From the Archives: Salman Rushdie Discusses His New Life and Book.

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: MARCH 10, 2000
Time: 12:00
Tran: 031001np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Interview With Salman Rushdie
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:06

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: From WHYY in Philadelphia, I'm Terry Gross with FRESH AIR.

On today's archive edition of FRESH AIR, writer Salman Rushdie. His latest novel, "The Ground Beneath Her Feet," has just come out in paperback. It's set in the world of rock and roll, and it's about the nature of love, art, pop culture, and celebrity.

Also today, the cinematic quality of violence. We talk with Brian De Palma, director of the films "Carrie," "Dressed to Kill," "Scarface," "Carlito's Way," and "Mission Impossible." His new film, "Mission to Mars," stars Tim Robbins and Gary Sinise.

And film critic John Powers reviews a new movie by Jim Jarmulsch called "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai."

That's all coming up on FRESH AIR.

First, the news.

(NEWS BREAK)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Salman Rushdie's latest novel, "The Ground Beneath Her Feet," has just been published in paperback. It was released in hardcover last spring, just a few months after the Iranian government formally repudiated the fatwah, the religious edict calling for Rushdie's death.

It was issued by the Ayatollah Khomeini on February 14, 1989, as punishment for Rushdie's novel "The Satanic Verses," which the ayatollah condemned as blasphemy.

There are extremist groups still calling for Rushdie's death.

Rushdie is from India, but is now a Briti9sh citizen. His novel "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" reflects on rock and roll and pop culture around the world and the nature of celebrity.

The story revolves around Ormus (ph), a charismatic musician from Bombay, and the love of his life, Vina (ph), a half-Indian singer with a thrilling voice who is worshiped by her fans. They perform together in an internationally popular band.

The story is told by a photojournalist who is Ormus's friend and Vina's occasional secret lover.

I spoke with Salman Rushdie last spring when his novel was first published. He told me that the two main characters in his novel are based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

SALMAN RUSHDIE, AUTHOR, "THE GROUND BENEATH HER FEET": I came up with that really because of wanting to write a big love story, and it seemed to me that that is one of the great love stories, because it's about the idea of love being constant beyond death.

I mean, Orpheus and Eurydice are lovers and marry, and she is bitten by a snake in the myth, and descends into the underworld, and he manages to follow her, by the genius of his music persuades the guardians of the gates of the underworld to let him follow her down. And he tries to bring her back up, and narrowly fails to do so.

I mean, my interest in the story was, first of all, that it is a great love story, secondly that it does raise some very profound questions about the relationship between love, music, and death, and I wanted to explore those.

GROSS (on camera): Do you think that the culture of celebrity has connections to the Greek gods and the stories that were told about them?

RUSHDIE: Well, I think they -- I think it does in one respect, in that I think the great thing about polytheistic religions, about the old myths, religions of Greece and Rome and contemporary religions such as Hindu polytheism, is that the gods don't have to behave well. I mean, they're allowed to behave badly. In fact, they frequently do behave badly. They're sort of lecherous and greedy and turn themselves into animals and run off with other people's children and wives.

And they are in no sense role models. I mean, they're not moral examples. What they are, in fact, is -- are examples of ourselves, but writ large, if you like, but, you know, if you like, put up on a giant movie screen for us to watch and see ourselves mirrored in them. And in the contemporary age, when we no longer have that kind of classical pantheon to look at, we seem to have invented a pantheon of our own, made up of more -- made up of human figures, but who occupy in our minds much the same imaginative space, as once the Greek and Roman gods must have done.

GROSS: Do you think we've attributed certain magical powers to celebrities in the way that the Greek gods had magical powers?

RUSHDIE: I think we do sometimes. I mean, we go to them for help, you know. We look to them for the solution of our problems. But we also do another thing, which is that we like to destroy them. That's also something that used to be a characteristic of the classical civilization, the idea of destroying the hero, destroying the superhuman character at the end of his or her journeys and adventures.

So I think celebrity also has that dark side to it. It's about -- it's a thing which we first create and then seek to tear down.

GROSS: That is so true. And why do you think that phenomenon exists, like, building them up and then ripping them down?

RUSHDIE: Well, I think it's because to allow people to be larger than ourselves, to allow them to occupy this privileged space where we look up and adore or in any way see ourselves reflected in them, the fact that fame is such a large and powerful and privileged thing, I think, creates also the desire to remove it from the people who get it.

So that happens sometimes, and I think the people who survive in that rarefied world have to be really quite -- you know, really quite tough and resilient characters, because the -- you know, the elephant traps are quite large.

GROSS: Do you feel that when you were younger, you ever worshiped celebrity or, you know, artists whose work you particularly loved?

RUSHDIE: Well, I mean, I think the phenomenon's got much more acute since the days when I was young. But I think, yes, certainly, I mean, I grew up with, you know, with kind of heroes in the musical world and in the movies and so on. I mean, I was a big Elvis fan, like everybody else, practiced singing "Hound Dog" into the end of a broomstick, you know...

