Anthony Lane
New
Yorker film critic talks with Robert Birnbaum
 Posted:
October 3, 2002
Copyright 2002 by Robert Birnbaum
All photos by Red Diaz / Duende Publishing
Print this interview.
Anthony Lane was educated at Cambridge, England.
He began writing for the Independent in London in 1989 and
was its Deputy Literary Editor—and from 1991, also its Sunday
film critic. In 1993 he was recruited as The New Yorker's
film critic by then-editor Tina Brown. Anthony Lane has recently
published Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker.
This 700-plus-page tome contains 140 of his New Yorker articles
categorized into Movies, Books and Profiles. Anthony Lane lives
in London with his wife (writer Allison Pearson, who is a weekly
columnist for the London Evening Standard and a member of
the BBC2's Newsnight Review panel) and their two children.
"Nobody's Perfect."
-Osgood Fielding III, from "Some Like It Hot" and the
epigraph from Anthony Lane's new collections of writings from
The New Yorker, Nobody's Perfect
Robert Birnbaum: How does it feel to become grist for the
critical mill?
Anthony Lane: (laughs) And it is a mill, isn't it really?
If you are referring to myself being reviewed, actually I haven't
read any reviews. I am completely in the dark on this.
RB: Will you?
AL: Probably not. It's enough trouble writing the damn book.
I have very little will to read about it as well. It's odd, people
here keep quoting me stuff, almost enticing me into responses or
feuds or whatever. Which is so not my style. I do tend to agree
with Francis Bacon, who said—he was asked by David Sylvester
in the great series Bacon did with Sylvester, "Do you ever read
reviews of your shows of your paintings?" And he said, "Only the
obviously hostile ones. I find them much more constructive." The
only possible help you are going to get is from the hostile ones.
If there were some cogently aggressive ones, I might read them.
Nothing else.
RB: How will you know?
AL: People will leak these things to me.
RB: Can I leak one to you?
AL: Yeah, sure. As long as it's not John
Powers again. Which is one everyone keeps doing to me.
RB: You might have escaped this one since it's from the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune. The writer, Eric Hansen, compares
anthologizing journalism and film reviews to "dumpster diving
in a tony neighborhood"?
AL: Yeah, very good.
RB: (laughs)
AL: See, I think it's good. The question of anthologizing
seems such a curious practice, doesn't it? I took heart from the
fact that I personally have always enjoyed anthologies of books
and film reviews long after the things which they had covered had
come and gone. Like yourself, I presume, I grew up reading Pauline
Kael and her anthologies. Having that, it was not as good as reading
Pauline Kael in The New Yorker, to get the full measure of
her surrounded by the magazine...
RB: And at the time.
AL: And at the time. As I say in the book, you need to be
on the spot when the movies are happening or much later casting
a cold eye. What you go back for—and I hope people might eventually
come back to this book for—is not just to find out what I thought
of a movie, which is one of the less important things I have to
do, but to try and recreate some of the landscape of that time.
To try and summon the era in which these movies were being put out
and received and watched. Forrest Gump is not a good movie,
never was and never will be. Despite all the severed heads I got
in the post telling me these things, telling me that I was wrong
about it. The story of its success is an interesting cultural phenomenon.
It was up against Pulp Fiction that year at the Oscars. And
that itself feels like a clash worth remembering—how the country
voted, in some ways. And it was a clean sweep for Forrest Gump.
I like going back over them myself for the simple pleasure of disagreeing
violently with myself. I haven't rewritten anything in the book.
I did take out a few repetitions. I didn't want to try and rejiggle
my thoughts on these things. The pleasure of going back to them
and maintaining the impulse to throw the book across the room was
too great.
 RB:
(laughs) Whose wonderful quote was it about throwing a book across
the room?
AL: Oh yes. Something like, "This book should not be
set aside lightly but hurled across the room with great force."
RB: Who said it? Dorothy Parker?
AL: It may have been Thurber. Though it sounds more like
her, doesn't it? But it isn't her. Most of the things we think are
funny turn out not to be her. Oddly enough there is a piece on her
in the movie and I kind of took her to task, partly to have some
fun. Because I thought, "Right, I'm right in her territory.
Let's see what happens. Will I be lynched for treason here?"
I didn't get any comeback at all. It was very strange. You think,
"Hey look, I'm saying I'm of two minds about Dorothy Parker, one
of the patron saints..." Nobody really...it's odd.
RB: Is it possible since not many people went to the movie
they weren't interested in reading about it?
