About Henry
The director goes behind the scenes on his self-reflexive oeuvre.

By Susan Gerhard

Festival in Cannes

'INDEPENDENT filmmakers don't get any more steadfastly independent, and oddly incorrigible than Henry Jaglom. Barbara Shulgasser, when she was writing for Hearst's San Francisco Examiner, coined the term "male lesbian" in describing the director who would go on to create films titled Eating, Babyfever, and the upcoming Shopping, but Henry Jaglom now corrects that label: he's a lipstick male-lesbian. Though his outfit choices are understated, a lot of love apparently goes into their selection. Jaglom's actor-intensive films, which ranged from experimental to extremely confessional in his early days have developed into quirky narratives with as much story line as sociological probing in his later works. The films typically focus is the inner lives of women – their romances, obsessions, and neuroses, which, apparently, reflect his own.

His ambivalence toward visual aesthetics and concentration on the performances of his ensemble casts, always filled with mysterious celebrity picks and the odd cameo, don't seem to put him on the Lincoln Center's "must have" list. In fact, Film Comment waxed caustic on the topic of Jaglom in its most recent issue. His "perpetual need" to make movies "and the fact that he still manages to do so is a lesson to us all."

So it is. If Jaglom's gathered a collection of enemies, just as passionate are his numerous fans – a peculiar list that includes Anaïs Nin, Orson Welles, and Jack Nicholson. An outgrowth of the studio system – he worked as an editor on Easy Rider before making his own directorial debut – Jaglom soon learned he wanted to make movies his own way, which meant financing them his own way, at times even through elaborate schemes concocted by his friends, if necessary. Yet his films repeatedly find their audiences and sit those audiences down on the therapists' couch.

I interviewed Jaglom, now a lipstick lesbian father of two, over the phone from his office in Santa Monica. He was speaking about his new film, Festival in Cannes, which stars a impressively plump Greta Scacchi trying to make a movie with the iconic Anouk Aimée, along with an interfering producer played by Zack Norman, not too many shades removed from himself. Part critique of Hollywood's handling of older women, it's also part fable of the filmmaking process, and Jaglom's guerrilla style has never been more well-suited to a scene. Norman has helped Jaglom finance some of his films with those elaborate schemes – in one case a tax shelter deal that fell through for investors seven years down the road – and Jaglom says he plays himself. "I just say 'plus 20 percent.' Zack is Zack." Jaglom spoke to me about truth, fiction, and filmmaking against the insane backdrop of Cannes, which apparently brings out the fantasy executive producer in everyone.

Bay Guardian: I've always been curious about how you finance your films, particularly because, in this case, this film was about financing films.

Henry Jaglom: Well this film was easy, because my last film was very successful commercially for an art film, Déjà Vu. It did very well and my producer of that film said, "We just did very well. What do you want to do next?" So it was fairly easy.

BG: Have you ever had financing experience similar to what you show in Festival in Cannes?

HJ: Oh, from the whole first half of my career! As a matter of fact, the guy who plays Caz – Zack Norman – put together the financing on my second film when nobody would come near me. It took five years to put together the financing. I went to Cannes, I met people. I tried to hustle them into financing me. Greta is me, she really is playing me in the movie.

BG: Did you get involved with any shadier schemes?

HJ: I let the people doing the financing come up with the shadier schemes. The guy who played Caz, Zack Norman, he put together my second film with tax shelter deal that existed at that time, where people got eight and nine to one write-offs which of course the government later on didn't even recognize. And he got dentists and doctors and lawyers around the country to put their thousands and tens of thousands of dollars into it. I don't know what he was talking about but he put together the three-quarters of a million dollars that I needed for that film.

BG: Then what happened when the government didn't recognize the tax shelter?

HJ: After seven or eight years the government retroactively said it was not acceptable. So these people had to come up with a lot of money. A few of them were chasing Zack, actually.

BG: I was looking at a few of your older films, Babyfever, for instance, and he plays the same "hairy huckster" role.

