It took a false start or two before we finally got James Woods on the end of the phone.
There was no agent connecting us, no middle person to monitor what we were saying.
Just a problem with a charging cable, oddly enough.
A genuinely fascinating man.
But do you really want to retire?
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Well, when I say retire, I say it tongue in cheek.
Im just sort of not interested in what I call service roles any more.
But the older white heterosexual European male is only the villain in movies.
Very rarely are we anything but the villain now.
Unless its something like Nebraska, which has given Bruce Dern a great role?
Well, once in a while, an Alexander Payne movie comes along though!
Look, I have a car with 200,000 miles on it.
Ive done very well, dont get me wrong.
But Im not a material person.
I wear cheap shoes and jeans.
I dont really spend money.
All I really want are my cameras and my computer stuff and my watches and thats about it.
Is that a reason why youve regularly been drawn to writer-directors?
I think what happens is… Ive had it said to me that you should write and direct more.
And I sort of understood that.
You have to understand that I didnt grow up in a showbiz family.
My father was a professional soldier, and he was in service.
A very brilliant man, wanted me to go to MIT.
They didnt have a lot of opportunities.
They were children of the depression.
My mom was a teacher for 28 years.
My brother was brilliant, God rest his soul.
Look, Michael Douglas acted and produced.
We worked together on our very first piece of film for a learning corporation.
A video on the American constitution.
I was 19, he was 22, 23 or something.
But his father was Kirk Douglas.
He was a child of Hollywood.
If I could do it over again, I would have done that.
As an actor of course, Ive been drawn to people who take a lot of input.
So Oliver, when we didSalvador, that wasnt even in the script that confession scene.
I said what do you want me to do?
and he said well, basically just an improvisation on who you are as a character.
And we did it just before the end.
So I had a real collaborator…
And then there was Casino…
Martin Scorsese!
I had five lines in that script when I did it.
He said I cant have someone blowing you in a movie, and I said yeah, you could.
I put on that robe.
I have to say I was screaming laughing.
I was doing this fake cocaine and stuff.
And then he said lets get Sharon on the phone and well do some improv.
We did five reels of improvisation.
And she said hey, those improvs that Jimmy has turned in?
Those are kind of cool.
What dont we use that as the soundtrack to the wedding!
Thats the perfect example of creating an entire scene.
All that stuff aboutThe Elephant Man, that was all improvised.
A wonderful screenplay too.
The greatest compliment I ever got was from Sergio Leone [onOnce Upon A Time In America].
He said Ive always worked like an opera director.
My actors are props.
Henry Fonda, Jason Robards people like that!
But he said theyre like props.
It was a great compliment to have Sergio Leone say you make me a better director [laughs]!
Once Upon A Time In America remains one of your most popular films too, of course.
Speaking of that, one of my favourite anecdotes of my entire career…
I speak French, and Sergio pretended that he didnt speak English very well he had an interpreter!
But he did really.
One day he was speaking in French, and I started speaking French.
And he went, ah, shit.
One time he said Jimmy, come here.
And Im talking to him, not really paying attention.
He puts his arm around me and its me, him and this other fella.
I said hi, how are you?.
Sergio said do you know Freddy?, I said no, hi Freddy, how are you?.
And that went on for a while.
Then I looked at him and said Freddy?
Is your first name Federico?
Yeah, he said.
This is when you wish youd had an iPhone!
And we picked one in particular: Best Seller.
You yourself have said that thats your mums favourite of all the films that you did.
Your parents werent from a film background, but how did she view your film career?
My dad passed away when I was 12, God rest his soul.
There was a long pause.
I said how do you feel about that?.
I never will get one, Im too old now!
When I had you I was 21.
She had my late brother later.
People said youre too young, but the happiest experience of my life was my family.
I loved your father, I loved you…
I had a phenomenal family.
My parents loved each other, loved their kids.
She said I followed my heart and I did what a lot of people thought would be a mistake.
Not that there was anything wrong with my dad just that they were too young.
And she said it was the greatest thing I ever did.
But she said I gave all of myself to it.
And Ill tell you what.
You go out there and promise me this one thing just promise me.
I dont care if you succeed or fail, or if you get lost along the way.
And its a promise Ive kept for 45 years.
I do love that her favourite of your films was Best Seller, too.
It regularly comes up as a favourite of yours amongst our readers as well.
Why do you think those films particularly resonated?