(LAUGHTER)

RUSHDIE: ... and tried to learn how to do that thing with the pelvis, which I didn't quite succeed in doing, but, you know, not for want of trying. And I think most of us did have idols in -- both in the worlds of music and cinema.

But I don't think the phenomenon had taken off in the way that it now has, because of the much greater force of the mass media. I mean, I grew up in a world where there wasn't any television. You know, I didn't see a television set till I came to England at the age of 14. So it was different then.

GROSS: My guest is Salman Rushdie, and his new novel is called "The Ground Beneath Her Feet."

Now, Ormus, one of the main characters, and he's the songwriter and performer, he disappears from the public eye for an extended period after a car accident. And the more invisible he becomes, the more famous he becomes. And I was thinking that that was, in a way, analogous to your situation. You became more and more famous as you had to go deeper and deeper into hiding.

RUSHDIE: I guess that's true, in a way, yes. I've actually -- I have to say I didn't think of that, but now that you say it, it's obviously -- there obviously is that echo.

It is very odd how an absence, the absence of a well-known person, creates a receptacle into which people can pour all their ideas about that person. And in a funny way makes that person more celebrated because you can say more or less anything, you can think more or less anything you want, say almost anything you want about them when they're not there in their own person.

And I certainly did feel for a time that I had become this kind of empty vessel, and there was just this empty space with my name on it that people were filling up with all kinds of notions, some of which very flattering, and some of which very unflattering.

And it's been a long road back to try and fill that space myself.

GROSS: I would imagine that in some ways, this celebrity was very helpful to you in calling attention to your cause, you know, and...

RUSHDIE: Well, it was both things. I mean, it was helpful, and also I felt it very -- it was very strange, because it was -- I felt it was being famous for the wrong thing, you know, and I didn't particularly ever seek to be famous as a kind of political hot potato. I'd always felt that the focus of attention would be on my writing. And it's taken a long time to make that happen.

And, well, it sort of began to happen with my last novel, "The Moor's Last Sigh," and I hope it'll happen much more so with this, because it's very odd that what people know about you is completely the thing that you don't want them to focus on.

GROSS: Right. It also must have been very strange to have this kind of dual life, one a celebrity life, in which people are writing about you all the time, and then the reality of your life, in which you're kind of cut off from everybody, because you were in hiding.

RUSHDIE: Yes, that's -- I mean, it was. There were all kinds of ironic problems of that sort. I mean, I'm happy to say that that's -- you know, that it's not -- it's no longer quite like that. I mean, I do have much more of a real life now.

And I feel in a way that characters like my two rock stars, in the long term, I mean, actually have that problem for their whole lives. I've had it for a little while, but I do think that now people who inhabit that very, very bright light, you know, probably have a bigger problem of loss of privacy and gossip, and indeed even sometimes danger, than I do.

GROSS: My guest is Salman Rushdie. His new novel is called "The Ground Beneath Her Feet." We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(AUDIO CLIP, EXCERPT, "YOU AIN'T NOTHIN' BUT A HOUND DOG," ELVIS PRESLEY)

(BREAK)

GROSS: Salman Rushdie is my guest, and his new novel is called "The Ground Beneath Her Feet."

Now, the three main characters in your new novel are either born in or have lived in Bombay, and that's -- you know, that's where they experience the birth of rock and roll. And you write, "In the '50s in Bombay, communications technology was in its infancy. There was no TV, and radios were bulky items under strict parental control. Also, the state broadcasting corporation, All-India Radio, was forbidden to play Western pop music."

What did you hear on the radio when rock and roll was being born?

RUSHDIE: Well, we had to find strange strategies to get hold of rock and roll, because as that quote says, the Indian radio more or less played Indian music or talk programs. What was then called Radio Ceylon, which would now be Sri Lanka, I guess, had a somewhat more liberal attitude, and at the weekend would play -- have a couple of hours program which was a Western hit parade. And that was the main way of listening to it on the radio.

But the other thing that happened is that Bombay, in my childhood and still, is a very, very international city. I mean, it's very cosmopolitan, and in the immediate neighborhood where we lived, the kids that I played with were not just Indian kids, they came from all over the world, they came from America or Europe or England, and they brought their records with them. So often one would hear these things sitting in our friends' rooms.

I do think it's amazing -- one of the reasons I wanted to write about it, is that it was the first global, globalized cultural phenomenon taking place in the years, you know, only a decade after World War II, at a time when, really, it was -- the world was not globalized yet. And yet this phenomenon rocketed around the world.

And I think I was hearing, you know, Bill Haley and Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard and Elvis Presley at more or less the same time as people in the United States were hearing it, and having exactly the same reaction. And one of the things that really strikes me retrospectively is how this music, when it arrived in -- you know, halfway around the world, didn't seem foreign to us. It didn't seem like music from a long way away, it seemed to be our music too.

And I think we responded to it more or less exactly the same way as people in America and Europe were responding to it.

