Ray Pride

Consequences await.

"Blow," more than six years in the planning, is a pop tapestry of urge and need. The flip side of "Traffic," Ted Demme's fifth feature embellishes the life story of George Jung, the most profligate of drug dealers, who, working in the late 1970s and early 1980s with Colombia druglord Pablo Escobar, filled our fair land with kilos of "disco shit -- pure as the driven snow." Johnny Depp plays Jung, sneaking into the particulars of the role with his usual quiet, fugitive authority. Other roles are sketched in quickly by the likes of Franka Potente (the stewardess girlfriend who launches Jung's career), Max Perlich, Ethan Suplee (as his cheery first cohorts), a vituperative Penelope Cruz (as Jung's wild wife) and a sly Paul Reubens, immaculate playing a hairdresser-turned-trafficker as the devil, if he wanted to be your best friend.

Brilliantly shot in diverse, era-appropriate styles by Ellen Kuras, Demme's profane sociological drama-comedy deflates into sorrow for opportunities lost, lives blown. But until that moment, "Blow" is a sensational pop wonder, filled with textures and gestures and details that flesh out a too-compact story of twenty-five years in Jung's life (from a script by David McKenna and Nick Cassavetes). Nervy as can be, the 36-year-old director embraces his influences, notably "Goodfellas" and its torrents of voice-over, even to the point of casting Ray Liotta as Jung's father.

A copy of the film's one-sheet -- Depp and Cruz doing a sexy horizontal recline against a red backdrop, a flurry of cocaine below the credit block, stands to one side of the room. While Demme dug into cereal with yogurt, I went for the coffee. We spoke early on the morning of March 22.

Pride: You spent how long developing this? Six years?

Demme: Yeah. I've had it for quite some time.

Pride: How'd the look of the film evolve? In that time, did you see other films using the ideas you were working on? There's a complex series of looks you're putting up there. I mean, obviously you're embracing your influences, notably "Goodfellas," and there must have been some concerns about being called derivative.

Demme: Yeah.

Pride: Casting Ray Liotta is an enormous nod to "Goodfellas."

Demme: Oh yeah. Totally.

Pride: So how does all the visual barrage shift as you bang your head against the wall for six years?

Demme: Well, I knew pretty much that I was going to get a chance to stretch my legs creatively. Visually, on this film, wherein I hadn't had a chance to do it in the past because I haven't had the landscape to do it in, you know what I mean? If I did a lot of montages in my other films, it would have felt like I was trying to show off. I didn't think that was the right thing. I felt like I could show off a little bit in this one because if this isn't the movie to show off in, y'know, what is? [laughs] We had so many periods. I just told my production team that I wanted to be really true to the period, but I wanted to be as original as possible, y'know. I didn't want to do the obvious lapel-beads-forehead and all that kind of stuff. I wanted to see them, but I wanted a different take on it. I think it was the same thing with the music. I wanted it to be true to the period, but I didn't want to use the same things over and over --

Pride: Stuff that would have been on the radio, or B-sides --

Demme: Yeah. Exactly, exactly. So we tried not to do the obvious and I hope that it worked. Because it was so much fun doing it, just listening to seventies music and watching seventies movies and reading seventies magazines for months. So it was great, man.

Pride: I was amazed when I talked to Peter Niccol, who made "Gattaca," about how he would amass stacks of visual and costume research so he could just hand it to anyone who asked any questions. Was that sort of the case here?

Demme: I guess I had a lot of personal research from stuff I just had from the time period. Old magazines that I had kept. Movies that I love to watch. Movies from that period are still my favorite movies to watch. I did a lot of that kind of stuff. It was great, because my production designer [Michael Hanan] was great. He brought in entire boxes of Time, Life, magazines from the period. So we just sat around every day for an hour collectively looking through stuff, "Hey look, this would be great for Penelope, hey look, this would be great for John, this would be great for Paul Reubens. I got everyone involved in it. We all really got into it.

Pride: The clothes are cool without being assertively awful. Some of the skirts, the pants and shirts, I think every person I know who's 25 or so right now would want to wear those today.

Demme: Yeah! Those are the girls. The bellbottoms on they guys, I don't know. The girls' clothes are so contemporary right now, it's true.

