When the Borat movie was released last year you couldnt even count the number of publicity appearances that Sacha Baron Cohen made as Borat. Those appearances, along with creating a hysterical and powerful movie, turned Borat into a monstrous hit and a cultural phenomenon that crossed all lines of gender, race and politics. Much of the attention for the film was given, and rightly so, to Cohen but for most movies the director is always an essential element. Borats director is Larry Charles previously best known for his writer/producer work on Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Entourage. Charles also directed another mop topped Jew named Bob Dylan in Masked and Anonymous. I got a chance to talk with Charles about creating the movie, the politics behind the scenes and how he got those people to say such outrageous things.
Check out the official site for Borat
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?
Larry Charles: I was supposed to edit today, actually. I took on a Kanye West pilot for HBO and I was supposed to edit today but the editors not ready for me so I put that off. So Im writing a treatment for a new movie that I was going to work on today and Im supposed to review some footage for this Bill Maher documentary [called A Spiritual Journey] that I shot.
DRE: You are a busy man.
LC: I am very busy.
DRE: How is the Kanye West pilot?
LC: I think its going to be really great. Its going to really surprise people. They have this very limited view of what the show will be. They think its going to be like a reality show so theyre really underestimating what we did. When they see it, theyll be really shocked.
DRE: People think it is going to be Kanye ranking on George W. Bush the whole show.
LC: Right, ranking on George Bush or acting like Flava Flav or whatever clich that they have of every other young black man on TV. Its going to be hopefully dissected, deconstructed and reconstructed into something that theyve never saw before.
DRE: Is it plot driven?
LC: Its hard to describe. Let me put it to you this way, when I made the Bob Dylan movie [Masked and Anonymous], I wanted to make a Bob Dylan movie that was like a Bob Dylan song. One with a lot of layers, that had a lot of poetry, that had a lot of surrealism and was ambiguous and hard to figure out, like a puzzle. So I wanted to make a show that was like Kanyes music. Theres seriousness and humor at the same time. Its very dark. Its very language-oriented. It draws on a lot of different musical influences.
DRE: Is it a heightened Kanye, like Larry David on Curb [Your Enthusiasm]?
LC: Yes, people have a very limited image of who Kanye is and this will shatter, or at least expand that image and play with that image and mock that image all at the same time.
DRE: It must be a lot of fun.
LC: Its been a lot of fun. We did it on a very small budget very quickly but I also wanted that urgency to it. I had a good game plan and I think we accomplished our goal.
DRE: As for Borat, I read that they originally started with another director, so how did you get involved?
LC: They shot about two weeks with another director and it was a mess. Everyone was very unhappy so they shut the movie down. Now usually when they do that, its pretty much the end of the movie, they write it off as an insurance thing or something. But for some reason, the people at Fox had a feeling that this could still be something. So they went out in search of somebody and my name had come up initially and then my name came up again. I sat down with Sacha [Baron Cohen] and the writers and we talked about what I would do differently and how I would change things and what I could bring to it and when I agreed to cut my hair, they said okay [laughs].
DRE: [laughs] Its hard to fool people with you looking the way you normally do.
LC: Thats right. I couldnt pass as a normal person. I look like some type of Gandalf reject or something. So I cut my hair and put on a blazer and khakis and looked like a community college professor or something.
DRE: Thats really funny.
LC: That was the thing they were most afraid to ask me actually. Creatively we were totally in sync and then Sacha finally said, Can I ask you one more thing? and I said, Sure, whatever and he said, Would you ever possibly consider cutting your hair? I said, Of course. Come on, lets go shave my head. Whatever you need. He was very surprised I wasnt attached to it.
DRE: I didnt know that you came to direct the film in such a professional way, I figured you knew Sacha and he just asked you to do it.
LC: Well, I did know Sacha a little bit beforehand. We had met a couple of times previously and we expressed admiration for each others work or whatever. But Sacha is not the person who does favors. Hes very serious about the work and he wanted to marry the right person to the thing, especially since it fell apart the first time. He wanted to find somebody who would actually work. I dont know if he talked with anyone else or not. Once we talked, it seemed like it all fell together.
DRE: From what I had heard, [the first director of Borat] Todd Phillips kept getting scared when they were shooting and turning off the camera. I dont know if thats true or not.
LC: I dont know if thats true either. I was not there. I never really heard stories like that.
DRE: Did they know that you were a guy who would do anything for the joke or the idea and thats why you guys connected?
LC: They knew I had a fearlessness in my aesthetic. Once they met me, they saw I was somebody who was not going to be afraid to walk into the line of fire. That I was willing to lead the troops into battle. I think that combination of things was what Sacha was looking for.