So it really did become -- it spoke, if you like to young people's streak of rebelliousness or to their need to dance or to their -- or to whatever it might be, but it did speak to young people everywhere in exactly the same way. And therefore, in exactly the same way, our mothers didn't like it.

GROSS: So was it in Bombay, like in America, were there a lot of parental groups and religious groups who saw rock and roll as this terrible threat to the health and morality of young people?

RUSHDIE: Yes, absolutely, it was a threat to the health and morality of young people. It was certainly something that my father wouldn't tolerate much, and so I had to wait till he was out of the house before trying to play any of those records.

And my mother was more tolerant, but she kept trying to steer me towards more virtuous Western music, like...

GROSS: Such as?

RUSHDIE: ... you know, like, I don't know, Frank Sinatra. I suppose I could have tried to tell her that Frank Sinatra wasn't exactly virtuous. But I think compared to Elvis Presley, he seemed like -- you know, he seemed like an archangel.

GROSS: Now, how did the music and art that you were interested in, you know, like the pop culture that you were interested in, seem different, if at all, after you left Bombay and moved to England?

RUSHDIE: Well, I think coming to -- I came to England in '61, when I was just about 14, and I think in terms of popular culture, it was a -- it was just a very fortunate moment to show up here, because it was just months before the great outburst of popular culture, you know, the Beatles and Stones and so on, and the whole, I guess, swinging London '60s thing was just in the process of being born.

And as somebody growing up through that age, I mean, it felt very exciting to be, if you like, in the middle of the second revolution of popular culture, if -- and the Stones were certainly the second thing. And to be here at the moment where, if you like, the way of being young and the music that we listened to was being reinvented here and then reexported all over the place.

So that was -- it was very influential on my way of thinking at that time. But, I mean, it wasn't just the English, actually, because one of the great influences on me at that time was getting to hear Bob Dylan for the first time, which I did when I was about, I guess, 15.

You know, I was having a miserable time at an English boarding school, and somebody else, one of the other boys, had an early Dylan album and took me into his room and said, "You really got to listen to this," and in the way that young boys do when they've never heard of something, I said, "Oh, Bob Dylan," you know, "who's that? He can't be any good."

And this album was put on, and, I mean, it really -- I mean, my jaw hit the floor. I'd never heard a noise like that. I'd never heard people -- I'd never heard anyone writing like that or talking about those things, and that -- and somehow not just his lyrics, but his phrasing and, indeed, his harmonica all had -- all added up to something that spoke to me very directly, and I've been a colossal Dylan fan ever since.

GROSS: Did you become a different kind of teenager in England than you would have been able to be if you stayed in Bombay?

RUSHDIE: Yes, probably. I mean, I think it's true that there's -- even though Bombay is a very cosmopolitan town, there's no doubt that there's more social and cultural freedom available in the London and the England of the 1960s than would have been so back home. And, yes, I suppose I was able to behave more -- behave worse than I would have been able to do at home, which my mother probably still doesn't know.

GROSS: Salman Rushdie is my guest, and his new novel, which we're talking about, is called "The Ground Beneath Her Feet."

The narrator in your novel is a photographer, and he thinks of himself as nearly invisible. And he says, "Honesty is not the best policy in life, only perhaps in art."

Do you agree that honesty isn't the best policy in life, but it is in art?

RUSHDIE: Well, I think it has to be in art. I mean, I think that's the -- that part of the sentence is certainly true. I mean, if you're not going to try and tell the truth in art, don't try -- don't start. You know, I mean, find another job.

But people are sensitive, you can't always tell people the truth. You can't always live in the real world without any kind of subterfuge. But in art, if you try and use those disguises and subterfuges, you damage the work, you know. And so it is a place that I go in order to be able to tell the unvarnished truth.

GROSS: Now, you've said that in your new novel, you wanted to explore, among other things, this paradox, that we have a deep sense of home, and our culture really respects and values a sense of home. But many of us also feel a deep need to leave home. And tell us more about that.

RUSHDIE: Well, I just think it's -- I just think that, you know, inside all of us, probably, there are both these desires. There's the desire to belong and to put down roots and to have a home and, you know, loved ones and friends and a feeling of continuity, and -- but also we have a need to leave home, because it's what we do, you know, we grow up, we leave home. We do not make our lives where our first home was, usually.

And it's a need in us to go away and find ourselves by departing from home. And I think that idea, the need to depart, may actually be as profound a human need as its opposite, as its contradiction. But because, you know, human societies are about being settled and forming those ties and attachments and roots, somehow that need gets a lot more air time, you know, people talk about it a lot more and give it a lot more status.

And yet when, in our dreaming selves -- by which I include, you know, our entertainments and works of art -- we always talk about the other thing, you know, I mean, that's why, if we look at our movies, you know, who are the people we make films about? We make them about outsiders and, you know, bandits and gangsters and people who don't belong and who get uprooted and who wander, you know, whether -- I mean, we make road movies and we make films about all sorts of people who are not settled.