Pride: So you said you didn't want to show off, yet you wanted to show a range of style. Where do you draw the line? What's a telling shot and what's self-aggrandizing? On Manhattan Beach [where the characters first learn how easy it is to deal in the 1970s], you do those wonderful zoomy yet still calibrated shots --

Demme: Oh when they're first selling --

Pride: Yeah, it doesn't look like surveillance, but it seems simply like you're looking for the story. Where would you find yourself emboldened to do that, when you could be flashy while still not getting in the way of the story?

Demme: Exactly. I think that sequence you're talking about, when they come to Manhattan Beach and they're selling all the pot, I just, y'know, I got on the camera a lot, I let my DP [Ellen Kuras] do a lot of it, too. I just said, let's have some fun. So what we'd do is we'd create scenes, improv scenes basically. We'd create a volleyball game with fifty extras. I'd tell everyone, look, when George [Depp] and Tuna [Ethan Suplee] show up, the "ice cream men" are here. So go get some "ice cream." So Johnny and Ethan knew what they were doing, so we'd just roll. They'd play the game for like three minutes, we'd roll camera, make it look like it was real, get a real thing going, then at that point, let them... A lot of stuff [like this can look] staged, so we set scenes up, did two camera rolls, told people to have fun, go with it, search for it, go and find it. The difference is, it's so subtle, it was like this slow finding instead of modern-day, which abuses a lot of stuff like that. Like [the zooms in] the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" video, y'know what I mean, it's like WHAM! WHAM! Which is great. But I didn't want it to be fast. It's like finding your guy.

Pride: It's also not the slow, procedural Altman zoom either. What was nice to me, my reading of it as I was watching it, it's whether you were a cop, watching, or someone looking to buy drugs, looking around the beach, you're just going to see this as part of the fray, you're not going to focus on it. It's almost "overseen," like "overheard."

Demme: Yeah, you nailed it. Totally. I mean, I wanted it to feel like you're looking, looking for the pot, searching to find the guy.

Pride: How about language and jargon? There are some directors, notably Michael Mann, who are in love with "terms of art," the language of a subculture, particularly a criminal one. It's articulate, but it's also head spinning. How did you decide to parcel out the period slang of these dealers and also make certain you're not burying the exposition? I could imagine you getting buried from your conversations with George Jung and also from the book.

Demme: As you can tell, I watched "Goodfellas" a lot. Because that movie, the way they use the voice-over in that movie, in my opinion, is just perfect. It tells you enough information, gives you enough interior thoughts and gets rid of some exposition as well, without feeling like it. So I watched that a lot to see how I could do that through voice-over. I tried to keep it firsthand. You have people explaining it to George for the first time, it was always like on a street basis. There's all this kind of nonchalant, it wasn't like the tech guy coming in and saying, "Here's what we're doing." It was just George, going, "Here's what we do, we get two guys, a stewardess, we use her bags." Those came firsthand, and shorthand, too, if you will. There are two informational points. One is funny, when he's smuggling drugs across the border for the first time, the camera ramps in slo-mo, he walks, "Think of something funny... a sexual encounter... " so and so. It's information without being information. And then when he says, "We started the market. In fact, if you snorted cocaine between 1977 and 1985, eighty percent of it was ours." So there's bravado, as opposed to info. I was really worried about that number. I talked to the FBI, I talked to a lot of guys, I said, "you've got to validate this number," and they're like, "yeah, he and Pablo [Escobar, working together], between '77 and '80, about eighty-five-percent of the coke that came in came in these guys' planes."

Pride: It's hard enough for guys with office jobs to imagine what it is the guy at the other desk does all day, but to imagine what you do with your day with all this illegal, improvised, power-mad activity... Just the scenes where George has the house jammed with boxes of cash. I have to suppose that's just a modest version of the real events.

Demme: Oh yeah. These guys, George had so much money he would buy houses just to stash the cash.

Pride: Not a place to launder it, but just to hide it?

Demme: Yeah! Yeah! He'd build air conditioning ducts. He'd build enormous air conditioning systems and store his money in them. It was amazing. This is what these guys did. And finally, they're like, "We've got to get rid of all these houses." That's when they turned to Noriega [and the banks in Panama]. It was incredible; these guys had so much money.

Pride: An occupational hazard -- just too much fucking money.

