ARLISS HOWARD: Hello.

CHRIS NEUMER: Hi Arliss, it’s a pleasure to speak with you. I want to let you know that I really enjoyed this film. I compared it to one of Robert Altman’s good films as opposed to Pret-a-Porter or Short Cuts.

ARLISS HOWARD: I hear the new one is really great. Gosford Park.

CHRIS NEUMER: I just asked your wife this, but how did you originally get involved with Big Bad Love and Larry Brown’s short stories?

ARLISS HOWARD: It was 1990 or right around in there. I got sent them just to read them because whoever sent them to me knew that I read pretty voraciously. I enjoyed them and I had just finished them and I was in Nebraska, I was crossing out of Nebraska, and I was listening to a public radio station and I heard this amazing piece of music–it was so amazing that I waited for the call letters of the station and pulled over and called the radio station. It was Arlo Burns playing Deathville Blues. I had never heard of that. They somehow synched up for me, the stories and the music, I’m not sure why. I somehow saw them, the collection, as a movie. Some people had been talking to me about making a movie at that time. My brother and I started working and we got a script together pretty quickly and then one thing led to another and I was off working on another project and got busy. 10 years passed and the guy came to me in the winter of 2000 and said, "You know you ought to direct something and I want to help you."

CHRIS NEUMER: That guy was…

ARLISS HOWARD: Some money guy, I can’t remember.

CHRIS NEUMER: So you’d been sitting on the script for 10 years?

ARLISS HOWARD: I’d refer back to it from time to time and I’d talked to Larry over the years. I’d let the option lapse. You don’t know a thing at the time; you only know it in retrospect, looking back. At the time, nothing makes sense to me. This particular day isn’t going to make sense for five years. But when I look back, I see that what I was doing was getting ready on some level for the task and the story needed to just perk. As it exists even in its present state it’s greatest strength isn’t a narrative style, there aren’t a whole lot of events happening, but I was able to flesh out a kind of skeletal structure over the years, using the other stories and characters from the other stories.

CHRIS NEUMER: I must admit, this film did get me to go out and read Larry Brown’s short stories. Every time I came across a really interesting character who wasn’t in the film, I’d always ask, "Why wasn’t this character in the movie?" My favorite was the guy who’s wife wrote incredibly bad fiction. In that story, when his wife wrote "The Hunchwoman from Cincinnati", there was a sentence something like, "and the manuscript set a new record for being returned" and I just burst out laughing. Brown’s style of writing is very unique. It just sort of goes and goes, a chain of thought kind of thing.

ARLISS HOWARD: Yeah. That particular collection is dealing with the same guy in various guises. He’s not always a writer, but he’s always a man whose longing after a woman who’s just left or trying to get rid of a woman or somehow stuck with a woman or a job, or wanting to get out of one. The character of Barlow exists throughout.

CHRIS NEUMER: Like an unnamed narrator throughout. Women? Why is it that they cause so many problems for Larry Brown’s characters?

ARLISS HOWARD: I think it’s really interesting. There aren’t a whole lot of women who read the stories and go, "Wow, what a great writer." Then you get down south and there is more recognition because there’s not as big a guard up. There’s more of a sense of humor about these things. This particular kind of living that involves sexual battles and alcohol. In my experience, a woman doesn’t cause you a problem unless she wants something from it. And the minute that you do and she knows that you do, she either gives it to you or withholds it. Then desperation comes in because you want it more and more, especially as it’s withheld. I think the gamesmanship is learned as you grow up about these things. It becomes sort of a drama of everyday living. Certainly in these particular stories you have these people who have real and imagined problems based on those kinds of sexual discontents. I said to Larry once, "You know, Larry, not all the women of the world are blonde and buxom and want to mow you down." And he said, "Yeah, but wouldn’t it be something if they were?" And I think in his world, he’s sort of decided–and not in all his work, especially in his novels–to label Larry anything based on his collection would be to do that thing that people tend to want to do which is: I don’t understand, so I’ll make this as small as I can. If you look at some of his other work like Father and son and Joe, I think you’ll see much more of a developed sense of story.

CHRIS NEUMER: Yeah, he has the space to get into more detail.

ARLISS HOWARD: There is truth in these things. These are not like made up whole cloth and they aren’t stereotypically positioned. There is truth in them: the basic conflict between men and women and sometimes I think you get educated. If you want to sit around and have a couple of glasses of trendy white wine and talk about things like this, the discussion inevitably shies away from getting right to it. You’d much rather be in a place where you get down right to it.