So we have that need, and it comes out, it comes out in our dreams, if you like. It comes out in our works of art. And I thought, therefore, in this novel, that instead of -- that I would actually give that need the center of the stage, and I'd write about people who don't have roots and who in a certain way don't have a need for roots, who are voyagers, you know, who are people like Kerouac's bums, who are happiest on the road.

GROSS: Which category would you put yourself in?

RUSHDIE: Oh, I mean, I think -- as I say, I'm probably in both categories. I mean, I think we're all in both categories. It's a question of mood. I think certainly I'm -- because my experience of life has been to travel a lot, you know, and also to end up in a country other than the one I started out in, I think I'm -- the idea of roots is not as central to me as it would be for a person or a writer who'd stayed in the same patch of earth all their lives.

And I must say, often if I read writers like -- you know, like William Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who can create the universe out of the tiny patch of earth which they know so intimately and well over such a long period of time, I have a kind of envy about a writer like that, because I can't be that writer.

And I've always had -- and one of the reasons this novel is called "The Ground Beneath Her Feet" is that I've always had the sense that people like me, who arrive as strangers in other parts of the world, more or less literally have to invent the ground we stand on. You know, we have to imagine the world into being around ourselves, because nothing can be taken for granted. Everything is strange and unexpected and unfamiliar, and we have to make it up.

So in that sense, voyaging, migration, whatever you want to call it, is a creative act. You're forced into creativity in order to understand your situation.

GROSS: Salman Rushdie, recorded last spring. His latest novel, "The Ground Beneath Her Feet, has just come out in paperback. We'll hear more of his interview on the second half of our show.

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(AUDIO CLIP, EXCERPT, "PAPERBACK WRITER," THE BEATLES)

(BREAK)

GROSS: Coming up on this archive edition, Brian De Palma, the director of "Carrie," "Scarface," "The Untouchables," "Mission Impossible," and the new movie "Mission to Mars."

John Powers reviews Jim Jarmulsch's new movie, "Ghost Dog.

And we continue our conversation with Salman Rushdie.

(BREAK)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

On this archive edition, we're featuring a 1999 interview with Salman Rushdie recorded after the publication of his novel "The Ground Beneath Her Feet," which has just come out in paperback.

It was first published last spring just a few months after the Iranian government repudiated the 1989 religious edict that called for his death as punishment for his novel "The Satanic Verses."

Rushdie's latest novel, "The Ground Beneath Her Feet," is set in India, England, and the U.S. and revolves around two charismatic singers who are in love with each other, play together in a rock band, and are worshiped by fans around the world.

The novel reflects on the nature of love, art, and celebrity.

In your novel you write about the conflicted attitudes about love and sex in India, and you say, you know, that -- or your narrator says that in the '50s, boy-girl relations were so strictly controlled. But what about the Kama Sutra? What about child marriages? What were some of the other mixed messages you got about love and sex growing up in India?

RUSHDIE: Well, it is a strange thing, but if you look at the cultural history of India, Indian culture has been very interested in erotic relationships, sexual relationships, and actually very explicit about them. And yet in contemporary India, there's a substantial effort to suppress all that conversation and to make it kind of taboo and bad for you.

And that really is a problem, and relations between the sexes are made problematic by those attitudes. It's difficult in most parts of India for boys and girls just to go out together. It's actually in Bombay less difficult than in many parts, because as I say, it probably is the one genuine world metropolis in India and has social attitudes to match. But it's -- I mean, everything's just that little bit harder.

I mean, I think one of the things that I really wanted to write about was the way in which these cultures, Eastern and Western, the way in which Western attitudes, social and cultural attitudes, infected and inflected, if you like, the life of India, or the India that I was growing up in, and vice versa, you know.

When I came to England and discovered that there was a kinder version of India that was in everybody's heads, which frankly I didn't much recognize, you know, I mean, having come from a great big city, more or less very -- in a very contemporary and cosmopolitan childhood that I'd had, to get here and discover that what India meant to people was, you know, sitar music and yoga, lentils and Maharishi, and sort of mysticism and kind of ancient wisdom.

And I thought, What's that? You know, I mean, what is all that about? (laughs) Because it seemed to me to bear almost no relationship to the country I'd grown up in.

GROSS: Were you still able to capitalize on that in some way, though, and pass yourself off as perhaps a little more wise and mystical than you really were?

RUSHDIE: Well, it isn't wise and mystical that was useful. What was useful is that there was a moment in the kind of late '60s when I was, I suppose, sort of 18, 19, 20 years old, when being Indian, you know, for five minutes became the sexiest thing in the world. And if you said to girls that you were Indian, I mean, you were more than halfway there, really. (laughs) It was -- people were incredibly aroused by the idea that one came from India.

And you could see -- or I could see that it was completely phony, you know, because they didn't -- because the India they were responding to didn't exist. But I have to say I did allow it to happen.

GROSS: Well, speaking of aroused, did the Kama Sutra have any part in your life when you were in India? Was that a text that, you know, young men were expected to see and read?

RUSHDIE: No, no, the Kama Sutra was completely invisible as a text. I think I didn't read that until I was quite grown up and living in England. (inaudible)...

