Alan Rudolph: Twentieth-Century Fox

Revisiting a mid-career interview with an overlooked great

Photo: Joyce Rudolph

Near the turn of the century, I conducted an extended mid-career survey interview with Alan Rudolph. He had a new film: Afterglow. It's one of my favorite interviews, with one of my favorite filmmakers. A version of the conversations ran way back then in Filmmaker magazine, editor, Scott Macaulay.

By design and default, Alan Rudolph remains, after twenty years, one of the sweeter anomalies of American filmmaking outside the mainstream. With Afterglow, the writer-director's fifteenth feature, which he describes as "an unwashed soap opera," Rudolph continues his woozy contemplation of love and desire, of melodrama and coincidence. It’s an alternately giddy and sorrowful fable about two married couples whose lives intersect in contemporary Montreal. Nick Nolte is Lucky Mann, a Mr. Fix-It who knows most of the Mrs. on his side of town; still suffering from a painful loss in her past, wife Julie Christie sits at home, watching tapes of B-movies she once acted in. (Christie was named best actress at the 45th San Sebastian Film Festival.) Jonny Lee Miller is a twentyfive-ish corporate shark and control freak who can't quite control his effervescent wife, Lara Flynn Boyle. Let the infidelity begin. While Rudolph's dialogue has a snappy, flirty quality, the images are more elusive. In the soft-focus style he favors—much like his own eyesight without glasses—Rudolph makes Montreal an otherworldly metropolis. The first glimpses of the young couple's apartment building with a crimson sunset manage to suggest Tunisia at moonlight.

Listening to Rudolph is like watching his movies—he's a real sit-down stand-up, a fountain of shtick. With his self-deprecating manner, it's an amusing image to think of him pacing all day, conjuring pained romantics while pacing a writing room over a garage somewhere. Solitude seems part of his process. His wife, Joyce Rudolph, is a leading on-set still photographer, and he stays at home to write if he doesn't have a project. At the first showing of Afterglow at last year's Toronto International Film Festival, Rudolph was full of jokes. Seeing the packed house, he jibed, "Well, this looks like there goes all our Toronto business. I love being here. Canada is my second or third favorite country." After the movie was warmly received by the audience, Rudolph returned. "I don't know what questions you could ask, and I'd lie anyway. But why am I up here? It's all about the actors. They're the only artists in the process. That's why we put a frame around their face. I never write with actors in mind but I only work with actors whose phone numbers I have." He left the stage with a smile, "I'll take this with me for the rest of the life of this film."

A long-nurtured adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, with a rapid-fire thirty-two-day schedule, is set to shoot in February, courtesy of a complicated rights deal orchestrated by star Bruce Willis (who first worked with Rudolph in Mortal Thoughts). Over several conversations across several months, Rudolph and I traced the dealings and the filmmaking philosophy that have kept him in the game despite never having a breakthrough success. Our last conversation, in the recesses of an uninteresting hotel lobby, took place on a gray, drizzly afternoon, with a view of a solitary golfer whacking balls into the gloom.

You are the king of the woe-is-me one-liner.

The woe-is-me one-liner?

All the self-deprecation.

Oh, that's not an act. I may not be happy but I'm having a good time. I hear you saying that, and I realize that I don't realize that I'm doing that. But I can't not tell the truth. 

So when did this attitude begin?

From the start. The truth is, the first film I made with real actors, Welcome to L.A. It was the most audacious film I'll ever make, because I didn't know the difference. Robert Altman, who produced it, sensed when I worked with him on Nashville that I could do things and that I was dissatisfied. He said, "Listen, I can get a film made for you." I had written the script for Buffalo Bill and the Indians. Buffalo Bill was at the time a pretty high-budget film, maybe $7 million. Had Paul Newman, all that. So we're in Calgary, the day before shooting and Orion—no, it was the old UA, all those terrific United Artists guys like Arthur Krim and Eric Pleskow—all fly up to have a big production meeting with Bob for whatever reason. He wants me to be in on the meeting. We're talking, Bob's sitting there and he says, "Okay, let's make a proposition to you guys. Our picture costs $7 million. For less than a million more, we'll make another movie, Alan will write and direct. Like a caboose. And we'll get a lot of big stars." They say okay. I didn't know it was coming. Later, Bob said, hey, you better write something. So I make this movie. I realize it's not conventional, but I had no frame of reference. 