Demme: Too much goddamn money in small bills! One of the things I always loved about George's stories... "Why didn't you just stop, George," I go, "You knew it was going bad, you knew that something was going down, you knew that you were in an arena where betrayal [or] death was inevitable on every level, why didn't you get fucking out?" And he's like, "Teddy, all I can tell you is, when you have so much money that you can do anything you want, anything... Because I would wake up in the morning and look at Mirtha [his wife, played by Penelope Cruz in the film] and say, "What do you want to do today?" She'd say, "Let's go to Cuba." He'd go, "Great idea. How do you want to get there?" "I dunno. Let's just go buy a plane." They'd go to a place and buy a plane, go, "Can you gas up, we're ready to go." "Well, we have to -- " "Here just take all this money and gas it up." They'd go, "OK!" They'd go and stay in a suite and stay there for whenever. They'd leave the plane. Or they'd, "You want to go fishing?" "Yeah, let's buy a boat." "You wanna buy a car? I can't make my mind up; let's buy 'em all. Let's get all six." He said, "once you do that, you're not going back to a nine-to-five job. Are you crazy?" It's kind of the "Goodfellas" thing, a line I can't remember exactly, something about being a wiseguy, once you're into this lifestyle, you can't go back.

Pride: It's also building on the rituals or habit, if you're maintaining that level, you feel empty if you're not being transgressive --

Demme: It's also power and greed. The eighties, as you know, was built on greed and more. So when George went into the eighties with that much money, that's real dangerous. He just wanted to be a pirate. He didn't want to follow the rules. He got sick and tired of people telling him what to do and he hated where our country was headed. He was very philosophical about it. He wanted to be his own guy. The government was bringing cocaine in, in his eyes, he wanted to be in it, too, because if it wasn't him, it would be someone else. That was it.

Pride: Timing is everything: this makes an amusing bookend to "Traffic."

Demme: Yeah! Steven and I were talking that it would be a great double feature, his movie in the morning, our movie in the afternoon!

Pride: You have the snap-crackle-pop followed by the hangover.

Demme: Yep.

Pride: I asked Soderbergh his ideas about how to hide exposition or speechifying, and he said he saves the best speeches for the assholes, somebody who shouldn't have that inside their heads, that makes it funny or unexpected.

Demme: You don't feel like it's preaching, right, right.

Pride: Not what do you hope, but what do you think people will come away from this film with? To me, there's an overriding sadness, here's this really clever guy, there's' all this fun, and then his life is spent in prison.

Demme: I always knew what the last scene of the film was going to be. Because it's obviously based on a true story, and the true story is that he's in jail, so I knew what the end was going to be. So I knew I had to show the fun. Talk to anyone who grew up in the seventies in their twenties or thirties or even teens, or even people now. "Man, I love to fucking party! That was it, man! The seventies? We partied our asses off! And we loved it! We had our jobs, we did this, we just fucked off, we just fucked, we got high, it was the fucking... best... time... of my life!" What happened? "Well, I crashed, I went into rehab in '80, got my feet back on me now. But... Man, that fucking time was great, y'know?!" Even when people destroy their lives, or go into rehab, whatever, they still talk about the party. Even today. Why are we out on a Wednesday night if there's no good music? If you love to party, you want to get outside, you want to have fun. I thought I had a little bit of license to show that, how it is, in the first hour. I think it's a real important story because I think it's a real sad one. Here's an innocent 18-year-old, 21-year-old, who went out to Manhattan Beach to [escape] his horrifying childhood and to find himself and now he's 58 years old, he's dying in prison, and his daughter hates his guts and won't see him. His wife... they're just starting to talk again. It's really funny because Mirtha calls me up. I talked to George, he loves me so much. Next week, "Fucking George!" It's still the same thing on the phone. I find real sadness in that.

Pride: Money doesn't buy happiness?

