Voices on the Art Form

Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 LAWRENCE KASDAN

Lawrence Kasdan is a writer, producer and director whose cinematic style brings a vivid candor and uncompromising realism to the screen. His stories engage the restlessness of modern times: The Big Chill, Grand Canyon, The Accidental Tourist are icons for the spiritual wanderlust of the baby boomer generation. He has directed romance (French Kiss) and '80s film noir (Body Heat), all stories with everyday characters facing not so ordinary struggles. "From cradle to grave you just struggle with different things pulling at you," Kasdan remarked during the interview which follows. "That's the stuff of art, that's what art is about, and should be about - that struggle."

Below he talks about the characters and their struggles in two Westerns he made in New Mexico - Silverado and Wyatt Earp.

The Westerns have seemed like a good arena for me to talk about things that are of interest to me in all my movies. The things that interest me in all my movies are: How do we define ourselves? Who are we? This constant battle between our ideal of how we should live, what's the right thing to do; and our desires, and what we want to do. That tension is really the center of all the movies that I've made. In a Western, it's very easy to see that in play: Because the West, when it was unsettled, when it was being formed, when rules were being made, that tension was being applied to the whole society. People had ideas brought from the East and from Europe, about how a civilization should be set up. But people's ambitions and their desires were uncontrolled and wild. Those two things come into constant conflict as the West developed. So a story like Wyatt Earp, you have a guy who's trying to impose order on a chaotic situation and has to use the weapons of chaos to do it. He's a violent man and that's the only kind of man who can deal with that kind of chaos. Silverado is even a blanker canvas, where these four people come together, take a journey, go out to a place where the rules are just being decided and try to impose some positive order onto a negative situation.

Any story you want to tell you can tell in a Western: It's just a very flexible, open canvas. Since I love the way the American West looks, I love horses and guns, it's very attractive to me.


The Western genre often employs a sense of mythic dimension. You've spoken at times about Joseph Campbell's writings - the role of the myth in the transformation of consciousness, and the way you then perceive your life in a new way. Do you think that's a valid role for a film to aspire to?

It's not even a choice, it does. This is an art that has imposed itself so strongly into culture. Every movie does that to our collective myth, whether you want it to or not. Even bad movies, a lot of bad movies. If you say our collective myth is the images that we use to go about our lives, then that's what movies do. And you don't really have a choice aabout it. That's one of the fun things about making movies, is that you get to have that kind of impact. It's a responsibility too, I think. Very often you see it abused.

It makes you wonder about the future of film and other kinds of visual entertainment. Do you have any thoughts about where it's heading as an art form, bringing in this whole idea about how it does impact the collective myth?

Things happen in cycles, and however bad it looks at any one point (and it looks very bad now), there's always some kind of reaction that happens that's corrective. It may be that Hollywood films, which are the worst, are in a long period of decline because the business has become very difficult. More likely, it's going through a cycle that will be corrected at some point. They'll accept a new reality, which is that for some films there will be large audiences, but for most films there will be specific audiences and the economics of the movies will be adjusted to accommodate that. So if you're making a film for say, older people in their 40s who are interested in dialog and wit and feeling and passion or detail, you aim that movie at a specific audience and make it for a price that makes their attendance enough. Then there will be other movies aimed at teen-age boys, and this would be budgeted in a different way.

They become less and less like movies as we knew them with narrative and story and character, more and more like amusement park rides.