Altman's still a maverick at 72.

He just went up against a big studio with The Gingerbread Man and he won. That's just great. The great thing about starting with Bob, at that time, especially, was I didn't feel any obligation to anybody but myself. The only thing he ever said to me was don't make a chase movie. So I made one! An emotional chase movie. So we finish the film. And I know it's different, but you tell yourself a lie when you're making these things, that the whole world cannot wait to see it. And then when you finally see it, when you can't change it any more, it's "My god, what was I thinking?" So we got to New York to show it to all the executives. A noon screening. We ask them to bring their secretaries. They see the movie, leave the theater. We're sitting in the theater waiting for someone to say something. Then the lowest-ranking guy, who's also the shortest, comes out, and he says, "Thank you so much for showing your film. You've done a very nice job. But we don't want it, you can have it back."

That might be a gift nowadays, but then...

Yeah. In the seventies, y'know, there was no cable television, video, the so-called art-houses. There's only foreign-language releases. There was nothing to compare my movie with. So Bob, ever the risk taker, says,"We'll release it ourselves." My very first film! It did well for what it was. It grossed about $4-to-$5 million, cost under a million, broke even, everyone's happy. The first day it opened in Los Angeles, people were picketing the movie. First public screening of my life. "This movie is vile, vile, vile..." with the "viles" getting smaller and smaller. I still have a snapshot of the woman with the poster. Did that mean it became less offensive as it went along? I didn't know what to think about this. There had been a preview and some people couldn't stand anything about this movie. Some of the reviews were so vicious. I got tough from the beginning, but I got damaged, too. Maybe not creatively, but your psyche takes a hit. Then I made another film with Altman. "The hell with it, just write something else," he told me.

Which would be Remember My Name.

Bob was working with Fox and he said, "I think I can get a little film made. You got anything?" And I said let me think about it. On my way home, I drove by the Metro theater and they were showing Rita Hayworth, Ida Lupino movies. Ooh! I got an idea about some kind of loose metaphor for the woman's movement at the time. disguised as one of those B-melodramas. I wrote it in two weeks, thinking this is a giant leap for me. I really loved this movie. Two weeks before shooting, Fox backs out altogether. We'd just cast Tony Perkins and Geraldine Chaplin. Had the whole crew on location. We decide that it's two weeks before we have to pay anyone a paycheck. You get two weeks when you first start. So we said we'll shoot for two weeks and if we don't get any money, we'll just shut down.

A kind of pay-or-pray deal?

Yeah. Then David Begelman was fired for writing bad checks at Columbia and there was this interim guy who came in, was looking for anything to have some pictures going, heard we were shooting something, again under a million dollars. He tells us he can't officially be part of this, but they'll underwrite the film. Right in the second week of shooting. I finish, edit it, I'm thinking, Hey, this is almost a real movie. Internally, I felt relieved. We show the film to Columbia. They say, "Thank you very much for showing us." We go back to Bob's office. They call, "We don't want this movie. You can have it back." Two for two! Bob had shut down the distribution company. So there was no distributor. But a friend of mine, a publicist, had a small distribution company and we sent it out. There were only six prints. That's a totally lost film now. No video, nothing. No prints left.

So it didn't make much of a splash for your career.

Yeah. After that, I didn't know what to do. Friends of mine, record people, wanted to start a movie company. I made two very bad studio pictures with them that I didn't want to do. And gradually, by the time I got to Choose Me, probably the film I had the most luck with. I've been lucky in that I've been able to control my films that I've written. This one, again, it was made for under a million dollars. I purged myself of the past and everybody involved in that film on our side of the camera was doing it for the first time. I got a first-time producer, a first-time cameraman, everybody. Moved everybody up. Did it in three weeks. I was so used to getting really, really beat-up badly when a picture opened—it was always the Willy Loman release, we'd put the posters up ourselves—and I got an invitation to go to France for two weeks and I left before the film opened and never even checked in. Of course, the one success I had I wasn't around for. 