GROSS: And what did you make of it when you did read it, you know, and about its place in Indian culture?

RUSHDIE: I just thought, gymnastically impossible, is what I felt.

(LAUGHTER)

RUSHDIE: I thought if you were kind of an Olympic gold medalist, you might be able to have a go at that stuff, but otherwise, you know, shut the book and get on with ordinary life.

GROSS: (laughs)

RUSHDIE: No, and I -- it's an interesting book now. It's -- because it's a picture of a completely lost world. And, I mean, it's -- there are things in it which are very strange, and what would now quite straightforwardly called sexually discriminating, because what the book is about, it is how a man doesn't need to do much other than be a man, but a woman, in order to be, you know, a successful woman, or sort of, you know, a woman fulfilling her function, has to learn, I mean, 275 sexual positions and 97 ways of kissing, and be a great cook and philosophy major.

You know, that brings her off somewhere to the lower foothills of manhood. And it is obviously -- you read it like that, it seems to reflect a world which was, you know, which is past, and in many ways should have passed.

But it is, on the other hand -- it shows a world in which Indians were much freer in their thinking about and indeed speech about the erotic, and that's really changed completely now.

GROSS: Do you think that's changed because of a more -- well, stricter fundamentalist reading of religion?

RUSHDIE: Yes, I mean, it's not -- it hasn't changed recently, it's changed hundreds of years ago. But it is because social attitudes shaped by religious attitudes have shifted dramatically.

I mean, for example, there's a part -- there's a town in India, Kadero (ph), in which there are a lot of beautiful old Hindu temples covered in erotic carving based on the principles of tantric art. And these are sacred places, you know, but these days most of the local villagers don't go into those temples, because they think of them as somehow dirty, you know, and they use the local temple, which is kind of whitewashed and completely without that kind of erotic representation.

And, I mean, I've often -- I mean, I've been to this place, and I've often talked to the local villagers about why they don't use these temples, which after all are part of their own heritage and their own history. But they say, No, no, no, those -- that's all pornography, and we don't like that stuff any more.

So India has changed. It's one of the things about being a kind of ancient civilization is that it goes through a lot of changes.

GROSS: Salman Rushdie, recorded last spring after the publication of his novel "The Ground Beneath Her Feet," which has just come out in paperback.

Coming up on this archive edition, an interview with director Brian De Palma. His new movie, "Mission to Mars," opened today.

This is FRESH AIR.

(BREAK)

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: Salman Rushdie
High: Writer Salman Rushdie's novel "The Ground Beneath Her Feet." is now in paperback. It's his sixth novel but the first to be set largely in the United States. His previous novel "Satanic Versus" offended many in Iran, which resulted in the government calling for his death. Rushdie lived in hiding for years. The Iranian government has since rescinded its "fatwah."
Spec: Salman Rushdie; Entertainment; "The Ground Beneath Her Feet"

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 2000 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 2000 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Interview With Salman Rushdie

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: MARCH 10, 2000
Time: 12:00
Tran: 031002np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: Interview With Brian De Palma
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:45

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: On this archive edition, we have an interview with Brian De Palma, a film director who has provoked strong reactions. Pauline Kael praised him for his "seductive virtuosic control of film craft, which enables him to express even what is in the unconscious." Others have condemned him for excessive use of violence.

De Palma's movies include "Carrie," "Dressed to Kill," "The Untouchables," "Scarface," "Casualties of War," "Bonfire of the Vanities," "Carlito's Way," and "Mission Impossible." His new film, "Mission to Mars," opened today.

When the first manned mission to Mars meets with a catastrophic and mysterious disaster, a rescue mission is launched to investigate what happened and bring back any survivors. In this scene, the rescue team, played by Tim Robbins, Gary Sinese, Jerry O'Connell, and Connie Nielsen are nearing the planet and examining their monitor to see what's left of the base camp.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "MISSION TO MARS")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Looks deserted.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Still standing, though. So's the ERV. And look, there's the greenhouse.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Well, we know Luke survived for at least a few hours. Now, are there any signs of recent activity?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: There. Scan northeastern quadrant of base camp.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: What the hell are those?

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Graves.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: Wait a minute, there's only three of them. That means that Luke's still got to be alive. It means he's still down there.

CONNIE NIELSEN, ACTRESS: No, no, no. No, it just means there was no one left to bury him.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

GROSS: I spoke with Brian De Palma in 1993 after the release of "Carlito's Way."

I'd like to talk with you a little bit about your background and get into how you started being interested in movies. You were raised in Philadelphia. Your father was an orthopedic surgeon.

BRIAN DE PALMA, DIRECTOR, "MISSION TO MARS": Yes.

GROSS: So did he take you to operations?

DE PALMA: Yes, I spent a few summers observing operations.

GROSS: Now, some people get really squeamish when they see that, and other people are absolutely fascinated by it. What was your reaction?

