and I wrote Caroline for that. And then Bobby decided he didn't want to write an opera. He played around with it, but he decided he was a jazz musician and not really an opera composer.

Who, Bobby McFerrin? McFerrin, right. Yeah. And I, and so he, he gave me the rights to the libretto back. And then I went to George Wolfe and we went to janine tesori and then that's it i think because my parents were musicians uh it was something it was a i didn't think i ever really wanted to you know i mean they say that tennessee williams really made life hard for himself by starting his career by writing glass menagerie. Yeah. O'Neill waited till practically the end of his career

to write Long Day's Journey. But something really autobiographical always seemed scary to me. Right. Maybe because it was going to be a musical and my parents were musicians, it felt like it would be the right moment to dig. Yeah, but also when you think about O'Neill,

it doesn't sound like you're going to go down a tunnel of darkness for, you know, how dark is it going to get for you? Oh, I wish I could get that dark. I mean, he was the greatest. Yeah. You know, I mean, he was. But I mean, autobiographically speaking, maybe this was. I'm glad I didn't have his family. Have you ever visited the house if you're

no if you're if you're ever on i-95 between like new york and through connecticut yeah um in new london connecticut is the monte cristo cottage it's the cottage his father who was an enormously successful actor bought and it's the cottage in which long day's journey uh is set in 1912 oh wow yeah yeah it's a national historic uh registry landmark it's run by the parks department but it's really weird because it's it's not you know like uh uh you know some sort of big mountain range or something or a beautiful forest it's this terrifying house where four people, you know, ate each other, basically. It's the one of the weirdest national landmarks in the United States. It's absolutely worth a visit. And you can just, the minute you go in,

the unhappiness is still there. I mean, it's just- You can feel it in the wood. Oh, you really can it's a spooky oh my god place so the whole journey of angels for you you know one and two i mean that was like how long a period of your life like a decade yeah i started in 87 i finished uh part one in around 88 89 it opened at the national in london in 1990 i had already written a very rough draft of the second part the first part i think eventually then it came to went to the mark table forum and then it came to broadway by 93 and then in 94 perestroika opened and then the

national tour went on so yeah it was about eight or nine years and that was like but that was your like the the first big play and it was huge and it's like eternal it was huge and it's never it's always going to be huge well you know kenneher all i care is that it outlasts me after that it's on its own but and when you when you put that together i mean were you able to see you know like when you talk about like a thoroughness of of character or being true to to you know who they are and what's happening in in the play like and it seems like you know when the angel comes down that's spectacular that you know something enabled you you know to to sort of like conceive of that i had a dream it was a dream

okay that's that's how it started the first guy that i had known personally to die of aids i was doing a year residency in st louis on a national endowment of the arts fellowship and directing and i got word that this dancer named Bill, who I'd gone to graduate school with at NYU, had just died. And I was sad about that. And I went to bed that night, and I had a dream that he was in his pajamas on his bed and looking terrified up at the ceiling, which started to bulgege and then it cracked open and an angel came into the room and wow and then so there so there there it was that's amazing right i didn't know that i'm sure that's out there to know but because that moment in the show is like dev it's just overwhelming i

that was supposed to be the intermission of a three-hour, two-hour, two-and-a-half-hour play. It didn't work out that way. It wound up getting longer than that. I feel like we all contain multitudes. Sure. One of the things that you try to do as a writer is loosen the stays, the internal stays that hold you together as a person just enough. So that's stuff that ordinarily in everyday waking life, you would keep securely locked away. You kind of loosen the hinges in the doors a little bit

and things start to come out. That's a good way to look at it. So the one thing I like when I was thinking about, like I watched your West Side Story in Spielberg's. And then, like, you know, an hour later, I watched the other one. Like, so I was able to really kind of see them both like that, you know, to see. Because I didn't remember the original. I think I saw it when I was a kid.

