CATCHING UP WITH NICHOLAS MEYER

TAKING HIS CUE FROM THE GREAT FRENCH DIRECTOR ROBERT BRESSON, NICHOLAS MEYER STRIVES TO MAKE THE PUBLIC WANT WHAT HE WANTS

Premiere Issue (P. 10)

By Deborah Gilels

In his three decades in the entertainment industry writer/director Nicholas Meyer has helped immortalize Kirk and Spock with his work on three Star Trek movies, directed films starring, among others, Tom Hanks and Pierce Brosnan, adapt his first novel The Seven Percent Solution into a screenplay and get nominated for an Academy Award for it, then go on to direct a controversial HBO movie, The Day After, that would ultimately influence then President Reagan to negotiate with Gorbachev, thus ending the Cold War.

Yet this profoundly talented and humble man will insist that this is only what he has accomplished "so far." Taking a break from adapting Michel Faber's bestseller The Crimson Petal and White for Paramount, Meyer sits with Daria's Deborah Gilels to discuss the highlights of his prolific career, the present depressed state of the film business and the kind of films he hopes will be made in the future.

Deborah Gilels: You've been a player in the movie business for 3 decades, what highlights of your career are most special to you?

Nicholas Meyer: Well, I would have to say the most special "so far" - I don't like to think of myself as retired (laughs). Clearly the highlights for me were my breakthrough novel The Seven Percent Solution and the film that came of it - my Oscar nomination, my directing debut with Time After Time, my involvement with the Star Trek movies, the television anti nuclear film The Day After. Certainly a high point for me was going to India for Merchant Ivory and making The Deceivers. And there have been other highlights that are in a way more private which is to say I've written screenplays that I'm extremely proud of that may never have gotten made or been made badly.

DG: Which films and screenplays are you talking about?

NM: Somersby, The Human Stain, or just some of the ones that never got filmed at all…there was a screenplay I wrote about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge.

DG: When you wrote the novel The Seven Percent Solution, what drew you to Sherlock Holmes and the Sigmund Freud angle?

NM: As a kid I loved reading the Sherlock Holmes stories and like most kids when I plowed through all sixty of them, I started to make up stories of my own. My father was a psychoanalyst in New York and his work, solving people's problems, seemed to me like detective work and after fifteen years of mulling that one over, I came up with the idea of Holmes meeting Freud. He and Arthur Conan Doyle might well have been aware of each other - Arthur Conan Doyle had been to Vienna for six months studying ophthalmology - and Freud had embraced the use of cocaine as an anesthetic with two eye doctors in Vienna…well that's a lot of coincidences so I found myself wondering what could I do with all these coincidences and went from there.

DG: How did you get involved with the Star Trek movies?

NM: After I directed my first film Time After Time, I was trying to get another project off the ground - a novel by Robertson Davies called Fifth Business - to no avail. I was obsessed with it and didn't want to do anything else. Then, a friend who was an executive at Paramount said, "You know if you want to learn how to direct you should keep directing instead of staying at home like a spoiled child waiting for your dream project to be financed - there's a producer on the lot at Paramount named Harve Bennett who I think you would like - and he's in charge of putting together the next Star Trek movie." I asked her if that was the one with the guy with pointy ears, when she said yes, I told her no and then she told me stop being an asshole and sit down with him. So I did and I found out that I liked him a lot, I still do, and he showed me several episodes of the original television series and the first Star Trek movie and it reminded me of the Captain Hornblower books by C.S.Forester, about an English sea captain during the Napoleonic Wars and his adventures -to me this was Captain Hornblower only in outer space. So, I had a point of view going in and was not inhibited by reverence because I never had watched it before.

DG: And then what came next?

NM: The Day After - a movie about nuclear war. I was called a traitor on the editorial page of the New York Post and they also said that I was trying to do Yuri Andropov's work for him! The movie almost didn't get on the air - it was very cut up and censored and all the sponsors had fled so there were no commercials. Who knew that movie would change Ronald Reagan's s mind about a winnable nuclear war as his memoirs acknowledge it did - he then went and negotiated with Gorbachev - all because he saw the movie. In doing the movie I was actually hoping to help unseat Reagan (laughs), but instead helped him change his mind.

