James Toback is without a doubt the most interesting, compelling person I have had the pleasure of speaking with. I have long been a fan of his work, so the chance to meet him was one I had to jump at, and he did not disappoint. We met at the Avalon Hotel in Beverly Hills to discuss his newest film, When Will I Be Loved.

Neve Campbell’s character comes from a long line of strong female roles in your movies.  Did you want to make a film about a woman who is sexually empowering?

Smart, erotically charged, a lot of repressed anger, beautiful, indolent, aesthetically inclined, all the things that make someone watchable, and  also to put in a context with two guys who are in over their heads and don’t know it, who think that she is in over her head with them.  That to me seemed to be an inherently interesting dramatic situation, to place a women who is younger than, and apparently more inexperienced than these to guys.  Have them take her for granted and think they can manipulate her.

Those kinds of roles seem few and far between.  Some would go as far as to say that men are simply incapable of writing women well.  How do you able to create those kinds of characters?

I’m obsessed with women, so I can imagine myself in a female conscious fairly easily.  But also it comes in turning the role over to the actress.  She [Neve Campbell] really created the role much more than I did.  Once you have an actress talk about the role as if it is her role and not yours, you know you’re in good shape.  In the sexual scenes, the worse thing is to tell – it’s bad enough to tell and actor what to do.  It’s ridiculous to tell an actress what to do.  You guys go in the other room, take as long as you want.  When you have a scene, show up and we’ll shoot it.

Speaking of the sexual scenes, what made you decide to shoot everything through that curtain?

I think it enabled them to do more than if the curtain hadn’t been there.  I think the actions were very aggressive and specific and bold, and I think the curtain had been away, it would have made the absence of nudity more glaring and less credible.  And if you had nudity, you couldn’t have had it in the movie.  You can’t have girls licking each other naked in a film.  You can, but you’re not going to get an “R.”  This “R” shit is real censorship.  Other than The Brown Bunny and some other films, you’re not… IFC is not going to release a film without an “R.”  It was a way of going as far as you could go without going into NC-17 territory.  I’ve had this ongoing battle with the rating board.  The guy that was my bete noir there is no longer there.  He’s now the chief appeals judge in the state of California, so it might be a little better now.  It’s all about head bobs and elbow jerks.  It’s people sitting around a table saying, well, Bijou Phillips’ elbow jerked six times in that scene.  There was the scene between Downey and Heather Graham, and a woman from the rating board said to me, did you know his head bobbed 18 times, and I said I don’t know, I never counted.  And she said trust me.  I don’t think you can get away with more than three head bobs.  And I said, I want you to introduce me to the guy who got you off with three head bobs.  And she didn’t even crack a smile.  It was just, next case.  That’s the level on which they’re debating things.  If you having Neve masturbating in the shower, you have to shoot it from the back and have the muscles twitch.  So it’s censorship, which everyone seems perfectly happy to go along with.  They all want to get their next movie made so they can get paid.  There is not the kind of indignation that there used to be.  Even among directors.  You do what you have to do to adjust.

Is this kind of elliptical, improvisational style of filmmaking more interesting to you?  Do you find it more exciting?

I think you get more from a certain kind of actor.  If you get an actor who can’t do that or doesn’t want to do that, it can be ruinously dull.  If you get an actor that is innately articulate – and that can include anyone from Neve Campbell to Mike Tyson – anyone who has their own way of speaking, who can think and speak without inhibition you open the frame to them, let them move and talk the way they want, you get rewarded, you get things that they wouldn’t normally do.  Normally you talk to actors the way you talk to a five-year old, and most actors are trained to accept that that is the way you make a movie.  What they are ultimately going to do is be depressed or rebellious.  The better equipped to do that an actor is, the more inspired they are when they get the opportunity to do that.

Why Neve Campbell?

I didn’t know for a fact that she was a free-wheeling and open as she was.  I suspected she was from what I had seen over the years, I thought she’s probably a bit of a loner and a searcher and a bit adventurous.  I thought that, but I didn’t know it.  And when we met, it was in the Beverly Hills Hotel, and it was supposed to be for an hour.  We ended up meeting for 12 hours.  And they end I knew she was ready to not only do what I had suggested, but to come up with ideas I hadn’t thought of, to take the character places I had never thought of. 

How did the rapport between the two of you translate to the film?

