Werner Herzog: The Hollywood Interview

Werner Herzog: The Hollywood Interview

Werner Herzog  

WERNER HERZOG BRINGS THE MUSIC BACK
By
Alex Simon


Academy Award-nominated German film director, screenwriter, actor and opera director Werner Herzog was born Werner H. Stipetić on 5 September 1942 in Munich. His family moved to the remote Bavarian village of Sachrang in the Chiemgau Alps after the house next to theirs was destroyed during bombing towards the close of World War II. When he was twelve, he and his family moved back to Munich. The same year, Herzog was told to sing in front of his class at school and adamantly refused. He was almost expelled for this and until the age of eighteen listened to no music, sang no songs and studied no instruments. He would later say that he would easily give ten years from his life to be able to play an instrument. At fourteen, he was inspired by an encyclopedia entry about film-making which he says provided him with "everything I needed to get myself started" as a film-maker. He studied at the University of Munich, despite earning a scholarship to Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.




In the early 1960s, Herzog worked nightshifts as a welder in a steel factory to help fund his first films. He hasn’t put down the camera since. He is often associated with the German New Wave movement along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and Wim Wenders His films often feature heroes with impossible dreams, people with unique talents in obscure fields, or individuals who find themselves in conflict with nature.

Herzog’s films have won and been nominated for many awards. His first important award was the Silver Bear for his first feature, Signs of Life. Nosferatu the Vampyre was also nominated for Golden Bear in 1979. Most notably, Herzog won the best director award for Fitzcarraldo at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival where, in 1975 his The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser won The Special Jury Prize (also known as the 'Silver Palm'). Other Herzog films nominated for Golden Palm are: Woyzeck and Where The Green Ants Dream. His films have also been nominated at many other important festivals around the world: César Awards (Aguirre, The Wrath of God), Emmy Awards (Little Dieter Needs to Fly), European Film Awards (My Best Fiend, a documentary about his legendarily tumultuous relationship with actor Klaus Kinski) and Venice Film Festival (Scream of Stone and The Wild Blue Yonder). In 1987 he and his half-brother, Lucki Stipetic, won the Bavarian Film Awards for Best Producing, for Cobra Verde and in 2002 he won the Dragon of Dragons Honorary Award at the Kraków Film Festival.

Herzog was honored at the 49th San Francisco International Film Festival, receiving the 2006 Film Society Directing Award. Grizzly Man, his documentary of the life and death of Timothy Treadwell, won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival. Encounters at the End of the World won the award for Best Documentary at the 2008 Edinburgh International Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Documentary Feature.

Herzog’s latest might seem to be a departure from his usual fare, but if you look closer, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans bears many of the master’s signatures. Nicolas Cage stars as a drug-addicted New Orleans cop whose life is slowly coming apart in the changing world of the post-Katrina Big Easy. Although it shares half a title with Abel Ferrara’s 1992 cult classic Bad Lieutenant, the similarity begins and ends there, with Port of Call being every bit as much of a Werner Herzog original as Bad Lieutenant was all Ferrara. The First Look Features release, which co-stars Eva Mendes, Val Kilmer and Alvin "Xzibit" Joiner hits U.S. screens November 20.

Werner Herzog sat down with The Hollywood Interview in Los Angeles, where he has lived since 1995. Here’s what transpired:

When I first heard you were doing this film, I thought ‘What an unlikely marriage of subject and filmmaker.’

Werner Herzog: (laughs) What’s your thought now?

I loved it. I think it’s your funniest film.

It is, yes. There’s such an instant rapport with the audience in terms of the sort of wild, hilarious side of it. It’s humor that you cannot easily name, however, like when you look at slapstick, you know immediately what it is that’s so funny. You know where the jokes are. But here it’s very hard to figure that out, yet audiences have responded very strongly to it.

So there was no hesitation on your part in doing a sequel, or remake of sorts?

It does not bespeak great wisdom to call the film The Bad Lieutenant, and I only agreed to make the film after William Finkelstein, the screenwriter, who had seen a film of the same name from the early nineties, had given me a solemn oath that this was not a remake at all. But the film industry has its own rationale, which in this case was the speculation of starting some sort of a franchise. I have no problem with this. What the producers accepted was my suggestion to make the title more specific—Port of Call: New Orleans, and now the film’s title combines both elements. Originally, the screenplay was written with New York as a backdrop, and again the rationale of the producers set in by moving it to New Orleans, since shooting there would mean a substantial tax benefit. It was a move I immediately welcomed. In New Orleans it was not only the levees that breeched, but it was civility itself: there was a highly visible breakdown of good citizenship and order. Looting was rampant, and quite a number of policemen did not report for duty; some of them took brand new Cadillacs from their abandoned dealerships and vanished onto dry ground in neighboring states. Less fancy cars disappeared only a few days later. This collapse of morality was matched by the neglect of the government in Washington, and it is hard to figure out whether this was just a form of stupidity or outright cynicism. So we tried to incorporate those elements into the story.