Demme: Yeah... I think the main thing for me is, parents take care of your kids, to be really honest with you. When Nick Cassavetes came on the project about three years ago, he and I went and saw George. I still didn't know what the movie was. I didn't know how it would stand out from "Scarface" or "Goodfellas." "Traffic" wasn't even [on the radar] yet. I just didn't know yet. I didn't want to make those films, because they had been made already. I wanted to do something in this genre that was different. Nick and I kept going to see George and all he would do is talk about, finally, his childhood, how much he loved his dad and how much he hated his fucking mother for torturing him, she was such a miserable woman. She thought she was marrying above her class, she needed to live a certain way and she wasn't. So she medicated herself and she was drunk all the time, and it was horrible. Now when we'd go to visit George in the pen, he'd go and peeks on the roll call to see who's coming to visit that day. You have to call in advance. He checks to see if his daughter's coming every day. It's terribly sad. This notion that parents provide an environment for their family that is not a positive one, I think those kids are going to go out and do the same things their parents did. It's gotta stop somewhere. The cycle's gotta end. So once Nick and I focused on that triangle, father-son, son-daughter, then the rest of it fell into place. I guess if I had to hit anyone over the head, that'd be it.

Pride: Do you know the Philip Larkin poem, "This be the verse"? It starts, "They fuck you up, your mum and dad./ They may not mean to, but they do." and it ends with "Man hands on misery to man./It deepens like a coastal shelf./Get out as early as you can,/And don't have any kids yourself."

Demme: [laughs] Oh god!

Pride: Which somehow reminds me of a couple of the long-lead reviews I read where the writers were jumping on Rachel Griffiths' role as George's mother and Penelope Cruz playing Mirtha, that somehow the way you were showing them was misogynist.

Demme: Also, in the L.A. Times this weekend, someone was writing about how women's roles are getting shittier again.

Pride: "Why does he have pretty Penelope play such a shrew?"

Demme: Yeah, "She's such a bad character, she's unforgiving." As opposed to what? I mean, if I present a film where it's not a classic, where the father is the scumbag, like "Tender Mercies"? How many movies have we seen where it's the father against the son? How many times have we seen it where the mother is one? I read that thing, and I was like, Jesus, when are you going to be happy? [laughs] You complain not enough roles and how all the women are just there and smiling and "Oh your father doesn't really mean it." Well, y'know, this is different as that gets!

Pride: So when you visit George, is he lucid? Is he the way you portray him at the end of the film?

Demme: Yeah. It's really sad. He works in the greenhouse. Go figure that out. They just don't learn, do they? He's delusional about a few things, but he's pretty much there.

Pride: There were a lot of things I liked about Spike Lee's "Summer of Sam," but seeing Ellen Kuras getting the chance to cut loose as D.P. was one of the most exciting. Was that the film that impressed you most about her work?

Demme: I loved "Summer of Sam," the way it looked, but I loved [Kuras' work on ] "I Shot Andy Warhol." I thought that film was really bold, the way it looked. And her short-form stuff is sensational, her commercial video reel and shit like that. You can tell there's someone inside in there who's just dying to do it in a big movie, dying to have the empty landscape, the paint. I'd really wanted to work with her for a while. I told her, three different decades, three absolutely different looks, plus a little bit of the fifties that I wanted to be like home [movies]. Seventies lenses, zoom-ins, still photos, stock footage, I go Ellen, at the end of the day, my technical goal is that in film school someday someone will say, "You want to see a film where they use voice-over really good, go see 'Blow.' Oh, and in that film, they also used this great stock they shot in the seventies -- oh, they also used this -- oh they also did -- and they also did -- " I told Ellen that and she said, "OK, OK, OK, stop, I'm here!"

Pride: A fugitive history of the last thirty years of technique.

Demme: I was hoping. It angers me as a filmgoer to see when filmmakers get lazy with period pieces, where they don't spend enough time to really get it down. I think that period is so much fun, and the [chance] to re-create it cinematically was great, using the lenses as opposed to modern day technology, lighting it differently in a way that perhaps wasn't flattering or doing a wash over it that wasn't great but making it feel like you were there. Making a period piece, you want people for a minute to just forget they're living in two-zero-zero-one. Y'know? Take me back! So, Ellen, she's just the shit.

Pride: So why the flash cuts of the high life sequences, the montages of stills? Were you anticipating ratings problems with sex on top of drugs?

Demme: No, George was kinky. Mirtha and he were both were really kinky. Johnny wanted to push it. I said, "Really?" I said, "OK, we'll push it." We've been so lucky, we've been under the radar with this movie, the whole making of it. [He turns to the poster, turns to the blur of cocaine at the bottom.] I can't believe we this is on the poster, this is illegal. The title? Y'know, I mean, Jack Valenti, after the Oscars, is gonna wake up and see the posters and have a coronary.

