Interview: James Toback
Like many people, my immediate frame of reference for James Toback is his most commercial achievement, his brilliant screenplay for 1991’s Bugsy, a film which only seems to appreciate in complexity and sophistication in the years since its release. But then again, that is the case with almost all of Toback’s films, even the less successful ones: they grow and evolve and offer new insights long after you’ve initially absorbed them, much less think you understand them. As such it seems appropriate that he has chosen as the subject of his latest film, Tyson, a person who has often been dismissed, oversimplified, or reduced to the sum total of his physicality and sometimes limited expressiveness.
Toback’s Tyson is not merely a portrait for the former boxing champion but a deconstruction – physically, intellectually and spiritually – of a man many have called a monster. I was fortunate enough to sit down recently with Toback at a roundtable interview in Los Angeles, where he not only talked about his unique connection to Tyson, but about the way in which his own evolving artistic style led to revelations about his subject and more importantly himself as well.
You have Tyson talking about his relationship with Robin Givens, although not specifically about the abuse allegations, and he talked about his negative feelings about Don King, but not so much how he got caught up with him the first place. Did you have material on that you cut, or did he not want to go into those [subjects]?
Toback: I didn’t get into anything prosecutorial. The idea of the movie was to create a kind of self-portrait to be transmitted through the prism of the aesthetic sensibility of yours truly. So that was the idea, and what I wanted was to get his view of everything in his own words, and I never, I felt that the way to get him to say the most interesting things about every subject that came up was not to ask direct questions, which would feel so weird given the nature of the way we communicate, but rather let the camera just keep going, and wait until he said everything he could possibly say about whatever subject was at hand. So often I would let, we had two high-def cameras going, five minutes of silence, ten minutes of silence, and then he’ll add something. Then, another three or four minutes of silence, then he’ll add something. So by the end of the movie I had him saying just about everything he would possibly say of interest about every subject that came up. To get into a kind of “what did you think about that?” and “what about this?” and “he said that” and “she said that” would have made him look at me as if I had three heads, and also lose interest in doing it. Because basically the appeal was to be confessional in the same way that somebody who goes – it was a Catholic who goes to the Catholic church because confession is a transforming ritual, and the idea is not to get a priest grilling you on the details of what you’re saying, it’s to give you an opportunity to speak almost as if you were speaking to yourself, and that was the kind of purgative idea behind it.
Were there things you had to cut?
Toback: I didn’t have to cut anything. I mean, I had total control editorially of the movie. There was no one with anything to say about it except me. There were a lot of things that were interesting that I cut because I needed a shape, but that was really my only editorial concern: can I afford to keep this in and keep the rhythm of the movie the way I want it to go, and the shape I want it to go? I mean most of it that I left out that I really liked will be on the DVD. I think I have a good hour’s worth of stuff that I think is just as good as what’s in the movie, or most of what’s in the movie, but it just didn’t fit the way the stuff that’s in [did]. When I did Black and White, there was a scene with Jared Leto and Bijou Phillips which was actually one of the two or three best scenes in the movie and I ended up cutting it because every time it came up, somehow the movie just stopped and it didn’t recover. It lost all of its rhythm and I was embarrassed to see Jared Leto because I knew what he was going to say, and I finally saw him at a party at Brett Ratner’s house a couple of months ago, and he just shook his head. He said, “How could you fucking do that me? It’s just the best scene I’ve ever done in my life. I’ll never do a scene that good and you cut it? How could you fucking cut that scene?” I said, “I know you’re not going to believe it, but the truth is I know it’s a great scene, but…” He said, “How is that possible? What do you mean it stopped the movie?” I said, “It just did.” He said, “No, that’s not true.” I said, “You have no idea how many times I put the scene back in and every time it just fucking backfired.” I didn’t convince him and he’s still – I know he thinks there’s some demonic purpose I had in robbing him of the best scene he did in his career and not letting anybody see it. But there isn’t anything like that that I cut from Tyson, but there are a couple of things that I really – there’s one thing in particular where I felt I really got the prison thing as horrifying as I could, because it was a horrifying experience and I wanted us to feel it, but there were one or two things that were particularly gruesome that I left out, and I just felt, it’s enough. Any more is going to be a mistake.
