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I guess Id say human comedy.
Its about a whole family, a microcosm of people.
Hum-com?Are we so lazy that we cant say the rest?
We have to abbreviate it.
I have always been grateful and shocked and pleased by that.
It entered the culture.
I didnt intend for it to, but Im glad it did.
You dont know how people are going to take it.
This was women in your life?At that time, yeah.
I would say the world has changed since then.
Lets put it this way: Maybe women have become more philosophical.
And no matter how uncooperative he is, she intends to get him.
Do you see a sort of alignment between the two movies?
Because I definitely do.Absolutely.
But I think Ive always been interested in the idea of people disenchanting other people.
People saying, You have to be realistic.
Youre not going to get everything you want.
My reaction is like, Why not?
Why aint I going to get everything I want?
Now, of course, life can stand in the way.
Something, many things can happen to make that the case.
Can you give me an example?First of all, I was in the Bronx.
I was like, I want to be a poet.
Whats more, I didnt want to just be any poet.
I wanted to be Cyrano de Bergerac.
I wanted to be a poet who was also a vigorous, masculine presence in the world.
Then, by going out into the world, I found many of the things that I sought.
There are other people in the world that are closer in sensibility to me.
Then when I wroteMoonstruck,I was in an Irish and Italian neighborhood.
I was like, This is a lot better than what is going on in my house.
Cyrano was in the military.
I went into the military.
He was a tough guy.
I liked that idea.
First of all, I wanted to describe a family that worked.
Im like, Well, then take me to the opera.
So, inMoonstruck, they go to the opera.
Im curious how you translated that to everybody.
How did you all get on the same page about that?I wrote the screenplay on spec.
I sent it to Norman [Jewison, the director].
He wanted to do it.
We had a very similar sense of humor.
He didnt attempt to mess with it.
He did the stage directions.
The actors, I think, the same thing.
The writing has a very definite style.
I was writing about versions of real people I have known and versions of myself.
I still know the guy who lost his foot.
The guy who lost his hand died.
His son contacted me and said, Was my father an inspiration forMoonstruck?
I said, Absolutely.
I sympathized and identified with the mutilation.
Thats like Cyrano, again, some kind of feeling of being grotesque that so many of us have.
I never met a teenager who didnt feel grotesque in some way, unless they were truly boring.
But look, Im a poet.
Im still a poet.
Thats a bizarre thing to be, and it makes you feel a bit like a freak.
I dont really feel like a freak anymore.
I run into a lot of people who are unable to truly be genuine.
Its not that they dont want to; they literally cant remember how.
The people you write in your films all speak their feelings out loud directly.
People were commenting that the language [inMoonstruck] was stylized.
I heard two women talking on the train, and I thought,Theyre doing it.
I mean, thats exactly …
They could be in the film.
The liquor-store scene is one of those.
They have a whole love story in a minute and a half or something.
Each place is called, like, Cinderella Beauty Shop and the Sweetheart Liquor Store.
I couldnt believe it existed.
I wanted to go there.
What did it change?Light changes everything.
Theres a daytime world and a nighttime world.
What I didnt tell him was I also thought I was a horse.
Oh, much like the character inWild Mountain Thymewho thinks hes a bee.Yep.
You also seem to have a fixation with death, which I completely identify with.
It sort of hangs over everything.Well, I think that the concept of death is really exciting.
Its like, Just do it.
Youre going to die in about ten minutes.
You have this idea youre going to be around forever.
Youre not, and its getting in your way.
When you feel youre going to live forever, you put off, forever, living.
Have you had any near-death experiences yourself?Yeah.
Ive been attacked with knives about three or four different times.
Who was attacking you with knives?Im from the Bronx.
When you watchWest Side Story,that came from my neighborhood.
And other stuff, violent car accidents …
I was in a plane crash.
Ive been very fortunate.
Can you talk to me a little bit about coming up with the Snap out of it!
moment inMoonstruck?I was up in a tenement, living on 177th and Fort Washington.
Really, I just kind of adored him.
He was very short, and he looked like he was from Castilian Spain.
He looked like he was running in front of a bunch of bulls.
Do not touch that.
I dont want it touched.
I wrote the stage directions.
I just acted it, pictured it in my head.
When you say you slapped him, you were talking about an imaginary person.Im talking about me.
I do the one part, then I turn around and I do the other.
I do a lot of that.
They will immediately be a great actor.
Its very hard to be a bad actor and eat, because youre doing something real.
But when Emily Blunt says to him, Would you like another sandwich?
I mean, I blushed.
Woo-hoo, that was hot.
Lets talk a little bit aboutJoe Versus the Volcano, which I really like.
I asked why, and they said because they had to discontinue this line because they clicked.
But it was weird environmentally.
Just the sheer misery of it.
The New YorkTimesdescribed the movies negative critical reception thusly: The meteoric rise ofMoonstruckled to a meteoric crash.
But the New YorkTimeshatedMoonstruck.Its like the only bad review in the country.
The basis of the objection was This is not what Italian people are really like.
Then the movie went to No.
And they hatedJoe Versus the Volcano.TheLos AngelesTimesraved about it.
A lot of papers really loved it.
But the perception was that it was a disaster.
It cost $30 million to make, and it made $40 million.
I can live with that.