But you keep making movies.

I've sort of learned the game, but every film since then has had this awkward kind of damaged release. I'm not exaggerating. Even a film that costs nothing, six million bucks, Mortal Thoughts, with Bruce and Demi, which I was hired to do the day before shooting. Ghost had come out while we were shooting, then Die Hard 2, suddenly they're Hollywood's hot couple. The producers sold it to Columbia, they screened it. Even that one, the studio said, "Lookit, you did a very nice job, we want to reshoot the whole movie and make it into a romance between Bruce and Demi, that'd be big." Here's a movie about two people who hate each other! I told them, I have no rights here, you can do whatever you want, but without me. Demi stuck by our cut, so they didn't change it, but they hated me as a result. Then another Ex-Lax release.

You sound weary, but resigned.

It's just part of life, it's like putting on my shoes. People don't come to me and say, listen, what do you what to do next? I've never, ever, ever, had continuity, I've never known what I was going to do next. Which would be one of the greatest things, to not have to start from zero. Because I don't have a big box-office success that anybody can point to, I can't dine out… Quentin, bless his heart, will never have to worry again even if every film he ever makes loses money. I remember Altman telling me after The Player, his quote, twenty or thirtieth comeback, he said, I think I'm set now for a while. Not financially, but he said, I think there's always going to be somewhere to go to get a film made for me. He was coming off a rugged period. I don't have that luxury. It's just part of it. I'm not looking for anybody's sympathy, and I don't think there's anything sorrowful about my situation. But it's true. I don't live in L.A., I couldn't name the heads of the studios, I think Hollywood movies are corporate propaganda. 

And then "independent" filmmaking, one of the "two Hollywoods" they're calling it now...

I think this independent label is a lot of posturing. I think everyone's dependent on money. And if everybody is so independent, how can everyone get together in groups? I think the filmmakers are starting to wear badges, labels that have been put upon them by the media or the corporations. It's a sales pitch. I say this even though he's helped me all the way through to this movie, but I think Altman is in a preeminent place. A film a year for however many years. A major studio [like Polygram] takes on Bob and they're undermanned. With the independent labels, with film festivals, there's a lot of buying of selling. Lots of activity. I don't know about the movies. It seems like the people you'd see at Sundance are the people you try to avoid in general! Agents, junior executives. I don't get it. I'm happy for the filmmakers, though. I say that as someone who helped pave the road a little bit. I say it intentionally, as a warning, because filmmakers should strive to be original. I hate to see a lot of really talented people swallowed up by the corporate destiny. What's happened in our society, as I can see it, globally, is that this fragile thing which we all possess, which is our identity, has been assaulted at a younger and younger age to the point where the big companies don't want you to buy their products, they want your logo in your dreams. They want to replace the natural instinct of originality with making a choice of what they present to you. I know it's just a lot of soapbox spouting. But you used to see one company did this, another company did this, now it's one big fucking conglomerate that's taken over your life. They want you to be part of their family! Filmmaking used to be the sharp elbow in the ribs of society. 

What changed?

I don't believe these decade labels, but the one true decade is the eighties. It started with Reagan, ended with the Berlin Wall. Suddenly films would come out that made money than a studio had in its entire existence. The directors seemed to be on the ascendancy, which I thought was really healthy. But the ones with huge power became the new establishment. The eighties were probably the most barren time in American filmmaking because they were standing in line with the studios to pick our pockets. The great thing about filmmaking today, as I see it, is that there are no rules. You get the money, you can make any kind of movie you want. Movies are currency, more valuable almost than cash; Disney is probably more important than Denmark. The need is there. People aren't asking questions, necessarily. The good news about this independent situation is that it has its own definition, unlike when I started where they'd say, what can I do with something like this? And you can also make a movie for five thousand bucks and Steven Spielberg will look at it. That's the good news. The danger is the corporate appetite, trying to get to that part of everybody that's original and then have them toe the corporate line early. 