DE PALMA: I was kind of fascinated. I was, you know, very interested in science. I'm a science fair winner and Franklin Institute for many years. And I had a very kind of scientific eye on it. I'm a very good person to have around in an accident, in the sense that, you know, blood and, you know, people being hurt doesn't faze me at all.

But, no, it was quite interesting. It's -- and I just followed him around on his rounds at Jefferson when I was, you know, 16, 17, 18.

GROSS: A lot of people have commented on the influence of Hitchcock on your work. What did you like about Hitchcock's vocabulary when you were starting to form your own?

DE PALMA: We basically thought the same way. He thought in terms of images, and so did I, so it was like an immediate meeting of the minds. I immediately saw what he was doing, and spent many years learning all the things that he had developed. And then I sort of started to develop a vocabulary of my own.

GROSS: When you started making movies, did you have a vision of what you wanted to do differently? Not just from Hitchcock, but, I mean, different -- differently as young director starting out, wanting to make his mark?

DE PALMA: Not really. You just sort of evolve. You have certain subject material that interests you. I started making sort of, you know, hippie anti-establishment movies.

GROSS: Like "Greetings" and "Hi, Mom."

DE PALMA: Yes, and then I spent, you know, a decade making thrillers, because I wanted to learn about, you know, visual story telling. And then I sort of got interested in a variety of different subjects, mainly -- that were driven by character and emotion.

GROSS: OK, thrillers, now, why do thrillers lend themselves to visual story telling more than other genres might?

DE PALMA: Because you don't have to spend a lot of time with character development. All those scenes where people sit down and look earnestly into each other's eyes that you see on your soap operas every day are not required in thrillers.

GROSS: And there's a lot of just, like, little visual details that can...

DE PALMA: They're all driven by visual ideas, you know, finding something, following somebody, chasing after somebody, looking, observing, which are all things that are purely cinematic. Very difficult to do. Most directors don't have a clue about what it is, because most directors spend a lot of time just photographing scripts, which any clever Xerox machine can do. Doesn't take a lot of brains to put two people across from each other and have them talk to each other and take a two-shot, and then maybe an over-the-shoulder, and then another over-the-shoulder.

Then they get up and walk out of the room.

GROSS: (laughs)

DE PALMA: Directing.

GROSS: I think "Casualties of War" is very much a character...

DE PALMA: Yes, it is.

GROSS: ... oriented movie, and it's stunning...

DE PALMA: Yes.

GROSS: ... visually. Would you choose a scene from there that you'd want to describe how you put it together to show not action, but to show what was happening inside somebody?

DE PALMA: Well, I thought that the way that the -- you finally show that all the guys raped the girl was done in a very elegant way, because it's done in a series of dissolves, with the camera pulling back farther and farther and farther and farther. And then you realize -- and then you cut to a closeup of Michael J. Fox, and you realize this is what he is watching. That's a big closeup of him with the rain hitting him on the face, and you realize he's been watching these four guys, you know, rape this girl.

And there's no sort of physical -- physicality to the rape, it's kind of like a -- I don't know, it's a -- it's funereal, is, I guess, the best way to describe it. And it's done in a series of very slow dissolves. And then you're brought to -- well, where were you watching this from? We're witnessing this as he's witnessing it. And then you cut to this incredible closeup of his face, and you see his frustration and impotence that he can't do anything, and his sorrow.

And I felt that worked very effectively.

GROSS: You once told Marsha Palley (ph) in an interview that you didn't like to see scary movies because being scared meant losing control, and being a director is about being the one in control. Was there a time when you felt you lost control as the director?

DE PALMA: No, never. Oh, well, sometimes when you're doing an improvisation, and the -- like in "Be Black Baby (ph)" and "Hi, Mom," where you basically worked out a kind of open-ended improvisation, and what you're trying to capture is a kind of, you know, documentary reality, and you basically just let the actors interact, and you just basically cover it like you would if you were a documentary filmmaker.

And that did happen in "Be Black Baby," and that was very exciting, where you don't know where it's going to explode. And it always surprises you, and that's what you catch on film, and it's as vivid to me now as it was then.

GROSS: Is it true that you don't like to see scary films?

DE PALMA: No.

GROSS: No, you don't, or no, it's not true?

DE PALMA: No, I don't like to see scary films. I don't like to be scared. Boo! is something that I don't like.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: And why not?

DE PALMA: I'd rather be the puppet master than the puppet. I mean, who wouldn't?

GROSS: As you've -- you know, as, as, as you became better known and started making more expensive movies and got deeper into the industry, did that bring more compromises you felt you had to make? Does one have to make more compromises as one gets deeper into the -- into the industry?

DE PALMA: That is the age-old question.

GROSS: I'm sorry!

DE PALMA: (laughs) I mean...

GROSS: Do we have to end the interview now, is it, like, really horrible?

DE PALMA: The age-old question. I mean, I exposed myself to Julie Solomon (ph) for "Bonfire of the Vanities" precisely to answer these questions.

GROSS: Yes, well, you know, I really admire you for allowing her to -- you know, to -- for opening up the door and allowing her to write that book. It's a fascinating book.