AL: I don't know. All monumental reputations like all monuments
are worth walking around and inspecting the brick work, aren't they?
The movie itself was rather disappointing, but I used it to come
out of the movie and talk about her. That's one of the things we
do. You get a chance to write about a Persuasion movie, not
because it happened to be for once, a good Jane Austen movie, but
here's another chance to talk about a very great novel that some
people might not know as well as the other ones. The whole book
is trafficking back and forth between these different areas.
RB: Is this the sum total of your writing for the past decade?
AL: Oh god no. I'm afraid to say, despite it being this
vast offensive weapon, this is only skimming the surface. It's amazing
how much, if you have a regular beat, as a critic or a columnist,
how much you compile over the years.
RB: Who edited and selected?
AL: I did the selecting and then my editor at Knopf, Jordan
Pavlin, and I fought over these things. She was trying to keep stuff
in and I was trying to cut stuff out. I cut out a piece about Edward
Steichen because there was too much about photography. It's interesting
having been on the road talking about these things there some pieces
that nobody talks about and you think, "Maybe they shouldn't have
gone in?" On the other hand, maybe once they've had the book for
a while and they have read all the pieces about the movies they
saw and the authors they like, they might think, "Who is this guy,
Jan Svankmajer?"
| What you
go back for...is not just to find out what I thought of a
movie, which is one of the less important things I have to
do, but to try and recreate some of the landscape of that
time. |
RB: Whose decision was the choice of title, Nobody's
Perfect [From Some Like it Hot]?
AL: Mine.
RB: You are aware that there is a biography of Billy Wilder
coming out later in the year with the same title?
AL: I'm not surprised.
RB: It's a wonderful title.
AL: It's a good title. I'm glad I got there first. I'm sure
there are many other great Wilder lines which you could use for
a biography. Since I wrote the piece about him and before the book
came out and he died...it's odd, these things shouldn't necessarily
alter one's view of him, but it generally did feel a sad occasion.
It felt like someone had switched another light out. It was like
when George Harrison died. People said, "Oh you are being mawkish
because all the radio stations started Beatles." But on the other
hand, "No, it's kind of a genuine emotion. It's quite possible in
200 years time people will look back and the only thing people will
remember about us is that we listened to the Beatles." We are right
to say that passing of George Harrison is a sad event. You have
a catalogue in your mind of people you really want to write about,
and if you hang around long enough the chance comes around. The
Nabokov short stories will come out. There will be an Evelyn Waugh
this or that. The Some Like It Hot book came out. I mean,
I leapt on that, when I saw it. I had been waiting to write about
Wilder and I didn't want to wait until he died. I didn't want to
be a complete ambulance chaser. Which I occasionally do, do. I wrote
about Alexander McKendrick when he died.
RB: I just watched The Sweet Smell of Success, just
this last weekend.
AL: Doesn't it hold up so well?
RB: Yes.
AL: Amazing. In fact, it seems some of the movies that are
very acid about journalism and publicity—that movie throughout
and lots of Citizen Kane look better and better, wiser and
sharper with every passing year. Only the really acute filmmakers
were able to prophetically imagine what was going to happen to the
press. You shouldn't have been able to imagine what it was going
to be like, that the appetite would grow that much for the scandalous.
McKendrick had been making comedies, wonderful, wonderful films
but nothing in those prepared us for the film [The Sweet Smell
of Success] that he would make here.
RB: Was there was much collaboration with Clifford Odets
[screenwriter for The Sweet Smell of Success]?
AL: There must have been and with James Wong Howe, who photographed
it. There wasn't enough in the biography about that. Was James Wong
Howe like his Greg Toland [cinemaphotographer on Citizen Kane]?
He didn't have to be told how to make a movie—but it may be
the photographing of American interiors...didn't Howe oil the walls
to get a gleam? Something really wonderful like that.
RB: Though I love films, I started to read you seriously
with the Bestseller column you did.
AL: A lot of people say that. That's one piece for good
or ill, just for whatever reason, you put down a marker. I grabbed
that piece—I didn't know it would turn into that sort of thing—it
became a slight setting out of my stall. I did the "trashing classics"
thing and I thought, "I do believe this." And I still do believe
that's a good sustaining diet. To this day my bedside table will
still have Elmore Leonard on it plus The Long Dead. I'm still
very bad at reading very sensitive new novels. I think Elmore Leonard
is sensitive to the patterns of American speech and if we all disappeared
beneath the waves tomorrow and people dove down and found Leonard...
