We've got a pretty special episode for fD with this one. It's the first ever fD podcast interview. Last week I co-hosted with who runs the great SchmearCast podcast, along with his Substack, The Schmear Hunter. We got to sit down with director Ed Zwick over Zoom for an hour-long interview to talk about his new book: Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood. We talked about his career, the stars he's worked with, his thoughts on a changing Hollywood, and a lot more.
The first half covers some of the movies that he's made and his experiences making those, with a long segment covering his experience on Glory. In the second half, we loosen up a little bit and cover some big picture macro questions about his career and his thoughts about Hollywood, before we finish with some rapid fire questions at the very end.
Hope you enjoy the listen and let me know what you think.
Transcript
Introduction
Teddy Kim: My first encounter with Zwick probably was watching The Last Samurai, starring Tom Cruise and Ken Watanabe, with my dad in theaters when it came out in 2003 and countless times after that on TV. I feel like it's one of those TNT movies.
Cruise is obviously the last living movie star and Watanabe has gone on to have a great career, most recently starring in HBO's Tokyo Vice. For anyone watching Shōgun, the finale of which just aired yesterday, you'll notice a familiar face in Hiroyuki Sanada. as well.
I watched another of his movies, Blood Diamond, I think in seventh-grade history class. It’s not only a gripping and heartfelt film, but spawned a lifelong practice of trying to imitate Leonardo DiCaprio's Rhodesian accent, which I'll spare you from now.
Most recently, I got to see his civil war movie, Glory, in 70mm at the newly renovated Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, seeing stars like Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, and Matthew Broderick up on that huge screen.
I learned a lot from reading Zwick’s book, which is filled not only with funny stories and harrowing tales about getting his movies made (or not), but also practical advice ranging from the technical to the philosophical, offered up for future filmmakers and storytellers.
For instance, I didn't know that Zwick was a producer on Shakespeare in Love, which infamously won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year over Saving Private Ryan. He originally intended to direct it himself and got involved later with a nasty legal battle with Harvey Weinstein who tried to cut him out.
Zwick is known for his wide range of movies, from romantic comedies to big action blockbusters, and his ability to make movies that are not only entertaining but have something to say. He's worked with a really deep cast of stars, often identifying up and coming talent before they've gotten their future wide acclaim.
A quick look through his filmography:
1986: He makes his first real feature debut with About Last Night… starring Demi Moore and Rob Lowe.
1989: He directs Glory, which was nominated for five Academy Awards and won three, including Best Supporting Actor for Denzel Washington.
1994: He directs Legends of the Fall, starring Anthony Hopkins and a young Brad Pitt.
1996: He directs Courage Under Fire with Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan. I got to watch this before the interview and really enjoyed it. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend checking it out.
1998: He directs The Siege starring again Denzel Washington, Annette Bening, Tony Shalhoub, and Bruce Willis. If you haven't seen this one, I recommend checking it out as well. It's a very eerie pre-9/11 movie about what a major terrorist attack in New York City would look like, shot by legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins. It is eerie how they get not only some of the storylines and political elements right, but also how closely they got to the visuals of what would be the terrorist attack on 9/11.
2003: We got probably his most well-known movie, The Last Samurai, starring Tom Cruise. That movie was nominated for four Academy Awards and three Golden Globes.
2006: We get Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Connelly and Djimon Honsou, about the Sierra Leone Civil War. That movie received five Oscar nominations, including Best Actor for DiCaprio and Best Supporting Actor for Honsou.
2008: He made Defiance, starring Daniel Craig, fresh off his first Bond movie, as well as Liev Schreiber, Jamie Bell, and George MacKay. MacKay has gotten a lot bigger recently with a starring role in movies like 1917 and The Beast.
2010: We've got Love & Other Drugs starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway.
2014: He made Pawn Sacrifice starring Tobey Maguire and again Liev Schreiber, about Bobby Fischer during the Cold War.
2018: His most recent film is Trial by Fire, based on a David Grann article, starring Jack O'Connell, Laura Dern, which is a drama about the death penalty surrounding a legal case.
In addition to all these films, Zwick actually started out his career in television, most notably as the creator of the drama series Thirtysomething, which aired from 1987 to 1991. It’s about a group of 30-something Baby Boomers and their lives during the 1980s. That show was nominated for 41 Primetime Emmy Awards and won 13, as well as two Golden Globe awards. Obviously, Zwick’s show came before similar ensemble sitcoms like Friends or Seinfeld.
Like I said before, I got to help my friend Gabriel Frieberg with this. He writes the great Schmear Hunter, which you should definitely check out for coverage and reviews on the latest TV shows and movies. Gabriel and I met when we started working in the mailroom at UTA, a talent agency.
We spent years shooting the shit about movies, actors, directors, and watching as many films as we could after work. So you can imagine we were super excited to be able to interview one of these directors together and actually ask him all of our questions directly.
The first half covers more so specific movies that he's made and his experiences making those, with a long segment covering his experience making Glory. The second half goes a little bit more macro. We loosen up a little bit and cover big picture macro questions about his career and his thoughts about Hollywood before we finish with some rapid fire questions at the end.
Hope you enjoy the listen and let me know if you think.