HJ: He is a similar character. The reason this whole character exists is because when I first went to Cannes in 1974, I went with him. Because we had just formed a company to release a film a documentary film called Hearts and Minds about the Vietnam War that won the Academy Award that year for Best Documentary. It's a boring and complicated story – but I got Zack to raise a million dollars for that and we went to Cannes with that film. It took him two years to raise it, we got it, we got the film out, and we went to Cannes for that reason. And I saw that this guy who seemed to me fairly normal at home, as soon as we got off the plane in Cannes, starting talking deals to people and having conversations about hundreds of tens of millions of dollars that he had that I knew he didn't have and about movie financing that I knew didn't exist. And it was shocking. The only thing more shocking was that the people he was talking to – many of whom I knew from Hollywood didn't have a bathroom basically – were themselves were themselves, suddenly putting themselves forth, living in great suites, ordering champagne and caviar, acting as if they had huge deals as actors as producers and directors. They all kept making themselves up, so I thought this was a great. And the juxtaposition of that and this beautiful spot in the world was just kind of a great film setting to set a movie in, I've always wanted to do it ever since.

When I went back to Hollywood in 1975, I met Gene Kelly, who was one of the stars of my childhood, my idol, you know. And I told him about wanting to do a film at Cannes, and he said, "Let's work on it together." And for three months, Gene Kelly and I, to my amazement, were working on this film, to star him, set at the Cannes film festival. And just one week before we were to leave – we had the whole deal set, MGM was financing it – he called and said, "I think I'm chickening out." And I said, "Why?" He said, "I'm scared of working your way. If I were young, it would be different," but with not real makeup, with little crews, and creating and improvising a lot of stuff on the spot, he said "I'm just terrified. So I went to Cannes very depressed, without him, without my movie that I was going to make, but I saw it for a second time, because my film Tracks had been invited to be in the festival. I've thought about it for 22 years I guess.

Then in 1997, I was at the 50th anniversary party of Cannes, which was at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences here in Los Angeles. I was there at the celebration, I was there with Candice Bergen, she's my friend. And I said, look who's over there in the corner, there. It's Anouk Aimée. I've been in love with her since A Man and a Woman. And I went over to Anouk Aimée, and instead of saying, "Hi, I love you in the movies, I'm a big fan of yours," I heard myself open my mouth and say, "I've been looking all over for you." And she said, "You have? Why?" and I said, "Because I have a movie for you," which I didn't. And I don't know where that came from. I became Caz. I became one of those guys at Cannes. I heard myself making this up in her presence. She said, "What's the movie?" I said, "It's a movie about a woman who shouldn't know what the movie is about," and I started faking this whole reason why I couldn't tell her. I said, "It's very important for the film I have in mind that the actress who plays the part doesn't know too much about what it's about – " some nonsense like that. She said, "Well, I like your films, I'd be interested ..." I said, "Are you going back to Paris?" She said, "Yes." I said, "OK, in five months I'll call you." And I wracked my brains, thinking, "I just promised Anouk Aimée a film, I don't have a film for her." Then I remembered this film with Gene Kelly in Cannes and I thought this would be perfect – and in fact I thought it would be better, because it would enable me to explore this issue which I've been very focused on in my past 10 to 15 years in film, which is how women are dealt with as they get older in this society and how they're discarded and how they're treated and so on. I thought this was the perfect way to use it, which I hadn't originally intended to. So that's the genesis of the whole thing.

We become hustlers is the point. I wasn't expecting to say this to her, I don't know how I did it.

BG: How did Greta Scacchi come on board with this?

HJ: Greta Scacchi had a baby nine months earlier and didn't want to work because she was four sizes larger than she usually was, and I saw her, and I said, on the contrary, you're gorgeous. This is womanly gorgeous, rather than the thing they usually use you for, which is a little bit artificial and very glamorous, coifed, costumed. I want this real womanly part. That excited me and I persuaded her to do the part. I love her in the movie. Nobody was going to use her; she was herself thinking she couldn't play a part until she lost forty pounds. I said on the contrary, I don't want that fake stuff. This is about how women are treated. I want a real woman who looks like a real woman and has the beauty that she has – a womanly beauty, not some painted beauty. I thought it was important for the whole point of the film.

