Keith Gordon

I do too. It was the first time I ever chased the chance to do a TV show. I’ve done some TV but that was the first time I saw the pilot, called my agent and said, “You have to get me into that, because it’s so damn cool.” Everyone involved with it was really great to work with. TV is always a crap shoot because you don’t know what you’re walking into and people can be really cranky or people can be really nice, but this is the case where everybody was terrific. I really had a good time I hope it comes back and I hope to do more of them.

Showtime seems delighted with how it’s doing. I know it’s the best rated new show they’ve had in quite a while. They’ve already sent out emails to everybody a couple of times saying how happy they are with how it’s doing. I know they almost beat NBC at one point and that was unheard of because they are in so few households. They expected it to start slow and hopefully build up but then it actually started out much bigger.

I did the 11th which is the second to the last one. It will be interesting to see where they go from here because I think they do a great job of slowly building things and having the characters evolve a lot over the course of the 12 episodes. I just think it’s dark and disturbing twisted and wonderful.

I would love to if the chance came along. I’ve pitched some shows, but I have never had anything that anybody’s jumped on. I wrote a pilot for Lorimar at one point and never did anything with it. It’s something that would be fun in the right circumstances. TV is getting better and better while movies are getting worse and worse. So the idea of doing a show like Dexter is something that is really cool and interesting. But the tough part is threading that needle of finding something that somebody wants to do that and that somebody else isn’t already doing. Earlier this year I was pitching things and people often say this is already like what ABC or TBS is doing. But I’d love to do one if I could find the right place to do the right idea.

I think what Showtime is doing is really impressive. I love Weeds. I think Sleeper Cell is pretty interesting and complicated. They really have very good taste so now that the show’s gaining momentum a little bit I might go in and pitch a couple of ideas because they certainly seem open to things that are a little bit off the beaten path.

Well, I don’t know. The networks are still comparatively squeamish. Some of the murders are pretty intense. Some are more some are less but there’s a decent amount of that. There’s some nudity in it like in my episode. They’re not pushing the limits but I think it’s more that the characters are really out there. I think networks are so scared of any character that they don’t think is likeable. I was supposed to do an episode of Smith and they pulled the plug on that so quickly largely because they were obsessed with the idea that the characters weren’t likeable. Those characters were a lot less threatening in a way than Dexter is although he’s quite likeable which is quite interesting.

Yeah, to me it’s a Pinocchio story in a way. It’s a little wooden boy who starts to become human so where does that leave him.

To me he certainly is. I didn’t quite believe it when he said “I have no feelings and I am a monster.” I always felt that he was an unreliable narrator. That’s the persona that he’s adopted but if he really didn’t have emotions he wouldn’t do a lot of what he does. He does seem to care about his sister. He does follow a code of how to live. If he was truly a complete sociopath, with absolutely no feelings, why would he bother doing those things? He would just kill indiscriminately. So clearly there’s some humanity underneath and I think as the season goes along you see more and more blips of it.

Oh it was a lot of fun. It wasn’t hugely crowded. There were maybe 50 to 75 people. But it was a blast to see so many people from the film that I hadn’t seen in a while like John Glover. Catching up with everybody was a lot of fun.

I believe he is in Texas and is a college professor. So I don’t think they fly people in for this stuff. Also I read a couple things with him where he pretty much said he doesn’t want to deal with the movie business anymore. He doesn’t even tell his students that he was an actor. So I’m assuming that it wouldn’t be something that he would jump at. Although I really do like him very much as a person and it would have been fun to see him.

Yeah, he was a very good actor and is a really cool guy. But I think he just got tired of the business and I can’t say that I blame him. He just didn’t want to keep dealing with the ups and downs and ego crushing of it. One day you have everybody bowing at your feet and the next day people don’t care. I think a lot of people get to the point where they go “I don’t want to live that way.” I think in teaching he found something he was real excited about and part of me is envious of him because the business side of the business is really awful.

Once I started getting into filmmaking, I stopped pursuing the acting. I never put a sign on my front lawn saying “Will not act. Stay away.” But I stopped going to auditions. Over the years the only acting I’ve done has been if somebody calls me and wants me to do a reading for their play or four lines in a movie. It’s not like I’m avoiding it. It’s just that trying to put together money to make movies is a full time gig and then trying to get jobs as an actor is a full time gig. I just couldn’t do both at the same time. It would be great to be somebody like Sean Penn where people say, “Hey do you want to come do the lead in our movie for a lot of money and we’ll build our schedule around when you’re available and when it’s convenient.” But I wasn’t quite in that position. In some ways I’d always been more interested in filmmaking than acting. The acting was a bit fluke-y in that it wasn’t something that I was aiming on doing and when I got some jobs and it started going, it became film school for me. When I was acting, I spent a lot of the time and energy hanging around with the directors I was working for trying to learn everything I could.

Well, I’m glad because some people who loved the book were really mad that we changed the ending. But to me, the ending of the book just didn’t work as part of the screenplay. We wrote it that way the first time and it was nihilistic but in a very adolescent way. You got to the ending and it was like life sucks and then you die. So we tried to find something that was very dark but was a more complicated idea. But to this day there are some people who are like, “Oh you went Hollywood on the ending.” I thought, “I went Hollywood on the ending? The main character saying everything I did was a waste” is not really Hollywood. It’s maybe not as bleak but it’s not exactly happy either.