CHRIS NEUMER: It seems like a more literate take on a film involving Ashley Judd. It strips away all the sappiness and gets down to the core of the matter.

ARLISS HOWARD: There isn’t really a place for sappiness in the South. There’s no real place for it to grow.

CHRIS NEUMER: That’s a commendable trait.

ARLISS HOWARD: Whatever drama is invented down there is more gothic than sappy. There’s too much to be afraid of for certain sentiment to live too long. I just believe in terms of film and in terms of people going down and writing about the south, for the most part it’s not very faithfully rendered. I’m not sure why that is.

ARLISS HOWARD: It’s hard to say because I’d have to go back and look at the first draft of it and then go and look at the shooting script and then the script that was taken from the completed film because there are going to be huge differences between all of them. He was down there with me writing all along. Not only were we writing the night before stuff we were going to shoot, but I would be writing while we were shooting and unwriting.

CHRIS NEUMER: So this wasn’t a project where the script was written at such and such a date and stuck to that.

ARLISS HOWARD: We were always writing, writing. It would be inaccurate to suggest that we didn’t arrive down there with a fairly rigid structure because the economics of the thing and the logistics of the thing mandate that you know where you’re going to be and when. You don’t show up at someone’s house in Holly Springs, Mississippi and say, "We were supposed to be here Monday and now it’s Wednesday, but we’re here." We knew what we were going to shoot and we knew when we were going to shoot it. We were very structured that way. But in terms of what went on inside it…

CHRIS NEUMER: You could toy with that a little.

ARLISS HOWARD: Yeah. I think the stronger the structure is the more you can mess around. The more you’re sure of what you’re trying to say and what its place is in the film. Again, you have this other thing that happens when you get the film back in New York and you start working on it. You’re hacking along one day and you chop right into a nest of hornets. It just busts up in your face and that changes the whole thing. I would say that the essential writing of it was done in 1990 and when we picked it up again in January of 2000 we started in earnest, weeding it out, trying to make it essential.

CHRIS NEUMER: there were a lot of visual images that you had in the film–my favorite was the flag through the rejection letters–having read Brown’s stories, imagery wasn’t his strong suit. Where did these images come from?

ARLISS HOWARD: One of the great things about Larry is like all great fiction, what is left out is as important as what you’ve got in there. The fact that, in particular, the story 92 Days where the bulk of the narrative was taken for Big Bad Love, you have this guy who alludes to the fact that he was in the service. It was just alluded to. It wasn’t specifically mentioned. You just feel the fact that he was a veteran. You just feel certain things about the people in his life. You know that there’s a university nearby, but you’re not sure what it is or where it is or why this guy is showing up at his house with these poems. You just have this sense that something’s out there, but you’re not sure what it is. As I began to put some of the other stories in, "Waiting for the Ladies", I started really feeling this sense of his military past. And that’s not too far from there to think you have this culture in the south which is locked, in many ways, in time warps. Economically, socially. A lot of that has to do with an economy based on certain socio-economic structure that was rendered impotent by the Civil War.

CHRIS NEUMER: Anything specifically?

ARLISS HOWARD: It would have been impossible to build the cotton empires and the economy built there on without slave labor. Once that was taken away, you had this collapse. Plus, the war had removed many of the heirs from these large fortunes. It had taken away the male sons. It had decimated the way things were passed down to a great degree. Except for those nimble few who were able to move quickly and laterally, you had this empire that crumbled or was parceled out. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution in America after that we had more mechanized, urban society, you had this area of the country that was immediately behind the times. In some ways in the South, you still have people who want to hold onto this flag for example. And this becomes so important for them to hold onto the stars and bars when it essentially has no meaning. There are still heated battles going on because of it. You have pockets in the South where the socio-economic climate hasn’t changed a lick except to add a welfare state. And the way people talk and deal with each other and the tender balance between races. You have this kind of thing that lends itself to looking back–it’s not forward looking. All I mean to say is that it was easy for me to think of Barlow as having–it’s not part of the book–but coming from a tradition of soldiers, going all the way back to the Civil War and beyond. Once I had that notion of being from soldiers, it became–because you’re talking about defeated soldiers, both in the Civil War and Vietnam–so you’re talking about the way things are passed on. If Leon was a southern soldier, where might he have come from. It was just a short little hop from there to have him trying to write fiction. And what was fiction and what was fantasy and what was reality? It all became part of the same notion. The other part of that throwing the flag and having it stick in the wall was that I was trying to find some way to imagine what it looked like in his mind while he was writing, without actually cutting to him writing that, having inserts of typewriters, because the act of writing itself isn’t particularly cinematic.

