Interview
Writer/Director Gary Ross
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AW: So far, your specialty seems to be dramedy.
GR: (laughs)
AW: Do you have any plans to work in other genres?
GR: Yeah, you know, I always do, and I always end up going back the same sort of voice. Which is weird.
AW: (laughs)
GR: So, I mean, any plans I have for other genres are I think are just reactive to the situation that I'm in, which is about to have a movie open, and I'm very ensconced in that process. I think you need a certain refractory period, you know, you need to calm down, relax.
AW: How did the structure that you use in all three films...essentially you use comedy as an inroad to character and situation --
GR: Exactly.
AW: -- and then twist it to drama at the end.
GR: Right.
AW: How did you come upon that structure? Is that just something you --
GR: I'm attracted to that. I don't know. But that's very well put. I mean that's exactly what it is. I don't know. I mean, I think that one, I don't write jokes. I don't try to put comedy on top of a premise. I find premises intrinsically amusing or comedic, and so they take you there, but as the issues evolve or bloom out of the second act, as we talked about, those tend to become more serious or more character-based, or there's a resonance, or a richness or a depth that begins to occur hopefully. In Big it's the pull between childhood and adulthood. In Dave it's between idealism and corruption. In Pleasantville, it's, my God, as these people begin to become real and the complications that ensue as the result of them having to wrest with that and deal with that. And so, those are less funny. Organically. And I think that I just sort of go where the story takes me in that respect.
AW: That actually relates exactly to this question, which is, as a film has a potential audience of millions of people, do you believe then that filmmakers have some social responsibility to present films that depict human beings struggling to become better people?
GR: Not necessarily struggling to become better people. I think we have an obligation...we don't even have obligation. I personally like to make movies that have moral thematic social implications that hopefully take people places or reveal things to them that are deeper or richer than they may have anticipated. And that illuminate. And I think we all have obligation to that. I don't know if it's struggling to become a better person, because you can make a very rich wonderful movie about someone who doesn't struggle to become a better person. But I guess implicit in your question is, should we make movies that hopefully will help or allow us to become better people? Yeah, if we can, of course. Yeah, if we can. And we should try to. I try to.
AW: I think that's evident in your work.
GR: Thank you.
AW: (laughs) That's why I asked you that question.
GR: Thank you.
AW: What advice do you have for aspiring, young screenwriters, especially as somebody who really didn't start out as a screenwriter yourself. I mean, people always want to know, "How do I do this? How do I get into this?"
GR: Don't worry. You'll always worry about selling, you'll always worry about making it. But don't try to work backwards from the audience, I mean, try to find something that is meaningful to you that you connect with emotionally as the first place. To do this as a calculus will not work, you can only do this organically from the way you feel as a person. That's the only way it's ever really going to work, because that's your voice, and you have to find your voice, and you have to express it. That doesn't mean there aren't antecedents or genres or things that one needs to understand, or that are helpful to understand to integrate into the movie business and to have a career. But the first thing to do is to find something that you hook up with passionately, instead of something that you've selected calculatedly, because that will just never work.
AW: That's a very good point. So then, coming from being a writer to being a director, and as you said, they're two different kind of jobs, was the prospect of directing your first feature intimidating?
GR: Yeah. Yeah. But I prepared for it for a long time, so I felt very ready. I had been on the set of both my movies, and other movies extensively, I'd shot second unit, I'd studied acting, I'd directed plays; I had an orientation that was very ready to be a director.
AW: Did you rehearse scenes a lot with actors?
GR: Yeah. But that's more for me than it is for them in some ways. That's more for me to find the intent of the scene, to make notes about performance, to understand what it is I'm going for, so I can -- when I get there on the day I don't have to find it. I've been through it once. They won't lock into those things that much; it's more an investigative process with the actors so that I as the director can have point of view.
AW: With such a really impressive array of actors, I must say, in Pleasantville, did you then give them any leeway as far as sculpting their performance, and then by extension, dialogue; in other words, did the dialogue change at all during rehearsal?
GR: Oh, yeah, it always does, sure. I mean, not during rehearsal, but...a little bit, but it mainly changed on the set, or when we played with it, and having the freedom to kind of play with it. Not that much. I mean, it's mainly my words, but I'm not anal about that, I mean if somebody has a better way of saying something, I'll let 'em say it. Or we'll mess it up a little. Yeah, you have to be flexible.
AW: I guess to sum it all up, then, this is a really general question, answer it any way you want: what is story for you? What is its purpose in our lives, for you as a creative artist?
GR: Hopefully it's a way of revealing certain truths, or revealing complexity about how we live, and through experiences we get lost in through identification. I think that the function of a story, of these kinds of storytelling arts, is it allows us to see life revealed to us in a way that is not our own lives, and therefore gives us distance. And it creates an aesthetic distance that can ironically create more involvement, because film itself is a metaphor; it's not your life, it's someone else's life that I identify (with) so viscerally or strongly, in plays or books, that I can experience it, I can walk in their shoes, and I can feel things that I wouldn't let myself feel because the consequences aren't as great because it's fiction.And so I can feel more alive, and more emotionally moved in those moments than I do in the rest of my existence which is a) mundane or b) defended. And we can in art strike at the essence of things that we can't strike at in daily life; we can see the epic nature of things that we can't necessarily see in daily life. The irony, I guess, is that in Pleasantville, I tried to make a movie about finding the epic nature of things in daily life. And if people can feel that out of it, then I've succeeded. But I think that's the intention of fiction. It allows you to experience life much more viscerally, and much more fully. Because one, it's rendered epic through the arrangement of detail, and the compression of time, and all sorts of other things; and two, you feel much more viscerally because the consequences aren't as great. It's not you. And that's why it works.