T A B L E+T A L K What were the last 5 books you read? List, compare and contrast in the Books section of Table Talk. R E C E N T L Y Edmund White By Daniel Reitz (10/15/97) Caleb Carr By Dwight Garner (10/04/97) Arundhati Roy By Reena Jana (09/30/97) J.G. Ballard By Richard Kadrey and Suzanne Stefanac (09/02/97) Tom Clancy By John Donnelly (06/04/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - INTERVIEW ARCHIVE R E V I E W S A Calendar of Wisdom By Leo Tolstoy A book of daily affirmations, from the great writer, featuring snippets from Shakespeare, Lao Tsu, Ruskin, the Talmud, the Dhammapada, Socrates, Jefferson and others. (10/24/97) S A L O N R E C O M M E N D S A list of staff favorites, updated weekly		C O N T I N U E D There's a theme from "Private Idaho" that recurs in "Pink" as well, one of men who "love, but they're not in love." In that scene from "Idaho," Mike's telling Scott that he loves him. And Scott says that two men can't love each other, they can only be friends. That's actually a quote from Walt Curtis, which is in his new book, a compilation of stories called "Mala Noche and Other Illegal Adventures." One of the stories is about Raoul, this Mexican kid, and he and Raoul, they're on a dirt road, and they're waiting for a bus or something like that. They're all by themselves, and he picks up a rock and says, "Do you love me this much?" And he says, "No." And he says, "OK, do you love me ..." and he picks a smaller rock, "Do you love me this much?" And then he picks a little tiny pebble, and finally Raoul says, "Two men can't love each other, they can only be friends." I once got a fortune cookie that said, "He loves you as much as he can, but he cannot love you very much." That's just a traditional theme that a gay man might experience if he has a lot of friends that are straight. He loves you as much as he can. Sometimes I think that happens between heterosexual couples, when you find somebody who's just amazing and they become your best friend and then the next logical thing is, you know, we could be totally in love. Except they might say, "Oh, but no -- no, I don't like you like that." And it's just like, why not? That can happen to any two people, but it often happens to two male friends. In "To Die For," you mock people's obsession with image and with being on-screen. Now, in "Pink," you make fun of filmmakers, presenting them as these pretentious and pathetic characters. In the book's opening lines, Spunky says, "Once I was good, and now I am shamed. I have turned bad ... I am looking for salvation. I am looking for the quick buck. I've sold out. I am spoiled by the system." Is that true for you? How do you manage to work in a medium that you're so critical of? Yes, that is true. How do I keep working in it? I feel guilty about it. I was thinking of changing my name today, just to have some way around the kind of name brand situation that I'm in. Some people, they make use of it, it's a power. Some people make use of it like a politician. A politician really needs to be a hands-on personality: "I'm the guy, this is what I think, and if you vote for me, I'll do what I'm saying." But there's not any reason for a filmmaker to be promoting what he does, because the film is there. If people say that the film is good, you'll go. Maybe there's an ad, but the filmmaker doesn't have to go around getting free press and articles about his film. In "Pink," Spunky is listening to a local Christian radio station, and he says, "I think all art should be in the service of something like Jesus, and not in the service of the glory of the artists themselves." Would that be your ideal? Well, it just means that I want art to be like food -- when you see a tomato in a store, it's a thing, you understand it, you know what it is. It's part of life. And art should be like that, it should be organic, something that isn't rarefied. It should be a group thing, it should not be removed -- so that only this person understands it and that person has to explain it to you. It shouldn't be issued as privileged information. It should be understandable by the group. And that's a utopian thing that I'm saying, but it's the way art used to be. In other times, I imagine -- and maybe I'm projecting, maybe I'm thinking that a Greek vase is understood by the Greeks in a different way, maybe there were in fact elites who were the only ones who appreciated it -- but I imagine that art was made by people in the same way that furniture was made. Something whose function is very certain, but that becomes art, too. It would be nice to deconstruct all of that labeling. You seem to both suffer from and yet make fun of the confusion that a lot of people of your generation seem to share -- for example, one issue that Spunky struggles with in "Pink" is his guilt that he has stopped rebelling and has now "sold out." Well I'm sort of a child of the '60s, and I still hold '60s values close, you know. There was something that happened then, but I have my own vision of it, and I've never applied it to anything. I have my own interpretation. When I was growing up in the '60s, there was this amazing dichotomy between the practice