And, you know, like, I wanted to see what stayed and what went and what, you know, what was different, you know, and they both are pretty spectacular, you know, on their own. Right. So when you take a when when when Steven Spielberg asks you to do this as he's asked you to do other movies with him, I don't know. I assume they were different. But I mean, what's the first thing you do in terms of like, how are you going to reboot this thing? What do you think? Like, do you say to yourself like, well, look, the race issue is there, but the class issue is unexplored? Well, in a certain sense, that is where Stephen started. I mean, the first I said, why do you want to do this? Because we both love the 61 film very much.

Yeah. And I said, why do you want to do it? And he said, you know, there were a few things that he was interested in. The fact that cameras are so much more mobile now, you can move them around, you can, you know. Technical stuff. Technical stuff.

I mean, you know, things that really get Steven excited. Yeah. He wanted to approach, he wanted to do a musical. He's always wanted to do a musical and it's arguably the greatest musical. But he also said, you know, I, I feel like these are street kids and they're very poor. So we began talking about poverty and poverty as being this kind of a,

along with racism and xenophobia, poverty is, is, is kind of the overarching meta villain of the tragedy. And that led me to start researching the area that these guys were writing about where I live right now, Lincoln Square, what was called Lincoln Square. Like, isn't it a Robert Moses development? Yeah, it was in 57. Moses and the Committee for Slum Clearance won two Supreme Court cases and blasted away a gigantic part of the West Side. left behinds of earlier generations of European immigrants that had come and sort of left there mentally challenged and the sort of criminal element and drug addicts and so on were left behind. And they were living in these kind of derelict brownstones. The top of Lincoln Square

was called San Juan Hill, not because it had anything to do with Puerto Rico, but it had been called San Juan Hill for a long time. I think I finally figured out why, but that's another story. Why? I can't prove this, but people don't know where the name came from. It was an African-American neighborhood from about the teens into the 40s. And then when Black people started moving up to Harlem, they began renting their apartment buildings that they owned to Puerto Ricans who were just arriving in the 30s and 40s and 50s. But they'd always called it San Juan Hill.

And I have no way of proving this, but the Rough Riders, when they wrote up San Juan Hill, which is in Cuba, is one part of the story that I forget the name of the hill next to San Juan Hill, but there was another hill held by the Spanish that had a fort on it that was protecting San Juan Hill and the fortress atop San Juan Hill. For the rough riders to be able to get up the hill, they had to first, somebody had to take the adjoining hill and, you know, sort of neutralize the fort. And the people who did that, there were a couple of garrison, platoons that did it, but one of them was an all-black US Army infantry squadron,

and they stormed the fortress and took that hill. And they were, of course, then completely written out of history. It was all about the Rough Riders and Teddy Roosevelt, who were all white, charging up that hill. But the black people that had made it possible were forgotten. And I have no way of proving this, but I really wonder, because the timing seems to work out, if the veterans from the Army veterans who felt themselves to have been great American heroes, as they were forgotten, decided to name this neighborhood that they were moving into and maybe buying real estate into with their pensions. If they decided to call that neighborhood San Juan Hill, then it became a Puerto Rican neighborhood. I think that's pretty good speculation. I don't know, maybe.

Good research. Good connections. I thought maybe that's the explanation. You did the good thinking on that. Thank you very much. Okay, so you decide to set it very specifically in this wreckage. In the wreckage, which became, I think, a really significant sort of aspect of the film.

I love anything about a scarcity economy. I love movies, books, plays, where an artificial scarcity is created. And the people that are fighting, that are sort of set against each other to compete for the very little bits of usually not very valuable whatever that's left because of this artificially created scarcity. The fighting becomes more and more violent and ugly. Yeah. I think because there's a real enemy that isn't present where the actual power lies

and uh and i think that frustration amplifies the fight between groups that don't really have anything to fight about and in this case you know the the these little white racist street kids and this kind of neighborhood protection group the sharks who are trying to keep their neighborhood together so so that's how so that's how you conceived of it. And it's interesting, like, watching them both side by side, is that a lot of the race stuff and the xenophobic stuff is really in it, you know? And a lot of the, it's very uncomfortable.

