|
|
|
 |
||
|
If one were to name the greatest writers living today amongst a panel of filmmakers, there's no doubt that the name David Mamet would appear. For over 35 years, Mamet has been a writer of countless plays which became stage classics. In 1987, Mamet made his film debut with the cult classic HOUSE OF GAMES, an intricate look into the world of the con. He is probably best known for writing the popular play GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, which has become both a stage and screen sensation. On television, Mamet is co-creator of THE UNIT, which airs weekly on CBS. REDBELT marks Mamet's tenth film as a director and is probably his most personal, as he delves into the code of the Samurai through the world of jiu-jitsu against the backdrop of mixed martial arts and the usual Mamet intensity of a good man undone by the cynicism around him. Six years ago, Mamet became a student of Jiu-Jitsu and has lived its code ever since. To promote REDBELT, Mamet sat down with a small roundtable of reporters including the Crypt to talk about REDBELT, his writing process, how he's able to do so much, the film's backdrop in the world of mixed martial arts, and more in this Colonel's Crypt exclusive.
How in the hell do you find the time to write all these plays? DAVID MAMET: If you look at the life of the farmer, they get up in the morning and they work all day, sleep all night, get up the next morning and do the same thing day after day. I don't work as hard as a farmer but technically it's the same idea if you do it all day every day and in enough years, you'll probably get a lot of work accomplished. How did REDBELT come about for you? DM: I've been training in Jiu-Jitsu for six years and I'm very fortunate to live in that world. All the fighters hang out together and I go to lunch with them every day and trade stories. I was fascinated both by the art of Jiu-Jitsu and by the ways that everybody in the fight world connected, all different sorts of lines in Los Angeles so the movie suggested itself. Why Jiu-Jitsu? DM: I have some background in a few other arts but I was ignorant of Jiu-Jitsu. Ed O'Neill, who's my very good friend, when I moved out to Los Angeles, told me to come out and meet these guys he was training with. He was training with the Gracies. I started training with their cousin and their Academy. It happened on the first day in Los Angeles and I'm still there. How did Chiwetel Ejiofor become the choice for Mike Terry? DM: He's a great actor. The idea is not to get someone with a great martial arts background but to get someone who's a great actor and is very physical, which we did with Chiwetel. In truth, he's not actually competing as a martial artist. What he's doing is portraying one so he has to know enough martial arts to be able to perform those specific moves but curiously he did start training in Jiu-Jitsu to straighten up. What's the purpose of the title REDBELT? DM: Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is practiced in the way I know it from my Academy is that it is different in the awarding of belts as opposed to other martial arts, especially the striking forms. One tests for a belt. The instructor would say for example to progress from a blue belt to a purple belt, you'll have to do the following things: you'll have to do things like break a number of boards and the like, but in Jiu-Jitsu it's the other way around where at some point in your development a teacher would award you a new belt so that almost invariably the awardee's reaction would be, "I'm not ready yet." What the belt is, it's an expression of the fact that the teacher thinks that it is now time for you to take creative responsibility. You're now ready to take on that responsibility, to fight like a purple belt rather than a blue belt and to fight like a black belt rather than a brown belt, so those are the belts. White is when you walk in off the street, then there's blue, purple, brown, and black. Then there's the red belt, which is an honorific position and it belongs to one person, the grandmaster of the sport. In this case, it's Helio Gracie who's now I believe 94. He was one of the two founders of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, he and his brother Carlos. They founded the art and the tradition. Do you think the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is more philosphical than the American or Japanese martial arts? DM: That's an excellent question. I think that any physical discipline that one gets oneself over to it, one is going to extrapolate a philosophy to it. Whether one can verbalize it or not, whether it's woodworking or rowing. In my experience, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is very much like yoga, and that there's a great component of the philosophy involved, but one doesn't learn the philosophy, one learns the moves and the philosophy becomes evident later on. Do you find that there's carryover from the art of Jiu-Jitsu to the craft of writing? DM: Not to writing but it carries over to much more in my life. In what way? DM: For example, Randy Couture is a world champion of UFC, he's a spectacular athlete. Randy Couture is 220 pounds and he's 6'2". He's built like a mailbox. In an interview I did recently, someone asked me if I were pitted up against Randy Couture, could I fight Randy Couture