Tiffany N. D’Emidio: Is the Cat’s Meow a story that you always wanted to tell?

Peter Bogdanovich: No. I didn’t know I was going to tell it at all. I originally heard the basic story 33 years ago from Orson Welles in a conversation we were taping for a book about his career…so he told me this notorious incident that happened on Hearst’s yacht.

Anyway, I was on an ocean voyage on the Queen Elizabeth, the QE2…There were a bunch of movie people on the ship…anyway, just by coincidence, ok, again everything is coincidence, I was having a lunch alone with Roger [Ebert] one day and we were talking about “Citizen Kane.” So I told Roger about this incident that Orson had told me. Well his mouth fell open and he said, “I never heard that story”. He said, “It sounds like a good movie”. I got home from that voyage about a week later and on my desk in New York was this script. Go figure.

TD: It was in the stars.

PB: Yeah, exactly. I picked it up it said “California Curse” based on a play by Steve Peros called “The Cat’s Meow”. I started looking through it I saw Hearst, Marion, Chaplin, Louella, Ince and thought “Jesus Christ it’s that story!” So I read it obviously and I liked it and I thought a lot of work went into it and I called the people and I said, “Why did you send me this?” and they said, “Well, we just thought you would be good for it.” “Who else did you send it to?” “No one.” So I thought well maybe I’ll make this so I sent it to my manager and he read it he liked it. He sent it to Lions Gate, which is the first studio that got it and they liked it, they wanted to do it and basically that was it. That’s how it got started.

TD: It can’t be that easy. Wasn’t it German-funded?

PB: Yeah, it was complicated. We brought in a representative for CPT Media. He’s one of the executive producers. He brought the German money in, which is why we shot in Berlin. We shot the interiors of the yacht in Berlin. We built them there because of the German money. They wanted us to work in Berlin. Everybody took a cut. The reason we shot in Greece is because it’s where the yacht was. Believe it or not it hard to find a yacht that was this vintage and that looked like Hearsts’ yacht.

TD: So this has been in the can for a year now?

PB: We shot it right at the end of 2000. Christmas we finished of 2000.

TD: So Kirsten Dunst was a little younger than she is now? Age and status wise?

PB: Yes, a little younger. Yes. She wanted to do this. She was keen to do a period piece and she loved the 20’s and she knew a little bit about Marion Davies and found out a lot more. She’s a very hard working, professional actress.

TD: What was it in her that reminded you of Marion?

PB: Well I had seen her in something or other. I knew who she was but uh, well, I think it was that vampire picture [referring to "Interview with a Vampire"] The studio sent her the script because again, coincidentally, her manager was a good friend of the head of the studio and had been talking about what they had coming up and he said, “well we’ve got this Marion Davies story”. “Oh Kirsten wants to do a period thing she likes the 20’s, send it to me I’ll read it”. He read it, passed it along to Kirsten, she read it and the next thing I knew I got a call saying Kirsten Dunst wants to do it. Shit, ok.

TD: Did you have any apprehensions because of her age?

PB: Yeah, a little bit. I said how old is she? She’s 18, she’s smart and she’s a good actress. So I went to see her in a couple of pictures. “Bring It On” was playing and “The Virgin Suicides”. I thought she was a good actress.

TD: Do you like working with up and coming actors?

PB: Yeah, I don’t mind anybody. It’s the big movie stars that make a fortune that make me a little nervous because I don’t know if they’ll listen to me. But the young actors…I like working with the younger actors, not just younger but serious actors that are really into the material and really want to work. River Phoenix was like that…Dermot Mulroney, these were people I’ve worked with that are really good.

TD: Sounds like the casting of “The Last Picture Show”. I thought was perfect acting wise. I always think the director has something to do with it.

PB: Well I did. I was an actor. See people thought I started out as a critic which is leaving out the first ten years of my career. I started out as a professional actor when I was fifteen. I studied acting for four years with Stella Adler, acted in the theater for four years, acted in some live television, directed plays in New York and off Broadway and up state and then started writing about movies. So it usually leaves out that part and that was sort of the foundation about everything I know.

TD: How good of an actor were you?

PB: I was a good actor. I’m still a good actor. [Laughter] The point is that when I work with actors I always make sure they understand that I am one of them, that contrary to what they may have read about me I’m not a critic.