Interview
Gabriel Frieberg: Ed, we loved your memoir. There are so many great, and not so great, film memoirs. In this you reference William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade, Sidney Lumet's Making Movies, Kurosawa's Something Like an Autobiography.
With these hallowed, and maybe some not so hallowed film memoirs in mind, what did you specifically and personally set out to accomplish with Hits, Flops, and other Illusions?
Ed Zwick: Obviously you have evoked the gold standard in those three. The only difference that I aspired to was the inclusion of some more internal and personal reflections about the experience. If I have a complaint about some others that I've read, they've often seem disingenuous.
They've often just been so lacquered over with a kind of presentational and performative thing. I wanted to get a little bit closer to the bone. I just believed that if I was going to try to be authentic about the experiences that I was having that I should be the same way about myself.
That then led me down a path that actually affected, some of the subjects and themes of the book. Obviously there was any number of anecdotes that were fun. I knew people would enjoy those. There was a certain amount of dish and things that I also wanted to have that were prescriptive. I think the closest one to that might've been Lumet book, which was nuts and bolts about the process.
I just wrote very hand in mouth. I've written for so many years. I've written personally and even tried to be revealing, but always putting those words in the mouths of more attractive, better lit, better dressed people up on stage. To be in the first person was a whole new experience. I didn't know what it was going to be like.
I didn't even initially admit that it was going to be a book. I put some things out on Twitter and saw how people responded. You know how we all have files in our computer and we name those files? This file I named B—K. I didn't yet want to offend the literary gods or put pressure on myself by saying it was a book.
Gradually it became that and it takes on a life of its own, particularly when you're experienced and yet you're doing something new. That's exciting. It was a creative challenge. I really relish that part of it.
Teddy Kim: Let’s dive into one of the first experiences then that you talk about in the book. One of your first real exposures to Hollywood was actually in Europe working for Woody Allen. I really love that chapter of the book. Appropriately there are parts of it that make you laugh and there are parts of it where you can imagine someone crying as well.
Can you talk about observing Allen and seeing him go from writer to director, approaching the material around him, and what you took from that and put into Thirtysomething and the rest of your movies?
Ed Zwick: The first thing you have to remember is this was a moment in his career in which he was transitioning. He'd made a couple of movies, he'd may take the money and run and he'd made sleeper and he'd been involved even with what's new pussycat. It wasn't like he was a rookie. But still he thought of himself primarily as a writer.
He admired filmmakers passionately, the great filmmakers, and had great knowledge of film and film history. What I observed was he surrounded himself with people who were much more experienced and able to interpret what was his vision, as long as he could articulate it. He could then see it as it took shape rather than being entirely over-determining about what things would be. That was interesting to me because I had been the theater kid and somehow felt that world was proscribed to me because I couldn't thread a Bolex or work a Moviola. I thought you had to be a techie to make movies.
What was surprising was no, you just had to be a storyteller and understand about actors and other things, but there was a lot to learn. Mostly it was to see his work ethic - getting up at 4:30 or 5:00 in the morning, working many hours, going back to write his next movie in the evenings, practicing the clarinet in his trailer at lunch. It was an extraordinary work ethic.
Allen and Diane Keaton were friends, had a relationship before, and yet there they were as friends. That was interesting and very sophisticated to me. When I read the first draft of Annie Hall, which was called Anhedonia, it was 200 pages. It was all the things in the movie and another movie's worth of bits, jokes and routines. It was a revelation because there was the relationship I had seen and there was Keaton with all her charm and idiosyncrasy presented in this loving, comedic, but artful way.
He's not the first person to have taken the truth of his life and turned it into art. Playwrights, novelists, European filmmakers like Fellini had done that. Ten years later, when we sat down to think about television, we realized nobody had done that on television. Larry Kasdan had done The Big Chill and John Sayles had done The Return of the Secaucus Seven, but nobody had presumed to try to do something that intimate and autobiographical on television. That's the seeds in some way of Thirtysomething.
Early Directorial Experiences and Making Glory
Teddy Kim: It's funny you talk about Anhedonia being two movies in there. That reminded me of what you said about reading an early draft of Good Will Hunting. Is that something you see often, where at a very early stage the script is actually two movies fighting in the womb, trying to kill each other, and you need to bring one out? Is that true of yourself or other scripts you read?
Ed Zwick: Everybody has their own idiosyncrasies about how they write. Sometimes I have a problem with trying to get to the good parts too quickly or wanting to state things that are more thematic too baldly. I've seen other people tend to write the ending first.
A lot of times, and it's a good thing, people write so as to know what they're thinking. Many write with this high concept so firmly in mind. I feel that so often when I watch streaming shows, I can hear the studio's notes and they clang in this way. It's like listening and hearing a discordant note in a symphony, or the most bombastic symphony where you hear the theme repeated again and again by the horns.
The more you write, the more confident you get of having internalized your intentions and being able to reveal them in a more artful way, as opposed to imposing on characters to do things they might not have done or say things they wouldn't have said in order to serve your plot or preconceived idea. That's where unsophisticated writing comes from.
As opposed to, and I quote a line from Jim Brooks in Broadcast News when Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks, old friends but you don't know their relationship, in an early scene one says to the other, "Look, I'll meet you at the place we went to that night before they went to did the thing." You go, "Oh, that is everything." That is how people talk. They don't say the thing they're thinking about and never say the thing the other person knows.
