No, this is my cut. I said to them, “If you can’t tell a story in 90 minutes, don’t tell it at all.” And it was always my intention to try and cut it to the bone. I knew the story was there. The bond company makes you shoot the screenplay. You have to do that and it was a long screenplay. I cut about 20 pages myself before we started shooting and I still knew it was overly long.
But also it’s interesting because there is another film. There’s a whole relationship between Mackenzie Phillips’ character [and the other guard]. There’s actually a scene where they make out in the nurse’s waiting room where “It’s a Wonderful Life” is playing on the TV. And it dissolves from that to Adrien in the drawer and you just hear Zuzu saying, “Every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings.”
There are kind of romantic/poetic kind of bits. In the end, they didn’t have any value or meaning to the story I was trying to tell. And I’m really interested in how much you can cut it to the finest kind of bone and still have a story. That’s where it brings me back to that thing about audiences have enormous intelligence. I’m a member of the audience. I remember. I know what it’s like.
Audiences will bring value to films that invest meaning to situations and subjects. I don’t buy into this thing of 5 hour, 4 hour, 3 hour… Imagine if “The Aviator” had been 40 minutes shorter. It would have won every f***ing Oscar last night. It was ironic that Thelma Schoonmaker got the Best Editor. She’s a brilliant editor, don’t get me wrong. But if she’d cut about 35 minutes from that film, it would be a masterpiece. But it lingered so long in certain scenes you were like, “Get over it. Leave me alone. Let me go on.” If it’s “City of God,” I will watch 7 hours of “City of God” because that’s a different kind of energy, a different kind of cinema. But within this kind of American/Hollywood me trying to be all proper, I think there is a kind of framework you can work within that is very vital to this day. Very full of energy – and I want to be a part of that. I hope “The Jacket” is. Even though it’s being sold as “The Ring.”
Were there any specific cinematic elements you used to create the world in the film?
There’s a very particular agenda. All the very expensive CGI sequences I actually had shot on film and I gave them to an art student and got her to just copy Stan Brakhage, actually. We painted blood and bleach and stuff onto the electronic sequences to make them more trippy, more organic, more psychedelic, simply because Stan Brakhage is my favorite American film artist. He’s kind of like the William De Kooning of American cinema, really. If I had money I’d be buying prints because in about 10 years time at Sotherby’s you’ll become a millionaire by owning a print by Stan Brakhage. Even the end credits are a bad pastiche of “Mothlight,” which is one of his films. This is me being really pretentious, which probably isn’t really useful for this particular conversation because I’m meant to be selling this movie so that there’s bums on seats and people with big buckets of popcorn and coca-cola.
Jennifer Jason Leigh said she showed you the documentary, “Titicut Follies.” What was your reaction to that film?
Well, that blew my mind. Jennifer Jason Leigh brought “Titicut Follies” to show us when we were doing our research. We had a 10 day research and rehearsal period on this film. If you’ve seen “Titicut Follies” and you’ve seen this film, this looks like a holiday camp. The way the patients are treated in my film is like a Club 1814 or Club Med or something. “Titicut Follies” is the most brutal, terrifying and real document of how people were treated not so long ago in this country in mental asylums.
The interesting thing is when I was researching this, I did go to some of the veterans hospitals here. They’re not that better staffed and supported than the place I portray in this film, and that’s what this is about, actually. It’s how your so-called heroes – my heroes, too, my nephews are fighting in Iraq at the moment - they’re treated like sh*t when this is all over. But “Titicut Follies” is an amazing piece of documentary cinema. That’s stating the obvious.
Would you ever make another Hollywood movie?
(Laughing) I bloody hope so. That remains to be seen if I’m allowed back.
Speaking of the Oscars, should Imelda Staunton (“Vera Drake”) have won?
I think so. Anyone should have won except for Hilary Swank for God’s sake. The girl from “Hotel Rwanda” for Christ’s sake. Or give them all the Oscars. It’s a pack of lies. Didn’t you think it was the most banal, corporate…? It looked like “American Idol” the way they had all those people standing on the stage.