Since your father was a TV director, then you were a DGA trainee, then you worked with Altman, your experience was always more practical, or pragmatic, than. say, film schools are offering today.

If I was in charge of film schools, the first day, I would line up all the students, all 200,000 of them, and I would put them in two classes. Okay, now, those of you are here because you'll like the money, glory and fame, over here. Those of you who can't sleep at night, jumping out of your skin because this is what you need to be, over here. I would have it as two separate occupations. The basic question at film schools, after all the bullshit, is 'How do we get in?' Of course there's no answer to that. I've never had anyone with any financial resources call me up. If I didn't generate my own projects, I'd be just another roadkill. I just wonder how many of that first category would go into the field if they knew there would never be any money.

At Sundance last year, there was a filmmaker who let a network magazine show follow him up and down the snowy streets. Every so often, you'd see the bright lights and the video camera and there he'd be, spouting about cinema and his movie, which still hasn't been released.

Well, more power to him. There's no difference between him and some of these Hollywood guys who spend $100 million on a film and call themselves directors. I don't know any of them. I like the old Mike Nichols quote, directing is like making love, you're never sure how the other guy does it. I hear about a lot of other directors because my wife's a still photographer, she's done about sixty movies. We talk about it and she likes everybody and has a good time. But with most big-time directors, the cameraman sets up the shot, the editor edits the film, the producer basically puts it together in casting. They're kind of almost a symbol. It kills me to see the shots from the sets and everyone's standing around the video playback and pointing. I appreciate that's the process, but let's not disguise it as something else. The only true immorality in Hollywood is the amount of money people are spending on movies. Yes, there are no laws, but a couple hundred million dollars on a movie is pretty scary considering what you could do with that in human beings' lives.

Cash does filter into the economy, getting spent by all the workers...

Well, also, there is a point where, I don't care what the movie is, if it gets released, no matter how poorly it does, it ain't gonna lose money. People say, "Oh, your movies don't make any money." They're talking about the grosses, which reflect the release pattern. But they don't lose money, because they don't cost very much. Through all the ancillaries, a lot of people have made a lot of money. Of course, not me. ever. But that's not why I'm in it. I have no high horse, but it's become part of the process of me doing the Rodney Dangerfield like you say...

I just meant it seems a way of coping for you...

Y'know, it's funny. People ask you, oh where you'd get this idea for this or that. And I could give some long-winded answer, but the truth is, it's a way of surviving. My professional life is all-consuming. There's only two dominant thoughts in my twenty-four hours of dreaming and waking. That's either thinking about the film I'm working on or how to get another one made. That consumes my entire existence.

Getting the idea and getting the money.

I have ideas, and I have three prices: cheap, cheaper and cheapest. Hey, I'm only holding on by my fingerprints. If I can get an idea that I can hang a movie on and there comes a point where if I know I have to write it, then I know I can get through it. Someone asked last night how I write these things, and I gave a simple, truthful answer. I had no idea where this thing was going, but each day I couldn't wait to see what they were going to say to each other. [Someone from Sony Pictures Classics] last night was telling me, God, get excited about this thing. I said, I'm extremely excited about the film, but somebody has to prove to me they can release one of my movies and actually get it out. We're opening in L.A. Christmas Day, Quentin's movie, Gus Van Sant's movie [Good Will Hunting], Titanic and fifteen other movies are opening the same day. I said, I don't mind that, we're just not going to be at the top of anybody's list and let's make sure we're going to hang around long enough. And I love the Sony Classics people... They think like me. They've been around. They're patient.

It's obviously not what comes afterwards, so what part of the process means the most to you?

