What do you think of films showing on digital now? Your film [shown at Regal Fenway] looked a little dim, not as crisp as it should be.
I was there for a moment, and it didn't look as good as it should. I think something needed to be tweaked. We shot on film. It's gorgeous; we're going to release a lot on film, as well as digital.
So how does that make you feel as an artist to see your film shown not in the way you intended?
I've yet to shoot on digital, but the ability to have quality control in digital is actually easier. I cannot tell you the number of times I have seen a bad [film] print, scratched to shit and shown with a dull bulb. Standardization will happen.
A funny point my editor [Peter Keough] made: the film is about Viagra, yet the clawed bathtub we see Jake and Anne in looks like one right from the Cialis ads.
[Laughs] I'll tell you a good story. When I was doing Glory, there is a scene where he [Mathew Broderick] is practicing the saber on his horse, and he's slashing pumpkins because the story takes place in the fall right before they go into battle. And when we shot the movie, it was in the Spring, and there wasn't a pumpkin to be found in all of Georgia, so the prop guy used watermelons. Well, of course, there are you critics, who said that slashing the watermelons must be symbolic of black slavery because they were eating the watermelons, and here's the director doing this heavy-handed symbolism. But the reality was, we just couldn't get pumpkins. I once had a loft where in the center there was a bathtub like that, and I thought why not; and now it's a symbol of making fun of Cialis. That's kind of funny. There is art that is deliberate, and there is that which is inadvertent.
Which of your works is most special to you?
Every director believes that his next movie will be his best. But I have extraordinary fondness for Traffic, because it was part of the currency of its day. It really made a statement about our culture. And in a way, Glory honored something that I always cared about, which is a love of history and the kind of a film it is, and a set of performances that just happened to come together in a way. The stars aligned the right people in the right part at the right moment. It was also a movie that gave me a whole host of opportunities that followed. I had done a small comedy, and nobody assumed I could do a film like that, and so doing it made it possible for a lot that followed. So it will always have a place in my heart.
So what's next?
I'm bad at that. Do you cook? If you do, have you ever beaten egg whites by hand? When you beat egg whites by hand, you use a whisk, and you think your wrist is going to fall off, and there's a moment when suddenly they peak and quicken &ldots; that's what I do.