Herzog with Nicolas Cage and Eva Mendes.

I thought it was a satire.

A satire, I think, is something else. I can’t explain it…there’s something more mysterious to it, something much darker and more subversive. A satire would be, it would try to imitate something and try to ridicule something, and here it doesn’t do it, so I don’t feel comfortable labeling it as a satire. Let’s be content with saying it’s hilarious. (laughs)

Okay, but tonally, it reminded me a great deal of David Lynch’s work.

It’s hard to imagine where you’d see that context. I think in David Lynch’s films you do not have that kind of humor. They’re much bleaker, and much stranger in a way…

I don’t know, a lot of this is pretty strange…

(both laugh) Yes, okay. We’ve got the demented iguanas…

And the dead guy’s spirit break-dancing in the middle of the floor…

(laughs) Yes, yes…

A lot of that, to me, is very Lynchian and while I’ve always found a lot of humor in the subtext of your films, you certainly aren’t known as a filmmaker who specializes in, or even utilizes, a lot of humor. Quite the opposite.

Well, over the decades people have laughed during films of mine, but the difference is, they weren’t sure whether they should be laughing or not. Grizzly Man, for example, has these very hilarious moments.

Well…uncomfortably funny, at least for me.

Yes, you feel uncomfortable, but for example when Timothy Treadwell is in the tent and he’s cursing all sorts of gods because of the rain, and then an hour later he’s flooded with rain, and his tent is crushed, and he continues recording from his crushed tent. He knew this was a hilarious moment, and he plays it dead-pan as a star in his own movie. So of course, there are very hilarious moments.

I understand, and I don’t disagree. I guess what I was referring to was the community of the so-called “film intelligentsia” that tend to label your work as very dark, very brooding…

It’s not the film intelligentsia that I object to. It’s more the kind of post-structuralist, post-modernists, vapid, academic babble that you hear quite often.

Most of the film professors in the world.

Yes, they’re all losers.

Herzog in the police station set, with Nicolas Cage in background.

Yeah, they tend to be people who never made it in the business and then take their anger out on working filmmakers.

I do not postulate that they have to make a living in the film industry, but it’s an unhealthy attitude with which to watch films, because I think films should be viewed with an element of wonder, of surprise, of marveling at something, and they take all the notion of wonder away from you. They stifle it. That’s why I don’t like it.

I won’t use the word “satire,” but I saw your Bad Lieutenant as a commentary on American consumerism.

I became aware of how broken the American system of finance was when I realized you got punished for not owing money. What finally woke me up was a banality: when attempting to lease a car I was confronted by the dealership with the unpleasant news that my credit score was abysmal, and hence I had to pay a much higher monthly rate. Why is that, I asked — I had always paid my bills, I had never owed money to anyone. That was exactly my problem: I had never borrowed money, had hardly ever used a credit card, and my bank account was not in the red. But the system punished you for not owing money, and rewarded those who did. I realized that the entire system was sick, that this could not go well, and I instantly withdrew money I had invested in stock of Lehman Brothers while a bank manager, ecstatic, with shuddering urgency, was trying to persuade me to buy even more of it. So it’s not so much consumerism, as a system that couldn’t sustain itself in the long run. I see this as a noir film, really. We’re living through a great time of insecurity right now. Film noir always is a consequence of the Climate of Time; it needs a growing sense of insecurity, of depression. The literature of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett is a child of the Great Depression, with film noir as its sibling. I sensed something coming in the months leading up to the making of the film: a breakdown which was so obvious in New Orleans, and half a year before finances and the economy collapsed, the signs were written on the wall.

Is that feeling of depression that you sense what attracted you to this material?

I think so, yes. In a way, I was totally astonished by The Dark Knight because, on the one hand, it’s a huge, mainstream movie. But it also astonished me at how dark it was, as though it was a premonition of something coming at us. I went to see the film, and ran into Christian Bale, which was the only reason I saw the film: I wanted to see how Christian was doing, because I so love that man, as an actor. I ran into Christian and (director) Christopher Nolan, and said to Nolan ‘Congratulations, this is the most significant film of the whole year.’ He thought I was kind of making it up, or joking. And I said ‘No, no, no! This is a film of real substance. It doesn’t matter if it’s mainstream or not.’ And it’s wonderful that he made the film the way he did.