RB: Does anyone celebrate Leonard more than British writers?
Martin Amis gives Leonard wildly enthusiastic reviews regularly.
 AL:
It may be the great years of Leonard are past, although I hear Tishmongo
Blues is quite good. That thing that one does around college
time—when one grows older you don't physically have the time
for—which is when you are discovering someone new and you are
just ravenous and you do all of them. I did all of Leonard and then
I had a Chandler kick and a Nabokov kick and then other people,
some of whom I was told to read at college. The pleasure of being
able to feast upon the writers you love, or the directors that you
suddenly become obsessed by—that is probably harder in college
now. When I was at Cambridge in England in the ‘80s they still
had nice scratchy old prints of these things that were going around
the college clubs and you would go to the art cinema and you would
see triple bills of Berman and Renoir and Hawks and it was sometimes
rather grim going—especially if it was Bergman—but you
got the homework done, you started to populate the hinterland.
RB: I was struck in your introduction by your suggestion
of what appears today to be a quaint concept, "cultural duty."
AL: Remember that?
RB: What does it mean today?
AL: What was so quaint about it all was that at its best
it didn't feel like a duty. There is a piece about Matthew Arnold,
and for him it really was a duty and you could sometimes find him
straining to maintain pleasure in it. And it was interesting to
find out that he wasn't as solemn as his writings would suggest.
Later on, when movies came along, it was one of the rare times when
duty was a pleasure. It has to be if is to be commonly shared. The
Arnoldian influence lasted a very long time right up to [F.R.] Leavis
really. Leavis was probably the last person who thought you were
not adequately equipped, not only to pronounce on life but to entangle
yourself with life, to take life head on unless you were armed with
all literature could teach you. That seems to many people now, absurd.
Certainly delivered with some absurd prejudices and with an almost
laughable lack of humor. And yet, like much of what seemed excessive,
it's worthy of some respect now...If you go back and read New
Bearings in English Poetry, to him these things were events.
It's like reading Axel's Castle, [Edmund] Wilson thought
these things were general events which should matter to people and
he thought they would alter the angle at which we looked upon the
world and read the world. Talk about quaint, that must now seem...
RB: When I talked to Darin
Strauss recently, he was somewhat shocked that some of his students
didn't know who Kurt Cobain was. This is a significant pop musician
of the last 5 or 10 years.
AL: They already don't know? The process of outdating is
now moving quickly.
RB: When I spoke to Nick
Tosches he opined that we were moving into a post-literate age
like Ancient Egypt when only the high priests knew how to read.
AL: He would have us read Dante. Trying to purvey the Ezra
Pound dictum, "Literature is news that stays news" is extremely
hard. Movies should be one of the ways—maybe the only way—these
things are, in which the gospel can be spread. I always find it
curious that you go on the subway and people are sitting and reading
The Great Gatsby, but if you go to the art house it's mostly
full of movie buffs. People ask me, "What's the best thing playing
at the moment?" in London, in New York, wherever. And I'm supposed
to say, "Oh well you have to see the new Jim Carrey or you have
to see the whatever." I say, "To be absolutely honest if you want
a great..." They say, "We don't want anything heavy. I've been working
hard. I want to go see a fun movie." I say, "Fine. There's a new
print of The Apartment." And they resist that. What is that?
They are quite happy to read a book from that era but since when
did movies, of all media, become this encrusted dusty scholarship.
| Truffaut,
Renoir and Godard looked at America, loved the films there
and ploughed that love and that knowledge back into French
films. No one did that in England. |
RB: In Nobody's Perfect's introduction you state
that writing in America freed you of having to be a cheerleader
for British Cinema. Besides Lindsay Anderson, please give me some
reference points for what is British Cinema?
AL: What that? I never much...it's never been one of my
concerns. Television is our medium, really. Most of the great English
directors, Hitchcock, notably above all...I love Hitchcock's English
films. They rise above the parochial. Thirty-Nine Steps, The
Lady Vanishes hold up extremely well, I think.
RB: Hitchcock is an English director?
AL: Absolutely an English director. And yet when he came
to America the movies became enriched. He lived this extremely orderly
British life. Dined and ate well. Didn't hike around the country.
He learned his trade partly in Berlin, so for a very conservative
man he was very outward looking. Even some one like Stephen Frears,
who I think is an interesting director, came out of that generation
making documentaries in England for the BBC and Granada in the ‘60s.