DRE: When Sacha was Borat, were you always there with the cameraman or with the camera?
LC: Yes, always.
DRE: From what I could tell youre not an actor, so how did you play this guy leading around this Kazakhstani guy?
LC: Well actually I am a great actor. Part of being a great actor is being real and I was able to really convey the sincerity and genuineness of what we were doing to people and almost create a state for people where they were comfortable with the idea. Then once that was set up, anything could happen within that constructed reality. We constructed a reality where this man from Kazakhstan just got here and you cant make any assumptions about what he knows. Hes never been in a hotel, hes never been on an elevator. In the middle of it sometimes, people would come out of the trance a little bit and say, Is this real? Is this real? and I would say, Yes, its totally real. But what I wouldnt say that it wasnt necessarily the reality that they thought it was, but it is real. I had to be able to convey that with sincerity.
I never considered what we were doing as fooling anybody. What I felt we were doing was tapping into peoples ego and vanity. The only people who agreed to do the movie were people who felt that they belonged in a movie, deserved to be in a movie, they had something to contribute to a movie, that they would look good in a movie. You cant make people do anything they dont want to. If you go to see a hypnotist in a nightclub and he has people getting up and dancing like a chicken, afterwards if you talk to those people, theyll tell you, I never felt like I had to dance like a chicken. I wanted to dance like a chicken. Its a similar psychological effect as the movie. People are eager to please, to look good on camera, to come off well on camera, to cooperate and sometimes they had a superior attitude towards him. Sometimes they were very patient towards him but whatever they truly were would emerge on film eventually.
DRE: I got the DVD and watched the extras and one of the deleted scenes is Borat with the woman at the dog pound. I respect that woman so much because she said, I dont like you. Youre not going to eat my dogs. Goodbye.
LC: Right, she has her line in the sand. A lot of scenes in the movie come to that point. Even scenes that are in the movie, usually come to that point where some line is crossed and the police are called. But yeah that woman at the dog pound had that line in the sand. Some people have the line in the sand before you get through the whole scene, some people have the line in the sand before you do the scene, some people never have a line in the sand. The luck part of the movie is, whos going to wind up participating and whos not.
DRE: Does Borat draw the line in the sand or is it the people themselves that put the line there?
LC: We dont put any line in the sand at all. We want people to take it as far as humanly possible. If you dont want to come along for this ride, you are going to be forced, on camera, to draw your line in the sand. People under those conditions will pick that up. For instance, as the scene would unravel, we would be told by the person, Okay, I want you to stop and wed go, Its okay, we think its going great. Dont worry. Then ten minutes would go by and they would say, No, I really want you to stop or Im going to call the police. We would say No, come on, everythings fine. You dont have to call the police. No, thats it, I want to call the police. All right if you have to call the police. Im telling you, Im going to call the police. We would get an extra half hour of filming while that person was psychologically preparing themselves to call the police. Then when they would call the police, we would be on some dirt road in the middle of South Carolina where the police are an hour away. So even once they were unhappy and thinking about calling for help, usually I could still roll like a hour and a half of film before we had to confront the police. So the line in the sand is not something people are comfortable with. They dont want to have to draw that line in the sand. So they put it off and they put it off and in the meantime, youre still filming.
DRE: As you very well know, experienced film directors and TV producers have little tricks they have to get actors to do what they want. Sometimes their trick is just yelling at them. Since youve done so much work did those tricks come into play when you were trying to get people to react to Borat?
LC: I usually didnt need to do anything to get people to react to Borat. Sacha was able to do that part himself. What I did was prepare them to react to Borat and then if they over-reacted to Borat, to talk them off the ledge and get them back into the scene. If they got upset and wanted to pull off the microphone, thats when I would step in to calm them down, assure them everything was going well and that the interview is really great. So that was part of my job on the movie.
DRE: [Borat co-writer/producer] Dan Mazer had a show last year called Dog Bites Man, which also combined improv with a story. One of the actors on that show was Zach Galifianakis. I interviewed Zach and he said there were times when he just couldnt take it. He would start crying during scenes. What do you have to have in order to do what Sacha and you guys did?