But that’s one of the things of editing that you learn over a period of time, that there’s a mysterious personality to editing, and you can’t learn it and you can’t be taught it. You can’t study it, you have to have a feel for your own movie and know that certain things have to end now even though – I mean, take a movie like There Will Be Blood, which I think is a very powerful movie with a great performance, but I believe there’s a good 20 minutes of footage that could be taken out of that movie with absolutely no loss whatsoever to the movie. Why? Because I don’t believe however talented Paul Thomas Anderson is, I think he’s a very talented director, that he has that extra dimension quality that some director-editors have of being merciless with their own work, and basically say, “I don’t need that. I don’t need that to go on for another 30 seconds. I don’t need that to go on for another 15 seconds.” And you get to the bone, or maybe you just don’t like that style of filmmaking. I mean, Bertolucci has a lot of great movies that you could lose half an hour from. Maybe it’s because my own weight needs to be removed that I don’t want any extra weight on my movies, so I’m always saying, “do I have to have this? And “do I have to have that?” and I end up trying to get it right down to the bone and this at 90 minutes seemed to be the right length.
Was that how the elliptical editing style came about or was that something you always knew you wanted to do?
Toback: I knew I wanted to do a split screen, moving images and multiple voices. That, I absolutely had to have. There was no way that I felt I could get across the chaos in the mind without using that, and that was just a question of how much to do, when to do it, when to stop it and just let that very powerful, tight image of the face do its work. But those were the things that made it take 12 months to edit the movie – five days of shooting, 12 months of editing, which is an insane ratio.
How difficult is it to juggle the demands of a chronology of events and then telling a compelling story?
Toback: That was again something I kind of felt my way into, because it wasn’t going to work as just straight chronology. But I wanted to keep some sense of starting with early memories and then going to the other stages of his life and career. But, you know, this was the hardest movie to edit but the most fun, because it was the most ambitious. Any movie you start editing with a script is 50 times easier because you have a blueprint, so even if you’ve altered things and changed things when you’re shooting, still you know generally where you’re going. This is only the second documentary I’ve done. I did one called The Big Bang which was similarly difficult because I had 20 people talking about sex, love, madness, crime, and death, and the shape there was very hard to find. But I think this was even more difficult because there I was only dealing with new footage that I shot. Here, I was dealing with new footage that I shot, but also this array of archival footage, primarily the fights, but even then, what fights to put in, what to leave out, what of the fights that were in should be in, and then the post-fight interviews. Several of which are quite fascinating, particularly the one after the McBride fight, well, after the Lewis fight too where he’s holding his little baby there, and then also in the McBride fight when he basically says I don’t want to embarrass the sport, I didn’t really want to fight, I don’t want to fight, I want to apologize to the fans for fighting this way and I don’t have the heart for it anymore, I’ve lost the heart for it, I’m just fighting for the money – all the things a fighter never says. And then saying I don’t think I’ll fight any more and actually sticking to it, probably the only fighter in history who’s retired once and that’s it. Because there are usually eight retirements in most fighters’ lives.
Was there a specific story you were trying to tell?
Toback: Basically, a kind of structure of a tragic figure, someone who starts with nothing, elevates himself to unimaginable heights and then brings himself down by his own behavior and his own flaws. Then in the case of Mike, a double Greek tragedy because he then did it again. He got back up and again brought himself down, all through the classic Greek vice of hubris, overweening pride. A sense that he could do anything and handle anything and most of all, get away with anything.
When did you come up with the idea for this? You directed him in Black and White.
Toback: Right, and it was the next scene in Black and White that triggered this, the one in the gym when Power of Wu Tang Clan asks him whether he should kill Alan Huston’s character because the guy’s about to rat on him. Mike in a reflective way talks about murder and whether it’s a good idea or not and being humiliated in prison. I said, well, that Mike Tyson I could expand into a really interesting self portrait. That’s when I hatched the idea and I proposed it to him that night. He said, “Any time you’re ready.” And six years, seven years later, we finally did it.