and the concept. The concept is paradise, and the practice is not paradise. But the concept is right. And the follow-through tries to get at it, but the problem is just human. Who do you think are the most relevant young filmmakers today? The young filmmakers not yet making big budget movies, they're the ones most in touch with their culture. Harmony Korine's "Gummo" got slammed in the L.A. press, but I thought it was pretty amazing. It seemed really open to me, really free. Whatever happened with the Harvey Milk film you were reportedly working on? Oliver Stone had developed about four or five screenplays, and I was working on it with Becky Johnston, the writer. But it wasn't really working. One thing was, the character didn't have a sense of humor. That was a very big problem, because I thought that was such a big part of who he was. The first time I worked on it, I got fired. Then I made "To Die For," and Warner Bros. called back and said, "Let's try it again," and I fell for it. Right now, they've got it at HBO. I asked if I could make a 10-hour version, not just about Harvey, but about the whole Castro. There's a much bigger story there that you just can't do in three hours. So I wanted to get a little closer. But it's Hollywood -- they get a little scared. You're next film, "Good Will Hunting," is opening in a few months. What's that about? It's about this janitor at MIT who secretly answers the problems left on the board by the professors. When he's confronted, he doesn't want anything to do with it. Robin Williams, Ben Affleck and Matt Dillon star in it. In the book, "Pink" refers to this other dimension that exists outside of the ones we inhabit, not heaven exactly, but a place of potential salvation. How did you conceive of this other place, this other reality? The one thing that you can be really, really sure of is that there is more. There's more in the sense that there's a future, you know, an hour from now, something else that's a weird disconnected part of now, but its not here, right now. But you can be sure that in an hour from now there will be some more of what we have right now. There is just definitely more. And that's the kind of wild, unbelievable thing about reality. It doesn't occur to you when you're part of it, because reality is all about what's real and what's in this reality, and it's not anything about what's outside of this reality. But if you just think about the other realities, it becomes unbelievably dumbfounding. But ironically these explorations don't make Spunky feel any less claustrophobic -- they make him feel perpetually stuck in the present. That's the weird part of our dimension. There is only now. There is no such thing as past and future, except in the way that we've been able to have a clock go around and we can time it, and that means we can go, "Oh, I remember you from five years ago, that was so long ago." But it was the same time then as it now, because it's always "now." Through the moon and the sun going around, we have this passage of time and regenerating of cells, but its all just a matter of transferring. Is that why Spunky is panicked about recording everything, to have everything captured on film? As a filmmaker, the first thing you find out is that you can lose film. The chapter when Spunky is talking about that, that is basically a story that happened to me. I made this first film -- it's actually the whole flip-book thing, that's a re-creation of it -- I made it, and I showed it to my friend. The next day it was missing, just gone. Later my friend said, "Actually, I took the film because I wanted to show my friends here how cool it was." And I said, "Where is it? And he said, "I don't know, I lost it." That was my first film, and within two weeks, it was just gone. What do you think about the Internet, where, theoretically, things could exist forever? Well, I don't know that much about it, except that it does seem like the Wild West. But I had a really vivid and very strange and very scary thought, which isn't very original, but it was the first time that I really saw the future of intelligence. It was machine, it wasn't human, and it was just hugely dominant. And I thought, wow, machines will take over and humans are going to be like animals. We'll just be organic fungus. And the computers, the machine, the thing, once it gets its own independence, will proliferate and become this huge intelligent organism. It was the first time that I ever really understood that. I'm sure it's the subject of all kinds of science fiction, and I'm sure that there are hundreds of people that have seen this and so forth, but I thought, it's a logical step. When it finally gets to the point where it's them calling the shots, and it can take care of itself, then it will be its own organism. And it'll be fast enough that it can take over, and we'll just be like toads, basically, because it might just say, "We don't need this organism anymore, the organism's a bummer. The organism is bothering us." And it'll just blow us away. We'll be back in caves, hiding from these things that we've built. SALON | Oct. 24, 1997

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