Pride: The MPAA let "Traffic" have the title that's in cocaine that blows away at the end of the trailer, but I suppose they might say, well, they're being "moral."

Demme: [laughs] Right, exactly, yeah!

Pride: This one... is a little more...

Demme: It's a porno movie! I mean, look at that poster, it's great! It's my favorite poster of all time! It feels like such a seventies movie. Based on a Russ Meyer novel! I'm just hoping people are going to want to party and go to this movie. And then they'll be going down at the end! [laughs] I mean, how many times in your life are you ever going to make a movie called "Blow?"

Pride: I'm sure someone's written a teen comedy called "Blown" already.

Demme: Yeah. On the Playboy Channel, I can almost guess. God! "Blown"!

Pride: The reason some moralizing stories fail is the filmmakers failing to recognize that partying is fun. Even though Georgie does get his comeuppance here... you show the rush.

Demme: You can't do what you do when you're younger when you're older, it's just a fact. It takes a week to recover from anything. Who wants that?

Pride: It goes back to St. Augustine --

Demme: [laughs]

Pride: You don't know what's enough until you've had too much. You have to go too far and then pull back.

Demme: That's great.

Pride: Are you one of those directors who subscribes to the idea that when your casting is done, most of the work is over?

Demme: Yes. In the particular film, absolutely. Every single character. Johnny a little bit more, obviously, but all I did was spend a week with everyone. I had my little pockets of time throughout the process, a meal or a research thing, we'd sit down. I mean, these guys are all so good. Like Franka [Potente], after I met her and I cast her, I just handed her over to these three hot blonde beach babes who are her friends in the movie, I just said, go, go have fun. She came back a few weeks later, she was just there. With Johnny, you're just a monitor. [You point him toward things.] He just makes it work. Paul Reubens. Even Penelope. She's gotten a bad shake, whenever you become "it," people want a slice of you.

Pride: You're not giving them the "it" they're expecting, the pouty, sexy, dreamy girl. The lovable chick instead of a loaded pistol. Instead of the force making George go crazier.

Demme: She's so good in going for that. They [all] made it real easy for me.

Pride: There's a wealth of small moments I liked, but I especially like Ethan Suplee, once they're established on Manhattan Beach, the girls all saying hi, his jelly-belly is bouncing, he's accepted and so happy and smiling. Chicks do like him.

Demme: I love that you love that. Great.

Pride: And Max Perlich is always great.

Demme: His character's just having fun, all the time. "This is great! We had this weed back east we could make a fortune!" I love Max. He's so good.

Pride: Talk about Paul Reubens turning on a dime, when he goes into the back room to make his deal, he goes from his salon voice to his business voice. He goes from being the hairdresser surrounded by women all the time, to something else. He still has that ambiguous sexuality, but --

Demme: Yeah, I love that part. It's his business voice. We wanted him to be ambiguous in everything. We wanted chicks around him all the time, That had to be really big. My favorite Paul Reubens part, a great acting scene, is when he comes in later he movie in that awful fucking eighties outfit, and he says, I'm sorry [to Johnny]. It's just really great acting. It touched me so much. I almost started crying when we did it. It was so sweet and real and apologetic.

Pride: And you keep the camera back in that scene, in that hallway. The two of them are doing a very precise dance of body language as well.

Demme: Yeah. totally. His hands were down, you got it. Their hug isn't a really good embrace, it's just a half-hug. I love that scene.

Pride: How do you keep track of the details? I'm talking about a few little things I picked out on one viewing, but you could get lost in form over content. It's your sixth film, so what have you learned along the way about making the right choices for yourself? That hallway scene, you've found the combination of text, camera placement and performance, but are the choices always that clear?