DG: In 1985, you directed Tom Hanks and the late John Candy in the comedy film Volunteers. What convinced you to direct a comedy?

NM: Volunteers was sent to me as a screenplay. I read it and laughed like hell. I have a philosophy, which is that I never really want to do the same thing twice. So when I was presented with the screenplay of Volunteers and Tom Hanks and John Candy were cast, I thought oh great let's just go and do this.

DG: How did you end up directing The Deceivers?

NM: My agent got an offer from Ishmael Merchant for me to direct The Deceivers, and I had actually read the novel by John Masters. In fact, I read all his novels and really liked them. The Deceivers was grand fun and just an extraordinary experience in India and to be making that movie and Pierce (Brosnan) and I have remained friends ever since.

DG: What drew you to adapting The Crimson Petal and White and paring down all 800 plus pages?

NM: When I read it, it seemed like an unexpurgated Charles Dickens novel - it was all that Dickens couldn't write because he really couldn't write about fallen women. And it had the kind of happy ending that I could really get behind because I thought it was so earned, and I just remembered looking at that book when it was delivered and thinking I was looking at Mt. Everest because it was so big - but when I started reading it and couldn't stop!

DG: How has the business changed since you began your career in the 1970's?

NM: Well, I'm afraid they're not changes for the better. With the absorption of movie studios by corporations the economics of making movies have changed enormously and so have the personnel and as a result finally so have the movies.

So the first thing that has changed is that many of these companies in swallowing each other up have acquired such vast debt that the only use they have for movie studios is to try to fund the debt - so they aren't interested in making movies anymore, they are only interested in making money.

There's a race to the bottom and if you keep appealing to the lowest common denominator you disenfranchise the older, more educated, more affluent part of the audience in favor of teenagers and you keep on insulting them with stupider and stupider movies, wind up movies and movies that are about nothing…so you sort of dilute the culture and you make movies that nobody wants to see, which is I guess what happened this summer.

DG: A lot seems to have changed even since the mid-90's when I was a development and production executive - movies I sold back then or produced would probably not even be made today.

NM: Now, the people making the movies or deciding what movies get made have no involvement with movies per se, they are the henchmen of the corporations and answerable to the corporations. There is no development department, there are no scripts in development - that's all changed, that's gone - there is no attempt made to find or recapture the broader audience or to be ambitious - these days to be ambitious is to be pretentious.

It's very interesting what has happened in my neighborhood on the Westside of Los Angeles. A defunct 50's movie theater that was abandoned was taken over by the American Cinemateque - and they've started running good movies. And the place is packed every night. Saturday night I went with 10 friends of mine to see Some Like it Hot. And the place was packed and the whole theatrical experience of going to the movies, not sitting there with three people in the theater or watching some comic book - but seeing something that was simply hilarious and brilliant and it was like we were in a time warp. I saw The Godfather there, I saw Gone With the Wind - I even saw my film The Wrath of Khan there two weeks ago and every night that place is packed with people who are starving to see a good movie.

So, it seems that what's changed is that movies themselves have disappeared - now to go to the movies is to go to a wind-up toy - and its a sort of check your mind at the door and you see something that you don't want to see. They seem largely joyless, formulaic, synthetic, and of course as part of a reflection of the political climate that we live -very self censored.

DG: Now, you've written and directed a wide range of genres that include thriller, sci-fi, action, drama and comedy. In today's film business, I think it's a lot more difficult for a filmmaker to work in so many different genres - do you agree? And, if so, what advice cans you give to a young writer who thinks he's equally capable in a myriad of genres?

NM: Well, in my experience if the work is good enough people don't care who wrote it and they don't care what it is and if you write a screenplay that is really terrific it will certainly at the very least provide you with some kind of entree - provided you get people to read it.

I had a conversation the other day and was talking about an idea for a film and somebody said, "Well, who is going to go see that?" I said I am and then told him my philosophy: I write the books that I would like to read - I write or direct the movies that I would like to go to - but I do not try to second guess the opinions of millions of people that I do not know or have never met - I make a different assumption - as Robert Bresson once said - "my job is to make the public want what I want." That's the best advice I can give a filmmaker. D

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