Bob said Fellini once said to him, dailies are the real film. If you removed dailies from filmmaking… it is the one time I just love everything and we have everyone come. Dailies on film. Part of the process when I write is that I know I can't raise a lot of money. But I don't want to ever, ever have that restrict what I write. It's the same way if you have a bad foot, you walk a certain way to compensate for it. I know without having to be conscious of it, that I won't be able to get the money. So I write with complete freedom, but I keep it small. That has become my world view. this film was written out of the ashes of Mrs. Parker and the disastrous post period where I wanted to do a film and I held onto it. I turned down work after the competition at Cannes. That's happened to me so rarely, I never want to say no. But I held onto this thing [Breakfast of Champions], got lied to a few times. I'm an island of one and I don't have the kind of cachet that even Jim Jarmusch has. I wrote Afterglow out of survival. I intentionally wrote something that was small. I'm as proud of the film as I can be. I realized last night it's a funny film, the highbrows won't like it, the snotty festivals won't like it, they've already shown that. Someone stops me and says, "I can't see your movie tonight, can you tell me what it's about?" And I said, "Of course not!" Those are the two hardest questions to answer: "How are you?" and "What's your film about?" Then the man said, "Can you just tell me the category," and I said, "Gee, it's an unwashed soap opera." He asked, "What does that mean?" And I said, "I have no idea!"

An interesting aspect as Afterglow unfolds is how all four actors are playing a different style, a different emotional temperature... Nick Nolte is the wisecracking ladykiller named Lucky Mann, Julie Christie is in pain from their lost child...

Miss Christie definitely is one of the handful of great modern cinema actresses and Nolte is as good as it gets as far as I'm concerned. 

Then we have Lara Flynn Boyle, who wants a child, but more than that, just wants to be needed, this bubbly, small black-clad sylph...

She's so wonderful. Her character's just sad! These are smart actors, smart people. They're true. The only bad actors are the ones who aren't true. 

Then we have Jonny Lee Miller, who's gotten some rotten reviews for his performance...

That is so wrong.

It's an interesting reaction. I mean, how do you play a stiff who warms up slowly without seeming to give a bad performance?

This guy is one of the great actors. It's always the reservations with the young couples. I got so tired of hearing that in all these interviews yesterday. "Oh those young actors just can't hold their own!" 

It's hard to play characters who are emotionally limited. 

It's a conscious decision to do that. Lara said, "I see her as a combination of a Stepford wife and Holly Golightly. I want to look like her," which she does. I came to Toronto, before I unpacked my bags, I said, "Are there any reviews?" All the local reviews are uniformly bad and dismissive and I thought, obviously these people not only don't get the movie, but they don't know what they're talking about. I mean, if they don't like these young characters, they should take it out on me. But they are so wrong, they are the most accurate. I told this one writer that I thought Lara's performance was as good as Nick's or Julie's or Jonny's, and I said, it's the character you're talking about. "Well, the older couple is so much more interesting," he said. And I said, yeah, they've had lives. Now imagine Lara's character goes to college, she's a virgin, she sees a man around campus more mature and reserved than the others and making a lot of money dabbling in the stock market. They get married. She's never dated. Loves being taken care of. She's never been single. Happy to be a wife. Designs their big apartment. Goes shopping. Designs everything. She's happy. But her life instincts bubble up. Then Jonny's character, his emotions kick in. And a lot of businessmen can't handle emotions because they can't control that, and they have to control everything, they're taught life is about control. Suddenly their natural impulses come through. She's an innocent. She goes after Nick's character. But c'mon, none of us are anything if not contradictory, that's the essence of humanity. Still, I think Jonny Lee is the one character you could go out on the street and find a couple dozen or two like him.

Every film needs an element of surprise, even if the surprise
is you getting it. The most dangerous thing is that audiences
are being surprised by what they already know,
yet accept that as the element of surprise.
It's unbelievable, and critics have done the same thing.

Some reviewers are threatened, as they get older, by young or unformed characters.

That's right. Somehow people project on reality their perceptions of reality itself. The knock on the young couple to these minor minds is that the characters are shallow. That's about as accurate as you can get about that particular couple. It's not to say all young people are shallow! One of the biggest cultural changes was when the advertisers stopped saying, hey kids, have your kids buy this, and now they say, hey kid, buy this. Buy this drink, get laid, wear these jeans, stay young, you're 16, get this credit card, no money down. Maybe that's all great, If there's one thing I've learned, it's don't peak too soon in anything, because you have a long period after that that will just be boring. I'm not being defensive for Jonny and Lara, I don't have to. But I'm totally disappointed by how small film minds have become. I think the bar is so low now that I think the biggest problem in film that I can point to... Every film needs an element of surprise, even if the surprise is you getting it. Traditionally, it's some kind of shock. The most dangerous thing is that audiences are being surprised by what they already know, yet accepting that as the element of surprise... It's unbelievable, and critics have done the same thing.