And you were seeking to bring that same flavor to Bad Lieutenant?

Yeah, but in a different way. I mean, The Dark Knight isn’t funny at all…

I have to disagree with you there: I thought Heath Ledger was hilarious—the same way Malcolm McDowell was in A Clockwork Orange.

Yeah, but scarier, really deeply scary, as was Malcolm McDowell. Whereas Nicolas Cage is more joyful. You see the bliss of evil with Nicolas in this film. As vile and as debased as he gets, you have to enjoy it because it’s these qualities that connect him and the film deeply to the audience.

Cage and Herzog confer on the set.

Yes, because in a way, he was the purest character in the film.

Yes, it’s a wonderful part and the way Nicolas crafted it, it’s like he put his whole existence into it, somehow. You don’t see something like that often.

Did the screenplay have that same spirit when you initially read it, and did it change much during the course of the shoot?

Yes, it did. It is still (writer) William Finkelstein’s text, but as usual during my work as a director it kept shifting, demanding its own life, and I invented new scenes such as a new beginning and a new end, the iguanas, the “dancing” soul—and actually this is Finkelstein’s, who plays a very convincing gangster in the film—the childhood story of pirate’s treasure, and a spoon of sterling silver. I also deleted quite a number of scenes where the protagonist takes drugs, simply because I personally dislike the culture of drugs. Sometimes changes entered to everyone’s surprise. To give one example: Nicolas knew that sometimes after a scene was shot I would not shut down the camera if I sensed there was more to it, a gesture, an odd laughter, or an “afterthought” from a man left alone with all the weight of a rolling camera, the lights, the sound recording, the expectant eyes of a crew upon him. I simply would not call “cut” and leave him exposed and suspended under the pressure of the moment. He, the Bad Lieutenant, after restless deeds of evil, takes refuge in a cheap hotel room, and has an unexpected encounter with the former prisoner whom he had rescued from drowning in a flooded prison tract at the beginning of the film. The young man, now a waiter delivering room service, notices there is something wrong with the Lieutenant, and offers to get him out of there. I kept the camera rolling, but nothing more came from Nicolas. “What, for Heaven’s sake, could I have added,” he asked. And without thinking for a second I said, “Do fish have dreams?” We shot the scene once more with this line, and it looked good and strange and dark. But it required being anchored in yet an additional scene at the very end of the film, with both men, distant in dreams leaning against the glass of a huge aquarium where sharks and rays and large fish move slowly as if they indeed were caught in the dreams of a distant and incomprehensible world. I love cinema for moments like this.

Tell us about your impressions of post-Katrina New Orleans.

Well, I hadn’t seen New Orleans ever before, so I don’t know the pre-Katrina New Orleans, although I had a basic idea what it was about. I think it was the right location for the film. This was fertile ground to stage a film noir, or rather a new form of film noir where evil was not just the most natural occurrence. It was the bliss of evil which pervades everything in this film. Also, the people of the city understand that bringing people and life back into the city would come through music and culture, and would attract movie-making that would, in its wake, bring people back. I think it’s a wonderful concept. You wouldn’t find that if, let’s say, Omaha, Nebraska had been hit by a terrifying tornado, they would probably do something else to bring people back. In New Orleans, it’s about music. Bring the music back. Even the police department really supported the film, and I really admire the police in New Orleans for their sense of poetry.

How do you mean?

They knew it was movies. It was a beautiful figment of movie fantasy, the whole film. They had the nerve to go ahead with it after they had read the screenplay. They came back to me and said “You know what? We’re going to support you. We’re going to block streets for you. We want this filmed in our city.” And I bowed my head and said ‘This is unexpected and marvelous.’ You see, the city needs a police department of that caliber.



I was in New Orleans last exactly a month, to the day, before Katrina hit, and had been there several times prior as an adult. I always had the feeling that bad things were around you, but were being held back, both literally and metaphorically.

That’s a very good observation, yes.

Many people have compared post-Katrina New Orleans to Europe after WW II, which you grew up in. Did you see any parallels?

No, that was a different sort of thing. Germany was not hit by a natural disaster. Its wound was self-inflicted and a consequence of systematic barbarism during the Nazi regime.

Sure, but one could argue that Katrina’s causing the levees to fail was a consequence on institutional incompetence and indifference to those from a lower socio-economic status.