The openness to the freewheeling sexual behavior, the eagerness to have a scene where she exploded with rage, the willingness to take on a narrative that was not planned out all the way.  The complete freedom to transcend the normal need of pandering to an audience’s good guy/bad guy, who to root for expectation.  Who am I supposed to root for here?  If I do this, will they like me?  All the sad catering that actors feel necessary to do.  Let’s just do it and not worry about whether the audience is going to hold her up as a moral paragon or try to get the audience to take sides with her, root for her as if it were a baseball game.  All of these things were a given with her.  She didn’t ask any of the questions that a dreary actor would under those circumstances.  Are they going to like me?  What is the arc of the story?  You hear phrases like that and you just… you puke.  None of the things you don’t want to hear, everything you do want to hear, and more.  And when someone gets it, when they laugh at the right time, you build a great rapport.  You’re open to their ideas.  And with the enormous pressure we were under to shoot this film in eleven days, there was a certain kind of energy.  There was no way to have a normal day.  Every day we were going for 20, 25 set-ups.  People would be exhausted.  Don’t worry, shoot it anyway.  Changing at the last minute.  All that was acceptable to her, even exciting to her.  Most actors would simply resign from the process.

I’m interested in the character you play, the professor.  In a way he’s no different than the other men in the film.

I felt there needed to be a classical foil.  There needed to be a guy who would come up to her, not in an obvious way, but in a not-so-subtle-as-he-thought way, who would try to exploit her sexually and I wanted to give her a chance to call him on it, and to give him a chance to admit it.  I think he’s still intending to try and fuck her.  I think his acknowledgment of it is another manipulation, and after two weeks of working with her, he is going to make another move.  And I think this character, I think Vera is at least 60% gay.  That’s my instinct on it.  I think she might find a certain amusement in twisting this guy around her finger, and maybe even doing something sexual with him.  I think his instinct about her is always going to be different than any reality.  I don’t take him at face value, however.  I think he definitely thinks something is going to happen.  I think she probably knows that too.  When she makes it clear what their relationship is going to be, she does not think it is anything more than winning that scene.  She knows they are going to go on to round two.

Would you say that this film is a comment on censorship?

In a way I think it is.  I think all these movies I do have been.  They are going right to the limit and saying, where do you intend to stop me.  At what point to feel you have to behave like the blockheaded, pinheaded retards that you are?  When you do have to exercise these absurd prejudices you have about sex?  Which is all it really amounts to.  You can have all kinds of torture people to death, cut their eyes out and force people to eat them, but you can’t show things that people do all the time.  It’s just so ludicrous.  It is what it is and it’s coming from where it’s coming from.  The thing I find depressing is the directors, writers, actors, to say nothing of the obvious studio executive are all to willing to accept it as long as they can keep making the money and plowing ahead.  No movement against it.  And I’m not going to say that this is a great moral issue in America, and whether it’s on a par with whether or not New Orleans gets obliterated in a nuclear attack, but I do feel that it’s a significant issue, and since there are so many stupid political issues that come up every year and everybody’s talking about this one this year and this one the next year, that it might be that this issue has some real validity.  And it’s not just about protecting the right of actors and directors to do what they want to do, it’s something greater than that, which is independence of thought and speech.  And I’m not talking about obscenity and the rating board.  It’s the whole question of final cut.  They idea that a corporation cam tamper with a work of art whether it’s good or bad is irrelevant.  It’s about the fact that since I bought your movie, I own it.  And since I own it, I can change it.  Yeah I bought it the way you liked it, but now I’m going to make it the way I like it, and there’s nothing you can do about it.  There’s that whole conversation between Godard and Fritz Lang on the DVD of Contempt, which was in the late ‘60’s – I don’t know if it’s still true now, that is that France was the only company at the time that it’s a law that you cannot buy a work of art and change it.  Whereas every other country in the world you can.  You buy it, it’s property, and you can do whatever you want with it.  And I think the movie itself deals with these questions indirectly.  You deal with rules and laws, and there is an anarchic spirit in this character.  They are all apolitical.  They all act as though there are no laws and no rules, none of them has any respect for laws or for rules, none of the main characters in this movie.  They’re all in their own way violating all moral and political scriptures and boundaries.  That to me is much more interesting.  Don’t just take it for granted.  There is a much wider range of dramatic possibility if you do that.

Have you ever thought about trying to do something with fellow filmmakers to try and change the system?

I have.  It’s simply not significant enough to them.  People want to get the next movie made and make the most money they can make.  The atmosphere is so anti-sexual, asexual, against sexual, so people are not interested in doing it anyway.

If the rating board was not a consideration, would you have done this film any differently?

I probably would have done this movie just about the same way.  I would have let them do their scene the same way.  What they did, I loved.  Shower masturbation scene I would have shot the same way.  I thought that was great.  The scene with Fred Weller fucking her from behind, I think the main point was the emotional anguish.  And I certainly would have done the scene with Dominic the same way.  I like that.  It’s the biggest age difference in the history of movies.  There’s never been a sex scene where there has been any kissing or any contact between two people of such wide age disparity.

