COLLINGS:
Today is December 22nd ,
Jane Collings interviewing Rick Carter at the Young Research Library,
and we’ll start at the very beginning and hear about where and when you
were born.
CARTER:
I was born March 24th, 1950, at St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, and
my parents, Ruth and Richard Carter, had been married I think for just a
couple of years. My mother was twenty-five—I think, yeah, that’s
right—and they lived at a farm in the San Fernando Valley, so I grew up
there for the first—I guess it must be four years of my life. It was
walnut groves and orange groves, and there was farm animals. So it was
fun to be in the Valley, as I remember, because there was a lot of heat,
but one of those sort of wide-open places where you could always just be
outside and go. And my earliest memories are of kind of tinkering around
with fire trucks and making my own little worlds, whether it was some
kind of something I would draw, or I remember my father had a blueprint
model of the house that we were in and some additions that were going to
be done, and I was just fascinated by the concept that you could be in a
space the way you are normally, but there was another perspective that
was sort of an above, overall, I suppose, godlike perspective that you
could sort of strategize and track how you were in that space, but not
necessarily the way you perceived it on your own.
COLLINGS:
How interesting to be looking at the blueprints of your own space.
0:02:57.4
CARTER:
And I think that was the way that I first had that be an intimate
experience where it was not so much formal, as that I understood it
represented something that I could get my head down into. So there’s
something about looking at a plan and almost imagining that it is an
overhead shot from a movie in which you boom down and then you are
actually looking at the same perspective, only from within the space
itself, and then even you can move within it, which is sort of like a
camera position.
In fact, just the other day, I was trying to place a set piece in a
larger context to try to figure out how it would work, particularly
because there were already existing poles that we had to work around,
and I found myself doing that kind of boom-down shot to see, well, what
would that look from here. It’s hitting these marks, meaning from above
it’s now not interfering with certain parameters that I wanted to make
sure were clear, but then I would have to kind of look at it as though I
was actually down at ground level or eye level around five feet. And I
was doing that in my mind, and I hadn’t really thought about it until
just now that it probably goes all the way back to that kind of looking
and being fascinated that that point of view existed.
COLLINGS:
Right, and being very aware of living within three-dimensional space,
which is something we don’t think about.
0:05:26.9
CARTER:
That’s right. And I think the other aspect was, probably at that time,
if I think about it, because since I was very young, I was still at the
point in the first two and a half years of my life when I had crossed
eyes, so I was not—I’ve never seen with both eyes at the same time. I
don’t see the same thing. I have a far-side eye and a near-side eye, so
it switches back and forth, which creates a kind of a duality in which
I’m not seeing normal 3D. I don’t see the depth perception that comes
from seeing 3D from two different points of vantage. But I think that I
was internalizing something that relates to the disparity of those two
points of view so that even when I’m mentioning this blueprint and the
looking at it from another point of view, even if I imagine then taking
it to the object that I was referring to, like a fire truck, and then
seeing the fire truck from above as I could hold it, but also getting
down to its level so now I’m at the level as though it’s big, that kind
of disparity of point of view. In fact, probably, the way my eyes are
set up, if I was looking at it from any distance from above, I would
have been looking at it with my left eye, which is the far-side eye, and
when I come down close and be more intimate, it’s with the right eye.
And so that kind of gap, even from a young age, I think formed the basis
of not just how I look at the world and do my own art work—for instance,
the work that I’ve done, in a sense, commercially, it’s like I had a
personal side that was the painter that I used my right for, the
up-close-and-personal eye, and I had a left eye, which was the more Pop
art, landscape, distant eye that became the basis of my production
design in movies. I’ve always sort of likened it to being as though I
was—somebody who had something that was intimate as an art form—writing
or painting or, in this case, both—but also had this other thing that I
went out into the world with, and in some ways it was not as intimate or
as vulnerable going out, so it allowed me to go further with it and not
sort of have those personal things held up to, I suppose, ridicule, is
what the fear becomes.
COLLINGS:
So it’s a duality that is actually physically embodied.
CARTER:
And I think that that’s the key through-line of my life, starting even
in my birth, of always finding myself in the middle of two disparate
points of reference, that I find myself in the middle, sort of like a
very strong ambivalence. You know, it’s not a weak point of view. And so
whenever I hear it in the way people talk, I always can locate that sort
of metaphorically as a place. I refer to it as minding the gap, that
there’s a gap—like in the subways in London between the platform and the
train. But I love the idea that in minding it, it’s evoking that you’re
supposed to put your mind or your consciousness into the gap, and I just
thought that was a very poetic way of looking at it. And I know this
doesn’t really reference the exterior part of growing up in Los Angeles,
but in a funny way, I suppose it is an entrée into that, which I could
illuminate a little bit.