LC: First of all, Sacha is a visionary. Hes trying to accomplish something in the bigger picture. Such as, in order for Communism to succeed or for Communism to fall, or for Democracy to succeed or fall, small people are going to be stepped on along the way unfortunately. Thats how history works. Sacha has a global vision of his work, which I share. So on that level, if you are in the way of our artistic pursuit, then you may be run over. But by the same token, I believe that no one was forced to do anything in the movie. Everything thats in the movie, people chose to do by their volition. If you film long enough, peoples true sentiments, their true personality, their true feelings, their true political stances, will eventually emerge. I used to showrun on sitcoms and in the first couple of meetings with the staff of writers I found that all of them wanted to come off a certain way within the meeting. This one wants to be the silent one, this one wants to be the funny one, this one wants to be the cool one. After a couple of weeks in a room together, your real personality will start to emerge, whatever that might be. The same thing happens in these scenes. People at first want to be polite or they want to be witty or they want to be erudite. But eventually whatever they really are comes out.
DRE: Borat works on at least two levels. On one level its a very intelligent comedy with all these overtones. On the other hand, it could be a dirtier version of a movie that Lorne Michaels might produce or something like that.
LC: Theres a great comic tradition of the very intellectual and yet vulgar comedy going back to [Franois] Rabelais, Lenny Bruce or Jonathan Swift. Thomas Pynchon is like that today. Theres tremendous humor on all different levels, puns, subtle humor, behavioral humor, character humor, conceptual humor, satire, broad satire, physical humor, political humor. All of those things can coexist and there is a comic tradition of it.
DRE: Its interesting because all those guys you mentioned were, in their time, loved by nearly everyone but now they are loved by a portion of the population that feels a bit elitist. But Borat seems to cross through all those lines. Is that because its a movie?
LC: Borat tapped into some type of zeitgeist of the moment and had this incredible populous success. Borat stands alone in the sense that its not really a studio movie in a traditional sense and its not really an independent movie in the traditional sense. It was a phenomenon that transcended itself. It wasnt just a movie anymore. People quote it. People do impressions of Borat. There are all these different levels permeating the consciousness of the culture through the movie. The movie is a very open-ended movie also. Theres the theatrical version, but theres also many, many possible versions of the movie also. So the whole definition of what is a movie is thrown into question by this. The fact that it had this popular success brings a lot more people into the tent. But I think that where intellectuals were initially very supportive of it, the more popular it got, the more the intellectual people started to back away from it and started all the backlash about the process and all that stuff. I think thats the nature of mass appeal.
Had it stayed a small movie and made $18 million, it probably would be lauded as the most important film of the decade. But because of this popularity, it was shunted into a different category. Thats very prejudicial but theres nothing I can do about that.
DRE: One of the stars of The 40 Year Old Virgin, Seth Rogen, gave me the best definition of improv I ever heard. He said, My friends say stuff thats funnier than anything Ive ever heard in a movie, so why dont we just put my friends in there?
LC: [laughs] But he has a lot of funny friends, of course. I dont know if that would be true if you went down to the gas station and just turned on the camera. But in our case, sometimes it was.
DRE: But what do you think of that definition?
LC: I think the key is the way Larry David has pioneered it and Sacha does this too, that is to create really funny concepts. Theres more writing involved in great improv than people give credit for. In both the case of Sacha and Larry David, there are tremendous amounts of writing and thinking and conceptualizing before the improv is done. So you have a great idea and a great arc and a great structure for that improv so all people have to do is be natural under those conditions and youll have great scene. So to me its not so much about the quip or the wisecrack or the funny joke, its about a funny situation and then having everybody act totally honestly in that situation. That will get gold every time.
DRE: On some messageboard Patton Oswalt wrote that there was a writers room on Borat.
LC: Not when I was there. I think during the initial phase of it, Patton and some of those people came in and tried to help out. Frankly, I dont know what contributions they made. The lines between the screenplay, the direction and the acting all got blurred. There are contributions from a lot of people, and of course, massive contributions from people who didnt even realize they were in the movie. So what is a screenplay under those conditions? But people did make contributions to it that I wasnt aware of until later on when they all wanted to grab credit for the screenplay.
DRE: Well for example, the scene where Borat goes for a driving lesson, you Sacha and everyone else knows that Borat is going to be driving. So did people come up with things for Borat to say beforehand?
LC: Yes, there was some stuff. You might start the day with a document that has a version of the scene but hes just getting that the morning that were about to shoot. So its not like he could memorize that. Also the other person has to cooperate on some level and thats going to take the scene to a whole other place, so you have to be open for that. But what you do have is a starting point and a structure. We knew that Borat would ask a few of these funny questions and get some funny answers, but we had to have this person fire him or give him the dog or whatever it was in order to move the story forward. The idea was that you would start with a structure and something to accomplish in that scene and you had to accomplish that thing in the scene before you could move on to the next scene. If we didnt accomplish it, we had to go someplace else and do it again.