Yes, but it was not a criminal plot and industrialization of mass murder, of genocide, which you found in Germany during the Nazi time, so I have hesitation to compare it. The comeback for Germany was different than that of New Orleans. It was mostly the women. You see 1945-46 was the year of women in Germany. Most of the men were either dead, or in captivity. The women rolled up their sleeves, cleared the rubble and started the rebuilding. It was the women who instantly acted. So in that respect it is a different destruction and a different recovery. However for children, it was marvelous to grow up in the ruins! Those were our kingdoms and forts. We had whole cleared-out blocks to play in, that still had guns and live ammunition buried in the rubble. I found a sub-machine gun once and tried to shoot a bird with it. The recoil knocked me to the ground. My mother, to my surprise, was not angry. She knew how to shoot a gun and taught my brothers and I how to secure, unload and shoot the gun. She took us into the forest and shot a single round through this big, thick log. The bullet went straight through and all these splinters flew out the other side. She said “This is what you must expect from a gun, so you must never point even a wooden or plastic gun at anybody.” I was cured from that moment on with any preoccupation of guns or weapons, and I’ve never so much as pointed my finger at someone since that day.



It’s interesting you mention that because your attitude toward presenting violence in your films has been almost reverent, in a way. In this film, for example, the violence is certainly there, but you never linger on it.

Yes, and we never really show it happening, just its aftermath. There’s only one real shoot-out, and it’s completely stylized. I do not like violence, graphic violence on the screen, in particular when it is violence against the defenseless. So I do not want to see in graphic detail the murder of a child. I do not want to see in graphic detail the rape of a woman. That’s what I do not want to see, and in our film you don’t see the murder of the Senegalese family.

Tell us about working with Nicolas Cage.

A great joy. This relentless, high level of professionalism he has is really joyous. The work itself was actually very quiet, very focused, almost like open-heart surgery. You don’t rush it, but you focus on the essentials. This is how I like to work, and Nicolas Cage followed me in this regard with blind faith. We had met only once at Francis Ford Coppola’s, his uncle’s, winery in Napa Valley almost three decades ago when Nicolas was an adolescent, and I was about to set out for the Peruvian jungle in order to move a ship over a mountain, for Fitzcarraldo. Now, we wondered why and how we had eluded each other ever since, why we had never worked together, and it became instantly clear that we would do this film together, or neither one of us would do it. There was an urge in both of us to join forces.

Patricia Clarkson: The Hollywood Interview

Patricia Clarkson: The Hollywood Interview

Yale  

Actress Patricia Clarkson.


PATRICIA CLARKSON: BELLE OF THE BALL
By
Alex Simon

Editor’s Note: This article appears in the March 2008 issue of Venice Magazine.


Patricia Clarkson should be designated a national treasure. One of America’s finest actors, she first appeared on movie screens (and made many man’s heart-a-flutter) in Brian de Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), playing the wholesome wife of Kevin Costner’s intrepid G-man Eliot Ness. Since that time, Patricia Clarkson has appeared in over 60 roles in TV and feature films, playing everything from suburban housewives to drug-addled lesbian actresses. The diversity in her body of work betrays a talent that seems to grow and evolve with each passing year, a rare mark that only the real mccoys of the artistic community can boast to bear.

Born and raised in the Big Easy AKA New Orleans, LA., this southern belle made her debut on the world stage December 29, 1959, the fifth child (and fifth daughter) of a father who ran the Louisiana State University Medical School and a mother who would go to onto become a renowned city councilwoman. After graduating Yale University’s prestigious drama program, Patricia never stopped working, initially trodding the boards on the New York stage, and soon landing plum supporting roles on television shows such as The Equalizer and Spencer: For Hire.

After making her feature debut, just a few of the noteworthy cinematic turns Patricia made include Rocket Gibraltar, Everybody’s All-American, The Dead Pool, Tune in Tomorrow, Pharaoh’s Army, Jumanji, High Art, Playing by Heart, The Green Mile, The Pledge, Wendigo, The Safety of Objects, Far From Heaven, Dogville, Miracle, The Dying Gaul, The Station Agent and last year’s sleeper hit, Lars and the Real Girl.

2003’s Pieces of April nabbed Patricia many much-deserved kudos, including: An Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress, and best supporting wins from The Boston Society of Film Critics Award, The Chicago Association of Film Critics Award, The National Board of Review, and a special jury prize from Sundance, which was also given for her work in that year’s The Station Agent and All the Real Girls. Patricia also won two Emmy Awards for her recurring role on the HBO hit Six Feet Under, as well as an acting prize from the Deauville Film Festival for The Safety of Objects, and the New York Film Critics Circle Award for her work in Far From Heaven.