and also Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini, who's a former boxing champion and also in the film, and they're both world class fighters. The answer is "Yes, I could fight them." This doesn't mean that I could prevail against them but I could fight them. That's a lesson of Jiu-Jitsu which is this: Here are these two guys that reason, untrained reason might say, if you got into a fight with these guys, there's no way that you are going to last more than ten seconds with them. The lesson of Jiu-Jitsu is the first thing you want to do is deflect force. Don't get into a fight if you don't have to. The second thing you're going to do is put yourself into a safe position where the other person can't hurt you and let them exhaust themselves. The final thing is if at some point they offer you the possibility to put on a finishing hold, do so. A great lesson for life is when faced with something that looks like an impossibility, you have two choices. You can go in and say that if you actually have to fight, you can use whatever skills you have. Or you can say that you're certainly going to get beaten. If you're going to fight anyway, what's the point of going to the fight with the second of those two, it makes no sense. It teaches you to use your physical training to in effect learn how to conquer your own fear. Does this make REDBELT a more personal film for you? DM: Well I think they're all personal in one way or another. They're either personal because I imagined them or they're personal because I participated in them. My mind is such a hodge podge to mix up. Tim Allen's mostly known for comedy yet he's in a serious role here as Chet Frank. How did Tim come about for REDBELT? DM: Tim Allen's agent called me up and he said "I understand you're doing this part of a movie star. Tim would really like to be considered." I told him that it's a straight part, it's not comedy, there's also no money, and it's a really good part but it's not the lead. His agent told me that Tim read the script and would like to meet with me about the film. I revere Tim Allen, especially for GALAXY QUEST which is one of my favorite movies. I met Tim and we spent a couple of hours together and I was very fortunate to have him in the movie. You didn't feel concerned on how an actor known for comedy would fit in your film? DM: No, I never felt that way and I'll tell you why. I did a movie with Steve Martin where he played a murderer and con man in THE SPANISH PRISONER, then my wife Rebecca did another movie with him called SHOPGIRL, which was a straight part. If you look at Steve playing straight parts, you look at Jackie Gleason in THE HUSTLER, or Jerry Lewis in THE KING OF COMEDY, or Don Rickles, they're just terrific straight actors. What an accomplished comedian does is try to be as simple as possible when the heat is on and then go off stage. You have a play on Broadway, NOVEMBER, which is completely different from REDBELT in that NOVEMBER is a satirical comedy. Do you find a commonality between your theater and film? DM: The common thread is I wrote them. I get the best job in the world. I get to get up every morning and try something new. Maybe that's a Chicago attitude or maybe it's kind of a second generation immigrant attitude of just trying it. Why not, the best thing that happens is you succeed, the worst thing that happens is you learn something and try another way. What is the basic difference in the challenge of writing a play and a movie? DM: In a play you're writing for the actors. In a movie you're writing for the camera. After you've been training for six years in Jiu-Jitsu, what element did you take the most from the training? DM: The lessons that I've learned from Jiu-Jitsu are the same lessons my instructors teach are the same, in that a man distracted is a man defeated; don't get tired, let the other guy get tired; there's no situation you can't escape from; there's no situation you can't turn to your advantage. Those are great lessons I find to go through life with, instead of worry and self doubt. Why do it? Can you talk about the casting of Alice Braga and Rodrigo Santoro and could you elaborate on a quote you had made about Rodrigo reminding you of Montgomery Clift? DM: He's very much like Montgomery Clift. I knew I had to have the Brazilians in the movie because it's very much a Brazilian story. It was the guys in the Academy who are Brazilian who recommended Alice and gave me both LOWER CITY and CITY OF GOD and I thought she was spectacular. Rodrigo I had seen him as Xerxes in 300 and also in CARANDIRU, and he's also spectacular. I'm crazy about the Brazilians in that the way that they train and teach are different than everyone else. There's something very fortunate there. I meet with the Gracies and Machados and have luncheons with them. In fact, I got to meet Helio Gracie when he opened up a studio in Florence. I got to train with John Machado many times, who is in the film. Their attitude in life and their attitudes on the mat are very similar. It's very fluid and different than the American attitude of fighting. It's very beautiful because the masters call it fighting for the belt, which means as skilled as these guys are, they just won't use their strength on you. I found it interesting that you said you didn't have a story for REDBELT until the use of the marbles