A Man Who Hates Rambo
By EUGENE LINDEN
He has made 29 films, including Oscar winners Midnight Express, Chariots of Fire and The Killing Fields. In 1986 English producer David Puttnam took over Columbia Pictures, vowing to make better films more cheaply and with less reliance on big-name stars. Following that formula, Puttnam put the Columbia name on such films as The Last Emperor, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1987. But in his pursuit of reform, Puttnam alienated much of the Hollywood establishment. A year after he was hired, Puttnam left Columbia. Now home in Wiltshire, he is independently producing a series of movies. Bruised but unrepentant, Puttnam still wants to prove that filmmakers needn't choose between profits and quality.
Q. You went to Columbia Pictures to improve the quality and reduce costs. Today you are gone, and the Hollywood system is still in place. If it is so inefficient, why hasn't it collapsed?
A. The film industry is like a cat with nine lives. It constantly seems to be able to come up with a new salvation. First there was the VCR, which has saved films that were theatrical failures, and now the opening up of European television puts a new value on second- and third-run new films. The film industry is probably on life six or seven.
Q. Are movies really not as good as they were in the past?
A. In the '50s there were quite a few remarkable films that didn't get nominated for an Academy Award, quite apart from the films that were nominated but didn't win. Today there are just not that many good films.
% Q. Have the standards of the American film audience declined?
A. Not the standards, the expectations. The audience lives on a diet of television that is something like McDonald's hamburgers -- nobody asks how nutritious they are; they taste good. Without any lack of gratitude, I remember thinking after Chariots of Fire won the Academy Award that it was the kind of film audiences should expect every single week and shouldn't be accounted the best film of the year. I only became comfortable when Killing Fields won. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind, I believed that taken together the two films deserved an Oscar.
Q. Are you saying the crass, materialistic Hollywood moguls were more enlightened than today's execs?
A. Today there is the whole notion of the home-run movie -- the one movie whereby you never have to work again. The home-run movie completely alters the nature of risk. The old moguls could take a roll on a picture and know that if it didn't work, it wasn't going to bring the studio down. There was a regular cinema audience. Today, as I learned to my cost at Columbia, almost every time you come up to bat, you're making a $20 million, $30 million or $50 million bet. That's not an environment that encourages risk or adventurous, creative decisions.
Q. Is the very cost of making movies having an adverse effect on the quality?
A. When budgets pass about $25 million, the studio, quite legitimately, wants to have a big say in the making of the movie. At that budget, you have the obligation to temper -- a very important word -- your vision of the movie with what is commercially viable. So what goes out the window is individual vision. This could mean changing the ending of a film -- don't upset the audience; don't disappoint them.
Q. You've also singled out stars and agents as threats to the notion of a movie as an individual vision.
A. The instant a director wants to have his own Winnebago, I worry a bit, and when that same man is calling his agent at lunchtime about a script he wants sent for his next movie, I worry a lot. Likewise the agent who tells the star, "I couldn't get you more money, but I got you your own car, or top billing in the movie." The question is, "What movie?"
In getting top billing, have I created an advertisement which is not the best for the movie though it might be for the star? We don't remember Wuthering Heights as a Laurence Olivier vehicle, we remember it as a great movie.
| Q. Among the various media, where do you place cinema as an influence on people and society?
A. I think television has far more impact on society at large. I think a movie can have the most impact on the individual. Cinema is insidious in a way. You're on your own in the theater, seeing images that are bigger than life. It almost steals into your subconscious. Like a great teacher, cinema can provide something you refer back to year after year.
Q. Aren't films merely entertainment?
A. Film is also an entertainment medium, but filmmaking is afflicted with a poverty of ambition that makes it impossible to throw in other values. Making films solely for entertainment is like making a soup with only one ingredient.
Q. Is this why you gravitate toward films based on moral conflict?
A. Absolutely. At the end of the day, the media have the effect of leveling society up or leveling society down. If I make a film the net effect of which is to make people within my society less likely to be the kind of people I want to live hand in glove with, I've unleashed forces within my own society that I don't want to contend with.
Q. Where do you cross that line in filmmaking? Isn't the universal appeal of Rambo that it offers release to people who feel frustrated at their inability to control their lives?
A. That's why Rambo gets its response. Rambo suggests that major and complex problems can be sorted out by simple violent opposition. Cinema has tended to dwell on the act of violence. The real effect of violence is not the man blown through the plate-glass window but what the man leaves behind: a widow, a mother . . . children.
Q. You have said in the past that you were shocked by the audience reaction to Midnight Express. Did this change your attitude toward violence?
A. I thought people would dive under their chairs when Billy bit the tongue off Rifki. Instead they cheered. Midnight Express posed a question to me about what kind of filmmaker I wanted to be. Chariots of Fire answered the question. I remember saying then, "If the audience doesn't want this, I'm in the wrong business." The audience didn't let me down.
Q. What other films successfully integrate commercial and social issues?
A. Star Wars, E.T. I'm sure my fundamental world view is identical to that of George Lucas, and very, very similar to Steven Spielberg's. Steven is a nice man, and he just wants the world to be a better place.
Q. Why have you never used a woman as a central character?
A. Maybe I should worry about this, but I don't understand women's motivations, which means that I don't know how to address the script, the castings, etc. Women's reactions are extremely arbitrary to me.
Q. In retrospect, were your battles with the Hollywood establishment inevitable? Might things have been different had you played your cards differently?
A. Most of the fights I had were waiting to be had. Had I rolled with the punches for a year, I would have been stuck with production deals that didn't make any economic sense for another three years.
Hollywood needs a regeneration, and the role of spokesman that I singularly failed at is still available to someone -- someone smarter than me, someone American, a person who can articulate on behalf of the greater film community the frustration and the need for change.