2008 has also proven to be a busy year for the lovely Miss Clarkson: Married Life, from Sony Pictures Classics, features Patti as a housewife circa 1948 whose seemingly idyllic marriage to successful corporate exec Chris Cooper is not all that it seems. Pierce Brosnan and Rachel McAdams round out the cast of this fine drama from co-writer/director Ira Sachs, which is punctuated with bursts of black humor and satire. Patti also just wrapped Woody Allen’s latest, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Isabel Coixet’s Elegy, and will start work on Martin Scorsese’s latest effort, Shutter Island, this summer. Patricia Clarkson sat down with Venice recently to discuss her latest work, her remarkable past accomplishments, and her pride in being a New Orleanian.


After seeing Married Life I thought immediately what a great double bill it would make with Far From Heaven.
Patricia Clarkson: (laughs) Yeah, that’s true. They’re very different films, but they’re both period pieces about secrets and intrigue and marriage.

I thought it was very Bergmanesque in the way it examined relationships.
It’s so funny you bring that up, because there is great humor in many of the scenes. We were just in the Miami Film Festival and the audience was just rolling in the aisles during some scenes laughing, and gasping in others. But when Chris and I were actually shooting a lot of these scenes, we went for broke, and it was like Ingmar Bergman. So although people might be laughing at certain points, these are very, very intense scenes and in order for them to have any kind of pay-off, we had to play everything completely straight. We were as invested as any deeply dramatic film I’ve ever done.

I think it was probably nervous laughter you were hearing.
(laughs) Well, yes!

Patricia Clarkson in Married Life.

I thought it was such a brilliant metaphor with the cast playing charades at the end.
Yes, and then putting the house back together.

Tell us about working so closely with Chris Cooper.
He’s an incredible man, very bright. He’s a real man. Everything you would want him to be, he is. Sometimes you meet or work with a star, and they disappoint. He doesn’t: he’s a gentleman. He has crazy talent. We actually worked together years ago in a film called Pharaoh’s Army (1995). It’s a tiny, little Civil War film where Chris plays a Union soldier and I’m a confederate woman on a farm whose husband is off at war. Chris and his men come and basically take over my farm. It’s this kind of chaste, dark love story in a way between me and Chris. It was actually the very first independent movie I ever did, before High Art. So we’ve been friends for years, and I’m friends with his wife, so that made doing this film with him very easy, because I was able to build on the intimacy of our friendship that was already there. Because you can only act so much, as an actor. There has to be some kind of connection there. He’s very giving, very selfless, which is rare.

Clarkson and Chris Cooper in Married Life.

It was great to see Pierce Brosnan on-screen again. He’s like this generation’s Cary Grant.
Yes, he’s got all the talent and all the charm. He’s timeless and effortless and…how much more thrilled could I be that I’ve got Chris Cooper as my husband and Pierce Brosnan as my confidante! Pierce is a real gentleman, too.

You’re a southern belle, born and raised in New Orleans. You’ve also played some great repressed women, all of whom could have easily slipped into caricature but you made them very real. Being from the south did you grow up around a lot of these types of women?
Well Pat is not repressed, so to speak, she’s secretive. I think Pat, for a period woman, without revealing her secret, is quite a sexual, sensual modern woman. She’s trapped by the times, but the era might repress her, but I don’t think Pat is a truly repressed woman. I think she’s a woman that has to adhere to the constraints that are placed upon her. I think if she’d been born ten years later, she’d have had a very different life. I think would have had a career, and lovers, and…a fast car! (laughs) And lots of lipstick! (laughs) So there was a certain repression to women of eras gone by that we associate with period films, but if you think about what she says at the get-go, that love is sex, many people still find it shocking now that I say that!

That’s too bad.
(both laugh) Yes, it is.

L to R: Patricia Clarkson, co-writer/director Ira Sachs and Chris Cooper confer on the set of Married Life.

But you had a very dynamic, working mother growing up, so that had to have had an influence on you.
Oh, absolutely, but she didn’t go to work until we were a little older.

How many siblings do you have?
Four older sisters, and we’re all eighteen months apart.