People often try to get exposition in the nature of dialogue as if it were called for when in fact, generally, if you know what you're doing and respect your audience, if they miss one bus, there'll be another bus by in a moment. You try to earn their trust.
I just watched what Steven Zaillian did with The Night Of and his recent Ripley. He, more than anybody else, is taking that medium of the long form and really finding its application to the novel, not doing it as cliffhangers or a Dickensian thing, but rather as a genuine form that has its own rhythms. You may not like the thing he's done - some might find it tedious, slow or unsuspenseful. But the rigor with which it's made visually and narratively unto itself is so exciting and rare because it is a unique piece of work.
You don't yet, except with those exceptions and maybe what Scott Frank did with The Queen's Gambit, have writer-directors finding a way to apply this different form to storytelling. Generally, it's just taken the piss out of storytelling and made it weak tea.
Gabriel Frieberg: You talk about confidence as an artist. You made Glory at 35 years old, which is just amazing to us. What was it like being a young white director in charge of such immense talent with a movie with such clear racial themes, with these southern ghosts you mentioned surrounding the production? It must have been a head trip. How did you manage this, and if you don't mind answering in specific reference to your star in the movie, Denzel Washington?
Ed Zwick: First of all, that's the longest chapter in the book because there was the most to say about it. I'm not sure I can do it justice, but I'll try.
It has to begin at the age of 14 or 15, being a white kid in an all-white school with the only black teacher there as my homeroom advisor and his role in my life for about four years between 1966 and 1970. Those years were the years of civil rights protests, the assassinations of King, the Chicago 7 trial, the Grant Park riots, the McCarthy campaign - so many things were happening in that moment, and many had to do with politics and race. He took it upon himself to take a group of very idiotic suburban white kids and try to raise their consciousness.
I guess that's the phrase of the time. I had at least some awareness of certain issues at a young age. I'm from Chicago and there was some opportunity in that setting, particularly sports, to interact with kids of other ethnicities and races.
But when I was in college, I would walk past that statue of Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment in the Boston Common and pass it right by because it seemed like dead history. There's a guy on a horse and these soldiers marching by and you don't look at them really. It was like patriotic gore.
It really wasn't until more than 10 years later that I came upon the monograph written by Lincoln Kirstein about the 54th. It was sent to me ironically by somebody I'd been to college with who sat in an American history class with me, so he knew I would have some awareness of this, maybe that interest. He couldn't have known that I had tromped up and down the Civil War battlefields when I was 15 or 16.
My point is there's a whole concatenation of events that swirl around this that then put me into that circumstance and somehow gave me the desire, if not the ability, to do it. That notion of being presumptuous to do it is born of a few things.
I directed a lot of plays that I shouldn't have when I was young and made a big fool of myself trying to direct a production of "the Scottish play" or Strindberg or whatever, but I had at least taken big swings at things before, not always successfully. That's part of where it came from.
I did something else, which is maybe a page out of what I'd seen with Woody, which is I surrounded myself with unbelievably gifted, talented people. Freddie Francis, the DP, had already won an Oscar and was one of the legendary British cameramen. Norman Garwood, my production designer, had designed Brazil. James Horner was not yet at his manuensis, so not that great peak he reached as a composer, but his promise was obviously there and Spielberg had already picked him out as a sort of B-version of John Williams. The things Spielberg didn't give John Williams to do, James would do, like An American Tail and some of the smaller pieces, but that was already something on the radar.
I only evoke those people to suggest I was not alone in stepping into this thing. The producer Freddie Fields was a very ambitious, wily and bloodied member of the film world. He was part of the mix.
But the idea of trying to tell a group of brilliant black actors about the nature of their experience historically was obviously a very presumptuous and possibly volatile thing to do. To be in college in the 1960s or early 1970s as I was, there was all sorts of friction between the idea of cultural appropriation, African American studies, and a kind of growing chasm between the experience of white culture and black culture.
What I saw though, the fact that I had considered myself a student of Civil War history or even of history, and that I had not known this story, was an opportunity for historical redress. It is also a story that talks about the aspirations of these black men within the context of white culture and white authority.
That's the character of Shaw, and that's the army, and that's Lincoln and all of that. So I saw in it also an opportunity to bridge that growing chasm that I sensed and felt in my life, and talk about a story where finally it is about commonality of experience and the ultimate unification of these men in death. It's not for nothing that last image shows them thrown together into that pit, as indeed they were.
This is the important point - this is one of those rare moments in which the historical truth aligned with dramatic shape. I did not have to bowdlerize the events.
Teddy Kim: The truth was better than any fiction you could come up with, really.
Ed Zwick: Exactly. Now that is not to say that within that context, I did not take an opportunity to write, because we did. We knew a little bit about Shaw - there were his letters at Harvard. We knew a little bit about Forbes who was his adjutant or his second. We didn't know who these men were really. There are a few letters, a few pictures, but nothing really. That was an opportunity to invent.
Those people were invented. It is also not known whether a man was whipped in the context of that story, but men were flogged often, white and black men. There was corporal punishment. But most of the other events about shoes, about wearing the uniforms, about pay, the threat of being shot - all of that was based on true things.