DRE: There was an article in The New York Times a couple months ago about Sarah Silverman. One of the things the article said was that since Sarah is white and liberal and much of her audience is white and liberal, she is just preaching to the choir and that she does safe humor in the veil of dangerous humor. Did that idea ever cross anyones minds when making Borat?
LC: Well when people write articles, they will take stances and theyre going to find angles and hooks to write articles about. I dont agree with that about Sarah at all. I think Sarah is one of the most courageous comedians and voices and Ive worked with her a lot. She, like Sacha and Larry, has a very unique and original voice. I dont think shes trying to preach to the choir, I think she may be limited in the only thing she could reach because she couldnt get a show on before. Im happy to see that her one-woman show was made into a movie. Im happy to see shes got a TV series, which is very distinctive and original. So I dont agree with that assessment to begin with. As far as preaching to the choir, for myself or the people I work with, and I would include Sarah in this, I think its a much more instinctive process than it is given credit for. Theres not as much calculation and contrivance in thinking about what effect this will have, were just following our instincts because theres no right or wrong. So you hope you make more good decisions than bad and hope that the X factor works in your favor. The X factor is the part that people dont want to admit about this because of the egos involved. You always hope you are lucky. With Borat we tried really hard to make a good movie, we were committed to making a good movie, but everybody who goes out to make a movie, tries to make a great movie. In this case, for some reason, every decision that we made happened to work out. Its like you hit that first domino and all the dominoes fell the right way. If one domino falls the wrong way, you know everything can get fucked up. People dont like the movie, they dont like the ending, they dont come to the theater, it doesnt get released in enough theaters, whatever it is, there are a million decisions that have to go right for a movie to have success like Borat. In this case it did. I cant take credit for that. I accept that there is an X factor that I have no control over.
DRE: You had a great quote when you talked about directing Masked and Anonymous. You said that your main direction to Bob Dylan was Just be. That seems to be a line that has been working for you for a very long time.
LC: Its just like being in a relationship. Your relationship is doomed if you want the other person to change. The key to the relationship is accepting what the other person is. With Larry David and Sacha and Bob Dylan, I want them. Im accepting them for who they are and I want the best version of them now to come out now on film. Thats my goal as a director with good actors like that. Im not asking them to abandon who they are. Im asking them to deepen and expand who they are.
DRE: How did you come to that idea?
LC: There are a lot of factors that led to that. Im allergic to a certain level of contrivance. Im looking for something thats honest and that strips away a lot of things. Im also a big fan of [John] Cassavetes and [Robert] Altman and [Roberto] Rossellini and [Pier Paolo] Pasolini. I like that sense of documentary reality that you get in a lot of those movies. I think you get a deeper, more dimensional portrait when you work with an actor that way, rather than try to push them into a hole that they dont feel comfortable in.
DRE: Ive talked to a lot of great comedy people over the years and I find when I ask them the question Does anything offend you? They tell me what offends and it usually has to do with something personal to them like It is because my kid has a disease so I dont like jokes about kids or My grandparents are dead or old or something. So if something affects you personally, can you still make jokes about it?
LC: Yes, I can because I can be offended and hurt by many different things. But I feel that there is an angle to approach any subject to make it funny. I think that both Larry David and Sacha have made their careers doing that. They can take any subject and find the angle or the hook to make it funny for anybody, to make it palpable on some level, whether its masturbation or the Holocaust. Theres a way to laugh at it without exploiting it in some way. So I can be offended by it but still feel that the idea is more important than my feelings. On Borat and even on Curb to some degree, I will examine everyday both philosophically and metaphysically how far I am willing to go, what my line in the sand is, how I feel about it, how I can proceed and do the best job I can under those conditions. I spend a lot of time examining my behavior and examining what Im doing, so I can justify for myself what Im doing and feel okay about it. To feel like theres some greater good that Im working on. Whether its offending another person or offending myself, if I feel theres some greater good, then I can push forward with it.
DRE: You worked on Seinfeld for many years and the famous tagline it has was a show about nothing, which was never true. It is a show about everything. But Borat seemed to combine the idea of a show about everything with real world stuff. Do you see Borat as a culmination of the work youve been doing over the years?
LC: I guess I feel all the stuff Ive done over these past few years is connected. I see connections in terms of subject matter, themes and work process even. Thats another very important point of this; I work to create an environment in which everyone is invested in the end product. Were on this journey together and I cant offer you money but I can offer this life-changing experience if you hop on the ship and take a ride with us. Like the Merry Pranksters, were going to go around the country, make trouble and film it. So that part of it is very connected to me and Im always looking for that type of experience.