I like some of his small films like The Snapper. Then he
made Dangerous Liasons and The Grifters.
RB: The Grifters, what a great film!
AL: That seemed to me most like The Sweet Smell of Success
in terms of an Englishman, or in McKendrick's case like a Scotsman,
coming and thinking it isn't just the landscape...
RB: Same composer, Elmer Bernstein, for both films.
AL: The Grifters was one of the last great film scores.
I am very disappointed in film scores most of the time now. One
of the many things one misses is Max Steiner and Miklas Rosza. The
Grifters has a great credit sequence. In the beginning I thought,
"This looks like man who has found a great new field to plow." I
like Frears. He has a nice grouchy, patchy-eyed pessimism about
him. No wonder he's at home in film noir. As for great directors
and small critics we have to look to America to open the world up
for us. As all the great French critics did. What they did, of course,
is what no one in England did, which is they looked at America.
Truffaut, Renoir and Godard looked at America, loved the films there
and ploughed that love and that knowledge back into French films.
No one did that in England. They either got out of there which was
a great English wish or they went back to making very English films.
Having said which the three great English films—which I have
always loved—David Lean's Great Expectations, The
Life and Death of Colonel Blimp and Kind Hearts and Coronets.
They are all about class. People say that the worst thing about
England is the class structure. Maybe. But what you do with a subject,
you use it. The English novel would be nothing without the class
system—mainly as a kind of comic rigging. Those three films
take class head on, the climbing and the falling. All three are
quite Dickensian in that sense, or more Trollopian. Or in the case
of Kind Hearts and Coronets, more Wildian. There should be
more like that around.
RB: Did you find it odd that you were called upon to The
New Yorker at 75 for that anniversary? You didn't exactly have
much seniority?
AL: That may be the reason I was asked. Just as Tina Brown
brought me in—I don't know of she was so smart, I can't presume
to read her mind—she may have looked around and said, "Oh
my god, this is Pauline Kael land. What am I going to do? Get someone
who isn't going to be too cowed by all this. Go elsewhere and find
someone." That may have been her thinking, I don't know. I
worship Pauline Kael, I hadn't grown up surrounded by her in the
way that people here were. It made it easier, I guess. Similarly,
who wants to write that thing. Nobody else has brought this up,
I'm glad you brought this up. I never know what to write for those
special issues anyway.
RB: (laughs)
AL: Maybe they just thought, "Well, let's try it." Maybe
there is something about using someone who isn't absolutely born
and bred to the system. Normally, I am quite lightly edited. I am
quite lucky. I turn stuff in quite fast and it's quite clean—because
I came from newspapers. But that issue took a lot of work. I was
praise-proof and suspicious of anything other than disapproval,
really. But one of the really few moments of genuine satisfaction
was when Roger Angell—who after all was really born to the
magazine and a great hero of mine—sort of the opposite of me.
Roger is 80 going on 21 and I am the other way around, he actually
came up and said I had done well with a difficult job. I was gratified
by that. They would have stopped me from making a fool of myself,
obviously, They wouldn't have printed anything that was embarrassing.
Plus it was fun to go back and read through things. The number of
books about the magazine and the history of it—in England nobody
would think to write such books.
RB: It is fascinating that a magazine has become such a
big topic. The last book I can recall was an extreme dissection
of Tina Brown. Which then spawned pieces like Michel Wolff's in
New York magazine about how the author once bumped into a
very disoriented Tina Brown.
AL: You can not imagine how happily I keep my distance from
all that stuff.
RB: It's disgusting. Very mean-spirited.
AL: It is mean-spirited. It's disappointing because mainly
I associate mean-spirited journalism with England. That's what we
do, that's what we're good at. Journalism in England is really foul
at the moment.
RB: (laughs) Sorry to laugh.
AL: It's vicious. It almost lives to be vicious, that almost
is its point. It's particularly scathing of anyone who has had the
temerity to do well in any field. It presumes that the only possible
consequence of success is to fail. The pleasure of getting out of
British journalism can not be overstated.
RB: You live in London.
AL: I live there most of the time; I am in New York quite
a lot.
| The pleasure
of being able to feast upon the writers you love, or the directors
that you suddenly become obsessed by—that is probably
harder in college now. |
RB: 150 transatlantic trips in 10 years?
AL: Well, it happens. I used to come once a month. Now I
come slightly less. Sometimes I go to Paris, which is still a great
movie going capitol for me. Some American directors show their stuff
there first. The new Brian De Palma has been out there for months.