Wow…all that hot southern blood in one house! Dad had to have at least one shotgun loaded at all times.
Oh, I think he had several! (laughs) But we were like his harem. My father is a remarkable man. He’s a very kind, gentle soul, and is very witty. He’s one of the funniest people I’ve ever known. He started out running a children’s home when we were little, then got a PhD in Public Health, and ran the LSU Medical School Department of Medicine. He wasn’t a doctor. He was an administrator. But he’s retired now and lived in a house of six women and two female dogs. I mean…but I think he kind of loved it! (laughs) He has male grandchildren now, so the estrogen count that he had to live with has petered out somewhat.

Do you and your sisters all look alike?
We all have similar timbres to our voices and similar mannerisms, so you know when you see us together that we’re sisters. I look like my mother, especially in this movie. In the poster for the movie, oh my God! (laughs) My sisters are all very accomplished and have beautiful lives. My oldest sister isn’t married, but my middle sisters all mix family and marriage and very challenging careers.

Did they all stay in the South?
Yes, they all stayed in the New Orleans area except for one, who lives in Dallas.

So you’re the only defector then who not only defected, but went to that ultimate Yankee state, New York.
Yes, when I was 19. I transferred from LSU to Fordham University’s College at Lincoln Center. My parents were…it was difficult for southern parents to let their daughter go off by herself to New York City. They agreed to let me go to New York if I finished my bachelor’s degree. So it was a real stretch for my parents, putting their fifth child through school, and they weren’t rich by any means. We were middle, or upper-middle class, but New York has always been incredibly expensive. So the sacrifices they made to send me there were enormous.

They must’ve seen something in you early on.
My mother especially knew that I was serious about being an actress.

When did you know you were an actress?
Probably when I was 13.

What happened?
I gave a speech in speech class, and my teacher said “You know, I think you’re an actress. You should join the drama department.” And I did! And that was it. I did a play called F.L.I.P.P.E.D.: Feminist Liberation Idealist Party for Permanent Equality and Democracy. The drama teacher was a major feminist. It was 1974 or ’75 and we did this rockin’ play! I had great training in New Orleans and great mentors, believe it or not. So I went to Fordham and had an amazing mentor there named Joe Jezewski, and then I got into Yale. I went right from Fordham into graduate school there. It was a fantastic, and rigorous experience. I mean, it was eighteen hour days. But in so many ways I didn’t realize at the time, it prepared me so much for this business, and not in the sense of auditioning and “the business,” but in a chemical, physiological way because it required so much of you. Then I graduated in ’85 and lived in New York.

The first thing I remember seeing you in was when you played the butt-kickin’ bride on that great episode of The Equalizer.
(laughs) Oh my God! I have to tell you, I did The Untouchables before I did The Equalizer, and I also did a Spencer: for Hire. (laughs)

Oh my God, it’s ‘80s night!
(laughs) Right? I played a murderer on that one. Foreshadowing. (both laugh)

But I imagine having a film like The Untouchables be your first feature must’ve been an amazing experience.
It was! Working with Brian de Palma first out of the gate was a great education. Again, it was illuminating and it was real on-the-job training.

Clarkson and Kevin Costner in The Untouchables (1987), her film debut.

It must’ve been especially tough with your stage background because, if memory serves, de Palma shot you almost entirely in extreme close-up.
Yes. I couldn’t touch a cup of coffee during that shoot! (laughs) But Brian really helped. You never forget your first, and he really took me under his wing. We keep in touch still. We’re friends, and I adore him. He has a great, wicked sense of humor.

You did about 2-3 years of stage work before your film career really took off, right?
Right. I was doing a lot of off-Broadway and Broadway. It was a dream, just beautiful shows, like The House of Blue Leaves. I met John Guare, and Richard Greenberg, and Nicky Silver. I was lucky and had great fortune to do this wide variety of parts on stage and then slowly doing these films like Rocket Gibraltar and Everybody’s All-American, which took place in Louisiana, but I played the Yankee! (laughs) And then I did The Dead Pool. Then things were cool for me for a while, while I was in my early ‘30s, and that was an interesting time for me.

That’s a tough age for actresses. It’s like the old saying about the three stages in an actress’ life: babe, district attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.
(laughs) Yes, it’s so true!