Demme: I'm not one of those filmmakers that has been doing it since birth. I'm not one of those guys who came out of the box with a huge head and got in right away. I worked really hard at just getting better, y'know? And each film has been such a huge learning curve for me. My first movie was "the Man," which was basically "Yo! MTV Raps, the Road Movie." I had never been in charge of a film set before. I was doing so many wrong things to so many wrong people in that movie, just because I didn't know better, y'know. "You shouldn't talk to an actor like that, you shouldn't give a line reading." "Oh yeah, right." It was like all this shit that somehow made it into the movie. Then working with Richard LaGravenese on my next film, "The Ref," watching him write and talk out scenes. Working with Richard was like going to a fucking screenwriting school because he's so smart. And then Judy [Davis] and [Kevin] Spacey walk in, and we do rehearsals. I'd never rehearsed in my life. So that was like going to rehearsal school. Then "Beautiful Girls," I felt like, I kind of get the lingo, now let's shoot some dramatic scenes, it was the first kind of drama I'd done, let's try to track stories with an ensemble, okay, let me learn that. Then "Monument Avenue," I just wanted to throw it all away and just go raw and remember that experience. Then "Life" was... a fucking freakshow of epic proportions. The money, dealing with --

Pride: A hundred million dollars will buy you control of the cocaine market or one Eddie Murphy movie.

Demme: Yeah, exactly. Dealing with $20 million dollar actors and that learning curve. It was a really positive experience for me. The editing was a whole different thing, but... So in this film, the same thing, just like everything we're talking about, everything has been a truly amazing learning experience. I'm not one of those guys who say, oh I can't watch that movie again. I've had such a great time on each film I've made. I guess I've been trying to pay attention to details more, keep learning. I don't want to get lazy, you know what I mean? That's why I like working with Ellen, switching up DPs like that, not talk in shorthand with people right off the bat. I'm hoping that every time I think I have the puzzle solved, I want to put it back in and shake it up again.

Pride: It's like the old days, flying under the radar, the days before there was radar! People like John Ford, Raoul Walsh, made all these shorts that didn't exist even after the 1930s.

Demme: Wow.

Pride: They stayed curious, they had lives before and after the movies.

Demme: Yeah, that's me.

Pride: A note about "Beautiful Girls." For me, that's like the one great modern depictions on film of somewhat older and somewhat younger attraction, not even a "Lolita" thing, it can be the 40-year-old who falls for the 24-year-old, each side offers the other something and there's intrigue, it's part of life, but it doesn't have to be deadly and awful and wrong.

Demme: I didn't want it to be dirty, but I wanted it to be sexy, too.

Pride: There should be an awareness of these things, which the scenes between Timothy Hutton and Natalie Portman have, but not this weird condemnation.

Demme: Yup. I know what you mean. I remember I talked to my wife and a whole bunch of girls, my peers. I'd ask, "Am I OK here?" And they're like, "Oh yeah. When we were 13, we had the worst crushes on 30-year-olds. Like major." " Like what do you mean, major?" "Like MAJOR. Major hormonal fucking nightmares going on in our bodies, feeling things that we had no idea about and not even knowing what to do about it. It drove us fucking crazy." That made me feel good! [He laughs.]

(2001-04-05)

Also by Ray Pride

THIS AMERICAN SO-CALLED LIFE
A thirteen-part series, drawn from 2,800 hours of video capturing the lives of fourteen students, their teachers and family, over the 1999-2000 school year at Chicago suburban Highland Park High School, it surpasses its creators' claim that they've made the nonfiction equivalent of "My So-Called Life."
(2001-03-29)

WHOLE CLOTH
Liars, cheats, two-timers, eager-to-please fantasists: And those are the good guys.
(2001-03-29)

COLOR BIND
With "The Brothers," about average, commitment-fearing upper middle-class African-American men, writer-director Gary Hardwick treads all over a number of expectations. Its fugitive theme is loneliness -- the intense fear each of the protagonists, played by Bill Bellamy, Shemar Moore, Morris Chestnut and the priceless D. L. Hughley, have of being left in their world without the possibility of love.
(2001-03-22)

WORDS ON PICTURES
Information wants to be free, runs the Web bromide. All the film magazines and trades and books that I pore over in a given week aren't necessarily free, but there are indispensable Web resources that can keep you as informed as e-mail or gossip does in the real world.
(2001-03-22)

OFF CAMERA
(2001-03-22)

MANNY FROM HEAVEN
(2001-03-08)

RAINSTORMS OF WORDS
(2001-03-01)

MEET JOE BLOW
(2001-03-01)

KNOWING DICK
(2001-02-22)

CROUCHING PRODUCER, HIDDEN EGO
(2001-02-22)

HANNIBAL THE AMICABLE
(2001-02-08)

WATERY, GRAVE
(2001-02-08)

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