Do you see two different Mikes?
Toback: He was a different person after getting out of prison. That’s when he went through madness and when you go through madness, that’s it. How many of you have gone insane? But not really insane. I went insane under LSD for eight days which ended my drug career. This is when I was 19 and a sophomore at Harvard and going on a pretty straightforward, well hardly straightforward, but a non insane course. But once you get out there, everything is different. It’s a kind of club of people who understand that. It’s not an exclusive club and not one you really want to be in because most people either kill themselves or are non functioning for the rest of their lives, or they’re so zonked out on medication that they have a zombie-like aura. But if you get out to that point where you snap and you go over, all of your behavior after that point is explicable in those terms because it’s very hard to maintain even lip service to conventional restraint after that. You might not put your foot in a fire because you know it burns. You might not do something overtly ludicrous but on the other hand you might. You certainly don’t have the normal restraints any more and I think what happened with Mike who was not a restrained person by nature anyway was once he was out there mentally, which happened in prison. He talks about it in the movie. He says, “I went insane” and even in the end, “I am an insane individual.” Those are not said lightly. Those are not said metaphorically. As someone who experienced that, I understand what it means. You can explain it to somebody else but no one else is going to get it the way that someone who has been there gets it.
The first night we met, when he was 19, I told him about my LSD experience and he didn’t get it then. He listened to something that sounded intriguing to him and he was kind of fascinated and curious but he didn’t know what I was talking about because he hadn’t been there yet. When you have been and you manage to stay functional, you almost have to use it if you’re an artist of any kind. That is to say that has to be a subject of your work or you have to do your work through the prism of that or then you’re really going to have a problem because otherwise you’re just telling a lie all the time and you’re doing work that you know is worthless because that’s the subject. I don’t mean just madness but the things that it brings to the front like death and social disorder and chaos and crime. All the things that violate the artificial boundaries that are set up by society and you don’t believe in them after that because they are, it’s like R.D. Lang’s great line which I quote in Harvard Man. “Sanity is a cozy lie.” And we all kind of subscribe to it because it enables us to function but once you lose faith in it, which is what madness is and the voices are unleashed, you can’t believe in it again after that. You can’t even pay lip service to it. That’s what happened to Mike in prison. The first thing he said to me, practically the first thing when I saw him when he came out, first I told him I wanted him to be in Black and White, he said great. Then he said, “You know, I was lying in solitary confinement the 19th month of my incarceration and all of a sudden I said to myself, ‘This is what Toback was talking about. I am now insane.’” He remembered back right to that moment to when he was 19 and I had been describing it.
Do you feel you achieve a greater understanding of these themes through these films?
Toback: Definitely. I do. On the one hand, it’s the only thing I really feel I can do well and that’s important enough to spend my time doing. On the other hand, by doing it I get a deeper and deeper understanding of them and of the connections among people who experience it. I mean, I’ve always felt I had an understanding of Mike because he understood that. Once he understood that better than I ever had before, it was just better than I understood him before. He understood himself better than he had before and he probably understood me better than he had before because it’s one thing to hear somebody talk about it. It’s another thing to experience it. How many of you know about Robert Lowell? Boy oh boy oh boy. How many of you know about Alain Delon? There are certain icons in my life and when I realize people don’t know who they are it makes me feel I’m either getting very old or in a parallel universe. Robert Lowell was probably one of the three of four great American poets of the 20th century although his reputation has been sliding slightly in the last 10 or 15 years. For a while in the ‘70s he was regarded probably as the best living American poet. Anyway, he taught poetry at Harvard and he’d had a series of crackups. I got into his poetry seminar that only took six people. The third class he was talking about Wallace Stevens and just in the middle of a sentence said, “I occasionally have to go over to McLeans” – this rich sort of mental hospital – “and commit myself because something happens. So I’m going to do that now and Peter Taylor or Steven Samuel will come and take over the class. They’re both very good. You’ll be in good hands.” He walked out and he was in McLeans for the next 11 months. It just happened. If you haven’t experienced madness you don’t realize that’s the way it happens.