You mentioned The Dead Pool. Tell us about the great Clint Eastwood.
I had just done Everybody’s All-American, and flew to San Francisco and met him for the first time. There were women screaming outside the restaurant, and just about everywhere we went: just mobs of people. He’s such a movie star. Working with George Clooney down the line was quite similar: just the sheer power they have with people. But at the same time, they’re both very real, and approachable and first-class people. But being the female lead in the final Dirty Harry movie was amazing! You know that Clint is famous for doing one take, right? So here I am on maybe my third movie, this huge part with lots of dialogue, playing an anchorwoman rattling off all this dialogue, paragraphs worth, and Clint would be looking at me and would say “That was good for me. Was it good for you?” I’d say ‘Uh yeah, sure!’ “Movin’ on!” (laughs) He was cutting Bird at the time, and was really burning the candle at both ends, and was still just unflappable. I’m very grateful that part of my “lore,” so to speak, will be that I worked with Clint Eastwood.

When you look at your career, it’s quite obvious you’ve chosen quality over quantity from the get-go. You easily could’ve gone the “starlet/babe” route when you began, but you never did. What motivates your choices for picking the right project?
There were some movies I passed on early on, and some movies I didn’t get, some big studio films. But now I look back and I realize that I really came later in life to a kind of career. I was somewhat typecast as suburban “mom” type roles early on. But I’ve always had this deep voice, so I think it was tough sometimes for directors to cast me as the ingénue. Because I’d walk in and look a certain way, then open my mouth and have this…voice! (laughs) So I think I sort of grew into my voice, my face, my body as I got older.

So you think of yourself as a late-bloomer?
Mm-hm. And, I hate the cliché, but maybe I’m an old soul. I think it all works better now, somehow. It’s all more symmetrical. (laughs)

Some of our greatest actors have had careers like that: Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman. Even Gena Rowlands didn’t really come into her own until she did A Woman Under the Influence when she was in her 40s.
Those are all my heroes! I’m lucky because now I have choices that I never had. In some ways, it’s “be careful what you wish for,” that I have the career that I have. That doesn’t mean that I don’t still have heartbreak, and disappointment, or feel that I’m sometimes underpaid (laughs). Shooting some of these independent films, and I am for the most part, an indie actress, but you know what? It’s tiring sometimes not having a place to sit between takes! (laughs) The amenities of shooting with money cannot ever be underestimated! (laughs) That’s why Married Life was a great job. It was truly an art film, I felt, with a great cast, but we also got paid. They treated us beautifully.

Who were your influences when you were growing up?
Oh, everyone from Ingrid Bergman to Lucille Ball, and Peter Sellers!

He’s one of my heroes. Every Pink Panther movie that came out…Oh my God, my father and I were obsessed with The Pink Panther movies! And The Party, what a brilliant movie! So I had odd, for New Orleans anyway, odd influences.

I don’t know about that: N’awlins is an eclectic city.
Yes, at heart it’s a European city.

It’s not the United States, not at all. It’s its own country.
And you’d have thought with the reaction to (Hurricane) Katrina that it wasn’t part of the United States! It was always everyone’s biggest fear, and it happened.

You were involved with the relief effort.
I was able to get back into the city because my mother is a councilwoman and so I just started helping wherever I could. It’s hard to talk about it…it’s difficult because I didn’t lose my life, so to speak, in Katrina. I witnessed people I love lose things. Fortunately no one in my family lost their life, but they lost a hell of a lot of other things. So I can talk about the gravity of it as an event, but at the end of the day, if you’re in the middle of it, it’s an entirely different thing. I love my family dearly and I love the city of New Orleans, and it’s not going anywhere! It’s rallying. It needs help, but it’s rallying. So what else should we talk about? What else do you have written on that little pad? (laughs)

Well, let’s see…You mentioned High Art earlier. Your character in that film had to go into some very dark places.
Oh my God! It’s interesting. That film changed everything for me. It was a glorious opportunity, one that I didn’t even realize at the time. I loved the movie and I loved the part, although I’m not German, I’m not gay and I’ve never even smoked pot! But (writer/director) Lisa Cholodenko had faith in me that I would transform and that I understood Greta in some way.

How did you get that accent down?
I don’t know. (laughs) It was cast and shot very quickly because we had no money. I mean, it cost $500,000. I knew a German woman and tried to learn her voice and her inflections, but there was no time for a dialect coach or anything. Plus I had to wear those hot leather pants…

Yes, they were…
No! I mean hot as in melting! (laughs) You’re bad…But it was a new beginning for me, in a way, and I’ve been offered magnificent things since then. I think it kind of shattered whatever the view of me was, then you do something that changes that perception. “Wow, if she could do that, maybe she could play my circus trainer who speaks in seven dialects.” (laughs) They start to think that maybe you could become something that’s impossible to picture, which is a great place to be, and a place that I always wanted to be in this business: people seeing me as an actor who could play…almost anything. (laughs)

If you look at your filmography though, it is a pretty diverse slate of characters.
Yeah, but even great movie stars are shape-shifters. Great acting is great acting, whether you’re a movie star or not. It’s interesting, this businesses. I think there’s more breadth in this business (among the talent) than we give people credit for, and people have greater imaginations than we give them credit for. (pause) And I say that because I’m not working right now! (laughs)

You worked with two amazing shape-shifters in The Pledge: Jack Nicholson and Sean Penn.
Again, they were two who don’t disappoint. They’re both consummate artists, two of the greatest actors of any generation, and Sean was a dream director. I was fortunate enough to be cast in the movie, and there was Jack, who knew when to have a light touch off-camera, and then when to drive it home. He’s a master. So I’m always thankful when I get to work with people who expand you, and hopefully make you a better actor. That’s what I seek…God, could I sound more pretentious: ‘That’s what I seek!’ (laughs) But that is what I seek: the idea of working with certain directors and actors that I’ve worked with, because that’s what I love: the actual work, going to work. I love the intimacy, even though it’s sort of a false intimacy you have with directors and other actors. There are times when you form a real friendship, and sometimes you have a real love affair, even though I haven’t! But even in the moment, it is manna from heaven. There is nothing quite like that feeling.

And without sounding pretentious on my end: it’s like a spiritual realization for you.
Yes, and hopefully you keep continuing to have those realizations. Otherwise, if you don’t continue to challenge yourself, you should just stay at home. That’s my motto! (laughs)

Let’s just go through a list of Patti’s greatest hits. You did a movie for writer/director Craig Lucas that was so twisted, but I loved it: The Dying Gaul.
Oh, thank you! Of course the hardest part was that bikini! (laughs) Somehow a bikini is harder than nudity. It’s a weird thing. I’m being sort of facetious…(laughs) That was a beautiful experience, and I loved making that film. I thought it was an incredibly provocative, sexy film.

It also had a lot of very intelligent truths to tell about “the business.” Oh, very much so! Craig Lucas is a beautiful man, and gifted and just a warm, inviting man that you fell incredibly…you feel you can be in a bikini with! (laughs)

Patricia Clarkson in The Station Agent (2003).

The Station Agent: loved it.
That film cuts across all time and place. Whatever country I’m in, people have seen this film. It’s the most universal film I’ve ever made. They all fall in love with this movie.

It has a very gentle spirit and it came out at a time when we needed some gentility in the world.
Yes, it did. Tom McCarthy is a great director. That was his first movie, and for him to capture that tone…I’ve had great luck with first-time, and young directors, knock on wood… (Patricia proceeds to knock on the wooden end table nearby) Here, I’m superstitious! Not so much in age, but first-time, second-time, neophyte filmmakers. I hope to continue to have that in my career, and hopefully they’ll have money! (laughs)

Good Night and Good Luck was the best movie of 2005, I thought. I grew up listening to the stories of the Army-McCarthy hearings and Edward R. Murrow from my parents, and I felt like George Clooney really captured a bygone era with that film.
Even though it wasn’t a large part, it was quite choice, and I love the fact that I am forever a part of that film.

Clarkson in Good Night, and Good Luck (2005).

Did you all know you were doing something special when you were making it?
I think we knew to an extent. We were all thrilled to be on that set. It was all shot on a soundstage. We’d walk through that door, and it was like walking through a time machine once we crossed through into that CBS studio to shoot the film. Everything was right, and we’d just enter. George is really brilliant. This was his baby. For him to set out and direct this movie as his first, it just shows the level of talent that man has.

And yet no one would take him seriously for nearly the first 15 years of his career, pre-ER.
Well, he always worked, shooting lots of pilots, and he was always handsome! (laughs) But I see what you mean. That’s the thing in this business: sometimes it can shift so quickly, but you have to be prepared for the shifts.

And a few young actors of late haven’t, which is very sad.
Mm-hm. It is a business that can be glorious one moment and deadly the next. But you have to remain hungry for the right things.

That’s the key mantra isn’t it: “stay hungry”?
Yeah, for the right things, for the right aspects of this business. All the other stuff you have to do is crucial, but always for me, it has to be just about wanting to work, and not in a 9-to-5 way. You have to be inspired. You have to be thrilled. You have to be all of those things. And maybe not every single job is going to make you want to run around naked (laughs), but in some movies you might have to run around naked! (laughs) So you better be prepared.

What I hear you saying is: it’s the process you have to love.
You do. You have to love the process. And you have to give your life to it.

Clarkson and Chris Cooper in a scene from Married Life.