I managed to make a movie that wasnt like anything else.
I had pretty much carte blanche to make the movie that I wanted to make.
I was like, Treat the camera like it weighs 5,000 pounds and its difficult to move.
The cameraman for that was also the cameraman forWild Mountain Thyme,Stephen Goldblatt.
I did an uncut master of a two-minute-long scene [for the studio].
Why?Because you didnt do that.
I mean, they would do movies like Chevy ChasesChristmas Vacationand then I do this.
It all worked out in the end.
The whole management at Warner Bros. is gone.
She used to come over and visit with Tom and Meg all the time.
She fell in love with them as a couple on that film and cast them after that.
Why did you pick them?Tom came to me.
He had his manager, his agent.
They all called the same day and said, I want this movie.
So I was like, Okay.
She read, but shes very consistently one person.
Then Meg Ryan came in and she was just spectacular.
Julia was too Julia Robertsesque?Yeah.
She got cast inPretty Woman, I dont know, a week later?
She had to make do.
She came to me in a wig.
But she did it in the audition.
I felt traumatized, but I jumped back in.
I dont think I ever told him this, but I was afraid for him.
He never mentioned it again, and we both went on with our lives.
I cast Jake Weber, who was a terrific actor and did a great job.
We did it at the Public Theater.
Extensive male nudity?Extensive.
What happened at one matinee made it all worthwhile for me.
How Cher of her.
Which is kind of how I feel when I watch it, specifically about the Waponi tribe.
It was my first film.
So if I didnt quite bring it off, sorry.
I get what youre saying, that you were inventing a new thing.
And none of them are, so they dont deserve to go on.
He takes the leap, and they survive.
Well, they dont survive, right?
Because doesnt the island blow up?They survive.
The tribe gets on boats, and they start to leave.
They dont die, they migrate.
Yeah.The tribe are supposed to be Irish, Jews …
I forget what else.
In other words, Im specifically saying, You aint never going to meet this tribe.
This aint no indigenous nowhere on earth.
Maybe in the ultrasensitive environment that were in now, but I think even there its a stretch.
This is a mythical group of people.
But then Joe is sort of reborn after a day of extremely intense shopping.
How did this happen?In other words, its a world that I didnt even truly know existed.
Theres a thread too in some of your other work, about this idea of soul-sickness and selling out.
I dreamt I was Hitlers pastry chef.
Its like, Im being well-paid, but this is a terrible job.
My life cost an unbelievable amount of money as a result of those two simple facts.
For a decade, I had to come up with more money than … an incomprehensible amount.
Like withDoubt,Scott Rudin called me up and asked me to come into his office.
He said, Hey, we should makeDoubtas a film, and I think you should direct it.
I went, like, Okay.
It was a large family but primogeniture, only one could stay.
My Uncle Tony was the one who stayed, and his wifes name was Mary.
The way they talked is the reason I wrote the play.
I know youre on Twitter.
I talked to Emily Blunt about doing it in the first place.
Were making this movie for everybody else, and the Irish will do whatever the heck they want.
I love their country.
I do not ask for love in return.
She said, Okay, thats quite a speech.
Frank McCourt was a friend of mine; he wroteAngelas Ashes.
In Limerick, they gave him a really hard time.
They were like, We were not that poor.
So ideas dont come from nowhere.
A lot of the time, it makes it impossible for them to accept love.
Does that apply to you?
Do you think you think youre something youre not?Absolutely.
Its just the truth.
Thats a bit of a shocker.
Do you really think women are the salvation of the world, and what does that mean?Absolutely.
Theyd be crazy, but theyd be a lot less crazy.
And you think men are beasts?Absolutely.
You get the guy with the club, and all he wants is sex and food.
Youre going to have to get an education.
Thats a stripe in the male identity.
There are many other stripes, but men are progenitors of war.
To put them into a constructive vein, sometimes we need help.
Do you think thats fair?A complicated relationship?
Thats how they explained what away?
This idea of these fundamental differences between men and women.Other people can say what they want.
Certainly, understanding other people, and understanding myself, has been the work of my life.
You dont have to really think that it applies to everybody.
It could be very hard to get people to do it, because they felt so endangered.
But Im like, I know you have them.
I know youre operating from these assumptions.
As long as you keep those unspoken assumptions complex, they remain static.
So your generalizations have shifted over the years?Oh yeah.
Viola Davis was nominated for the Academy Award for the part that I wrote [inDoubt].
In fact, they all were: Amy Adams, Meryl, and Phil Hoffman.
Because I see women as a force, like I said in the movie.
I said that they have the power to change the world.
I get mad at women because Im like, You should be doing more.
I cant do this part.
Only a woman can do this part.
Thats a lot of pressure.Well, men have a lot of pressure.
Why shouldnt women have pressure too?
Thats a perspective, for sure.
Youve never publicly talked about it.
Of course, nobody else was there.
I was fortunate in that I had a great deal of evidence.
It came up a significant length of time after wed stopped seeing each other.
I was very shocked.
Occasionally, people say things that arent true.
I just went out, got a lawyer, and said, Heres the facts.
Heres all the details, everything else.
I really went through it.
The judge threw the whole thing out.
Well, I appreciate you addressing it directly.
And Im glad youve made another human comedy.Are they going to start calling it hum-com?