As T.S. Elliott said in another context, not with a bang but a whimper. The only way to defeat it, not even defeat it, harmonize with it is to accept death and realize death is right around the corner and it’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Yes, you might die this afternoon. That’s okay. But not just that’s okay meaning yeah, that’s okay, and then if it happens say, “Wait a minute, I didn’t think you were serious.” But actually that’s okay in a way that you mean that’s okay, so that if you do have to die five seconds later, you say, “I know that. I understand that.” That’s the acceptance of death and if you can’t accept it, you’re going to be vulnerable to that. If you do accept it, you’re not. You finally go with it but that’s why people crack up because they haven’t. I think what happened to Mike in prison was he just really finally instead of fighting death and denying death and being obsessed with it and not knowing how to handle it, basically harmonized with it which is why there’s that passage when he says, “I’m 40 years old. I can’t believe I’m still alive. Who would’ve thought I’d live to 40?” He’s talking about 40 as if it were 80. It’s like a guy who’s survived a massive earthquake and saying, “How am I still here?” Certainly not saying, “Oh my God, I gotta stay alive” but rather whatever happens happens, and meaning it. And that’s on the other hand why he’s free to do all the stuff that he’s doing, both good and bad and crazy and sane, because there is no line stopping him. It’s not a question of putting enforcement in. You could say, “All right, so we’re going to watch you 24 hours a day.” So, then I’ll sneak out and do it somewhere else. The only real answer to it which is the conventional one is to drug people to the point where they are zombies or where you can tell there’s something about them that’s different. What’s different is they’ve been narcotized. They’ve got their chemistry altered.
What does Tyson think of the film?
Toback: The first time he saw it, he said “it’s like a Greek tragedy. The only problem is I’m the subject.” The second time, I think he just started to digest it better, and the third time, which was at Sundance, he actually said when we went to dinner afterward, “people always said that they were afraid of me and I never understood why. Watching the movie tonight, I realized I’m afraid of of this guy.” I think what’s happened is it’s become a deeper, more complex introduction to himself – by himself, of himself, to himself.
So he thinks it’s accurate?
Toback: He thinks it’s accurate, but he also is looking at someone he didn’t really know before. I think he learned a great deal about himself, because a lot of what came out, came out inadvertently. It didn’t come out in a conventional, rational question-and-answer forum, it came out because the cameras kept rolling, and a lot of voices that were buried worked their way to the surface, and through it.
Were you worried at all that this might affect your friendship with Tyson?
Toback: No, I didn’t, and if it did it did. I don’t have any friendships that I would regard as so important that I would jeopardize the seriousness of a movie for them. My movies are much more important to me than my friendships are. I’ve never had a relationship that was a tenth as important as my least important movie. But I would say that the interesting question would be would Mike have been so thrilled as I think he is, or at least happy with the movie, if people hated it instead of it instead of responding they way they are. There’s been an unbelievable response to the movie – ten minute ovation at Cannes, five minute ovation at Sundance, an incredible response in all of the q and as. If everybody had booed and hissed, and everybody had said what a piece of sh*t this movie is, I don’t know. I mean, I hope our friendship would still be intact, but who knows? Maybe he would be saying “I can’t believ Toback f*cked up this way and has turned me into this object of even worse horror than was ever imaginable!”
Are you still as interested in a traditional narrative format as you were in the 1980s and ‘90s?
Toback: Um, I think I started not to be with Black and White. That was the first one, and then Harvard Man really took it even farther where I fractured the narrative more. It’s hard for me to take things straight generally the older I get and the more my mind sort of separates itself into different channels, the less interesting I find a straightforward story, a straightforward narrative, a straightforward anything. I think to contradict Nixon, as I get older, I become more and more of a crook. But a crook in the sense of just being crooked as opposed to being straight, if I ever was being straight in the first place, which is unlikely. But I think just the nature of experience is you have more and more over, it doesn’t seem to fit comfortably or even believably with anything that is sequential or logical.