And once you, I guess, you know, once you get past the blackface stuff, which is, I guess, the nature of movies at that time, you know once you get past the blackface stuff uh which is i guess the nature of movies at that time you know the dancing and the tension and and the emotions of it are all there but like what i what really happens in your version is that there's a depth to it that connects them all like you don't there there's not the same you know outside of like this neighborhood's always shitty but there is something like you're saying there's something bigger than them that's setting this you know in motion and it's not addressed by them specifically maybe a little bit with the women singing their understanding of a possible future

that's that's false or even their understanding of what's really happening seems the most grounded understanding politically in the whole in the whole piece i mean i i think i'm really glad that you said that because i think that i mean i felt like what we were doing the whole way was taking you know i think the musical the original musical is a masterpiece i think it's a great work of art and and all the things that we wanted to talk about and deal with and that we did talk about and deal with and address in the movie that we just made, I think are latent and latent but present in one way or another. Yes. In the original Broadway musical and in the 61 film.

And so it felt like we had a new opportunity to look at it and to sort of draw some of those things. We got permission from everybody in support to do that. and to sort of draw some of those things. We got permission from everybody in support to do that. And I thought that the decision to have no subtitles, I think, was good. And I think that white people deserve it. I sort of feel that way, too. Also, practically speaking, Puerto Rican Spanish, you know, is filled with English idioms. So you'd have a hard time, I think subtitling it, like be, you know,

that there are people who are struggling with whether or not they want to speak Spanish or speak English and they can speak both. So you'd be popping into subtitles all the time and it would, and it also sort of then makes English the official language of the movie. And I think it, you know, I've been enjoying how freaked out people on the right, like on Fox News, were that this is there's unsubtitled Spanish in the film. So stay away, because if you go, you won't have any idea what was what's going on. Are they really doing that? Yeah. There was a real sort of like, oh, my God, this is woke culture taking over.

And it was like, you know don't panic steven spielberg is not going to make a movie where huge numbers of people have no idea what's going on just go and you know yeah i i i got it i you know i'm the same way with shakespeare to be honest with you i get the idea yeah i can't i don't know what really they're talking about but i understand the story you. You'll be okay. Exactly. Watch out. Now, what was your biggest fear going into it around taking this work?

Who do you get permission from? Jerome Robbins? Who do you get permission from? Well, Stephen got permission from the Jerome Robbins estate, Leonard Bernstein's three kids, Alex, Jamie and Nina. And Arthur Lawrence's estate, this man named David Saint, who was Arthur's partner. And then Sondheim. And they all had to pre-approve me as a screenwriter.

I know the Bernstein kids and I knew Arthur Lawrence and David and I knew Steve Sondheim for a really long time so that was pretty easy but they they gave Stephen permission um you know they their uh Sondheim at least was very and Arthur Lawrence and I think Bernstein were fairly critical of the 61 film I don't think they were fair about it. I think they were a little grouchy and unfair. Really? But they were not. Yeah. Famously, Arthur Lawrence, when he finished watching the movie for the first time, said, wow, that's a really tough gang of

ballerinas. What are you going to do? Dancing is dancing. Dancing is dancing. And they were great. I mean, all the changes that I proposed, giving Rita somewhere. Oh, Rita was great. But, you know, I thought that was really the most interesting story point that, you know, that you sort of were able to dig into was to give that kid, the lead, you know, a backstory.

There's no backstory in in the i mean in 57 they you know they were making they were doing a lot of radical things with west side story that nobody's ever done before bringing a type of person on stage that had not been brought right the broadway stage before and making a musical tragedy which no one had done before i mean the rogers and hammerstein made sad musicals but they really wanted to follow Romeo and Juliet and make a tragedy. And I think they succeeded. So with all of that that they were doing, and also it's a dance musical, it's sort of driven by dance, with all the things that they were trying that hadn't been tried before, they made a couple of concessions to convention. And one of them that the the boy and the girl in the a plot had to be good kids

they couldn't be juvenile delinquents they had to be from good families and nice kids and then everybody else could be tougher and rougher and we don't need to worry about that anymore so well to the point where there was like outside of him deciding to work, you know, as opposed to be in the street. I mean, that's all you got with that kid. And she was, you know, young. So there was no. But I just thought the backstory was compelling to have that inner struggle, you know, with himself. Well, thanks.