ARLISS HOWARD: I was really interested in writing only as an activity–I’m not trying to make a story about writers and how great writers are and how important they are. He could have been a sculptor, a guy who likes to cut patterns in the lawn with his mower. I was just looking for some way to articulate the activity inside him, because he’s trying to make sense of all this. One of the earliest things that came to me was when I was trying to cook this up with his past and his present. He has a son, he was a son, he is a father, he had a father. I was trying to make sense of all this as it is in my own life and I noticed that as a man I have a tendency–when I’m working my mind drifts sometimes, which is which I enjoy repetitive work like chopping wood or framing out walls or something where you get into a trance state and your mind’s not creating a narrative, it’s just sort of idling.

ARLISS HOWARD: Repetitive work has a tendency to calm the mind. If you’re doing other kinds of work–the repetitive nature of chopping wood can work in a meditative way. But if you’re doing work that’s not repetitive, if you picking something up and trying to figure it out, or you’re sitting trying to puzzle out something, your mind can start jumping track. That’s what I figured out about Barlow was that there was this repetitive motion of painting and then stepping back to look at what you’ve painted.

CHRIS NEUMER: On the boxcar, right?

ARLISS HOWARD: Yeah. I’m talking about the house. When he first starts picking up the seeds of this story. He’s painting the house with Monroe and they’re talking about the flasher and this little boy rides by on a bicycle. He’s painting the house by himself and the football comes flying at him and he turns around and the little boy’s playing football now. Now he’s got this little boy riding his bicycle away and the story picks up where the boy is by this car that drives by. He is sending out little threads, like, where can this go? Then that little boy turns into him as a little boy who is now picked up by these undertakers. Then his father’s in the back seat. When I was writing I started thinking we have this story that he’s working on and he's taking the raw material that’s happening around him and he’s turning it into fiction. Then he has to come back to life. Then I started realizing that there is no difference in Barlow’s life between fiction and his life and the passed and present. There was no marked difference. That’s why Betty deLaurio can come knocking on his door and when he answers it, it’s his son. That’s why he’s actually putting a rejection letter up on the wall when he’s brushing his teeth and a spear flies in that this kid has thrown. It’s all happening, it doesn’t matter whether it’s in his mind of real.

CHRIS NEUMER: It had a sort of "Secret Life of Walter Mitty" quality about it.

ARLISS HOWARD: There’s that too. Although I think Barlow isn’t inventing a life for himself, a secret life–

CHRIS NEUMER: It’s just a life he’s leading and this is something he does for himself.

ARLISS HOWARD: Yeah. It’s the life of the mind. I’m really interested in: If I had somebody who really blew my mind, it was always something that I wasn’t instantly familiar with. It wasn’t like, I’ve never recognized that.

ARLISS HOWARD: I think if I were in my 20’s it might be more remarkable. I think certainly it would be getting more that examination. It would be really interesting to create a character and say "He directed it" and run a little scam, because you want to manipulate the media–my experience with the media is that its so manipulative and so selective and so much about looking over your shoulder. By and large the writers and the entertainment media are building a consensus. And they’re so often wrong anyway. The only reason I bring this up is because they have become very necessary in this marketplace for certain kinds of film. You need to have someone who is publishing in a certain sized venue who is hollering about the film if you want attention paid to it. The movie going public has been turned off of movies, despite what the box office says. The box office receipts say that more people are going than ever before–it’s the same people going over and over, there are vast demographics of people who have been alienated by movies.

CHRIS NEUMER: Why do you think that is?

ARLISS HOWARD: Because they feel, when they go, when they walk out their head hurts.

CHRIS NEUMER: Because they’ve been thinking or because they saw Armageddon?

ARLISS HOWARD: Because they’ve been ganged up on with noise and action and incoherence and implausibility. I’ll tell you what. I have nothing against big studio movies. One of the best movies I’ve seen in 10 years is Unforgiven. It does everything that a big ole’ movie is supposed to do. It takes a movie star and plays on his image and it subverts that image and returns to the image. It takes the hyprofical epic quality of the western and it messes around with that structure. And it uses these wonderful big movie stars and this wide canvas to the best effect. It’s haunting and it’s not a loud movie and it’s not gratuitously violent and it doesn’t offend you and you don’t feel stupid for having gone. And you’re not so far behind it or ahead of it. You’re engaged. You’re partnered up with the movie. I can remember a time when that would happen more often than not and, I don’t’ want to sound like an old fogey, but I will say that I’ve not seen more really good directors make worse movies in the last three or four years, where you just think "They’re making them because they had X star at this time and they had to go and they didn’t have a script and they thought they could fix it, even though they knew they couldn’t. It was like, I want to work so let’s go ahead and make it.