COLLINGS:
Yes, do.
CARTER:
Anyplace that anybody lives, they’ve got their interior world and then
they’ve got their exterior world where they are, and what the social
times are, what other people are doing, how prosperous it is, how
desperate the situation is. Los Angeles, for me, has always been a
relatively benign place where I can’t say that I ever experienced
anything that was radically desperate. I’ve had my best family
experiences of having a long-term marriage and kids, so there’s a
continuity in that regard, and I’ve lived, in my times, in Hollywood,
and the West Side of Los Angeles all the way even going back—we were
just looking at this article about the long-hair riot at “Pali” High. I
was there, and it was sort of the awakening of this whole other way of
thinking about, essentially, masculinity. Really what it boils down to,
I think, is there was a rebellion about the male image, actually,
because a lot of the ways that people would try to say you shouldn’t
have your hair long was to say that then you weren’t masculine.
COLLINGS:
And specifically, as you pointed out earlier, it was a few football
players that were pushing back against the—
CARTER:
Right. Well, there was these dress codes, right, and they would tell you
that you had to be a certain way, but then there was so much in the pop
culture coming from The Beatles and all of the new things that were
happening in the sixties that said to you that you wanted to be a
different way. So whenever you tried to go that way, you were being
blocked, so then there was a demonstration about why do they have the
right to do that, which was sort of part and parcel of a lot of things
that were being asked at that time. It was like whose rights should be
heard and where do they come from? So the football players, they were
upset that this other idea was being propagated, and they were probably
being sort of—what’s the word—encouraged by their coaches, too, because
it was anathema that that would be the male model. But so those were
life and times issues. They weren’t particularly violent in the scheme
of where things went to. When I left Los Angeles and I went up to
Berkeley in the late sixties as a college student, it was, of course,
much more violent and turbulent from 1968 through the early seventies as
far as rebellion and the rioting and the confrontations, you know, the
no-business-as-usual aspects of what was going on with the protest
movement, mostly about either civil rights or the war in Vietnam. So the
war in Vietnam was probably the first outside thing that affected my
life. If I think about, as I mentioned, having the crossed eyes, that
was rectified in a surgery process over the course of a year when I was
young, but never really went away. But it was a significant thing for my
development and my life and the way I look at the world. The war in
Vietnam, when the draft came knocking, that created another situation in
which that’s the outside world knocking in to my inside world and
demanding that I make a decision as to how I felt about things.
COLLINGS:
And you were eligible for the draft?
CARTER:
I was eligible for the draft in 1968, so right after this event at
“Pali” High, which is 1966—I would have been sixteen—I was seventeen and
had to decide how I felt about the Vietnam War. So I did a lot of study
about it, and I determined that I really was against my going there. I
didn’t feel like I was against all war, which was the way you were
supposed to be able to state your case if you wanted to be a
conscientious objector. If it had been World War II, I didn’t feel that
that was a war that I would have stayed away from if drafted because it
was a different set of circumstances. This one I could never get my head
around who we were fighting and for what reason. I mean, in general, I
could understand the Domino Theory ideas of those years with the
communists taking over the world and we had to stop them in certain
places, but it seemed like whenever we would take something, we would
have to give it up, and there were these things like you’d have to bomb
and destroy a village to save it, or the people that you were putting
into power and propping were sort of worse, almost, than the ones that
you were fighting against. And so I became a conscientious objector and
I applied for it, and the amazing thing was that I got the status okayed
by the draft board.
COLLINGS:
So how did you go through the whole process?
CARTER:
Well, the process is first you fill out an application, and they ask you
to tell what’s the nature of your belief. And I drew upon—I was not a
Christian in the sort of traditional sense, but I’d been born and raised
in a relatively Christian-background household, and so I started seeking
out the aspects of Jesus and Christianity that were more on the peace
side of the doctrine. And basically, I really tried to listen to my own
conscience, and wrote a piece that was very heartfelt and it was very
real to me. I didn’t think that it would actually work, necessarily.
There were so many people at that time.
COLLINGS:
That’s what I’m thinking, yeah.
CARTER:
Well, I think that what happened was, from what I know—and I also worked
at it with other people in the sense that I was part of a group when we
were at Berkeley to help with draft counseling, but when I wrote this
was before that. I went to my grandmother’s house in Carmel and I wrote
this, and I didn’t know how this would affect my dad.