I felt it worked really well. How did the thing with Spielberg start with you guys? When Angels in America, Mike Nichols' version came out on HBO. As many of you have anything happen on a movie or a TV show or something come out, you get calls from producers who say, let's have breakfast. Sure. And I got a call from Kathy Kennedy saying, let's have breakfast. I'm going to be in New York and I'd like to meet you. And you just meet and you have breakfast and they say, what are you doing?

And you say, what are you doing? And I said to Kathy, what are you guys working on? And she said, we're working on two films, you and Stephen. And she said, we're working on two films. One is about the murder of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972. And the other is adapting Doris Kearns Goodwin's book, forthcoming book, Team of Rivals about Abraham Lincoln. And I said, those are great projects. And then right as we were about to leave, I said, you know, I just published, I edited with a friend, Lisa Solomon, an anthology of essays about the Israeli-Palestinian

conflict called Wrestling with Zion. And I said, I'm really proud of the book. And if you guys are going to make a thing about the Munich Olympics massacre, maybe you'd find stuff of value in it. So if you'd like, I'd be happy to send it to you. And I did. And I thought, well, that's the end of that. And then about two weeks later, I got a phone call. It was Spielberg. And he said, I just read the essays and I really liked them. And I'd like to talk to you about this script. And we got together. He sent me the script.

I read it. We talked about it. And then he said, would you like to try and write your own version of it? And I said, yes. And now we just this summer finished our fourth movie together. So it'll be coming out in uh thanksgiving which movie is that it's about his childhood we wrote it on zoom just like what we're doing now no kidding uh during lockdown we wrote it it's the fastest thing i've ever we co-wrote

the script together it's about steven's uh uh childhood and his sort of the beginnings of his uh really of him running around with his super 8 camera super 8 camera and then 16 millimeter and and it's also about his parents and his parents marriage falling apart and it's uh interesting michelle williams and paul dano are in it and and seth rogan and it's uh i'm very excited about it well that's amazing so he finally does an autobiographical picture and he he you to help him out. I would like his shrink. Well, that's a good question about like with Munich. I mean, what was the challenge characterologically? Because I mean, you seem to be driven by dialogue.

You like people talking. So what did you need to show with that? You know, I was in Hebrew school when that happened. I was like nine years old and I remember when it happened. And I remember there being this weekly magazine we used to get at Hebrew school about all those athletes. So what was it that you needed to, what was it that, you know, with what you were saying before about forces and about people, you know, at odds with each other in situations that are out of their control. So what was it with Munich where you're like, I'm going to do this project because this needs to be seen? What was it?

Well, I didn't know why Stephen wanted to go into this incredibly dark event in this sort of terrible moment. I was nervous that it was going to be, that it would demonize the Palestinian people. That was, you know, I, of course, think that what was done to the Israeli athletes in the Olympics was horrendous and, you know, inexcusable and unforgivable, monstrous act. But I believe that, you know, the plight of the Palestinian people is a world historic calamity. And as a Jew, I support the existence of the state of Israel. I'm very much and as a Jew, I support the existence of the state of Israel. I'm very much identified as a Jew. And I also think that the way that the Palestinians have been treated is unforgivable and inexcusable and violence begets violence. And I, you know, it was also right after 9-11. And so I thought there was a lot of room for exploration, the movie addresses Israel's decision to eliminate ostensibly the planners of the massacre.

