20 Karen Ballard/HBO
metroactive.com | sanjose.com | metrosiliconvalley.com | MARCH 7-13, 2012
22 PHILIP KAUFMAN
aircraft carrier. Rather than tensely studying dials or velocities, Shepard is dreamily obsessed with the gags of the semiforgotten dialect comedian, Bill “Jose Jimenez” Dana. As he lands, seemingly without effort, Shepard is rolling Dana’s Mexican-peon shtick in his mind as if it were poetry. There’s the harsher kind of humor in the film as well. Dennis Quaid’s hot-dog pilot, Gordon Cooper, makes, seemingly by accident, an unspeakable jest when offering a too-burnt wiener on a fork to his wife (Pamela Reed). He doesn’t realize her nerves are already snapping over the possibility of her test-pilot husband’s flaming death. Hemingway & Gellhorn, Kaufman’s first film in eight years, is a biography of Ernest Hemingway (Clive Owen) and his one-time wife, the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (Nicole Kidman). We began our conversation with this project.
METRO: Since this week was the 50th anniversary of the John Glenn flight, I have a question or two about “The Right Stuff.” The film is really enormously good. On the one hand, it touches on some ideas from Howard Hawks and John Ford while bringing in that sense of 1970s satire—with Harry Shearer and the I Fratelli Bologna involved. The result is something like Thomas Pynchon: satirical but acknowledging that larger-than-life men exist.
METRO: How is Hemingway & Gellhorn coming along?
IMAGE SNATCHER Philip Kaufman has made a career
KAUFMAN: It’s all done. We’re airing
outside the Hollywood mainstream.
it on HBO Memorial day weekend. It’ll be released everywhere else in the world as a feature film. METRO: Can you describe Martha Gellhorn? KAUFMAN: Funny you should ask, since today (Feb. 22), we’ve been reading the obituaries for Marie Colvin. She was killed in Syria. [The fearless correspondent Colvin, who wore a patch over the eye she lost covering the fighting in Sri Lanka, was killed in the city of Homs.] These correspondents rarely get the public light shed on them that they deserve. There’s an article in the Telegraph from London calling Colvin the greatest war correspondent of her time. Colvin hosted a BBC documentary about Martha Gellhorn, which we looked at often when we were making this film. And the risks Marie Colvin took are like the risks Martha Gellhorn took. But Martha was obscured to some degree by the fact that she was married to Hemingway, the most famous American writer. METRO: I’ve read that in later life, Gellhorn would terminate interviews if Hemingway’s name were mentioned.
used that line of Hemingway that’s in [Tom] Wolfe, about how “courage is grace under pressure.” These pilots and astronauts become the torchbearer of the Hemingway code, that element of the right stuff. Gellhorn came to embody that, too. What’s exciting is that a woman falling into the shadows of history can now be given her due place. She was braver than anyone.
KAUFMAN: Yeah—that’s not what our story is about. He and Gellhorn were a great match. It was a great love affair with a tragic ending. In the end, Gellhorn was a better war correspondent but not as good a novelist. Their years together were incredibly passionate; it was an amazing relationship created during the Spanish Civil War. They went to China together. After the relationship was over she wrote a book titled Travels With Myself and Another. She refers to Hemingway as “the Unwilling Companion” or “UC” for short. In that journal, there are some incidents that are in our film. I was reading yesterday that Chiang Kai-shek’s house in Chongqing has just been demolished. The article mentioned that this was the house where Chiang had met famous people like Hemingway and Gellhorn. We actually just filmed the scene of their meeting: Joan Chen plays Madame Chiang. Right next to her at the table is a friend of mine for 20 years, Larry Tse, the chef who runs The House restaurant in North Beach. I always told him he looked like Chiang Kai-shek.
METRO: Have your feelings about Hemingway changed much since you were a young writer in Paris? KAUFMAN: Hemingway’s a great writer, really the most influential writer in American history. He was an influence on Norman Mailer and J.D. Salinger alike. I even have some correspondence from Nelson Algren, who was a good friend, about how much Hemingway meant to him. He’s gone through a period of some re-evaluation and revival academically. Witness the fact that there have been four or five books about Hemingway this year, as well as his appearance in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. And people who felt he didn’t like women or treated them badly no longer dismiss him as totally macho. There’s been a mellowing of those feelings. Hemingway was the man who could thrill either as a writer or as a man of action. He was a spiritual descendant of Teddy Roosevelt, who believed in that life of vigor. He wasn’t an academic, not at all an academic ... but somewhat of an autodidact, and a sportsman. When we were making The Right Stuff, we
KAUFMAN: We tried to get Wolfe’s boisterous humor on film, the way it bubbled up in the writing, by using characters like Shearer and Jeff Goldblum. Weird coincidence: The Director’s Guild magazine wanted me to do an article on an excerpt of 14–15 frames about the scenes of the Glenn launch. And I was doing this right on the anniversary of the Friendship 7 flight, so I found myself talking to Ed Harris, a.k.a. John Glenn, on that day. METRO: Do you like flying? KAUFMAN: I don’t fly really, and I haven’t gone anywhere lately. I don’t have a pilot’s license. When we were making The Right Stuff, Chuck Yeager took me up in a Beechcraft, and my son was in the back seat. He gave me the controls and turned off the motor. I think he wanted to see if I’d be a Hollywood guy, and freak out and start crying. But I was with Chuck Yeager, so I felt like I was safe. I tried to show him a film director’s version of “the right stuff.” That was an amazing experience. METRO: Can you describe some of the technical innovations that made the film possible? KAUFMAN: Well, in Hemingway & Gellhorn we’re using technological breakthroughs that enable us to make a big sprawling epic on an