Special thanks must be given to Beth Lapides and UnCabaret for their help with this interview.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Check out the official site for Borat
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?
Larry Charles: I was supposed to edit today, actually. I took on a Kanye West pilot for HBO and I was supposed to edit today but the editors not ready for me so I put that off. So Im writing a treatment for a new movie that I was going to work on today and Im supposed to review some footage for this Bill Maher documentary [called A Spiritual Journey] that I shot.
DRE: You are a busy man.
LC: I am very busy.
DRE: How is the Kanye West pilot?
LC: I think its going to be really great. Its going to really surprise people. They have this very limited view of what the show will be. They think its going to be like a reality show so theyre really underestimating what we did. When they see it, theyll be really shocked.
DRE: People think it is going to be Kanye ranking on George W. Bush the whole show.
LC: Right, ranking on George Bush or acting like Flava Flav or whatever clich that they have of every other young black man on TV. Its going to be hopefully dissected, deconstructed and reconstructed into something that theyve never saw before.
DRE: Is it plot driven?
LC: Its hard to describe. Let me put it to you this way, when I made the Bob Dylan movie [Masked and Anonymous], I wanted to make a Bob Dylan movie that was like a Bob Dylan song. One with a lot of layers, that had a lot of poetry, that had a lot of surrealism and was ambiguous and hard to figure out, like a puzzle. So I wanted to make a show that was like Kanyes music. Theres seriousness and humor at the same time. Its very dark. Its very language-oriented. It draws on a lot of different musical influences.
DRE: Is it a heightened Kanye, like Larry David on Curb [Your Enthusiasm]?
LC: Yes, people have a very limited image of who Kanye is and this will shatter, or at least expand that image and play with that image and mock that image all at the same time.
DRE: It must be a lot of fun.
LC: Its been a lot of fun. We did it on a very small budget very quickly but I also wanted that urgency to it. I had a good game plan and I think we accomplished our goal.
DRE: As for Borat, I read that they originally started with another director, so how did you get involved?
LC: They shot about two weeks with another director and it was a mess. Everyone was very unhappy so they shut the movie down. Now usually when they do that, its pretty much the end of the movie, they write it off as an insurance thing or something. But for some reason, the people at Fox had a feeling that this could still be something. So they went out in search of somebody and my name had come up initially and then my name came up again. I sat down with Sacha [Baron Cohen] and the writers and we talked about what I would do differently and how I would change things and what I could bring to it and when I agreed to cut my hair, they said okay [laughs].
DRE: [laughs] Its hard to fool people with you looking the way you normally do.
LC: Thats right. I couldnt pass as a normal person. I look like some type of Gandalf reject or something. So I cut my hair and put on a blazer and khakis and looked like a community college professor or something.
DRE: Thats really funny.
LC: That was the thing they were most afraid to ask me actually. Creatively we were totally in sync and then Sacha finally said, Can I ask you one more thing? and I said, Sure, whatever and he said, Would you ever possibly consider cutting your hair? I said, Of course. Come on, lets go shave my head. Whatever you need. He was very surprised I wasnt attached to it.
DRE: I didnt know that you came to direct the film in such a professional way, I figured you knew Sacha and he just asked you to do it.
LC: Well, I did know Sacha a little bit beforehand. We had met a couple of times previously and we expressed admiration for each others work or whatever. But Sacha is not the person who does favors. Hes very serious about the work and he wanted to marry the right person to the thing, especially since it fell apart the first time. He wanted to find somebody who would actually work. I dont know if he talked with anyone else or not. Once we talked, it seemed like it all fell together.
DRE: From what I had heard, [the first director of Borat] Todd Phillips kept getting scared when they were shooting and turning off the camera. I dont know if thats true or not.
LC: I dont know if thats true either. I was not there. I never really heard stories like that.
DRE: Did they know that you were a guy who would do anything for the joke or the idea and thats why you guys connected?
LC: They knew I had a fearlessness in my aesthetic. Once they met me, they saw I was somebody who was not going to be afraid to walk into the line of fire. That I was willing to lead the troops into battle. I think that combination of things was what Sacha was looking for.
DRE: When Sacha was Borat, were you always there with the cameraman or with the camera?
LC: Yes, always.
DRE: From what I could tell youre not an actor, so how did you play this guy leading around this Kazakhstani guy?