So it was about trying to weave in the individuals. And that leads me to the actors, because the actors each had such extraordinarily rich inner lives. Their experiences were very different as men, and yet I think it served to try to present this group of people not as a monolith, but rather as very distinct individuals from very different backgrounds.
That's mirrored by what happened as black men around the country heard about what we were doing and some of them knew that story. People came from all over the country - there were teachers, military men, professors, lawyers, any number of people came because they wanted to participate in this story. They felt that there was an opportunity to represent.
And then you talk about what that meant to Denzel, Morgan Freeman, Jihmi Kennedy, and Andre Braugher. Morgan, when his success really began to rise, ended up buying the plantation in Tennessee on which his family had been slaves.
Gabriel Frieberg: And this is Morgan Freeman, for any listeners.
Ed Zwick: Yes, and Denzel literally was one of these people who so internalized the character that his experience of making the movie was not unlike the experience of Trip, which is to say he held himself apart and let himself very slowly be brought into that sense of common experience. That ended up being expressed in the moment when they do that prayer before they go into battle. I had never been in the presence of such ability.
Look, the actors on Thirtysomething, I take nothing away from any of them. It was a fantastic experience and they were very collaborative and available. But maybe I shouldn't even try to distinguish between them, except that there is something about movie actors, their ability to hold the screen, your fascination with their inner lives.
Andre Braugher, his family had wanted him to be an engineer and he was brilliant, yet instead he'd gone to Juilliard. The minute I saw him in his showcase his senior year, it was a revelation. Now you take all of these men, including Jihmi Kennedy, and you put them together and something happens that is far beyond any of your expectations. You can write lines, you can write descriptive passages, but as we began to do some rehearsal and improvisations and just conversations, what emerged was a kind of rapture. There was something far larger and stronger than anything that I thought I would feel.
It was something spiritual that I was in the presence of and did not quite know how to respond except to shut up and get out of its way. That became a lesson to me in many regards about film - that you think being a director is the ultimate authority and you're going to take control, but in fact what you're doing is trying to corral all of this ability and talent and emotion. You're trying to help move this, nudge that, or corral something else, but you're not necessarily making anything happen.
Teddy Kim: You're like the conduit.
Ed Zwick: You're presiding. You're a vessel through which all of this is passing through on its way to the screen. You're the gatekeeper because you're there saying "Here's the camera," but you're actually trying to see like the camera sees. You're trying to see what's honestly happening. It doesn't matter what your expectations are or your anxieties or your dreams.
It's about being present and seeing what is actually taking place. And what was taking place before me was magnificent. It really was about finding a way to let it grow and flourish.
Capturing Natural Performances
Gabriel Frieberg: You mentioned that the best actors are the ones whose pulses drop instead of quicken, and I think my favorite parts of this memoir were how you talk about performance. You appreciate performers that are so natural and fluid, where in your words, "the default is reality."
I think Denzel exemplifies this, like you said, but who else in terms of actors that you worked with could lower their pulse and really inhabit a character, a moment, a scene? Who were some of the best at that?
Ed Zwick: One of the first people was Tim Busfield on Thirtysomething. He had a natural grace and an ability to inhabit these words with an ease that I had never seen before. He certainly was one.
Obviously, Matt Damon was another. When I saw the way he could be at ease and flow with things and allow things to happen to him in the moment. Leonardo DiCaprio certainly was another at times. Anne Hathaway, not obligatorily.
There are great actors like Anthony Hopkins, who is an actor of the National Theatre and of great preparation, or Liev Schreiber, who is maybe our greatest classical actor that America has produced. He's lapidary in his preparation and his minute understanding of what's happening. But you're talking about something different.
Gabriel Frieberg: It's an ephemeral quality. I think Anne Hathaway is so fantastic in Love and Other Drugs and it's a real person in front of you, not an actor.
Ed Zwick: Obviously we could point to other actors who do it now in different ways. At times Joaquin Phoenix does that, and many others. But I think when you're talking about a period movie, your obligation to try to make things as you said, the default being reality, is amplified because you're literally trying to do something anti-entropic.
You're trying to push away all modernity, all elements of planes overhead and buildings in the distance and the natural rhythms of life that people become accustomed to. In any movie, I think that begins with the screenwriter anticipating that same attempt. In other words, not writing words that oblige actors to do things that a normal human being wouldn't do, unless you're writing about superheroes.
The simplest example, which you see all the time, is when someone writes a scene where the couple sits down to have dinner and the waiter comes and they take the order. Then five lines later, they ask for the check. It happens emotionally just as often, where someone enters the scene and all of a sudden they're making this enormous transition, which I like to call "going around a corner on two wheels," to try to do things where then the actor is obliged to sell your work.
Other than you having anticipated all of their process, what they may have to go through internally, the time that is needed, the obstacles, the hesitations, the inhibitions, rather than just doing a thing that accomplishes your goal. In that outline that you've written before, you've actually understood what human beings would say.
It's about trying to be able to overhear or put yourself above that scene and look at those people listening to them, do what they're doing naturally. And if the writer has done it, then the director does it again with the size of the set, with the way the set is dressed, with what they're wearing, with what kind of staging you ask them to do, or let them fall into things that are indeed natural. Everybody strives to contribute to that feeling. He walks in and if it's really right, he feels like he's cheating.