But in the process, they also got rid of most of the people who they deemed as being important people in the PLO. And they chose to do this in violation of a huge number of international treaties and, you know, sort of setting aside the rule of law. And so I thought that was an interesting thing to look at. And the idea of these Jewish Mossad agents who are essentially assassins going around and, you know, and planning it. I thought that was fascinating. Eric Roth had written a version of the script that I thought was really good. And, you know, I've always admired Steven as a filmmaker enormously. And I thought, well, you know,

it would be an interesting thing to explore with him and I was taken by how dangerous it was for the guy that makes Schindler's List and who is a Jewish filmmaker beloved by Jews to take this on and I was very impressed

that I didn't need to sell him on the idea that this is not a situation of like, you know. The Israelis are the good guys and win. The Israelis are the good guys and the Palestinians are monsters who are subhuman, evil people who, for some reason, can't leave us alone. So I wanted to see, I wanted to become part of his process of exploring that. And, and, and, you know, I was stunned. I'm always stunned with Stephen, because he's such a complete master of the art of filmmaking and of the art of storytelling. I mean, he's not since Dickens

has there been anybody, I think, more profoundly gifted at the construction of narrative. And he's an incredibly generous collaborator. He really invited me in. He kept me on set the whole time. Did you argue? Oh, we argued terribly. Yeah. Probably a little bit less on Munich than with with lincoln where we really what were those

arguments about oh about everything i mean really and and i lose a lot of them and i also win some um and what was the big problem what was the struggle with lincoln there's never like just one thing yeah they're always you know there were just subtleties and complexities in the situation. I mean, I wrote a 500-page first draft covered from January to April of 1856, 1855, and

I thought Stephen would film the last month at the end of the war when Lincoln was down at City Point with Grant. What he wound up filming was the first part, which was the fight for the 13th amendment. And I think it's a brilliant choice that he made just to focus on that. But when we did that, we wound up making a movie about the house of representatives and in a world

where the Democrats are the bad reactionary, horrible people and the Republicans are the progressive liberal, decent people. And keeping track of all of that was hard. horrible people and the republicans are the progressive liberal decent people and keeping track of all of that was hard and there are lots of things steven also doesn't like to rehearse and he he can get excited when actors improvise and i hate it and uh we've always had a big struggle about that. I want them to stick to the script. And in Lincoln, sometimes, you know, this is not about an actor. Like, I was watching, and I had made a pest of myself that day,

about 600 other little things. And I went running onto the set. I watched from Video Village. I'm running on the set. And I said, Stephen, you've got to stop for a second. We've got to change something. And he said, I don't want to change. We're behind. I want to keep going. And I said, no. They were packing up Lincoln's office. It was a scene where they're packing up

the war charts, because the war is essentially over right before he goes to the theater and gets killed. And they're putting things in a box that had been marked for the National Archives. And I said, you can't do that. The National Archives were founded in 1932. Yeah. So you have to get rid of that box. And there were little things like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I won't tell tales out of school. But the great thing about him is he really, with West Side Story, we had a ton of things where we were, you know, I, you know, where we were trying, I mean, I think the reason it turned out as well as it did is that we, everybody involved was constantly just slightly adjusting things to make sure that we were telling, uh, as rich and full and true a story as we, as we could. And, uh, it's great. It's such a, it's great. It's such an aggressive collaboration.

Yeah, it is. It doesn't, I mean, I've known him now for a really long time and I love him as a person. And I feel like it's an incredible privilege because I think he's kind of, I mean, I don't use this word very often, but I really do think he's a genius. And I think he's capable of doing things. When you work with him over and over, he'll come up with some shot or some image just out of the thin air, it looks like. And you can't understand where it comes from. And he doesn't always explain it well.

Who decided to make Lincoln 20 feet tall? I think God decided that. Well, that's an amazing thing to say. It reminds me of that moment where, on a much lesser scale in some way, because it's a different medium, where I don't know if you watched the Beatles documentary. Oh, God. Where Paul's just sort of like pulling, get back out of the air, you know? And you're like, that's what it's happening right now. It's happening.

And there, and what I love is he's sitting there at the piano, just he's playing get back. And then he's sitting there playing along and winding road or let it be. And they're all rolling their eyes and making fun of it and even he's making fun of it it's like wait a minute this is like one of the greatest songs ever written and it's happening right here what i what i'm really curious about and nobody's been able to explain it to me is get back was clearly um about uh nativism and i I mean, you know, because at one point, McCartney says, some of the Pakistani data, and then there's also somebody who's a Puerto Rican. And so it's

clearly about immigrants, not or in the case of Puerto Ricans, migrants, not being welcomed somewhere and get back was get back to where you once belonged and and you hear it and then in one of those moments when they're not on camera uh and they break up for a few days they come back and it's turned into a song about nothing except the beatles nothing which is better than anything you want to hear one great thing that i found out um uh in um oh god what's the song? Here come all flat top, here come grooving up slowly. Come together. Come together. I just read, I hope this is true, that Lennon came up with that when Timothy Leary, who was running for governor against Ronald Reagan, asked Lennon to write him

a campaign song. And he came up with a song and Leary, for whatever reason, wasn't organized enough to make use of it. So it didn't get... Oh, that's hilarious.