The pattern of movie distribution will change quite a lot. Who knows
with digital projection, in 10 years time things will probably open
around the world at the same time.
RB: Your first viewing of a film will be in a theater?
AL: Absolutely. If in 10 years time the big studios will
have thought the critics are a pain more than anything else and
they say, "We're not having critic's screenings. You just go on
Fridays." Fine by me.
RB: What about tapes?
AL: I never review from tapes. I will get a screening tape
if I have already seen the movie and I want to check something.
I would never review from the tape. Which makes life easier.
RB: You made a bit about fact checking at The New Yorker—as
does Adam
Gopnik in his book—as a very American practice.
AL: In England if you start with facts that require checking
it would be laughable. To me that's one of the great pleasures of
the fact-checking department is that it is full of very, very bright
people.
RB: When I have pointed out errors to the magazine I found
the responses amusing.
AL: The practice of wryness and open admissions of guilt
and genial pedantry. I love all that. I think lots of English writers
find it completely—some writers have written once for the magazine
and never again. They find all the editorial attention and caution
too much to bear. I can't get enough of it. To me the fact checker
is not someone who is making my life difficult but someone who is
encouraging me to get things right in the first place.
RB: Do you foresee being at The New Yorker in 40
years? Would you want to write somewhere else?
AL: Oh no, I wouldn't want to write somewhere else. They
will almost certainly will tip me out soon.
RB: Oh please.
AL: There is nowhere else I would wish or be happy writing
for. I'm extremely lucky. Obviously, at some point they will rumble
me and as I say they will knock on my door and say, "Sorry we got
the wrong guy. We've finally been through the files. You're the
wrong one."
RB: You don't really believe that.
AL: "So you're out of here." How long one should
go on reviewing movies is, of course, an interesting matter. If
I felt that movies were getting me down, I would stop.
 RB:
But you don't only review movies.
AL: No. The book is exactly split half and half, to the
page between movies and other stuff. I need both.
RB: Is there a book you want to write?
AL: No. No creative gift. I leave that to my wife. You can
only have so much creativity in one family.
RB: I noticed in your piece on Walker Evans that you seemed
to dismiss the photographs he took for Carlton Beals' The Crime
of Cuba. As someone who both appreciates Evans and has a deep
interest in Cuba, I wonder why.
AL: I was probably wrong about that. They seemed to me to...I
don't know. I'd have to go back and read what I wrote about them.
RB: You were dismissive of them.
AL: If I went back, I should and would have probably rewritten
that. I am interested in the things that I got wrong and the things
I missed. They seemed to me at the time that they were—that
it was a learning curve for him [Evans] rather then finished work.
I thought he went there [Cuba] and came back refreshed but that
that the real stuff was still ahead of him. I may well be wrong
about that.
RB: I don't see a big leap from the '33 Cuba photographs
to the FSA pictures or the work in the Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men.
AL: You may well be right. I need to go look at those again.
Maybe it was to do with the layout at the Met.
RB: Have you seen the Getty book, Walker Evans: Cuba?
AL: No. I've certainly seen all the photos but not in the
show.
RB: One last question. To quote the title from your wife's
novel, how do you do it?
AL: Round midnight. I wait till peace and quiet and write
as I go. I don't enjoy writing. I enjoy rewriting. I like editing
myself down. It is journalism. I'm not sitting there waiting for
the muse to descend. I'm lucky I have subjects. Nothing would terrify
me more than sitting down and being told to write a novel, Chapter
One. That would seem like naked self-exposure to me. Whereas I hope
that most of these pieces are by way of being tributes, even if
they're sometimes disapproving tributes, to the efforts of other
people. Which happens to suit me far more. I remain in nothing of
awe for those that can start from scratch and build the monuments
and all the outhouses by themselves.
RB: That reminds me of a Steve Martin joke, "Look what
I did starting with just a blank sheet of paper and pencil."
So what we have to look forward to in the foreseeable future from
you is more of the same?
AL: Keep up with the movies until movies themselves die.
And then again, I haven't gone through the back catalogue yet, all
the things I want to write about. There is one big subject that
I haven't written about which I have been meaning to do for about
10 years now. I finally will do it probably at the beginning of
next year.
RB: So there is a book coming?
AL: Not a book, just one big piece that I want to do. Which
is about P.G. Wodehouse. When that finally comes out you'll see,
that in fact, I am the madman in the attic. You'll find what level
of lunacy a critic can descend to.
____
|
