This is a recent interview I did with Larry Charles for the soon to be late, but perennially great,
WORD magazine. We chatted for about an hour, so there was a fair bit of his wit and wisdom that I didn't have room to include in the finished article. I'll knock that into shape and post it soon. It'll be like a DVD extra and everything.
FACETIME
- LARRY CHARLES
Paul
Whitelaw
Anyone
familiar with the generous bounty of behind-the-scenes extras on the
Seinfeld
DVD sets will recognise Larry Charles in an instant. Whereas
everyone else looks relatively conservative, Charles, with his
warlock mane and biker beard, appears to have gatecrashed proceedings
en route to a Jerry Garcia memorial concert.
His
distinctive appearance is matched by his idiosyncratic output, most
notably on Seinfeld,
where during its first five seasons he penned some of the most
ambitious and offbeat episodes, and as director of Sacha Baron
Cohen's Borat
and Bruno
films.
Having
exposed the casual bigotry endemic within certain portions of the
American psyche with those wild guerilla mock-doc's, the pair explore
similarly explosive territory with their latest film, The
Dictator,
in which Baron Cohen plays a hubristic Middle-Eastern despot
transplanted to the streets of New York.
But
if Charles, with his penchant for risky provocation, has found the
ideal partner in Baron Cohen, his key collaborator is still Larry
David, the co-creator of Seinfeld
and
writer/star of peerless HBO farce Curb
Your Enthusiasm.
They first met as writers on '80s sketch show Fridays
– prior to which Charles hung around comedy clubs literally selling
jokes to the likes of Jerry Seinfeld – and have worked together
ever since (Charles has directed numerous episodes of Curb).
Despite being “in the throes of
waking up” during our conversation, he's every inch the energised
comedy philosopher, betraying an uncurbed enthusiasm for the
endlessly fascinating possibilities of his craft, not only as mere
entertainment but also as a probing psychosociological scalpel
(believe me, ten minutes in his company and you'd be using such terms
too).
Speaking in a garrulous drawl with a
hint of Brooklynese, Charles coincidentally grew up in the same
Jewish neighbourhood as Woody Allen and Larry David. Whatever they
put in the water there, it clearly fostered several shared sensibilities
between them.
“
If
you think about that scene in Annie
Hall
,” says Charles, “when Woody's a kid and he realises that the
world's going to come to an end in billions of years - that's a bleak
thought and I was always really able to relate to that. I've always
had a morbid curiosity for everything, and the truth that underlines
the reality beyond the reality that we live in. Growing up at a time
in the '60s and '70s when there was a lot of experimentation with
drugs and art, society and politics, I think I was very, very
influenced by all of that.”
Both
Borat and
Bruno
were largely unscripted, whereas The
Dictator is,
relatively speaking, a more conventional comedy. But does it bear any
similarities to those films?
It's
along the same lines, actually. The themes of Borat
and Bruno
have a lot do with the world's perception of America. Borat
came out during the Bush administration, and it really gave an
interesting outside illumination of the American mindset and how they
approach people from other countries with such ignorance and naiveté.
Bruno,
obviously, was about this rampant homophobia that lies under the
surface of American and global society. And The
Dictator
arrives in a political climate where there's the Arab Spring, where
the concept of democracy and governmental systems are being
questioned. And we see very clearly during the Wall Street meltdown
and all these things, how we talk about dictatorships - we point our
fingers at other countries and tell them they're not running their
countries properly, but here we've discovered that corporations have
undue influence over what we call democracy; freedom is suppressed in
much more subtle ways. So the movie is extremely relevant and topical
in respect of that.
You
essentially used real people – who thought they were taking part in
a straight documentary – as stooges in Borat
and
Bruno.
What do you think that approach revealed about their attitudes?
The human insight that those movies
provide, they tap into people's vanity, people's ego and hubris. What
people should do in those situations when they're being asked to
appear in something they don't really understand, they should be
saying no. But many people feel they have something very important to
say, they're flattered by the attention and being on camera, and they
wind up eventually revealing their true self. It becomes almost like
a therapy session in a way, where it's not just what you're saying,
there's also a subtext and eventually that rises to the surface. I
mean, Sacha is extremely sophisticated about psychological
experiments like the Milgram experiment, we discuss these things
quite often in terms of how people let their guard down, how people
hear what you're saying and respond to what you're saying; just that
very process of communication is fascinating.
An
unusual aspect for you when making those films was that – after
shearing off your hair and beard – you had to play the offscreen
part of a serious documentary filmmaker in order to convince the
participants of your supposedly innocent intentions. Was that strange
for you?