Storytelling & Scale
Teddy Kim: Maybe that's a good place to jump from the actor's process to your process as a storyteller and as a writer.
When we were watching so many of your movies, particularly Legends of the Fall, we loved how it preserved the novelistic aspect of the book that it was originally based on. But then we also had the thought that if you made this kind of movie today, it would probably be a miniseries or at least the economics of it, the business of it, would push it towards expanding the story into an 8 to 10 episode series.
Ed Zwick: I'm sure that's right. Obviously it's horses for courses. In other words, knowing that you're making a two-hour story out of a novella - I love Jim Harrison and I just adapted a Stephen King book of 630 pages as a movie, so you can imagine that challenge.
Teddy Kim: What do you think is gained or lost in that?
Ed Zwick: It's about the solution. It's all about problem-solving. The problem is how do you make this a story in two hours? When you look at the book, which I read 600 times and really tried to internalize, I realized that it was a story told more in the manner of oral history, that it was very conscious.
We began with One Stab sitting by the fire telling this story and I almost began to think of it as a kind of an illustrated story, where they were sitting by the fire and telling you a story. They would say, "And then four years passed" and "Then they grew tired of each other" or "After Tristan had been gone so long, Ludlow's hair grew white overnight and he had a stroke." Literally these things are presented with ellipses in time, in emotion, and in character. That becomes the rhythm of the piece. You set it up from the very beginning and you just say, that's what this is going to be. Sit back, I'm just going to tell you this tale.
Look, great people have done it before. I don't know if you've ever seen David Lean's adaptation of Great Expectations. He does Great Expectations in about an hour and 46 minutes. Now, Great Expectations is a very long, dense narrative, and yet he does it. It's a little bit, I'm gonna say this as if I know what I'm talking about but I don't, it's like reducing a sauce. The way that they create reductions to intensify the flavor and the consistency of things to make it an experience that's rich.
And that was the whole idea about Legends of the Fall. Susan Shilliday, who wrote it with me, understood something very specific. It's something that Harrison actually had studied in school. It was about Norse saga. In Norse saga, character is not fate. Fate is fate. These kinds of things happen that are disturbing and almost random. It's full of dread and yet full of passion and it's unjudgmental about how people behave. I think that affected what we were trying to do there.
Teddy Kim: There's an amorality to it. You talk about that with Tristan, and on the epic scale of the story at large too.
Ed Zwick: Yeah, the father has participated in the genocide of the Native Americans and he's now gone to try to isolate himself and take himself away from the world as if he can. The idea of this woman coming and her having these involvements with three different men...
Teddy Kim: It sounds biblical almost.
Ed Zwick: Yeah, it is. Biblical is a pretty good analogy. Something I really recommend - Stephen Fry wrote a book recently which is a colloquial version of The Iliad called Troy. He's a classical scholar in addition to being this wag and this really good actor. When you read it, you realize that everything we do as dramatists has its antecedents right there.
Everything having to do with action, everything having to do with love story, everything having to do with betrayal and scheme and comedy - it's all there. So when you say something's biblical, it is also Greek and you can trace it all right back there. By the way, same with psychoanalysis, as we know. Everybody has found the roots already long before. It's something I would actually recommend to writers to say, okay, if you don't have an idea, something to write about, they're all there. Just take your time and go reread The Iliad.
Teddy Kim: One of the first stories.
Gabriel Frieberg: One more question about your work and then I have some more general questions about the book and your career. I want to talk about The Last Samurai. People talk about scale a lot. You hear that word. What does scale mean to you and how does it relate to actor and performance?
I don't know if you're watching, but Shogun is on TV starring Hiroyuki Sanada.
Ed Zwick: Sanada, who's my friend who I cast.
Gabriel Frieberg: He's amazing.
Ed Zwick: It's one of the great performances I've seen in many years.
Gabriel Frieberg: So how do you think about scale and if you're a fan or not a fan, how do you think maybe Shogun on TV is pulling off scale and other shows like it?
Ed Zwick: Okay, you asked a good question that would oblige me to sit here again for another hour, but I'll try. First of all, scale is part of the director's palette. It's not unlike color and movement and mise en scène, all those things are part of it.
Scale is also not just about size. Scale is about the size of ideas. And I think that is something that people don't quite realize. I think it's something that at times for all his genius, it's things that Ridley Scott seems to be too little interested in. I think he looks at scale sometimes, as do some other directors, as this opportunity for pageant. I don't think that's what scale is. I think scale is trying to create the verisimilitude of a circumstance, trying to give the sense of reality of that which surrounds your story.
Teddy Kim: It feels like if you go off the frame, there's something there.
Ed Zwick: Yes, exactly. It's also creating an edifice on which these actors can stand. The size of their emotional life, the melodrama, often seems more in place because there's an urgency and an exigency that's happening in that moment, that historical moment or that contextual moment, that makes that seem more plausible.
If you put that in a living room, it would seem melodramatic, but somehow in that moment it seems right. That too is what scale is.