TD: Do you have any thoughts about the current state of film criticism? We’ve lost Siskel and Pauline…

PB: I think that the thing that concerns me…I think there are some very good critics around, very good writers. What I do miss more than that is conversation or interchange about older films and comparing the newer films to the old films and discussing the heritage of movies, the foundation of the media. None of that seems to take place anymore. I guess because it’s a young country and the history of movies is awfully short.

TD: But it is a history now. It didn’t use to be.

PB: It didn’t use to be. It’s a pity that nobody thinks about it anymore. Younger people have no interest. They hear black and white their eyes glaze over. I guess it’s part of the general American disaffection that anything that isn’t of their own generation is lame.

TD: I wanted to ask you, I’m sure you get asked this all the time, about “The Last Picture Show”. Did you intend it to say anything about the 60’s generation that was winding up and ending when you made it or was it really a piece about the 50’s and Texas?

PB: Well you know I think all of ones experience comes into play when you make a picture, it’s suppose to. So who knows. Maybe there was a lot of stuff. People ask about this film did you relate to this that and the other and yeah, and my own personal life experience adds up to my understanding a lot of things in this movie without have to particularly think about it. I didn’t sit around thinking, “gee I have similarities to these peoples life experiences”. I just understood them. I think the same might be true in relating the 60’s to the 50’s. I think the biggest thing, the biggest challenge making “The Last Picture Show” was that it’s quite a good book and the trick was to just do the book and without movie-ing it up, you know making it a movie by taking out the sex cleaning that up. We sort of did teenage sex in the way that that hadn’t been done. I think one of the reasons the picture was shocking in its day was because of the tension between a kind of classically told narrative feature mixed with very modern sensibility in terms of the sex. You don’t see in the 50’s, 40’s, 30’s you don’t see them sticking their head up someone’s dress or taking a bra off. But I thought; since we were doing this book…we better do the book. I chickened out a little bit well I didn’t chicken out…there’s one sequence that was cut out with Cybil [Shepherd] on the pool table which is back in the DVD.

TD: When you cast a film, as an ensemble is it really just shooting in the dark, do you catch lightning in a bottle or is there a rule of thumb that you follow?

PB: You know what I’ve learned? I didn’t follow my instincts on “The Last Picture Show” on a very important piece of casting and regret it to this minute. I got agented. So what I did, probably more than on any picture I’ve ever done, on “The Cat’s Meow” was to just go with the flow and go with the instincts that seem to be happening at the time and just trust them.

TD: There seems to be a notion these days from what I’ve seen there’s this gap between festival films, independent films and commercial films but there is nothing in between.

PB: Yes that true. I was hoping that this was really not quite a festival film as much as more of an audience film and it is turning out that way. But in order to get to the audience you sort of have to start at the festival because you certainly don’t want to start in two thousand theaters…not with this picture.

On “The Cat’s Meow” I really followed my instincts. Like the story I told you about Kirsten, I could have said wait a second she’s too young, I’m not sure, let me think. But I figured it’s what’s happening. They want her, she wants to do it…she’ll do it. I went with it. Chaplin was a very tough part to cast and one day my manager, in the summer of 2000, said what are you doing, do you wanna see Eddie Izzard at Town Hall? And I actually said, “what’s that?” and he said, ” No no it’s not what’s that it’s whose that. He’s an English comedian he’s very funny you go ought to go see him at Town Hall” and I said ok. So I went and he came out and I started laughing like everybody else and I really had never seen him. Wonderful, brilliant genius of comedy and I said, “He’s and actor this guy’s an actor of comedy. He’s not a stand up comic, this is not a stand up routine he’s funny he acts and stuff.” That was the first thought. The second thought about ten minutes later was he’s an English comic…can he play an English comic? He’s short he doesn’t look like Chaplin but he’s short. There’s that. The more I thought about it the more I thought maybe he could do it. It turns out that he had just become a fan of Chaplin only a year before so it was all very lucky. That’s how the whole damn thing went. I followed the flow of the river you know.

TD: Has your time on the Sopranos sparked any interest in the mob genre of film?

PB: No not really. It’s so well done I wouldn’t want to compete with… Marty’s [Martin Scorsese] done it well. I was offered “The Godfather” years ago. I didn’t even ask what the book was. “We have a new novel by Mario Puzo” “I don’t want to do a Mafia story”. That was the end of that.

[A longer version of this interview originally appeared on Eclipse Magazine]