It's been suggested that criticism can be the most damning autobiography. You sometimes wonder what's the problem, why critics are often threatened by any female characters.

You can't deny that for everyone of us, part of this big process is totally self-serving. It's everyone's couch, I guess. What's got me upset is that most critics now are lazy. As we become visually literate, people are accepting the current trends as the full dimension. I watched my film last night and I thought, it takes place in natural rhythms and time. I said, that's deadly. I was reading the paper on the plane up here and some director who has some hit says, "You have to make films where no shot lasts more ten seconds and a scene can't be more than two minutes. You can fit a film into that and you have to abide by this or the audience won't sit through it." If I was just starting out and I was 16 and I read that, I know me, I would say, "I'm gonna do just the opposite." That is the real threat. You can mess around with story, structure, stars, subjects, but you cannot mess around with sensibility. That's the one threatening thing. When you impose your sensibility on a film and it finds an audience, that means that predictability is not necessarily the dominant factor in anything. That's a threat to the whole food chain of selling.

The last shot is utterly mysterious, even majestic. 

Well, you don't want to describe it. But for me, when Julie starts crying at the end of the movie, it's not sad. It's like the blues. It's healing.

I wound up with all kinds of readings for the title after seeing the film—literally, after sex, which is alluded to; then all the booze in the film, the afterglow being whiskey burning down your throat; but the last shot utterly ties up the ideas in a way that is explicit nowhere in the film is the idea that recapturing romantic youth, rather than being infantile forever or a skirt-chaser can be reliving all your romantic joys through the joys of your children.

Also there's the technical term, the life, the glow that remains after the source is removed. Nick and I used to say that Jonny's character was a walking documentary. He's the one out there on the streets. But here's something that's happened to all of us, a simple example. You haven't talked to someone in a long time, soon after, the phone rings. It's them. Some people will say it's a coincidence, Jonny's character says that, I can't deal with that as any kind of life force. A minority would say, well, it's a reminder of how mysterious this whole life is that we're dealing with. It's the mystery of life that is the truth to me. Factual reality is a very negotiable thing. One reason I thought I could write this movie was, what if two couples, four people somehow got involved, but they're all living in different emotional time zones. One lives in the past, one lives in the present, but can't deal with the past, another lives in the future, and another lives in this void. So you get to the basics, where does love reside? What is love? Where do we put this stuff? By definition it can't merely be a present-tense condition. It requires the past and the future. 

But that's backstory. That's subtext. Maybe you can act it, but can you show it as a filmmaker?

You can describe two people having dinner, all the details, but what matters is what's going on underneath. To me, that's reality. How you get inside that. But how do you put that on film if it dominates most of our lives but we're taught to put it in a second tier in terms of our daily factual lives. Numbers have replaced letters in our good culture. Numbers are trustworthy, words are interpretive. But this is a naked movie. It's not hiding behind a plot. It would probably be a huge success if the same exact stuff came out but it was a also a film about kidnapping or there was a killer on the loose. 

Genre gives people an excuse to lavish privileged moments instead of just enjoying the moments.

There you go. It makes me realize that you have to educate an audience to that. Last night was the first time I saw the film with an audience I didn't know. There was some chuckling early, and I said, oh shit, maybe people will laugh at this! I felt like I had to say beforehand that it's okay to laugh, it's okay to cry, it's a serious comedy. You can't resist films, you gotta surrender to them or walk out early. While I'm watching this thing, I realize it's not a mainstream movie that's widened the river, it's not a so-called art film, like this German critic told me about Trouble in Mind when I was booed off the stage at Berlin. "You know why you will win no awards at this festival?" he asks me. "Because your film is too damn entertaining!" 

What's wonderful is how potentially bubble-headed dialogue in Afterglow, stuff you might just go, "Aw, jeez" at, is enriched by each actor's innate charm.