In terms of The Last Samurai, there's a fantastic story about Sanada. When I went to make that movie, we went to Japan and I met a lot of actors. Ken Watanabe walked in the room and it was like, "Oh my God, this is the person that I've written. This is him." And then Sanada walked in and before he walked in, we were basically told, "This is the Tom Cruise of Japan. This is the most prominent actor of his moment." And he walked in and he was divine. He was wonderful. But it wasn't what I had written. I had written a different character.
If you think of the character that he's playing now as Toranaga, which is so extraordinarily internal - it's about a man who has these secrets and keeps everything closed inside, he has these plots and he's affecting the world around him - the character we wrote of Katsumoto was in fact larger than life and funny and emotive in a very different way.
And when I told Warner Brothers in Japan, they had some guys there, they said, "No, you can't do that. In Japan we cast hierarchically. Ken has been doing these NHK TV dramas and Sanada is this great movie star." This wonderful woman, Yoko Narahashi, who helped me cast it and is a director in Japan, I said, "Can I talk to Sanada about this?"
He came in, and within five minutes of talking about it, he said, "Oh no, I completely understand. I would like this to be for Ken and I would be honored to be his second in this story."
Gabriel Frieberg: Be a second...
Teddy Kim: Not second in the samurai way, in his seppuku...
Ed Zwick: Aha yes. In fact, his vote of confidence gave Ken, who at that moment wasn't the most confident that he would be able to do it, such extraordinary support as a supporting actor should. And he was great in the movie and great to me because he knows so much.
Then of course, when you see this production of Shogun and you compare it to the first production of Shogun that they did - I don't know if you ever saw that...
Teddy Kim: The Richard Chamberlain one.
Ed Zwick: Oh, it was so terrible. This new one has, first of all, things done so right in terms of the staging, the pace, the stillness, the ritual, all of that. The scale obviously is great. They shot the whole damn thing in Canada and it's a hymn to CGI.
They built a lot, and I'm very curious to see how much they built and how much they used as extensions. But it was CGI used for the purpose of a period and not for the purpose of rocket ships and explosions. Another advancement in terms of what it can be.
Working in Different Time Periods
Gabriel Frieberg: You have work that is both in the present and the past. I wonder how you think about telling contemporary stories. A lot of famous directors seem to be looking backwards but you have played in the waters of both the present and the past. How do you think about the time period you set a story in and the themes being contemporary and speaking to us in the present?
Ed Zwick: It's never occurred to me that there's any difference. It's never occurred to me that there's any difference in times between television and movies. And then I just wrote a book and that was like making a movie. I don't know, I've never really differentiated past and present in that regard.
I like period because it gives you a whole different view of behaviors and the behaviors can be different, but that's just not one that I really dwell on.
There's something I wanted to say about something we talked about earlier, though, that occurs to me. You were talking about filmmakers now and the intergenerational difference.
And I wonder about a group of filmmakers now your age, younger even than you, who have not had the experience of movies in theaters, really. For whom that is not the singular experience, it's an occasional experience. Who look at movies on their computer or they can stop them and answer their phone or get emails. The relationship is, I'm not saying it's less passionate, but it seems a little bit less revered. They don't understand that the role of movies in the culture can really be significant. That they can touch people in this very deep way.
Because once movies became available on VHS and DVD, they became commoditized in a very different way. They became units that could be sold and controlled by the consumer rather than this one-off experience that was ephemeral.
Teddy Kim: Right, it's like I can control - I can press play, I can press pause. I'm almost in control in a way that I'm not if it's playing on a big screen in front of me at a theater.
Ed Zwick: Yes, and consequently, if you have control, I don't think you necessarily abandon yourself to the experience as regressively as one used to. I think there was a kind of childlike wonder and awe...
Teddy Kim: Cinema Paradiso type...
Ed Zwick: Yeah, that's exactly right. That's been diminished. Anyway, sorry. That was just an observation.
Capturing Hometown Chicago on the Screen
Teddy Kim: No, no, that's interesting. We were talking about past and present. Maybe we can jump into your past a little bit, because we touched on About Last Night. You grew up in Chicago and I was thinking that it must've been a really cool experience to do one of your earlier movies where the city you grew up in is as much of a character as any of the real-life characters in the movie.
Actually right after I saw About Last Night, I loved the Chicago visuals so much that I went back and I immediately turned on Thief after I finished About Last Night. Because to me, that is also a very Chicago movie. And-
Ed Zwick: Michael Mann is a Chicago kid. Oh yeah.
Teddy Kim: A hundred percent. The Bear is a very popular show right now as well. So yeah, what was it like capturing your hometown on the screen? How do you think about representations of a city in movies or TV?
Ed Zwick: I think the best part was having old girls who hadn't paid attention to me suddenly think that I'm a cool guy.
Gabriel Frieberg: Always good.
Ed Zwick: Always good. No, look, Chicago in particular - in the way that New York does other cities - but Chicago has a role in my life in all sorts of ways. All the guys from Steppenwolf were guys that I knew and I've worked with all of them at different times.
There's a kind of unpretentious work ethic of people that I have known and stayed friends with there, and even here from that place, that is easier. It doesn't seem to be as affected or as self-important. There's a kind of grounded, Carl Sandburg, broad-shouldered idea of work. And that's really been important to me in the people that I've worked with.