CHRIS NEUMER: It sounds like you’re talking about Town and Country there. That was the exact situation for Town and Country. Which is funny because you were talking in generalities.

ARLISS HOWARD: All I mean to say by any of this stuff when I started out talking about the media is that what–I was talking about inventing this character, this 22 year old kid who directed this movie and the lighting that this would create. Almost Zelic like, we would invent a guy to go over to Cannes and we would pass him off as the director. We just thought it would be such a gas, because it would take the onus off of me being in it as well, he would come completely fully formed out of left field. Even if the movie was not seen to be really, really great, the fact that he was so young would be like "Omigod, what’s he going to do next!" which is what the whole Cannes Film Festival is about: what’s coming, not what’s there. So the nature of hype is also that: it’s about what’s coming, not what’s going on. We really had fun thinking about that; his name, his biography, who we would get to play him because quite frankly, for myself, the fact that I’m in my 40’s and I’ve worked with a number of really wonderful directors and been on a lot of movie sets, and as important as the wonderful directors were, some of the ones who were not so wonderful were very, very important, so you could see how you could take something and mess it up because you’re overwhelmed.

CHRIS NEUMER: You wouldn’t care to mention any specifics, would you?

ARLISS HOWARD: No! It’s a hard job. I have a lot more compassion now for directors in general now having done it. My God, I would think I would have learned something if I was just paying a modicum of attention. I would have learned something about structure and function and how to run a set. Mainly what I’ve learned over the years is where so much is wasted. We ate everything in this movie, we didn’t leave a scrap. That was the sensibility I grew up with, because my father went through the depression, there wasn’t going to be any waste in our house. I’ve lived a fairly dissolute life at different points in my life and I’ve squandered my health and my sanity on any number of occasions with any numbers of substances and activities. So I guarantee you I didn’t leave much there to pick up after. I used rollouts in the movie where the film ran out of the camera four or five times. You’ll see a roll out flash that we put in the movie because it just seemed–this movie ends on a roll out. The film ran out of the camera on that shot and that was what we used. I just guess that was what formed the movie more than anything else. The movie is about waste in some way and it was executed without very much.

ARLISS HOWARD: We were very lean and low to the ground and got a lot of work done and worked a lot of hours.

CHRIS NEUMER: Did it help that it was your money you were putting up to finance this?

ARLISS HOWARD: Not really. I mean there was a point where it became our money and I don’t think I worked any harder or faster than I had done before. The money question is the money question. It doesn’t matter whose hand is on the money. If you’re paying attention to the task, it’s your money, it’s someone else’s money, you’re still responsible for the money. You’d have to be a real prick to waste someone else’s money and then decide not to waste it because it’s your. You’d have to be a real asshole. And wherever my assholiness comes into it, it’s not about that. I have a real ethic, a real stringent ethic about money. I think it’s overrated. I think it’s talked about way too much and I don’t like questions about it. I find them in poor taste, when people want to know how much something cost–when people come into your house and look at something and want to know what you paid for that, I find it so nauseating. And more and more pervasive with the different technologies and media. Stuff that my grandfather would've thought was in such poor taste he would have thrown you out of the house now becomes dinner conversation. I just don’t think that you can work in a collaborative effort that is so expensive to work in with a split ethic about money. And I see it all the time. It’s like it’s a studio movie so we’re going to have three guys for every job. And you have actors who have their studio movie price and then they have their independent movie price. I'll do this one for me and this one for the studio. And all these kinds of invented aesthetics. I’m not going to fight against it, but I’m not going to participate in it either. In a long answer to your question, when we were starting to pay for the movie, which was half way through, it didn’t change the way I worked at all.

ARLISS HOWARD: Don’t use that word. Don’t say that.

CHRIS NEUMER: Okay, let me change that then. In references to the actions of other people, your actions stand out as being good.

