To the outside world, filmmaking is an industry of rare privilege and profit; Hollywood players lead unceasing lives of glamour and ease.
The reality, though, is that most people who make films for a living spend the majority of their time unemployed. The Screen Actors Guild figures only about 15 per cent of its membership are working at any given time, not counting waitressing. Directors have it even worse: There's only one of them for each film.
Which brings us to Philip Kaufman, the helmsman behind such luminescent fare as The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Right Stuff, Henry & June and today's release of Quills.
The last time Kaufman came around was 1993, when he steered Michael Crichton's paranoid financial-industry murder-mystery Rising Sun away from its racist inclinations to make an unusually ambiguous thriller. Unlike many of his previous films, Rising Sun was rewarded with an actual box office. And how was Kaufman rewarded? With seven long years of waiting to get back to work.
"Anyone who is unemployed for long periods of time knows what you go through. Even though I've got plans and ideas and stuff, I'm unemployed more than most of the unemployed are unemployed," explains Kaufman patiently, sitting in a hotel suite on Central Park South. At 64, he has big bushy eyebrows, a mustache and goatee, and a big mane of wavy hair, all the colour and density of light steel wool. A ruddy complexion shows an inclination for the outdoors.
He speaks of working with his wife, Rose, with whom he frequently collaborates on scripts, and his son, Peter, who produces his films. They spent a good two years planning to make The Alienist, an adaptation of a Caleb Carr story. This is how it felt: "We have a lot of plans. We've got storyboards, I've had my French storyboard artist fly in and draw these incredibly beautiful pictures, going through parts of the script. We've chosen locations, we're ready to go. Then it doesn't get made."
It helps that Kaufman resides outside of the tiny Hollywood snow-globe, where the populace lives off the air that others exhale. "I live in San Francisco where we say, 'When the going gets tough, we go for cappuccinos.' And I've got a certain number of friends who are artists and our dialogue isn't oriented around: Success, Failure, what are you doing? What projects you got? and so forth. You learn to be a little bit stoical about it. You just try to find other things to dream about."
For a man who has spent his life capturing stories of passion -- of the sexual kind ( Unbearable Lightness, Henry & June), the pioneering adventurous kind (the Arctic escapade The White Dawn as well as The Right Stuff), and even the rebellious kind (the Jesse James tale Great Northfield, Minnesota Raid) -- Kaufman himself is surprisingly impassive, a man of equanimity. He says things like, "You fight for what you believe, that's what an artist should do," with the kind of fervour a physicist would bring to dictating a recipe for hollandaise sauce.
Kaufman has accepted his status of intermittent filmmaker. "I get knocked down so often, it's just what I do," he says. Unlike many artists who breathe indignant fire in the face of disturbing developments or commercializing trends, Kaufman views culture as a progression that occurs slowly over decades and centuries, rather than as a series of specific hand-to-hand battles.
So don't read too much into the fact that his first film in seven years is about a man who was stripped of his ability to speak, or the fact that Quills is at least his third picture that deals with censorship. Kaufman says it is simply a story that grabbed his interest.
Quills gives us Geoffrey Rush as the Marquis de Sade, a lewd peacock of an id who delights in scandalizing the oppressors of his world. Living comfortably in the asylum at Charenton, where he is a friend of the indulgent abbé (Joaquin Phoenix), de Sade attracts the disapproving notice of Napoleon. When Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine) is dispatched to cure him of his scandalous inclinations, Sade meets the censorious threat head-on by attacking the doctor's hypocritical soul.
Written by Doug Wright, the film was based on his successful off-Broadway play of the mid-nineties. Wright said he was inspired to write the play by the censorious efforts of U.S. Senator Jesse Helms, who attacked funding for an exhibition of the late Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs in 1989.
It was a lucky accident that Quills became newly relevant when U.S. President Bill Clinton found his affair with Monica Lewinsky splayed in front of the world. In Quills, Royer-Collard ends up publishing the works of the Marquis. "When I read the script, it was a time when Ken Starr was pursuing Bill Clinton and then publishing the Starr Report, all these little things that took place around sinks and pizza boxes and black berets," observes Kaufman. "All of that stuff suddenly was all over the world, on the Internet and in bookstores for children to read. And who published all of that stuff? Not the people whose intimate, quiet story that was."
By one measure, Quills fits perfectly in Kaufman's oeuvre as a picture about a historical archetype on the verge of extinction. He prefers to see it more as simply another film about an extreme character.
"Extreme characters are always on the verge of extinction," he says. "That's what The Right Stuff is about. Chuck Yeager is still around, but that individual spirit was transformed into team spirit. Czechoslovakia: All that changed, it became a place for partying. We would never have imagined that when we made [ Unbearable Lightness of Being]
"I've been wrong about some of those things, but so what? The time I made them and in their meaning and their mythological spirit, I think I was right," he says with a sigh. "I mean, I never thought I'd see Yeager selling Delco batteries."
Kaufman may tackle another extreme fellow next: He's talking to Robin Williams about a Liberace movie. A long-delayed film about the spy Aldrich Ames is a possibility. He and Jack Nicholson are also interested in collaborating on an adaptation of Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King. But they've wanted to do it for about 30 years now, so who knows?
"There's three or four things that may happen," offers Kaufman optimistically, then looks up and realizes he is always talking about possible future projects and then suffering as they fail to materialize. Hope springs eternal. "Here I go again," he says.
Simon Houpt