On Franchises and Superhero Movies
Gabriel Frieberg: How do you feel about franchises and superhero movies, honestly? And besides employing thousands of people, do you see redeeming qualities within them?
Ed Zwick: What I see in them is an enormous enterprise and astonishing amounts of talent on all sides applied in the accomplishment of very little.
Teddy Kim: It's like the inversion of the Churchill quote. Never has so much been done by so many to achieve so little.
Ed Zwick: Yeah, I'm in awe of the ability and of the application of the technologies and the talents of so many people to create something that I find to be ultimately so boring and so redundant.
Teddy Kim: Imagine if we put that money towards making our modern Lawrence of Arabia or Doctor Zhivago.
Ed Zwick: Oh, yeah. Or eight other small movies or whatever.
What Didn’t Make the Book
Teddy Kim: Before we jump into the rapid fire questions, was there anything left on the cutting room floor of your book that you wish you could have included?
Ed Zwick: That's funny. There's so much I realized, but it's right. I did this book tour. And as I would be talking, I'd say, "Oh, could have put that in the book. Oh, there's an idea that would have been nice." I realized that there was a moment in which, when I was actually working to try to come up with The Great Wall, Marshall Herskovitz and I had written a script, and what we'd written was this sort of fun, Crosby and Hope - if you know the Crosby and Hope movies, they were like "Crosby and Hope Go to Africa," whatever, they were romps.
And I thought of this movie about monsters climbing over the Great Wall. Wouldn't that be fun if these two silly white guys, Europeans from the Crusades, end up going over there? And we were doing it. I was in the Gobi Desert. I was literally scouting in the Gobi Desert when the bottom fell out and they lost their money and they somehow had this different deal with Warner Brothers. And then the Chinese said, "No, this has to be serious."
And then all of a sudden I was literally - there are a bunch of us, eight of us, designers and DPs and me and a producer - we were in the Gobi Desert. And we heard this news and we had to straggle our way back to Beijing or Shanghai, wherever we were. And then they couldn't get us out of there enough on flights for another two days. And we just sat there and spent the studio's money for two days, just eating and drinking our way through the city. It's hard to get bored with Chinese banquets, but we managed to.
Teddy Kim: Where they're plying you with baijiu.
Ed Zwick: Yeah. There were a lot of stories like that.
Dream Projects
Gabriel Frieberg: Ed, what movie of yours do you think is your most underrated and why is it Legends of the Fall?
Ed Zwick: Some people think that Legends of the Fall is a kind of bodice ripper.
Gabriel Frieberg: We loved it. The classical bigness of it and the way looks communicate so much just felt so right and provoked us and got our emotions running. But we're just messing around. What movie do you think is your most underrated?
Ed Zwick: Oh, I don't know. I know there's a movie that's underseen. I don't think as many people have seen Pawn Sacrifice as might have. The distribution of it was so badly handled and so screwed up and so much happened to prevent people from seeing it. I would have said Defiance, except that actually has found its way into the culture in different ways, in interesting ways, and seems to have endured.
I think Pawn Sacrifice seems not even known by a lot of people who like movies. And yet I think it's a very different movie. I think Bradford Young's work in it is great. I think Liev Schreiber's work in it is wonderful.
I think that it was an exercise in trying to make a sports movie about chess, which I thought was a real challenge. And yet I think it does have in it a certain amount of suspense and rooting.
Gabriel Frieberg: That's so funny. Because I wanted to ask you about sports movies. You use a lot of sports metaphors in writing and in conversation. But you never made a sports movie. I guess Pawn Sacrifice is one, in a way.
Ed Zwick: I would love to make a sports movie.
Gabriel Frieberg: Is there a dream sports project for you?
Ed Zwick: Yeah, but we've already made it. It was Bull Durham. I think Ron Shelton's movie is maybe one of the best sports movies that will ever be made. But I know all of them. Denzel in Remember the Titans and Rudy and God knows going back all the way to It Happens Every Spring. And Moneyball, I thought was a really fine movie.
Yeah, I would. There was something I tried to work on once. It didn't work. It was about a great sort of bonus baby MVP type of guy who ends up getting transported back to the beginnings of baseball and having to see exactly what that was. He learns the ethos of really being a ballplayer as opposed to just being massaged and pampered.
Gabriel Frieberg: So it's like a moral, personal tale.
Teddy Kim: I guess there was a lot of baseball in About Last Night, right?
Ed Zwick: Yeah, I got to go. They start by playing softball in Grant Park and they go to Murphy's Bleachers and then he's wearing a Cubs jersey half the damn time. And then at the end, they're playing softball again.
Teddy Kim: Expanding from sports movies, is there just a dream project that you've never been able to do?
Ed Zwick: There are a couple of scripts that we take out of the drawer every year or two and try to get made and so far haven't. But there are a couple of them that we feel as fondly about as those that have been made.
It's weird how - I mean, what must an architect feel who makes plans for a building that never gets built? These are stillborn children and they're as beautiful as the children that I have out there.
I don't think there are any less good. I think they could be better or not, but you won't know until they're made and some of them will not get made. Listen, I think if I've developed, if I've made 15 movies, I'm sure that I've developed 30. By the way, 50 percent good, that's a remarkable batting average based on some stories that I know about a lot of people who have done 10 or 15 scripts and they've gotten one made.
