Right.
So, the question I would pose to such a character, and it’s kind of where I started the script, is this. “Okay, here you are, you run out of road, you’re at the peak of this mountain. You look beyond, maybe you can distantly see another mountain peak, but you’re not going to get there. You’re 50 years old, looking in the rear-view mirror; if you could have a conversation with your younger self, what would that conversation be?”
And that’s really the scene in Juilliard. I really conceived that scene to ask that question. If you could talk to your younger self, like that character of Max [the young black student that she is arguing with], that may as well be Lydia Tar at 24, coming out of Harvard in 1990. She would’ve been trying to push the boundaries as much as possible. She would’ve been chasing atonal music, we know that she went down to the Amazon to study sort of—what would’ve been a very unknown [music] with the exception of like the field museum on Chicago—
Right, really esoteric music, especially at the time.
Yeah, yeah, But now she’s settled in, now she’s at the head of this German-Austro cannon. And she’s kind of become the old man next door telling the kids to turn the music down [laughs]. But she was one of those kids, right? So that’s a very digress answer; where did this all start? But, essentially, that’s kind of where it started for me.
So power is clearly on your mind, the use of it, the transactional nature of it, our transformational evolution as humans: does that lead you to the world of classical music because of its power structures? As we discussed earlier, it’s a pretty perfect locale if you know.
Well, yeah, it’s a very clear hierarchy. And she has to manage a hundred-plus people for a full complement orchestra. Not to mention what’s in the front of house. The back of house is the organization itself, it has the board, its donors, so yeah, how better to take a character and, and seize the concessions that they’ve made to their art to sit at the top of that power structure. And also, probably wanting, unconsciously wanting to blow it all up, and making really, what appear to be, very sloppy poor decisions to ruin it. Because as Peggy Lee would say, “Is that all there is? [laughs]
To that end, there are a lot of ghosts—ambiguous, metaphorical, imagined or otherwise—seemingly suggesting that the choices she made to get to that mountaintop are haunting her.
Yeah, I think she’s haunted. She’s haunted by herself. She is sort of burdened with remembering herself. That’s an Emerson line. “Let me not be so curious to not be burdened with remembering myself.” But yeah, she’s haunted by what she sees are missteps, things she could have done better. There’s something crawling on her for sure. The first moment that she sort of senses that is at the Carlisle Hotel after that sort of very long scene at Juilliard. There’s something on her, and it latches onto her. And for the rest of the film she’s trying to figure out what that thing is.
The character Olga [a young, untroubled, unburdened cello prodigy] feels like an interesting clue to the psyche of Tar because if something is nagging at her, Olga is this evocative thing that she’s simultaneously allured by, but also seems to resent and therefore detest.
Olga turns everything upside down because Olga asks for nothing.
She’s the disruption.
Olga interrupts something because she’s not corruptible, so it’s also why Tar is completely drawn to her. Because in the simplest form, when Lydia was a young person, that’s who she essentially was. She was in it because of the joy of doing it, the joy of making it. And now she’s looking at legacy, which is a dead end. And again, she’s looking forward through the windshield, but looking in the rear-view mirror. And along comes this creature who’s all windshield.
Man, I have to ask, it’s been, god, how many years, 16-17 years, since your last movie?
Yeah, I dunno, something like that.
Okay, but you’ve written so many things, the reports of movies almost made over the years…if we made a list, it would be a very long one, right?
Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. I mean, look, I’m in a large company of filmmakers out there trying to get films made. I don’t think my case is that special. There’s a lot of filmmakers that are in a very similar position trying to get their stuff on and—
I might disagree with your premise there slightly. I mean, an actor turned director—that’s a big leap, at least for critics and outsiders, the degree of potential failure there—and then, your first two films out of the gate, I think there are eight Academy Awards between them, including Best Picture and Best Director? That’s no small feat. One assumes the world is their oyster after that and a lot of doors open, no?
Well, we all get kick me signs attached to our backs, all of us, and we all get ghettoized, “oh, you do this thing, you did that thing?”
I mean, I quit acting 30 years ago, and then I went to film school. And while I was in film school, a film that I made while I was an actor—Victor Nunez’s “Ruby In Paradise”—that was a film that was a really important film for me, as a young filmmaker, actually, to be able to work with Victor in that manner, wow. It came out, and all of a sudden, the phone started ringing. I didn’t even have an agent, so I worked as an actor for the next ten years, mainly to pay off my film school bills, but I had no intention of being an actor.
So, from the beginning, I wanted to make my own films. Like I’m a highly technical director, and the way that some people talk, people say, “Well, you were an actor, so you’re an actor’s director.” Or, “You’re a writer because you write your own stuff.” OK, sure, I wrote my own stuff because it was cheap. I couldn’t afford anyone else. But the truth is, the larger part of why I was interested in doing this has to do with cinema, and the films that I love, and photography, how do we see things, and what my point of view is. So, I don’t know if any of that has to do with anything in terms of, like, why I haven’t made a film in 16 years or whatever [laughs], but I think that sometimes it’s jack of all trades, master of none kind of thing.