Not as much as I would have liked to. He seemed like a really nice man, everything you’d like him to be. But he didn’t seem to want to be that involved. Mostly I dealt with his agents and stuff when we were getting permission to use the book although everything had to go through him. I really only met him when the film was done and we did a couple interview things together. He was already getting older and lived on the East Coast and we were on the West Coast doing the film and he just didn’t seem like he was that interested in being involved in the film on a day to day basis.

Actually I really am. I look at it and I still feel good about it. Sure there are little moments I cringe at, which is inevitable. You get older and you go, “Ok, well there was my 26 year old post student-y self coming out.” Some of the dream images are a little hokey or dopey. But overall I feel happy with it. I think it caught the spirit of the book and I really liked the performances the way the photography looks. I love it for what it is even though I can see its flaws.

There’s supposed to be. This has been the strangest process. Almost a year ago we re-transferred the film, did a whole new sound mix for it, did a commentary track and it was about to come out. Then the rights got sold and it went from Sony over to Fox. So now Fox has it and I’ve been in contact with those people and they keep saying they’re going to put it out this coming spring but it’s really been frustrating because it took forever for Sony to get going on it. It’s been a strange ping-pong thing but Fox assures me that they intend to put it out. They think that they can make money on it because the book has sold so many copies but given what I’ve gone through I’ll believe it when it’s out. My second movie A Midnight Clear was supposed to come out last year too in a brand new version and it became hung up in all this legal stuff. So it’s been a frustrating year with that kind of stuff.

Yeah, because with anything newer usually all the DVD rights are locked up. But movies that were made before DVD was an established medium often had contracts that were a little blurry about who would own those rights.

Yeah but that isn’t how Mother Night got started. Really what happened with Mother Knight was that Bob Weide, who wrote the screenplay and produced the film with me, was very close with Vonnegut and also very close with me so he was the connection. Bob, who is a wonderful filmmaker in his own right, brought me the idea of doing something with one of Kurt’s books because Kurt hadn’t been happy with some of the movies that had been made of his stuff. It was just a coincidence that I happened to meet him on Back to School. Frankly I was so intimidated by him on Back to School that I probably didn’t say more than a couple of words to him. By nature I’m a little shy with people that I really admire and Kurt is in that category so I went up and said “Hi, I love your work. Great to meet you” and that was it. I only got to really know him once we started working on Mother Knight.

Oh I would say that would be the case. Although it’s funny, every movie I’ve made has had incredibly negative detractors along with incredibly positive supporters. Some of what happens is just who those critics happen to be. Singing Detective actually got some great reviews but they just were from critics that didn’t carry enough weight for them to matter. If you make movies that are at all edgy or out there you’re always going to get a hodgepodge of reaction. A Midnight Clear probably got not that much a better percentage of reviews than Singing Detective but the good ones happened to be New York, LA Times, Time magazine and Newsweek. So to the world it looked like everybody loved the movie. Whereas the good ones on Singing Detective tended to be from The Des Moines Register and all these places that don’t have the national weight. There isn’t much you can do about that. The whole thing with critics is such a roll of the dice.

Well, the reality of being an independent filmmaker is that you always have a bunch of irons in the fire. Billy Dead may be my next film but I don’t know. I’ve got four projects right now and one is close, but the weird thing about independent filmmaking is that close doesn’t mean very much. Close could mean years and years away or it could mean one phone call and you’re in pre-production a week later. It’s this strange rollercoaster because you get some money here and then you’ve got this actor attached and then the first money falls out but then you get more money in this other place and then the actor decides they don’t want to do it anymore.

Ethan’s definitely a part of the film because he brought me the book and is a producer on the film. He no longer wants to play Ray, which is the leading role, because Ray is supposed to be 28 and Ethan has gotten too old for it. There’s the part of the older brother which is a pretty juicy supporting role part and he’s expressed an openness to doing that. But in any case he will be an exec producer on the movie. Whether he’s in it or not is now going to depend on when and how it happens. He first brought the book to me seven years ago. People don’t always realize that a lot of these things are very long time investments. I remember hearing about Little Miss Sunshine six years ago.

Oh wow! There’s a forgotten film!

It’s pretty enjoyable in a goofy way. I don’t know that I could argue that it’s a good movie but it’s fun and it was a fun experience. It was nice to kiss Helen Slater.

The part was a lot of fun because the character I played was somewhere between nerdy and sexy and an odd mix of things.

Yeah I guess so. I liked playing a lot of unclassifiable mixes of things, which is funny because now you’re allowed to be geeky and sexy at the same time. But in the current culture at the time I didn’t fit neatly into any one category. So I’d end up in these roles that nobody knew what to make of. But I was a little disappointed with Legend of Billie Jean because I thought that the original script was better than the final film. The script read more as a sharp edged tongue in cheek satire about itself. It was almost a satire of teen movies. When you read the script it was clearer that on a certain level this whole thing was about a damn motor bike and that is not the biggest moral issue of all time

I think what happened is that as they made it the studio decided not to go that way so they ended up taking all that out. It wasn’t like it was a joke but that it had more of a sense of self-mockingness. It became much more “fair is fair” instead of being ironic. We’d get these rewrites which took a lot of the life and personality out of it but I think that happens in the studio world a lot.