Somebody who saw the film in New York said, "I was laughing at lines that were not supposed to be funny." But there is not one line in that film that is not contextual for the characters. It's all bone-headed—intentionally! When Lucky comes up and says, "The women I like are the ones who want to get Lucky," I mean, c'mon! It's his whole rap, man. Nick and I would laugh, "What an asshole!" But we knew that we are all that asshole! If a movie has four characters and one is named Lucky Mann, you gotta know it's a fable. I realized last night that the film plays better the next day, which is kind of a pyrrhic victory—if you don't walk off a pier. It's the resonance. If you don't take it literally, it's a diary, a day in the life of a marriage, of both the couples, the ups and downs. The conditioning in America is, "I love you I love you let's get married," then we never have to deal with that again. In fact, it's a living thing you have to deal with daily. Moment by moment. If it was written into law that every spouse had to have a lover, there would probably be no divorce. People would probably divorce their lovers! But marriage is the supreme challenge between two people. Marriage is the most unnatural act, yet the most honorable. It would seem to be one of the main pursuits of humanity because we think more of someone else than ourselves.

Then you can extend to the rest of the world what you've learned about honor, respect...

Forgiveness. That's what it's all about. One of the real joys of being alive is to have this unpredictability with someone else. As humans, there are two basic things that motivate us, period, fear and love. And to make a film that deals with love and try not to be theoretical, just entertaining, that's the challenge.

Can you give a concrete example of how you shape your stories? There's a dreaminess or fable-like quality in most of them, even a drugginess without drugs.

The positive side of drug use, psychedelics, whatever, is that you get a different awareness of things. When you're into something as a writer, it consumes you, everything's distorted. It's like a clothesline, everything you see, you look for what applies to that story. You can hang everything you see that applies, things you never would have noticed. Even more pronounced is when you're writing. Take Choose Me. Completely a survival thing. I made a documentary with a new company, they asked how much would it cost to make a real movie, we don't think we can afford it. I said $639,000. I hadn't written anything. I said, I'm not going to write anything until I know the parameters. I called up Keith Carradine and said I had a good part, will you work for nothing, I called up Geraldine Chaplin. Everybody said yes. I said, work out the schedule, how many days do we get? Let's figure out how much it costs and how many days shooting? He asks, what's the script about. I said, two-three-four people in rooms talking, maybe one day, fifteen people. But what's the story? Never mind that, before I write it, what are my limitations, exactly what it needs to make a movie. We figured we had twenty days. Then I had to find a story. I had this song, the company said if you use this, we can get Teddy Pendergrass, who's just been in this terrible accident, can use some money. So I said I can write a whole movie about this. I came up with a guy who's in a mental institution for being a pathological liar who only tells the truth. I start writing. It took six days to write it. The second day I was writing, I was searching the dial on the way to the store for the Dodgers game on the radio. The game was rained out. Suddenly, there's this woman, this doctor, on the radio, who's giving out all this advice. It was the funniest thing I had ever heard. I thought it had to be a joke. When I write, I don't even like to go out of the house, but then I realized, how could I ever write this movie without this? If I hadn't been thinking of this story, I wouldn't have even stopped at that place on the dial. You get X-ray vision about things that apply to what you're writing about. Things that seem coincidental are in a way, editing, finding experience at its essence. We could bore each other to tears with stories like this. The great human revelation, the big discovery, is relativity. If all our lives are bound up in time, relativity seems to be the one human awareness that matters. We have an organism that is capable of recognizing the unknown, of knowing that there are things we don't know. 

There's always Conrad's "We live, as we dream, alone."

Yeah, but that denies what seems to be our quest. Not to be alone. I'm not clever enough, I wish I wasn't self-taught about everything, but I wish I knew how to take that idea, that awareness to make a film about that idea, and make it about more than that idea. I only know how to attack that on its own. I look around and don't see a lot of colleagues trying to do things the same way that I do. 

(Afterglow is on Pluto with random commercials. A video interview via MUBI with Rudolph and Keith Carradine from 2018 is here.)