BG: Over the years, you've had so many friendships with these incredible high-profile actors, and even directors, i.e., Orson Welles. Is the only thing that's unusual about this that you build friendships out of your artistic collaborations? How unusual is that?

HJ: It is unusual. I'm an odd duck in this town. I'm friendly with everybody. I'm part of the town. I've been here for 30 years now. I came of age with people who became the biggest stars, the biggest directors, studio heads. But I never wanted that for myself. I wanted to make these independent films. Jack Nicholson got me the part in my first movie. These are the people who are my friends. Then I started making these movies that actors really liked. Actors all want to get back to why they originally wanted to be actors. Many of them get caught up by the time they get famous, by economic considerations, by agents telling them what to do. So I give them all chance – which is exciting for them to really act again. They get a chance to fly, take chances, be creative. I very much share with actors the process of creating their characters. I would never say, "This is the line." I very much want them to dig into themselves. I think that my job is to cast really well and then encourage actors to use themselves to create the character with me. And actors love doing that, so I've got a whole list of wonderful, famous, and very important actors and actresses who I could never afford – they cost five times what my movie cost – but they work for me for nothing.

Jack Nicholson, when he worked for me on my first movie, he had already done Carnal Knowledge and received a million dollars. My whole budget on my first movie was a million dollars so I said "I can't afford you," even though we've always planned for you to act in my first movie. He said, "I need a new color television set; I'll do it for a color TV." Actors want to act, and frequently what's happened to them in Hollywood is that they've become big, but the thing that's gotten lost in the process is the excitement of creativity. I think what they feel with people like me, with people like Woody Allen, with people like Bob Altman, they feel the chance to do that again and they're willing to take huge cuts in their normal salaries in order to do that.

BG: Also, you have that mix of nonprofessional actors and pros. Is that the mix of your personal life as well?

HJ: Well sure, the people in my films are usually my friends, and there's a lot of lawyers and doctors and business people and writers and housewives and all different kinds of people it. I think you have to center it on an actor's performance, but I like to revolve around that a certain kind of reality that I think you can get much more excitingly from real people.

BG: Did your first wife, the one featured in Always, about your divorce, go on to have any other acting career?

HJ: No she didn't want to, that was part of the reason we had trouble. She didn't like the life. She's a yoga teacher outside of Boston. She didn't want to live in this big swirling high-profile high-energy way. And she's wonderful. She had a great response to the film. She could have had a big career and she decided she didn't want that.

We costarred in it in the house we were living in together. It was the most painful thing I've ever done. I look back at it and I'm amazed at something so bizarre.

The breakup had happened but we hadn't actually gotten the divorce. I think in the back of my mind, I was hoping to win her back by making the movie and reminding her how wonderful I was. But it didn't work out that way.

BG: Do you feel like your new wife, Victoria Foyt, has taken your work in any different directions?

HJ: Oh, yeah. She's more oriented toward story – I've always been more interested in character, I haven't cared that much about story. Two things with Victoria changed it: One, she's an actor – and as an actor likes to know exactly where a character is – but she's required it, and she's cowritten the movies with me, so she's given them much clearer story arcs, starting with Babyfever. And people have sensed that with Babyfever – "Oh, his films are getting much more narrative." I'd never cared about narrative. The other thing is that I now have two children and Victoria and I read to them every night, and what we've discovered – it's not a surprise to Victoria, but it's still a little bit of a surprise to me – is how much kids like stories. They'll hear the same story over and over and over again. It brought me back to my childhood. I thought that Hollywood had been so much about story, and so much artificially based upon narratives that don't really happen in real life that it estranged us to the movies. So when I started making movies, I was rather determined to try to break new ground, and make movies in the European mold, like Fellini and Godard and Ingmar Bergman whose films had influenced me a great deal. I wanted to tell films from the point of view of a character rather than of a narrative story. Victoria really pushed me – while leaving me free to do my own improvisational work – to have a much more thorough skeleton, a much more worked out scene-by-scene breakdown of what's going to happen. When I shot New Year's Day for instance, I wrote it all on a shirt cardboard; it was the least-scripted.