which are used in the competition. How did the marbles come about? DM: I made it up. I was sitting with Rickson Gracie, he stages an event called the Buddha Challenge around three years ago. They were doing these Nogi Jiu-Jitsu competitions. It was a beautiful event. We were sitting in a control room and we were talking about the evolution of mixed martial arts and how to film it. It's an old custom that you can't film Jiu-Jitsu because it's very different from the striking forms. In that, you close the distance, then open the distance. In Jiu-Jitsu, you're locked up with your opponent on the ground so if you don't know what you're looking at, it's hard to enjoy. Then I had this idea and suggested to Rickson about the three marbles and he wasn't too sure about it. A couple of months later when I was working on the movie and I thought that it was a good idea for not only dramatizing the fight but also dramatizing the film. You have a passion for Jiu-Jitsu in the way that some people have a passion for your writing. What are you a fan of your own work? DM: No, it's all kind of the morass of the continuous present for me. How did you decide to cast Cyril Takayama, who played the magician? DM: Ricky Jay, who plays Marty Black, is one of the world's great magicians, and I told him that we needed an Asian magician for the film and he mentioned Cyril. I didn't know who he was so Ricky gave me some tapes of his. Ricky was the one who made the call to Cyril to be in the movie, he was in Japan at the time and so he graciously came here to the movie. He's a great actor. Being that you've worked with Ricky Jay, Joe Mantegna, and your wife Rebecca on many projects throughout the years, do you specifically think of them as you're writing the film, as in REDBELT did you think of them as you were writing it being you're so familiar with working with them? DM: No I just write it. I just write the best I can. How did Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini come to be involved with the film and in his role as an instructor? DM: I know Mancini from the Academy and I originally thought of Boom Boom as the corner guy, Snowflake, but I realized that it had to be a younger guy. The great quality of Mancini is that he has the quality of a master, so I modeled Boom Boom's character on Danny Inosanto. Inosanto is a world great sensei, he was Bruce Lee's partner. Danny plays the old man at the end of the movie who we call "The Professor." Do you find this is more of a guy movie than a movie that women will get? DM: One of the very gratifying things about the film is that women seem to really like the movie and I think it has to do with the whole idea of empowerment because that's what the Jiu-Jitsu is saying to the woman played by Emily Mortimer. If you take upon yourself the idea that you've lost the fight, your life is over, so why feel that? Have you ever lost yourself in writing your stories because there are a lot of subplots within this film? DM: Sure, I do that all the time. That's why you have to keep writing over and over again. You just keep writing it over and over until the story emerges and sometimes you start up telling one story and it just doesn't work. Sometimes the story itself wants to tell you that it's not what it wants to be about and you've got to do both things; you want to bring enough force to bear on it to make it be the story you think and to bring enough intelligence to bear to realize that sometimes it doesn't want to be that story, it wants to be a different story. When you talk about your sensei, it's like they are rabbis in a way. Being that you have written extensively about the Jewish faith and your Jewish heritage, do you think there is a similarity between the code of the rabbi and the sensei? DM: Curiously, in an absolute coincidence, my rabbi also studies Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. There's a wonderful Hasidic tradition where if someone wanted to study with the rabbi, they would allow it but you couldn't ask questions. I think it's kind of a marvelous way to learn. It means you have to keep your mouth shut, your eyes open, and figure it out for yourself. It's taking the secretive method one step further. I think the same thing is true in working on a physical discipline because you tend not to ask questions. You ask a few of them but basically you understand that it's all right here so what one is trying to do in learning Jiu-Jitsu is to learn to do the move correctly; to learn what the essence of the move is. Bruce Lee said, "Don't perform the move, express the move so one would try constantly to get more and more simple to get more and more close to people, to the essence of the move and when you do, you don't use any effort." What's next for you? DM: I'm working on a musical version of OKLAHOMA. When will that be coming to New York? DM: I'm just kidding you. (Laughter) I have a couple of things, I can't really talk about them at the moment except that I'm doing a new play, two one acts. One is an old one called THE DUCK VARIATIONS and one's a new one that's never been done called KEEP YOUR PANTY ON which is about the worst actor in Ancient Rome. Thank you very much Mr. Mamet. DM: Bye bye and take care. REDBELT opens in limited release on Friday, May 2nd from Sony Pictures Classics (Special Thanks to Falco Ink) |
HOME
BLOGS
|
|||