LC: Well actually I am a great actor. Part of being a great actor is being real and I was able to really convey the sincerity and genuineness of what we were doing to people and almost create a state for people where they were comfortable with the idea. Then once that was set up, anything could happen within that constructed reality. We constructed a reality where this man from Kazakhstan just got here and you cant make any assumptions about what he knows. Hes never been in a hotel, hes never been on an elevator. In the middle of it sometimes, people would come out of the trance a little bit and say, Is this real? Is this real? and I would say, Yes, its totally real. But what I wouldnt say that it wasnt necessarily the reality that they thought it was, but it is real. I had to be able to convey that with sincerity.
I never considered what we were doing as fooling anybody. What I felt we were doing was tapping into peoples ego and vanity. The only people who agreed to do the movie were people who felt that they belonged in a movie, deserved to be in a movie, they had something to contribute to a movie, that they would look good in a movie. You cant make people do anything they dont want to. If you go to see a hypnotist in a nightclub and he has people getting up and dancing like a chicken, afterwards if you talk to those people, theyll tell you, I never felt like I had to dance like a chicken. I wanted to dance like a chicken. Its a similar psychological effect as the movie. People are eager to please, to look good on camera, to come off well on camera, to cooperate and sometimes they had a superior attitude towards him. Sometimes they were very patient towards him but whatever they truly were would emerge on film eventually.
DRE: I got the DVD and watched the extras and one of the deleted scenes is Borat with the woman at the dog pound. I respect that woman so much because she said, I dont like you. Youre not going to eat my dogs. Goodbye.
LC: Right, she has her line in the sand. A lot of scenes in the movie come to that point. Even scenes that are in the movie, usually come to that point where some line is crossed and the police are called. But yeah that woman at the dog pound had that line in the sand. Some people have the line in the sand before you get through the whole scene, some people have the line in the sand before you do the scene, some people never have a line in the sand. The luck part of the movie is, whos going to wind up participating and whos not.
DRE: Does Borat draw the line in the sand or is it the people themselves that put the line there?
LC: We dont put any line in the sand at all. We want people to take it as far as humanly possible. If you dont want to come along for this ride, you are going to be forced, on camera, to draw your line in the sand. People under those conditions will pick that up. For instance, as the scene would unravel, we would be told by the person, Okay, I want you to stop and wed go, Its okay, we think its going great. Dont worry. Then ten minutes would go by and they would say, No, I really want you to stop or Im going to call the police. We would say No, come on, everythings fine. You dont have to call the police. No, thats it, I want to call the police. All right if you have to call the police. Im telling you, Im going to call the police. We would get an extra half hour of filming while that person was psychologically preparing themselves to call the police. Then when they would call the police, we would be on some dirt road in the middle of South Carolina where the police are an hour away. So even once they were unhappy and thinking about calling for help, usually I could still roll like a hour and a half of film before we had to confront the police. So the line in the sand is not something people are comfortable with. They dont want to have to draw that line in the sand. So they put it off and they put it off and in the meantime, youre still filming.
DRE: As you very well know, experienced film directors and TV producers have little tricks they have to get actors to do what they want. Sometimes their trick is just yelling at them. Since youve done so much work did those tricks come into play when you were trying to get people to react to Borat?
LC: I usually didnt need to do anything to get people to react to Borat. Sacha was able to do that part himself. What I did was prepare them to react to Borat and then if they over-reacted to Borat, to talk them off the ledge and get them back into the scene. If they got upset and wanted to pull off the microphone, thats when I would step in to calm them down, assure them everything was going well and that the interview is really great. So that was part of my job on the movie.
DRE: [Borat co-writer/producer] Dan Mazer had a show last year called Dog Bites Man, which also combined improv with a story. One of the actors on that show was Zach Galifianakis. I interviewed Zach and he said there were times when he just couldnt take it. He would start crying during scenes. What do you have to have in order to do what Sacha and you guys did?
LC: First of all, Sacha is a visionary. Hes trying to accomplish something in the bigger picture. Such as, in order for Communism to succeed or for Communism to fall, or for Democracy to succeed or fall, small people are going to be stepped on along the way unfortunately. Thats how history works. Sacha has a global vision of his work, which I share. So on that level, if you are in the way of our artistic pursuit, then you may be run over. But by the same token, I believe that no one was forced to do anything in the movie. Everything thats in the movie, people chose to do by their volition. If you film long enough, peoples true sentiments, their true personality, their true feelings, their true political stances, will eventually emerge. I used to showrun on sitcoms and in the first couple of meetings with the staff of writers I found that all of them wanted to come off a certain way within the meeting. This one wants to be the silent one, this one wants to be the funny one, this one wants to be the cool one. After a couple of weeks in a room together, your real personality will start to emerge, whatever that might be. The same thing happens in these scenes. People at first want to be polite or they want to be witty or they want to be erudite. But eventually whatever they really are comes out.
DRE: Borat works on at least two levels. On one level its a very intelligent comedy with all these overtones. On the other hand, it could be a dirtier version of a movie that Lorne Michaels might produce or something like that.
LC: Theres a great comic tradition of the very intellectual and yet vulgar comedy going back to [Franois] Rabelais, Lenny Bruce or Jonathan Swift. Thomas Pynchon is like that today. Theres tremendous humor on all different levels, puns, subtle humor, behavioral humor, character humor, conceptual humor, satire, broad satire, physical humor, political humor. All of those things can coexist and there is a comic tradition of it.
DRE: Its interesting because all those guys you mentioned were, in their time, loved by nearly everyone but now they are loved by a portion of the population that feels a bit elitist. But Borat seems to cross through all those lines. Is that because its a movie?
LC: Borat tapped into some type of zeitgeist of the moment and had this incredible populous success. Borat stands alone in the sense that its not really a studio movie in a traditional sense and its not really an independent movie in the traditional sense. It was a phenomenon that transcended itself. It wasnt just a movie anymore. People quote it. People do impressions of Borat. There are all these different levels permeating the consciousness of the culture through the movie. The movie is a very open-ended movie also. Theres the theatrical version, but theres also many, many possible versions of the movie also. So the whole definition of what is a movie is thrown into question by this. The fact that it had this popular success brings a lot more people into the tent. But I think that where intellectuals were initially very supportive of it, the more popular it got, the more the intellectual people started to back away from it and started all the backlash about the process and all that stuff. I think thats the nature of mass appeal.
Had it stayed a small movie and made $18 million, it probably would be lauded as the most important film of the decade. But because of this popularity, it was shunted into a different category. Thats very prejudicial but theres nothing I can do about that.
DRE: One of the stars of The 40 Year Old Virgin, Seth Rogen, gave me the best definition of improv I ever heard. He said, My friends say stuff thats funnier than anything Ive ever heard in a movie, so why dont we just put my friends in there?
LC: [laughs] But he has a lot of funny friends, of course. I dont know if that would be true if you went down to the gas station and just turned on the camera. But in our case, sometimes it was.
DRE: But what do you think of that definition?
LC: I think the key is the way Larry David has pioneered it and Sacha does this too, that is to create really funny concepts. Theres more writing involved in great improv than people give credit for. In both the case of Sacha and Larry David, there are tremendous amounts of writing and thinking and conceptualizing before the improv is done. So you have a great idea and a great arc and a great structure for that improv so all people have to do is be natural under those conditions and youll have great scene. So to me its not so much about the quip or the wisecrack or the funny joke, its about a funny situation and then having everybody act totally honestly in that situation. That will get gold every time.
DRE: On some messageboard Patton Oswalt wrote that there was a writers room on Borat.
LC: Not when I was there. I think during the initial phase of it, Patton and some of those people came in and tried to help out. Frankly, I dont know what contributions they made. The lines between the screenplay, the direction and the acting all got blurred. There are contributions from a lot of people, and of course, massive contributions from people who didnt even realize they were in the movie. So what is a screenplay under those conditions? But people did make contributions to it that I wasnt aware of until later on when they all wanted to grab credit for the screenplay.
DRE: Well for example, the scene where Borat goes for a driving lesson, you Sacha and everyone else knows that Borat is going to be driving. So did people come up with things for Borat to say beforehand?
LC: Yes, there was some stuff. You might start the day with a document that has a version of the scene but hes just getting that the morning that were about to shoot. So its not like he could memorize that. Also the other person has to cooperate on some level and thats going to take the scene to a whole other place, so you have to be open for that. But what you do have is a starting point and a structure. We knew that Borat would ask a few of these funny questions and get some funny answers, but we had to have this person fire him or give him the dog or whatever it was in order to move the story forward. The idea was that you would start with a structure and something to accomplish in that scene and you had to accomplish that thing in the scene before you could move on to the next scene. If we didnt accomplish it, we had to go someplace else and do it again.
DRE: There was an article in The New York Times a couple months ago about Sarah Silverman. One of the things the article said was that since Sarah is white and liberal and much of her audience is white and liberal, she is just preaching to the choir and that she does safe humor in the veil of dangerous humor. Did that idea ever cross anyones minds when making Borat?
LC: Well when people write articles, they will take stances and theyre going to find angles and hooks to write articles about. I dont agree with that about Sarah at all. I think Sarah is one of the most courageous comedians and voices and Ive worked with her a lot. She, like Sacha and Larry, has a very unique and original voice. I dont think shes trying to preach to the choir, I think she may be limited in the only thing she could reach because she couldnt get a show on before. Im happy to see that her one-woman show was made into a movie. Im happy to see shes got a TV series, which is very distinctive and original. So I dont agree with that assessment to begin with. As far as preaching to the choir, for myself or the people I work with, and I would include Sarah in this, I think its a much more instinctive process than it is given credit for. Theres not as much calculation and contrivance in thinking about what effect this will have, were just following our instincts because theres no right or wrong. So you hope you make more good decisions than bad and hope that the X factor works in your favor. The X factor is the part that people dont want to admit about this because of the egos involved. You always hope you are lucky. With Borat we tried really hard to make a good movie, we were committed to making a good movie, but everybody who goes out to make a movie, tries to make a great movie. In this case, for some reason, every decision that we made happened to work out. Its like you hit that first domino and all the dominoes fell the right way. If one domino falls the wrong way, you know everything can get fucked up. People dont like the movie, they dont like the ending, they dont come to the theater, it doesnt get released in enough theaters, whatever it is, there are a million decisions that have to go right for a movie to have success like Borat. In this case it did. I cant take credit for that. I accept that there is an X factor that I have no control over.
DRE: You had a great quote when you talked about directing Masked and Anonymous. You said that your main direction to Bob Dylan was Just be. That seems to be a line that has been working for you for a very long time.
LC: Its just like being in a relationship. Your relationship is doomed if you want the other person to change. The key to the relationship is accepting what the other person is. With Larry David and Sacha and Bob Dylan, I want them. Im accepting them for who they are and I want the best version of them now to come out now on film. Thats my goal as a director with good actors like that. Im not asking them to abandon who they are. Im asking them to deepen and expand who they are.
DRE: How did you come to that idea?
LC: There are a lot of factors that led to that. Im allergic to a certain level of contrivance. Im looking for something thats honest and that strips away a lot of things. Im also a big fan of [John] Cassavetes and [Robert] Altman and [Roberto] Rossellini and [Pier Paolo] Pasolini. I like that sense of documentary reality that you get in a lot of those movies. I think you get a deeper, more dimensional portrait when you work with an actor that way, rather than try to push them into a hole that they dont feel comfortable in.
DRE: Ive talked to a lot of great comedy people over the years and I find when I ask them the question Does anything offend you? They tell me what offends and it usually has to do with something personal to them like It is because my kid has a disease so I dont like jokes about kids or My grandparents are dead or old or something. So if something affects you personally, can you still make jokes about it?
LC: Yes, I can because I can be offended and hurt by many different things. But I feel that there is an angle to approach any subject to make it funny. I think that both Larry David and Sacha have made their careers doing that. They can take any subject and find the angle or the hook to make it funny for anybody, to make it palpable on some level, whether its masturbation or the Holocaust. Theres a way to laugh at it without exploiting it in some way. So I can be offended by it but still feel that the idea is more important than my feelings. On Borat and even on Curb to some degree, I will examine everyday both philosophically and metaphysically how far I am willing to go, what my line in the sand is, how I feel about it, how I can proceed and do the best job I can under those conditions. I spend a lot of time examining my behavior and examining what Im doing, so I can justify for myself what Im doing and feel okay about it. To feel like theres some greater good that Im working on. Whether its offending another person or offending myself, if I feel theres some greater good, then I can push forward with it.
DRE: You worked on Seinfeld for many years and the famous tagline it has was a show about nothing, which was never true. It is a show about everything. But Borat seemed to combine the idea of a show about everything with real world stuff. Do you see Borat as a culmination of the work youve been doing over the years?
LC: I guess I feel all the stuff Ive done over these past few years is connected. I see connections in terms of subject matter, themes and work process even. Thats another very important point of this; I work to create an environment in which everyone is invested in the end product. Were on this journey together and I cant offer you money but I can offer this life-changing experience if you hop on the ship and take a ride with us. Like the Merry Pranksters, were going to go around the country, make trouble and film it. So that part of it is very connected to me and Im always looking for that type of experience.
Special thanks must be given to Beth Lapides and UnCabaret for their help with this interview.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 5 of 5 COMMENTS
And the recognition of how Merry Prankster-like his work m.o. is was good of him to share. It revealed that - happily - there are a few old-school, hippie-ish creatives who not only made it out of the 60/s / 70's intact, but who also continue to thrive and stay engaged with the process and who contribute to the common pop-cultural vernacular.
Word.