And that's a tough life.
Teddy Kim: Anything you can share, or do you want to keep those in the drawer, your special projects?
Ed Zwick: Oh, no. One of them's about a small town in Colorado that wants to be a city at the turn of the century.
And it's called Century. The premise is it's a love story. It's a romantic triangle between three people. And it talks about how what people don't understand about the West is they really just want it to be the East. It's about that impulse. It's about the hard rock mining wars and the Wobblies and the IWW and the Pinkertons and all those things that were happening at that time.
Teddy Kim: Is it like Deadwood or Heaven's Gate type era?
Ed Zwick: Heaven's Gate is about the ranch wars. And Deadwood is earlier, I think. No, this is a little bit more about the coming of the modern era.
Rapid Fire Questions
Gabriel Frieberg: Ed, some rapid fire questions for you. Let's start off with the movie you'd tell every aspiring filmmaker to watch.
Ed Zwick: The Seven Samurai.
Gabriel Frieberg: Great one. Any actor, living or dead, that you'd love to work with?
Ed Zwick: Meryl Streep.
Gabriel Frieberg: What movie do you think is deeply overrated?
Ed Zwick: Children of Paradise.
Gabriel Frieberg: Which director's oeuvre would you point aspiring filmmakers to watch, and why?
Ed Zwick: Hal Ashby, because he understood things about life and had an ease and an ability to get performances that were just fantastic.
Gabriel Frieberg: Nice. I wouldn't expect that answer, but it's a good one. What's an upcoming movie you're really excited to watch?
Ed Zwick: I'm very curious to see what Kevin Costner comes up with in his two-movie opus. Because Dances with Wolves really did set a bar in terms of a kind of storytelling.
Gabriel Frieberg: Besides Bull Durham, which you mentioned, what existing movie or show do you wish you got to adapt or have a crack at?
Ed Zwick: It's funny, they made a movie of the book The Killer Angels about the Battle of Gettysburg.
Gabriel Frieberg: Oh, yeah.
Ed Zwick: It was on television and it was pretty good, but I actually felt that if it had been done slightly differently, it might have been even better.
Gabriel Frieberg: What's a favorite recent film of yours from last year or the past couple of years?
Ed Zwick: Gosh, that's funny. Not in the past couple years. I actually went back and rewatched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind recently. There's a movie that I just loved.
Gabriel Frieberg: 20 year anniversary.
Ed Zwick: Is it 20? Really? What a good movie that is. Recently - yeah, I really liked what I already talked about, what Steven Zaillian just did. Scott Frank has done some good stuff recently. There was a Western that he did. What was it called?
Gabriel Frieberg: Godless.
Ed Zwick: Godless. I thought it was very good.
Gabriel Frieberg: That kind of answers the next question. What's your favorite recent TV show? And it can't be Shogun or Ripley.
Ed Zwick: No, I mean, like everybody, I really responded to The Bear. What I liked about it was its ability, like a short story, not necessarily to have to make the shapes so rounded and so complete and unified that it aspired to tell very small stories and that allowed it to surround it with a lot of this ambience, which is as much the story of what The Bear is as the narrative. And yet ultimately led to some very profound storytelling. It just took its time to get there.
Gabriel Frieberg: I love that. And the way you mentioned shapes, because it's jagged, but they fit. I think that's a great point.
Teddy Kim: How about what is the kindest thing that anyone has ever done for you?
Ed Zwick: The kindest thing that anyone's ever done for me? Oh boy, there's been so much.
Teddy Kim: You can take your time. You can think about it.
Gabriel Frieberg: Teddy, you stumped him.
Ed Zwick: Yeah. When I was sick, I had a friend who just decided that he was just going to keep coming over to my house and we're just going to watch baseball together.
Gabriel Frieberg: That's beautiful. Honestly. What is the best piece of advice you've ever received? And what is the worst? That'll be the last question here today.
Ed Zwick: I do talk about advice in the book. And I talk about Sidney Pollack a lot. I talk about the advice that he gave me. Part of it was prescriptive about actors and about making movies. But the idea that one of the hardest things to do is to actually enjoy your life when you're an artist. That the sense of ambition and the sense of dissatisfaction and unrest is so prevalent that it's very hard to take pleasure in what you're doing because it's surrounded by so much anxiety and so much noise.
So I think that the opportunity to try to enjoy this process is a very challenging thing.
Gabriel Frieberg: Yeah.
Teddy Kim: Do you have a worst piece of advice that you've ever gotten?
Ed Zwick: Oh, the worst piece of advice. There's a lot of bad advice.
Oh, I know the worst piece of advice. "Always have something to fall back on."
Gabriel Frieberg: That is some not courageous thinking. Ed, thank you so much for taking some time today. We had a fantastic time both reading your book and definitely talking to you.
And I hope you did too. Really congratulations on a film memoir that I think will enter the echelons of film books. We highly recommend it to anyone.
Ed Zwick: Thanks guys. I really appreciate it. This was fun. Thank you.
Legendary Filmmaker Ed Zwick on his Best-Selling Memoir: "Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions"