Interview with James Toback
- Posted: 24th Mar 2010
- Category: Articles
James Toback is the writer and director of several acclaimed films, both fiction and documentary. He is a compulsive gambler whose work is often autobiographical and tends to revisit certain themes. Highlights include The Gambler, Fingers and documentary The Big Bang, as well as the Warren Beatty film Bugsy.
Toback talks to Zoe Morgan Chiswick about hypnosis and the art of interviewing a friend with a troubled past.
How did your idea to make a documentary about Mike Tyson come about?
It started with the death of my mother which was the seminal individual event of my life, because I was closer to her than I was to anybody. And I found myself doing things which were so reckless and so likely to end in my extinction that I felt, I am going not to be around much longer unless I consciously stop myself. So, the way I decided to do that was to say I’ll start to make a movie and that will get me back on track. What’s the movie? It has to be one I can finance myself because otherwise I’m gonna have to wait too long. How do I figure out what it is? To find a way of stopping that behaviour and in addition find somebody who could be the movie, so I don’t have to spend a lot of time casting and getting a whole group of people.
Since Tyson and I had been talking for years about doing this movie and prepared for it in a weird way with Black and White and to a lesser degree When Will I Be Loved [Tyson appeared in both films] and because he had just crashed literally and figuratively and was in rehab I thought now is the time from every point of view if I’m ever going to do it with him it’s gonna be now.
So essentially we started shooting three weeks after the idea was hatched. And since we’d been having these very intense kind of communally revelatory conversations about sex, identity, madness, love, death, crime, boxing for 22 years there wasn’t much doubt about where we were going with it. The idea of the moving boxes of the multiple voices seemed to mirror the several personalities that were active in Tyson, so we shot for a week and then I edited for a year.
And it’s in the nature of documentary, this is the second one that I’ve done, that editing becomes the writing. Since you’ve already done the writing in a fictional film, you’re basically executing a plan and editing therefore becomes much more an aspect of selection than it does of invention. Whereas in a documentary the notion of invention is endemic to it because you basically have all this footage; but you don’t have any pre-ordained map.
You mentioned you were going to base the documentary around the theme of friendship so how do you think that your relationship with Tyson influenced the portrayal of him in the film?
Well my original idea was to shoot both of us and to make it a record of that relationship. Once I decided to go all the way with him it was then a question of basically using him to do two things: reveal him so as a kind of record of this very complex intriguing character and at the same time articulate metaphorically and through him the same themes that I’ve been obsessed with in all of my movies. So, it became a movie about not just Mike Tyson but the same subjects: identity madness, language, sexual obsession, death, crime, all the things that are near and dear to my heart as an artist and a human being.
How did you prepare yourself and Tyson for the interviewing process?
I really decided that what I had to do was simply allow the extremely relaxed uninhibited way that we dealt with each other to unfold in a very organic and natural way. I knew that we had this easy rapport in every respect and all I had to do was create circumstances similar to those. So since I wanted this highly stylized visual representation of it the first goal was to find a way to place two cameras so that they wouldn’t make him too self-conscious but at the same time I could shoot things in the way I wanted to shoot them.
That was not too difficult to figure out, what was essential was to create this mood. So I thought, what’s the signpost of the way we are when these conversations occur and have been occurring over the years? I realized tone was very significant, that in order to draw him out I needed to engage in a kind of quasi self-hypnosis and hypnosis simultaneously where the unconscious is summoned up.
Then I’m toying with how he treats women sexually and what he wants from women sexually… From some fundamental source of truth he’s not trying to impress, to ignore, and basically went out on a limb and so did I with him.
There’s a certain excitement in that. This is why I wanted this movie, this is it. That’s what the great payoff is when you’re making a film document or fictional: an epiphanous moment of revelation when you just say, this is what it was supposed to be.
Making the documentary in a way you were taking on the responsibility of piecing together the parts of Tyson as a man. Were you ever worried that it might open him up to negative judgment?
In general I don’t give a fuck what people are going to think about it. I mean, I like people to like my movies; obviously I don’t want to make it for an audience of one, namely myself. But basically what I’m really doing is making a movie for me and anyone else who wants to join in on my enthusiasm is welcome.
But, is it good for him? I assume that I’m on the right track, period. I don’t think that there is any security whatsoever [and] the only way I can begin to feel right is if I don’t care what happens to me; I don’t care what happens to him in terms or response, reception, image, go for the truth. What is the truth, what are, who are you? What are you about? What is your longing? What is your need? What is your desire? Allow me to help to affect it.
I’m not going to promise that we’ll win – if we do, we do. But basically the goal is not to get you, Mike Tyson forgiven for all your sins and appreciated [and] loved by the rest of humanity. Although I think the movie actually does something very close to that. But my goal is to get to the truth of the complexity of who you are and that is my allegiance to that truth, not to some generally favourable notion of who you should be.
Which do you prefer, documentary or fiction and what do you consider to be the pros and cons?
I prefer whichever one is most exciting to me at the moment, for instance, I know that I don’t want to make a documentary now, I want to make a movie that is fictional and about a certain subject and in a certain way and with a certain actor. But if you said to me just before the Tyson film, what would you like to do? It would have been to make the Tyson film. I think the film is the issue. What is the film I want to make, not whether it’s a documentary or not.
The advantage of making a documentary to me, is that it’s pure in its open investigative capacity, so an extreme version of what I’m doing in a fictional film, which is keeping the mind open everyday and shooting in a way that allows you to explore in a way that you want to explore and not have to stick to a pre-ordained plan that makes documentary filmmaking superior at that level to fictional film-making. What makes fictional film-making superior as a concept is that you then have a real strong start on the editing process which, let’s face it, one doesn’t want to sit around for 9 or 10 months editing the movie. I mean sometimes it’s necessary but you know, it’s better to spend two (months) if you can and if you know generally where you’re going and you’re executing a plan that you had – the editing basically is selection, its emendation, it’s not selection. Right now I’m looking forward to having a somewhat arduous task down the road but a great one.
Toback talks to Zoe Morgan Chiswick about hypnosis and the art of interviewing a friend with a troubled past.
How did your idea to make a documentary about Mike Tyson come about? It started with the death of my mother which was the seminal individual event of my life, because I was closer to her than I was to anybody. And I found myself doing things which were so reckless and so likely to end in my extinction that I felt, I am going not to be around much longer unless I consciously stop myself. So, the way I decided to do that was to say I’ll start to make a movie and that will get me back on track. What’s the movie? It has to be one I can finance myself because otherwise I’m gonna have to wait too long. How do I figure out what it is? To find a way of stopping that behaviour and in addition find somebody who could be the movie, so I don’t have to spend a lot of time casting and getting a whole group of people.
Since Tyson and I had been talking for years about doing this movie and prepared for it in a weird way with Black and White and to a lesser degree When Will I Be Loved [Tyson appeared in both films] and because he had just crashed literally and figuratively and was in rehab I thought now is the time from every point of view if I’m ever going to do it with him it’s gonna be now.
So essentially we started shooting three weeks after the idea was hatched. And since we’d been having these very intense kind of communally revelatory conversations about sex, identity, madness, love, death, crime, boxing for 22 years there wasn’t much doubt about where we were going with it. The idea of the moving boxes of the multiple voices seemed to mirror the several personalities that were active in Tyson, so we shot for a week and then I edited for a year.
And it’s in the nature of documentary, this is the second one that I’ve done, that editing becomes the writing. Since you’ve already done the writing in a fictional film, you’re basically executing a plan and editing therefore becomes much more an aspect of selection than it does of invention. Whereas in a documentary the notion of invention is endemic to it because you basically have all this footage; but you don’t have any pre-ordained map.
You mentioned you were going to base the documentary around the theme of friendship so how do you think that your relationship with Tyson influenced the portrayal of him in the film?
Well my original idea was to shoot both of us and to make it a record of that relationship. Once I decided to go all the way with him it was then a question of basically using him to do two things: reveal him so as a kind of record of this very complex intriguing character and at the same time articulate metaphorically and through him the same themes that I’ve been obsessed with in all of my movies. So, it became a movie about not just Mike Tyson but the same subjects: identity madness, language, sexual obsession, death, crime, all the things that are near and dear to my heart as an artist and a human being.
How did you prepare yourself and Tyson for the interviewing process?
I really decided that what I had to do was simply allow the extremely relaxed uninhibited way that we dealt with each other to unfold in a very organic and natural way. I knew that we had this easy rapport in every respect and all I had to do was create circumstances similar to those. So since I wanted this highly stylized visual representation of it the first goal was to find a way to place two cameras so that they wouldn’t make him too self-conscious but at the same time I could shoot things in the way I wanted to shoot them.
That was not too difficult to figure out, what was essential was to create this mood. So I thought, what’s the signpost of the way we are when these conversations occur and have been occurring over the years? I realized tone was very significant, that in order to draw him out I needed to engage in a kind of quasi self-hypnosis and hypnosis simultaneously where the unconscious is summoned up.
Then I’m toying with how he treats women sexually and what he wants from women sexually… From some fundamental source of truth he’s not trying to impress, to ignore, and basically went out on a limb and so did I with him.
There’s a certain excitement in that. This is why I wanted this movie, this is it. That’s what the great payoff is when you’re making a film document or fictional: an epiphanous moment of revelation when you just say, this is what it was supposed to be.
Making the documentary in a way you were taking on the responsibility of piecing together the parts of Tyson as a man. Were you ever worried that it might open him up to negative judgment?
In general I don’t give a fuck what people are going to think about it. I mean, I like people to like my movies; obviously I don’t want to make it for an audience of one, namely myself. But basically what I’m really doing is making a movie for me and anyone else who wants to join in on my enthusiasm is welcome.
But, is it good for him? I assume that I’m on the right track, period. I don’t think that there is any security whatsoever [and] the only way I can begin to feel right is if I don’t care what happens to me; I don’t care what happens to him in terms or response, reception, image, go for the truth. What is the truth, what are, who are you? What are you about? What is your longing? What is your need? What is your desire? Allow me to help to affect it.
I’m not going to promise that we’ll win – if we do, we do. But basically the goal is not to get you, Mike Tyson forgiven for all your sins and appreciated [and] loved by the rest of humanity. Although I think the movie actually does something very close to that. But my goal is to get to the truth of the complexity of who you are and that is my allegiance to that truth, not to some generally favourable notion of who you should be.
Which do you prefer, documentary or fiction and what do you consider to be the pros and cons?
I prefer whichever one is most exciting to me at the moment, for instance, I know that I don’t want to make a documentary now, I want to make a movie that is fictional and about a certain subject and in a certain way and with a certain actor. But if you said to me just before the Tyson film, what would you like to do? It would have been to make the Tyson film. I think the film is the issue. What is the film I want to make, not whether it’s a documentary or not.
The advantage of making a documentary to me, is that it’s pure in its open investigative capacity, so an extreme version of what I’m doing in a fictional film, which is keeping the mind open everyday and shooting in a way that allows you to explore in a way that you want to explore and not have to stick to a pre-ordained plan that makes documentary filmmaking superior at that level to fictional film-making. What makes fictional film-making superior as a concept is that you then have a real strong start on the editing process which, let’s face it, one doesn’t want to sit around for 9 or 10 months editing the movie. I mean sometimes it’s necessary but you know, it’s better to spend two (months) if you can and if you know generally where you’re going and you’re executing a plan that you had – the editing basically is selection, its emendation, it’s not selection. Right now I’m looking forward to having a somewhat arduous task down the road but a great one.
Related Pages
Read the review in DFGDocs/Reviews