ARLISS HOWARD: Well, you know what it is? It really doesn’t come from me. I don't mean to be chippy about this, but I’m really leery about those kinds of things because I’m not immune to the vagaries of consumerism or capitalism or any of that shit, but I think when you’re talking about making something that involves a collaboration of a lot of other people ergo a lot of money and you’re working away from home and you’ve got people who are working away from home and you want them to be comfortable and you want them on your side and they’re looking at you from the very beginning thinking " How’s he going to walk this thing?" And if I’m out there walking one way and talking another way, they’re not liable to come on with you. If they’d seen me all of a sudden become a tightwad because it was my money, they would have stopped working–it wouldn’t have helped me. I don’t think most producers understand this thing because it’s not their money–they’re not responsible for–it’s the bank, it’s the studio, they have a job and they're going to have a job no matter what. The guys who come in and start pinching pennies and hollering about expenses–that’s the other thing, for the most part, the guys who make the most noise about it are trying to save it in the most asinine ways. They’ve got a personal trainer, they’ve got two secretaries, they’ve got three fax lines, two cell phones, they’ve got a chauffeured car and they’re staying in a penthouse suite in hotel and they griping about what people are eating at craft services. It’s just–Debra can give you better idea of this than I.

CHRIS NEUMER: She went on at length about the product placement guy with me before. A particularly well loved credit in the cast… which I say facetiously of course. So in that respect, working with Deborah as the producer, that must have eased several tensions that would normally be there, because you were on the same page.

ARLISS HOWARD: What was really wonderful to see were the people she contacted for help. The line producers when we discovered that deals hadn’t been cut with labor unions. When she talked to labor union representatives who had no interest in our problem, because they had an enormous amount of leverage when we were so far into and no deal had been cut. The things that had not been done by the time we took hold of the movie were legion. To watch her navigate this, largely because of the respect she had because of her work. You started to see how much of the hype of Deborah being difficult and how much of that stuff how people had a tough time working with her, you saw how much of it was bullshit. Because where the rubber meets the road, no of these people felt that way. And these were the people she was working with. These were the labor unions guys who had been apprentice carpenters when they knew her back in the old days. These were people in photolabs who’d been watching her dailies since she was a pup who were now talking to her on the phone and happy to cut her a break because of what she had meant to them. To watch her not take advantage of that and be square and honest with people, to watch her take care of the people in the crew and the cast, the little thoughtful things like flowers for the women and insisting that–particularly Angie–that Angie be well looked after. I mean down to saying to Andy, the transportation guy, when you pick her up, you can’t pick her up in a truck, you can’t just use whatever vehicle you have out there, just because it’s out there. We’re not going to save money that way, get one of those low riding Dodge vans that she can step up into easily. And then you’d find that these guys were all running around and they were thinking bout these things: who am I going to pick up?

ARLISS HOWARD: Well, Debra would tell you that it all saves money. Because if a guy wants to come to work, you’ve already saved money, right off the bat than if a guy doesn’t want to come to work. And if a guy is being allowed into the process more so than what he is normally allowed into, the contempt that certain people have been held in on a movie set has always been baffling to me.

CHRIS NEUMER: By contempt you mean what?

ARLISS HOWARD: I’ve heard directors talk to dolly grips as if the dolly grip arrived sprung out of the head of an ogre and was walking around on all fours. Have you ever stopped to talk to a dolly grip? They are some of the most interesting guys and how they ended up in that job. What their view of the film is. When I was working with Spielberg, I watched a camera movement one time that Spielberg kept saying, "You’re slow to the mark, you’re slow to the mark." The dolly grip said, "Steven it feels like it wants to be slow." So Steven says, "Okay, let’s try it your way, we’re not going to hustle to the mark." And they shot one and he goes, ‘You’re right." The guy was included and was accepted and when a guy feels like he can contribute something to the movie. When he goes to the movie a year later with his girlfriend and can say "I’m responsible for the speed of that shot."

CHRIS NEUMER: It makes you feel more involved.

ARLISS HOWARD: Ah, man. That guy’s going to be five minutes early every morning. Most of it’s common sense and how you treat people. If you treat them like shit and step on people’s toes and hurt people’s feelings just because of the pace, sometimes you forget you’re talking to another human being, you think you’re talking to a cow. IN this movie I was, in fact, talking to a cow quite a bit.

CHRIS NEUMER: Funny how that example works right in. You wore so many different hats in this project, writer/director and actor. Your lead performance as Barlow was well tapered and delivered. You never got the feeling that this was an Eric Roberts drunk. This was a pre-Con Air