Yes,
there was a whole parallel reality going on. People would stop the
filming sometimes in the middle of a scene, they'd go, “Wait a
minute, is this real?” And I would go, “Yes, it's real.” But in
my mind I was like, “It's not exactly the reality you think
it is, but it is very real.” But no arms were twisted, no
manipulation takes place at that point. They have the right to say
whatever they want, they're not being told what to say – they're
being moved in a certain direction in the conversation, but their
choices are their choices. So there is an element of volition to it.
Is
the adrenaline pumping when you're, for all intents and purposes,
pulling off an elaborate prank?
No question about it, that's one of
the greatest gifts about this style of filmmaking. You're essentially
like a bank robber! We don't scout locations, we case the joint. I'm
looking for exits, how we're going to get out and run away. And then
when we go in and accomplish the scene, we come running out giggling
and giddy because it's so exhilarating - we got away with it!
Your
work with Sacha seems to be informed by an almost countercultural or
situationist desire to subvert reality.
It's snapping people out of a certain
mindset, and I think Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters did that.
Andy Kaufman is another great example, and he was someone I knew
peripherally and watched admiringly for many years. They were testing
the boundaries of what is art, what is entertainment, what is the
relationship between the audience and performer? All those questions
are very fascinating to me as part of the process, and with Sacha
we're able to put some of those things into practice in a rather
commercial filmmaking format. It's really surprising to bring those
two forces together and have them synthesise and create a dialectic
that becomes its own form in a way. There's been many great comedy
characters, but applying some of these verite techniques, these Dogma
techniques, to a mainstream comedy, that wound up being an almost
accidentally revolutionary idea.
You
directed Bob Dylan in the film Masked
And Anonymous,
which you also co-wrote together. What was that experience like?
I recall it as nothing short of
life-changing. The first time I met him he had a shoe box, and he was
like, “I don't know what to do with all of this.” And he opened
the box and dumped out a pile of scrap paper. I picked up some of the
scraps and they'd have a single line on it, like a line that could be
in a song or the name of a character. So I said you could take this
line, that could be said by this character and so on. I started to
show him how to put that puzzle together, and he realised it's very
similar to the way he writes music. So we wrote the screenplay in a
kind of almost automatic writing or cut-up technique. He's someone
with complete integrity, somebody who totally trusts his instincts.
Did
he confound you in any way?
One
day he had a line for the movie that acually wound up being a lyric
for one of his songs - “I ain't no pig without a wig” - and I'd
been working with him long enough to be able to talk to him this way,
even though I admired him and worshiped him, I said, “Bob, you
know, even in this movie people aren't going to understand that
line.” And he just turned to me and said, “What's so bad about
misunderstanding?” And he was right: what is
so
bad about misunderstanding? In your artisitic and personal process he
is challenging you all the time. People will say to him, “What were
you thinking when you went electric at Newport?” And he'll say,
“What were you
thinking?”
He's really not accepting anything at face value, which is very
similar to a comic's sensibility. It's the way Sacha and Larry David
approach life, and me as well, we always ask why. And that's a
dangerous question in this society quite often.
As
you say, Larry David is a man of integrity - it seems that if he ran
out of good ideas for Curb
tomorrow,
he simply wouldn't make another series...
That's
such a non-corporate, non-commercial approach, and that's why he's an
artist. Even when he wasn't successful he never did anything he
thought wasn't right. He always did what he thought was right
regardless of the consequences. He has that kind of unwavering
integrity, he will not compromise. He's unable
to compromise. And the result was that he was able to keep that
vision intact as it went through that very corporate system.
And
it's that commitment to making something of lasting quality, isn't
it?
Myself,
Sacha, Larry, we're all very competitive guys on a base level. We
want to make the best show, we want each episode to be the best
episode, we want each movie to be the best movie. We want to top the
thing we did last time; we have very ambitious aspirations. We don't
want to make Borat
II,
we don't want to do Seinfeld
spin-offs.
I want to provide the audience with something fresh and
unpredictable. Our conclusion is that the audience craves that
experience, they want to be taken out of the normal machine
entertainment that they're fed. What I've always been committed to,
like Larry and Sacha, is a certain level of instinct to the material.
You can have political satire, subtle character humour, deft verbal
humour, very silly, graphic and course humour, all within the same
framework. So it's an incredible epic canvas to choose from, like
you're looking at a Bruegel painting or something. A great painting
you can stand in front of all your life, and we're trying to make
something in our world that has that kind of resonance.
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