What about Harold and Maude?

They don’t actually get physical.  They’re supposed to do it, but you don’t actually see it.  It’s one thing to say, hey, they’re fucking.  It’s another thing to see it.

Do you think she feels used by all the guys?

I think she feels that they took her too lightly and took her for granted.  I think her nature is somewhat vengeful and angry.  You see it in the relationship with her father.  Her father is a guy who tries to control her and dominate her.  She does not brook his domination.  She’ll take his money, but she won’t let him control her.  Her empathy and sympathy is with the mother, who has been pretty much defeated by him and is sort of drinking her way through life.  And I think that sense of being someone who can get what she wants from a situation without giving up what she wants is kind of natural to her.  And I think with the two me is sort of existential.  It’s going by minute by minute and she’s deciding as it goes along what she is going to do.  The scene with Dominic, which is very delicately calibrated, and unlike the rest of the movie planned beat by beat, and it shows how she is literally taking each moment and making the most of it and arriving at each conclusion as the moment occurs.  The only time he gains the upper hand, and it’s just for a minute is after he gives her the million dollars.  She kind up ups the ante.  It’s not as if the scene started and she thought she could bump him up to a million dollars.  When he finally brings back the million dollars, he gains the upper hand by leaving.  Except he doesn’t leave.  He allows her to regain the terrain by saying, what’s your rush, and allowing him to come back.  He should have, he would still be alive if he would have said, you know, call me sometime if you’re interested and left.  Then it really would have sunk in, but he was so eager to fuck her.

Are men really willing to give themselves up that easily?

I think I could name without coming up for air about 30 rich, famous, established, successful guys who have turned themselves into helpless, pathetic buffoons because of a woman.  I will say, just because it’s in the news and I’m not revealing anything new, I found this whole saga of Kirk Kerkorian quite fascinating.  Here’s the most powerful and successful businessman in the world, or close to it.  You could make a case between Kerkorian and Murdoch.  Kerkorian basically controls Las Vegas, owns nine hotels, and he’s also the biggest American shareholder of Chrysler-Daumler.  Immensely successful guy over a sixty year period in business, and he marries this fourth rate tennis player – a professional tennis player, but not a highly ranked player, who’s 55, 60 years younger, has a child with her, and suddenly she announces that she’s getting divorced and wants a lot more money than he’s ready to give, even though what he’s ready to give was an astronomical amount.  Now there’s where he draws the line and says, I better check this out.  Turns out he’s not the father of the child, that Steve Bing was the father of the child, which they found out by going through Steve Bing’s garbage and getting the DNA off his toothbrush.  Now he doesn’t have to pay any money to the woman or to the child.  Here’s my point.  How did a guy of Kirk Kerkorian’s sophistication, experience, knowledge and power marry someone who was looking to hustle him that way?  Not go out to dinner with her once, not have three dates and not catch it on any of the three dates, but marry her.  You would think that’s a mismatch of epic proportions.  27 year old would-be tennis player against Kirk Kerkorian.  We’re not even in the same universe, and yet, had it not been for her greed it all would worked out according to plan.  The only thing that stymied that was that she wanted even more than the massively generous settlement that was already offered.

Do you see yourself remaining on the outside?  Do you want to work within the system?

I’m always ready to take a lot of money from anybody.  I don’t mean just to put in my pocket, but to make a movie with.  But under the right conditions.  I can’t do it if I’m not going to be able to do the movie I want to do.  Right now the studio system is constituted in such a way that except if you’ve made a few massive hits and if you are well connected and have loads of friends, and kind of generous budget is going to scrutinized, the movie is going to scrutinized, the script, the actors, the changes you want to make, that to me would be counterproductive to the point of defeating.  So I would rather do it for much less money, and do it the way I want, and then try to sell it to a distributor.  I don’t know.  I think it’s getting worse, not better.  Costs are getting higher.  Average cost of a movie now is $68 million dollars, $30 million dollars of marketing money, every time you go in it’s a hundred million dollar investment.  The climate is one of everything pushed into the middle and terror of everything out on the edges.  And that’s going to get more and more that way, not less and less.

Are you working on anything now?

I have a movie that I owe Sony for three years, which will be an expensive movie, which I think unconsciously I haven’t finished because I’m dreading facing the whole drama that will occur.  It will probably result in my going out and making the movie for less money, unless they want to give me the money I want and not put a gun to my head about what I can and can’t do.

What’s it about?

It’s a kind of epic movie about a guy’s life from 11 years old to middle age, starts with male prostitution, ends with movie direction.

When Will I Be Loved opened in theaters on September 10, 2004.