I love that. Because then you know who Old Flattop must have been. Oh, that's interesting. It's clearly Ronald Reagan, right? Oh, I wonder if that's true. I think it would be... I want to write a film or play where Leary takes the song and it becomes his campaign song and he beats Reagan for governor.

It was Reagan's first successful campaign and he beats Reagan. So Reagan just goes back to being a G spokesman or whatever. And he really just leaves the american political stage and the entire history of the united states after that is all free to reaganism we we stay on course and we become a bigger and better and healthier democracy that is an amazing hallucination yeah so this this discomfort with improvising now Now, is this something like, because there's a big chunk of time between Columbia and Angels.

You know, how was that? Was that wrought with difficulty in becoming a playwright because of behavior that you may have had? You mean... What, I mean, were you difficult? I am difficult. I'm a horrible person.

Ask any of the directors who've worked for me. I'm a nightmare. Now, you know, I mean, it took me a while. I went to graduate school to be a director. I think I was afraid to be a writer.

Writing is hard. Writing is scary. And I couldn't quite believe that I'd be good at it. And I'm actually an okay director of stage director. I don't have any idea how to direct a writer writing is hard writing is scary and i couldn't quite believe that i'd be good at it and i'm actually an okay director of stage director i don't have any idea how to direct a movie uh but i'm i'm okay i'm not yeah i'm not really great at it uh and i think i went into directing because it was a way of sort of coming into playwriting through the back door. Was it helpful? Yes. The W-R-I-G-H-T part of playwriting, there is a part of this that, as I was saying about Arthur Miller, is really craft. It's really like cobbling together a skeleton that will hold this event together. And you have to learn, I think, a certain amount about how actors work. Yeah.

And, and, and, you know, you learn if you spend time with actors, with really good actors, and you see what they're struggling with, you learn some of the, none of it is rocket science. It's all pretty simple, but you learn what, you know, anybody who comes out on stage comes out to do something. At least this is true in narrative realist drama. You come out on stage to have an action, to do something, and you either succeed or you fail. You run into somebody who doesn't want you to have all that stuff.

But it's amazing to me always how many people who act and many people who direct and sometimes even people who write don't quite get that. That's where the drama and drama comes from. What they're doing things. Yeah. Action. You need an action. And also that speech is action. Right.

Which is why I get annoyed when people improvise a little annoyed. Yeah. We just made this movie and Seth Rogan was on the set and Stephen kept teasing me before we started. I'd never met him before. Seth Rogan, it's like he's going to be Mr. Improv. He's not going to do a single line

that we wrote. He's going to make it all up. And I thought, well, at least he really knows how to improvise, which most people don't. Did he? He was word perfect the entire time. how to improvise, which most people don't. Did he? Not. He was word perfect the entire time. He was probably terrified. No, I think he just, he said, I really liked the script and I really wanted, I can do my thing with my stuff and I wanted to come here and really.

Honor the thing. You know, and yeah, and explore it and oh i'm excited excited about the movie loved the loved west side story there's a great thanks mark thank you very much great talking to you say hi to mark for me i will well this has been a lot of fun it has take care all Wow. That was rich. Is that the right word for it? Nice. Rich. Deep. Thoughtful.

And it made my brain go all the places. West Side Story is playing in theaters now. I would go see it. It's pretty great. So that was fun. Tony Kushner. I'm just just gonna whip out some guitar i'm gonna whip it out here we go Thank you. ¶¶ Boomer lives. The monkey and the fonda. Cat angels everywhere.

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