BG: By the time you got around to Festival in Cannes ...

HJ: It was the most scripted. It was a 90-page breakdown, scene by scene. But still, I say to the actors, "Look, that's just my idea of what should happen. I need that to happen, but you don't need to use my words. As much as you want, you can reflect in your own words." And the movie is maybe half my own words and half theirs, but in a scene, they have to accomplish what's supposed to happen in that scene.

BG: You'd said you'd added some subplots on the set, which were those?

HJ: Well, the young girl becoming a star – I saw that happen over and over again – the young boy deciding to become a manager and break loose suddenly by taking advantage of a young girl. All these things I saw happen year after year at the Cannes Film Festival. People falling in love, but not really being sure if they're falling in love or just trying to use each other.

BG: How many times have you been to Cannes?

HJ: Seven or eight times, each time with a film. When they come out in the spring, I go to Cannes. When they come out in the fall, I go to Toronto. Cannes is a zoo, at Toronto, they care more about the quality of the films. Cannes's a marketplace. It's just insane, it's just unbelievable. And yet I wouldn't have a career without it. I got money from foreign countries. Talk about financing. Long before I could find anybody to finance my films, I would go to Cannes with my little films that I'd made, show them in the marketplace and tell them what my next film was that I wanted to make and get 50K from England, and 75K from Germany and 35K from Spain and put together a few hundred thousand together to make a movie. That's what I did for four films until I started really becoming very famous in Europe and then people started coming to me and offering me deals.

BG: Are your films bigger in Europe than they are here?

HJ: Here they aim at about 5 to 10 percent of the audience it seems, audience that wants to see grown up films about human relationships. Audiences here are more into action adventure or films that are sort of distractions. In Europe, they see film as an art form and they're less scared to say that. So I've got a much bigger audience percentage-wise in Europe though it's growing – I must say it's been growing with each film. Eating was a big leap and Déjà vu was a big leap.

BG: When you got to Cannes, did you just set yourself up at various parties?

HJ: Everyone in Cannes is doing documentaries or doing interviews with people. So I just said we were doing a documentary. Nobody bothers you. I knew that I knew my friend was going to be at a party for Austin Powers – and I said I want to shoot there. It was the party with Faye Dunaway. I said, by the way, "I need someone to play a studio head." He said, "I can do that." And then at the party, I ran into Faye Dunaway. and said I need you to playa movie star. She said "I can do that." The Bill Shatner thing was completely accidental it was a wonderful star accident.

BG: Which party was that at?

HJ: Party at the Beach – another studio party – for Gods and Monsters. I had a camera and a long lens on a pier, so that nobody at the party would know I was shooting them. The only people who knew were Max Schell and the Italian actress who plays with him. And they had mics on them. I was going to have them go through the party and talk a certain way, but in the middle of shooting the scene, somebody runs up to Max hugs and kisses him, they start hugging and kissing the photographer – and I start photographing them and I realize, "Oh my god, it's Bill Shatner." This is better than anything I could have written in a million years. I'm still sitting at the camera saying, "Don't run out of film, don't run out of film." At the end of it, Max walks away, and says to the girl, "Who was that man I was just talking to?" I said, "Thank you, Max." it was the greatest moment.

BG: Did he actually not know who it was?

HJ: I'll never know. I went up to Shatner, he saw me coming toward him, he had this weird expression, he said, "Oh my god, am I in a Henry Jaglom film?" I said, "That's right." He said, "And I'm not getting paid for it." "Right. But will you still sign a release?" Otherwise I couldn't use it. He was a very good sport. I didn't know him before. It's that kind of serendipitous wonderful surprise that you get by shooting the way that I shoot. That to me validates this entire process – using tiny cameras and authentic environments.

BG: Did you shoot your early films yourself?

HJ: I was never a DP.

BG: It seems like the shooting style has changed though ...