Right.
I think it’s hard when people say, “Well, what does he do? Or what do you do?” Like I’m hired as a writer all the time. I shoot all the time. It’s not like I have to stop directing. I’ve been on the floor for 16 years. I’ve been shooting, I shoot all the time. I shoot commercials. And I work with the latest technology and I feel like I’m probably technically a much better director and a stronger director than I was 16 years ago.
You also have to understand that…And this is a tired thing to say, and people will flame you for saying it, and that’s famously what happened to Martin Scorsese—but if you want to make a film about just human-scaled things and you think that you’re going to be able to release it in theaters—theaters with paper-thin walls, uncomfortable seats and ear-splitting decibels for what’s coming next door—that’s a very tall order.
And this was a perfect storm. The idea that there was a pandemic on, that I had the goodwill of Peter Kujawski and Kiska Higgs at Focus Features, who said, “write whatever you want. We don’t care what it is. We just want to make a film with you.” And no pun intended, but that was music to my ears. No one had said that to me in a long time.
Well, that’s interesting because you obviously understand that human-scaled stories in cinemas are hard to pull off; you haven’t made a film in nearly two decades, so that baggage is on you, you have the goodwill of the studio, but it’s not like you turn in something really easy to get made, in fact, the opposite. The bar is extremely high here. I would think most studios would read it and go, “Huh, what?”
I think all studios, with the exception of this group would’ve said, “what?” I don’t think anyone would. I told them when I sent them the script, I said, “Look, if you don’t want to do it, it’s okay.” And they said, “No, no, no, no. We’re making it.” And I said, “Okay, but you must have something to say.” And they didn’t have any notes. That’s the only time I’ve ever turned in a script and no one gave me any notes. And I said, “You’re sure you want to make this, right?” And they said, “Yes, we want to make it. We want to make it as soon as possible. And that was extraordinary.
I was going to say, you started writing it during the pandemic and it’s basically in theaters now [October 7 in limited release]. That’s a lighting fast turnaround, especially for the development of your films! [laughs]
I handed it into Focus on July 9th, 2020, and they green-lit the movie like essentially that day.
OK, but you must have had Cate already in the back pocket, right?
No! Cate wasn’t involved. Cate really didn’t know anything about it, and I didn’t send her the script until a month later. Mainly because my wife insisted that I send it to her because she kept saying, “What are you waiting for?” Because I’d written it for her. She didn’t know I’d written it for her, you know? And then we were going to actually go [into production] almost immediately. And then there was a second lockdown in Germany so we couldn’t go back. So we had to delay it for, not a year, but like nine months.
God, and that’s usually the time when this type of ambitious project falls apart, an actor leaves or is no longer available, a studio loses their nerve, something like that.
Right. It could have absolutely fallen apart. And I presumed that it would because, obviously, that’s my experience. But Cate and I started working daily from that point on. She took other work, she made two other films during that nine months period and she’d come, she’d finish her work during the day, and then we’d get on the phone at night and work for several more hours. So, by the time we were on the ground in Berlin together, we had about nine months under our belt already.
And Cate’s like the ultimate Stratovarius; she’s so perfect.
Well, she’s not a Stratovarius; she’s more. She’s also like [Korean American classical violinist and child prodigy] Sarah Chang. I mean, she’s, she’s an incredible, incredible artist. I mean, it’s stupid. You can’t really talk about these things where it doesn’t sound phony, like it’s hyperbole. But it’s not. You’re looking at a fantastic performer. You’re talking about one of the great minds on the earth, which helps.
She is an incredible, incredible human being. She got the most unbelievable intellect matched by an expansive heart and soul. And so, she shows up and she works, and she’s looking at the whole thing, and she’s not just looking at that character. Especially in a piece like this where with the exception of the last shot in the film and one passing shot toward the beginning with Noémie Merlant crossing the street, Cate’s in every other shot. I mean, it is a singular point of view and it would be very easy for her to just simply concentrate on her character. Also, considering the amount of preparation and execution that she had to do, aside from inhabiting the character, just the technical requirements for that character.
But the conversations that we had were much, much broader. They were much more about the thing itself, the film as a whole.
I’ve got to let you go in a second, but two quick things. Those 16-17 years—it sounds like you were a little at peace with that, whether things get made or not and why. But also, please tell me that we’re not going to have to wait as long to see something else.
Well, who knows? You know, I mean, I think—yeah, who knows? I don’t know. You know? I don’t know.
OK, sure, but let’s say the world’s your oyster again, but for real this time, “TÁR” opens up all these new avenues and the phone starts ringing off the hook. You would at least have a big drawer of scripts to potentially chose from or reconsider, right?
You mean in the dead letter box? [laughs]. I mean, certainly, yeah, I have 16 years worth of material. And there are other things that I’m very much interested in doing, so we’ll see. But I’m glad, I’m happy that I got to make this film, and if I don’t get to make another one, that’s fine.
“TÁR” is currently playing at the New York Film Festival. The drama opens in limited release on October 7 and then starts expanding in theaters nationwide on October 14.