What are your memories of them?
We did a little odd movie calledFast-Walking.
Jimmys a quirky guy.
We think alike about a lot of stuff.
Oliver Stone was pretty much going to offer meWall Street, but I was committed to doingCop.
You know, could have been a mistake!
But I have no regrets.
Best Sellerwas done by Hemdale.
He never paid anybody, he knew how to alienate everybody!
I mean look at this: heres who John Daly had in the first three films he did.
Harold Becker, Arnold Kopelson.
But I loved John because he was the real Harvey Weinstein.
And you know, Harvey Weinstein is unparalleled in terms of bringing great cinema.
I dont care what people say about him.
Ive actually never worked with him… actually once, I didScary Movie 2or something.
Ive always wanted to work with him more, its just never happened for some reason.
And Brian Dennehy is basically playing Joseph Wambaugh.
It was a very clever auterist idea.
It reminded me oddly enough of those smaller Kurosawa movies … hes a great crime director Kurosawa.
Anyway, the point is that this was like an updated 80s version of film noir.
And you hit on something very important.
You wrote a piece for us on that before, about the problem with Salvador?
Oliver Stone and I went to the New York Film Festival forSalvador a fucking film festival!
A screening of a seminal Oliver Stone film.
Really, his first real film.
Here it was, we were both Oscar nominated for that film.
Things like the boy getting out of the car to go fight for the guerillas…
I went through a whole bunch of scenes.
And a lot of that was down to the authorship, whoever owned the negative.
Harold Becker went to takeThe Onion Fieldsto a festival and there were four scenes missing from that picture.
People buy these fucking negatives and nobody looks after them.
Hemdale didnt even have a fucking vault for their movies!
So a lot of times, these things only exist because theyre on DVD or VHS.
The big problem with film preservation is in the 80s, and thats when I was king!
I was king of the independent movies.
So why did you like doing those movies particularly?
I liked doing them because they had a genre overlay for me.
I just loved that the character[in Best Seller]was kind of a believable Superman.
They really are trained to do all that stuff.
Its really a profession.
I always love movies that are about ethical moral dilemmas.
Because the only thing that separates the man from the beast is morality and ethics.
So movies that are about that are very, very powerful.
Because if you dont kill them, theyre going to die, and theyre part of this fucking group.
Its a shame, but theres collateral damage.
On the other hand, you cant kill a kid in cold blood.
Even the Mark Wahlberg character sort of says thats the kind of shit thats on CNN.
It covered all the bases, from genuine moral conscience and expediency, and bad PR inbetween.
It was really great to hear that sort of complex discussion.
The consequences of a wrong decision, or a poor decision.
Clearly it wasnt a good one for them.
Did you ever watch the movie Touching The Void?
I did watch that, the documentary?
That for me was one of the most chilling images.
Can you fuckingimaginebeing down there?!
You know, I approached these films instinctively for a while.
Where they must dig deep inside and find some supernatural solution.
There has to be an intervention from within or from without.
Where you realise that your quest is one thing, but your journey has in fact become another.
Thats the essence of great movie making.
I told my mother a funny story about it.
She just loved that he was so suave, and such a great character.
I thought you know what, youre 100% right.
Its like eating a piece of steak.
It sounds like you and your mom were very close.
My mom was a very sensible person.
I give you my mother in a nutshell.
She grew up as a child of the depression.
She just dreaded poverty.
And yet ironically what she did do which I didnt find out for years she saw an opportunity.
Picking up kids for school.
She said I remember being poor as a kid.
I remember how it made me felt.
How humiliating it was to be poor, but we couldnt do anything.
Your father had a medical malpractice thing he was a hard-working man and then he wasnt able to work.
So what she did, she followed that bus into the inner city and to other places.
It was an amazing school and she was a great, great teacher.
A fundamentally, spiritually great teacher.
And she took 20% of the kids at that school for 28 years for free.
So thats my mother.
Heres the other story about her that I love.
We went on one of those charity golf tournaments.
Youre in Maui, and youre playing golf, the go-go days of the 80s when things were great.
So I brought them, and that was back when they used to smoke in hotels.
They had those standing ashtrays by the elevator.
And I was standing by my mom and she said Jesus Christ.
I said what mom?.
My mom walks over and says sometimes, rich people are just too appalling.
Leaving an imprint in the ash in their ashtray!
She sounds one of a kind.
Part two of the interview can be foundhere.