HJ: I wanted a rougher style in the beginning. I wanted a style that looked more like guerrilla filmmaking. In recent years, I've had this Israeli cameraman. It's hand in hand with Victoria's idea of more narrative films. If you have more narrative then you can deal with them more visually. Still I'm basically concerned with actors and their reality. I stand behind the cameraman and conduct it.

BG: Which films were your most difficult and why? Which were your most precious and why?

HJ: My first film was the most precious. I didn't know anything about audiences. I didn't think anyone was ever going to give me money to make another film. I thought it was a fluke; I'd worked on the editing of Easy Rider and it was so successful that everyone involved had a chance to direct their own movie. And I had a play at The Actors Studio called A Safe Place. I made a film which violated all the rules of filmmaking, an interior film in a young woman's mind without any thought of whether an audience would follow it or not. In that sense it was the bravest film I'm ever going to make. Once you're more aware of what's going to work for an audience it's a terrible temptation. I didn't do any of that in a A Safe Place. Nobody paid attention to it until Anaïs Nin found it and took it around to campuses, women's film groups. Time magazine said it looks like he threw the film up in the air and it landed up in a Mixmaster. They didn't understand the internal landscape; they didn't understand it was from a woman's point of view. It was not narrative in terms of what was happening externally but what was happening internally. It's a very brave film.

The film that I really love because it captures life as I know it is Venice/Venice, the film I had the hardest time getting an audience for since A Safe Place. I don't know if it relates to the fact that again I messed with time. Audiences – you can do almost anything to them except mess with their sense of time, what is real and what is not real.

BG: When you were primarily an actor what kind of frustrations did you have with directors?

HJ: That's why I do what I do. They'd say, "Cut." They'd say, "You said 'and' and you were supposed to say 'but.'" I guest-starred on these TV shows doing silly stuff. I thought, "This is an insane thing for a grown person to do. It's just about being cute, charming, winning on camera."

David Thomson said the thing to keep in mind about my films is that they're actors' films. The look, everything else, is secondary.

BG: I just finished watching that Who Is Henry Jaglom? documentary.

HJ: And you're still willing to talk to me? I'm not mean like those people think I am. I think Candice Bergen is the only one to be trusted in that. She said, "If Henry had been my mother, I could have taken Poland." I'm not sure why I create such antagonism, especially among men. I understand that men, a lot of them, don't like my films, but why do they get so angry about them? I'm always stunned. There's something very annoying and disturbing to them about the way I get into this whole emotional area.

BG: The movie really played up the whole male-lesbian thing. Do you think of yourself as different than other men?

HJ: I know it's a corny label and I try not to use it now, but the truth is, I'm such a girl. I wouldn't be making movies about women and their lives if I hadn't felt enormously connected to women in my childhood. My mother shared with me the entire world that she was experiencing. She never said, 'You're a boy so you can't cross this line.' I listened to women – saw their vulnerability, their power and their needfulness, and their desire for real feelings and real emotional satisfaction, and at the same time listened to men. And they talked about sports and money and cars. I identified much more closely with women. The reason the male lesbian came up, is that, while I am male, and I'm attracted to women, all my friends are women. The best part of me is like a woman. Basically I just like to identify with women who also respond to women. I just feel like that's my group. I'm a lipstick male lesbian.

BG: Are you going through menopause?

HJ: You know that's a movie I've got on my schedule. Some very big actresses are excited to talk about it. Also Shopping is my next film. All I have to have is to have a title of a film for women to know what it's about.

BG: It's just amazing to me that there are no other films on these topics.

HJ: It's unbelievable. Men still are the ones who make the films. The men keep thinking they're supposed to make them for 14-year-old boys. They are 14-year-old boys in their own minds. Their sense of women – women are bizarre. Women, when they want to make it in this business, they have to become one of the boys. I feel my job is to become one of the girls. I just want to deal with real emotional stuff.

BG: I was interested in what Orson Welles had said to you about his notions of filming emotions –

HJ: He said he began a film with a story, and tried to find the emotion. I begin with the emotion and try to figure out what the story is. That would be the difference between my filmmaking and almost everyone else's. My stories come from emotion.

'Festival in Cannes' opens Fri/12 at the Opera Plaza, S.F. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.