DE PALMA: That's right, because you really try to show what happens as it happens, and how these seemingly strange things occur on the screen that make no logical sense when you're looking at them for the first time.

GROSS: And it's a book that really shows a lot of the frustrations in casting and shooting and budget that go on behind the scenes. Would you do it again? Would you let a journalist see everything that was involved in the making of a film again?

DE PALMA: No, I think it's a one-time experience, because a lot of people get their feelings hurt, and there's no such thing as Hollywood reporting, really, because you're basically just being served publicity material to reprocess out into the media. Nobody really tells you exactly what's going on. I guess the closest thing you get is gossip.

GROSS: Is that why you felt it was a good idea to let her do it, so that there'd be a real report (inaudible)?

DE PALMA: No, I thought it was a good idea basically because I would get questions about, Well, do you...

GROSS: (laughs)

DE PALMA: ... do you have creative control over your casting, and how does the studio affect your work? And I -- everybody I'd be talking to was seen (ph), like, I was at an interview in 1930s while I was a contract director at MGM. It seemed to have no reality to the world I'd been working in in 20, 25 years. So that's why I let Julie aboard on "Bonfire of the Vanities" so she could see what was going on, so maybe the journalists would read this book, and maybe not ask these questions again.

Now, to answer your question (laughs)...

GROSS: (laughs) Yes.

DE PALMA: Directors that are -- have a certain track record like myself, and, you know, Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, I mean, a bunch I can name, Sidney Pollack, they have a certain power, because of the quality of the films they've made and the successful films they've made. So consequently you are able to do pretty much what you want to do. Are you influenced by agents, producers, studio heads, marketing meetings? Sure. Do you have the ultimate say about everything that goes on the screen? Yes.

So it's a sort of a process that works on you, but you are completely responsible for all of the decisions that go on the screen, and as -- and "Bonfire of the Vanities" is the next example, in which I made a lot of decisions that, when I think about it now, I probably would have done differently. But I made all those decisions myself.

GROSS: You were talking before about how thrillers have a lot of opportunity for visual story telling. Is it the same way with violence? Do you find that, that, that, that violence lends, lends itself to the kind of visual language, you, you, you like to use?

DE PALMA: Here we go again.

GROSS: What did I do now? (laughs)

DE PALMA: (laughs) I mean, here's a question I've answered for 25 years. The thing about violence in cinema is, it's cinematic. That's why it appears in the cinema. Now, of course, you can never defend violence because it's like defending wife beaters. I mean, you know, how -- what can you say positively about violence? Violence is good? I like violence? You can't say any of these things without getting your head beaten to death.

So consequently, I'll again say for the 9,000th time that violence is part of the palette of cinema, and that's why you see it in cinema. You can't see it on stage, doesn't work too well, doesn't work too well in music, doesn't work too well in painting, doesn't work too well in ballet. But on screen, it has a tremendous force, and it's specifically cinematic.

So if you're making movies, you may move in the terrain of action and violence.

GROSS: Brian De Palma, recorded in 1993 after the release of his film "Carlito's Way." He directed the new film "Mission to Mars," which opened today.

Coming up, John Powers reviews Jim Jarmulsch's new movie, "Ghost Dog."

(BREAK)

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: Brian De Palma
High: Director Brian De Palma's new film, "Mission to Mars," opens this week. It stars Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins, and Don Cheadle. De Palma's other films include "Carrie," "Dressed to Kill," "The Fury," "Scarface" and "Carlito's Way." His thrillers were often compared with those of Hitchcock. In the 1970's, De Palma, along with other young film directors Martin Scorcese, Steven Speilberg and Francis Coppola, made films of such quality that the period is sometimes referred to as another Golden Age of Hollywood.
Spec: Brian De Palma; "Mission to Mars"; Entertainment; Movie Industry

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 2000 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 2000 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: Interview With Brian De Palma

Show: FRESH AIR
Date: MARCH 10, 2000
Time: 12:00
Tran: 031303np.217
Type: FEATURE
Head: John Powers Reviews 'Ghost Dog'
Sect: Entertainment
Time: 12:56

This is a rush transcript. This copy may not
be in its final form and may be updated.

TERRY GROSS, HOST: Jim Jarmulsch, the New York filmmaker best known for "Stranger Than Paradise," has made his first fiction film in five years. It's called "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai," and it stars Forrest Whitaker as a hitman.

Critic John Powers was taken by the film's odd mix of comedy and metaphysics.

JOHN POWERS, FILM CRITIC: Back in 1984, "Stranger Than Paradise" made Jim Jarmulsch one of the world's hottest young filmmakers. But unlike such peers as Spike Lee and the Cohen Brothers, Jarmulsch didn't use his indie success to make the leap to Hollywood, quite the contrary.

Over the next decade, Jarmulsch traded his commercial heat for a steady downtown cool that played better abroad than in the States. He seemed to keep making the same small, ironic art film over and over.

I kept waiting for him to risk a leap into something new, and he finally did just that in his brave 1995 Western, "Dead Man," a meditative Johnny Depp picture that charted the borderline between life and death, the civilized and the primitive.

But while "Dead Man" had moments of ravishing beauty, it put off Jarmulsch's old audience while failing to win him a new one. And so almost inevitably, his enjoyable new film "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai," finds him retrenching. Although his subject here is also death, the movie's shot through with his trademark humor.

Forrest Whitaker plays a hitman called Ghost Dog, a moniker he was given for his invisibly murderous approach. He lives in a rooftop shack in urban New Jersey along with his pigeons, which, in a poetic touch, he uses to communicate with his Italian boss, Louie, a man to whom he's pledged his life.

Although Ghost Dog is a professional killer, he's no sociopath. He's friendly to kids and patois-speaking immigrants, and he draws his values from the Book of the Samurai, the classic Japanese code of the noble warrior, excerpts of which Jarmulsch prints on screen. But these rigorous principles are put to the proof when the other gangland capos decide that Ghost Dog himself must be eliminated. Suddenly this hip-hop samurai must decide whether to save his own skin by betraying his chief.

Jarmulsch is too self-conscious to play any crime story straight, and "Ghost Dog" is definitely not a thriller. It's not about suspense. It's about the juxtaposition and collision of various worlds and sensibilities, African-American street life, medieval Japanese ideals, and the collapsing ethos of the Mafia, which is even more clownish here than in "The Sopranos."

At one point, the Mafiosi ponder the sobriquet Ghost Dog.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP, "GHOST DOG")

ACTOR: Now, what the (bleep) is his name?

ACTOR: Ghost Dog.

ACTOR: What?

ACTOR: Ghost Dog.

ACTOR: Ghost Dog?

ACTOR: He said Ghost Dog.

ACTOR: Yes, he calls himself Ghost Dog. I don't know, a lot of these black guys today, these gangsta-type guys, they all got names like that they make up for themselves.

ACTOR: Is that true?

ACTOR: Sure. He means, like, the rappers. You know, the rappers. They all got names like that, Snoop Doggy Dog, Ice Cub, Q-Tip, Method (ph) Man. My favorite was always Flavor Flave (ph) from Public Enemy. He got the funky fresh flyer (ph) flavor, lively looks (ph) in the bank of (inaudible). I kicked the (inaudible), (inaudible) technicality, to a dope (inaudible).

I loved that guy.

ACTOR: I don't know anything about that. But it makes me think about Indians. You know, they got names like Red Cloud or Crazy Horse, Rain Bear, Black Duck. Moooooo!

(END AUDIO CLIP)

POWERS: Jarmulsch has always been interested in cinematic form, and "Ghost Dog" is beautifully shot by Ruby Mueller (ph) and features a terrifically moody score by Wu Tang Clan's (ph) RZA (ph). But for all these formal virtues, the screen is dominated by Forrest Whitaker's aura of soulfulness in the largest sense of the word.

Whitaker's always been an actor blessed with extraordinary gentleness, and here his big hulking body gives Ghost Dog's actions a strange gravity, a killer's paradoxical reverence for life. Like so many white filmmakers who deal with black characters, from Warren Beatty to Quentin Tarantino, there's a hint of self-congratulatory racial cool in Jarmulsch's glorified portrait of Ghost Dog, and his far less flattering treatment of the caucasian world.

Indeed, the movie scores some very cheap points about American racism. While this may be a sop to his European fan base, Jarmulsch's holier-than-thou smugness drove me crazy. So did his ending. At first I thought the movie was intended as a rebuke to the shallowness of Tarantinoism, with all its wisecracking hitmen. In fact, Ghost Dog's grave samurai melancholy could almost be Jarmulsch's answer to bad-wig, Scripture-quoting Samuel Jackson in "Pulp Fiction."

But in the last half hour, the movie starts turning into the sort of lazy, violent crowd-pleaser it appeared to be deploring. Even the hero's murders start to be played for laughs. By the final fateful showdown, we don't really care who lives and how dies, which is not the samurai way.

GROSS: John Powers is film critic for "Vogue."

FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our engineer is Audrey Bentham. Dorothy Ferebee is our administrative assistant. Excuse me. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our theme music was composed by Joel Forrester (ph) and performed by the Microscopic Septet.

With a catch in my throat, I'm Terry Gross.

TO PURCHASE AN AUDIOTAPE OF THIS PIECE, PLEASE CALL 877-21FRESH
Dateline: Terry Gross, Philadelphia, PA
Guest: John Powers
High: Critic John Powers reviews the new Jim Jarmusch film called "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai."
Spec: Entertainment; "Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai"; Jim Jarmusch

Please note, this is not the final feed of record
Copy: Content and programming copyright 2000 WHYY, Inc. All rights reserved. Transcribed by FDCH, Inc. under license from WHYY, Inc. Formatting copyright 2000 FDCH, Inc. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to WHYY, Inc. This transcript may not be reproduced in whole or in part without prior written permission.
End-Story: John Powers Reviews 'Ghost Dog'
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.