COLLINGS:
Your dad?
CARTER:
My father, in terms of his own feelings about his son refusing to go. He
didn’t go to World War II because he was diabetic, but he was very
patriotic, but he understood that this was a different war and I had to
make my own choices, and so it didn’t really cause a terrible rift at
all. What ended up happening was my grandmother, I didn’t know at the
time, had been somebody who had been a Quaker, even, and had been sort
of a radical in her politics from all the way back from being a
suffragette in the—
COLLINGS:
Really? How interesting.
0:15:38.7
CARTER:
Yeah. So she was a very, very strong woman who also was very supportive,
and it wasn’t until going up to her place and starting to discuss this
that I found that I was, to some degree, within a family tradition, so I
didn’t feel alienated as some people do, especially in those eras when
you had to make a choice that took you outside of the norm of your
family or your background.
What I think happened with the draft board was they were so overwhelmed
with people applying for conscientious objector, and I actually applied
in Berkeley, and I didn’t do this strategically, but that’s where—I was
seventeen right when I started school, almost eighteen, and I turned
eighteen—it was on March 24th in 1968. And I think what they did is they
just had a quota of the number that they were going to give for COs. I
think they put the names in a hat and I think they just picked them out,
and then that way they didn’t have to go through a process them. And
then everybody else they were going to put through a difficult process
to try to become a conscientious objector, or they’d have to resist the
draft or they’d have to do something crazy like people did in those
days. So I got the conscientious objector status. Then that meant that I
did not have to serve in a combat role, but I would have to be a medic.
If I dropped out of school, for instance, then I’d be eligible for the
draft and I’d have to go in as a medic, or if I refused, then I would
have to leave the country or I’d have to go to jail.
So I decided to stay in school, and so I had the 2-S deferment until a
year and a half from them, was in the December of 1969 there was the
first what they called a bingo draft lottery, which meant that they put
all the birthdates as Ping-Pong balls into this fishbowl and they picked
them out one at a time. So the order that they were picked out was the
order that people would be drafted, and they thought that they would get
up to about 180 of the 365 days of the year, and I had a number that was
more like 220, so I felt pretty assured, because the war was drafting
less and less people, but there was still a lot of people. So in 1969 at
Christmastime, my father had inherited some money from a great-aunt, and
he said—since he knew I was—it was very tumultuous, what I wanted out of
things, and he’d actually just been going through having radiation for
cancer. So he had a little bit of money that he was given, and for
Christmas he gave me a check—my mom and him gave me a check for $3,000,
and they said, “This is how much we spent for you all of last year to go
to school and all your living expenses.” That’s how much it cost in
those days—
COLLINGS:
Yeah, wow.
CARTER:
—for living and everything, and including going to UC. And they said,
“You no longer seem to be in threat of being made to go over to Vietnam
if you drop out of school, so you can take this money and do what you
want with it.” Now, underlying that, I always felt there was a kind of a
message, which was, “You here now have the resources to do what you
want. Don’t keep coming back to us and complaining about the world and
how terrible it is and what you feel about everything as though we’re
supposed to fix it,” not because they were someone who tuned out as much
as they were tuned in enough to know that I need to not just have a
place to come complain all the time and act out. And I had acted out a
couple of times where, for instance, when I came back in 1968 from
Berkeley and I was going to go to Chicago to protest the National
Convention for the Democratic Party, and my mother was—we had a nice
meal, and my mother was asking, “Is there some way that you can make
your voice known and protest without getting your head beaten in?” in a
very—
COLLINGS:
Very sort of conversational tone.
CARTER:
And motherly kind of just—and I just was scoffing and seething on the
inside as I’m scarfing down this hard-cooked—
COLLINGS:
Lovely meal.
CARTER:
—lovely meal that I’m taking for granted entirely. So just about where
you are across from me, my father actually had the expression similar to
the one that you have, which is just this kind of smile, and he asked
me, he said, “While you’re trying to change the world, can you see any
humor in any of this?”
COLLINGS:
That’s a really interesting question.
CARTER:
Well, the blood just went up to my head.
COLLINGS:
Wow.
CARTER:
I was immediately furious. I took the whole table and I lifted it up and
I said, “What’s so funny about war and racism?”
COLLINGS:
Well, that’s a very good question as well.
0:21:56.0 0:24:17.5 0:26:53.5
CARTER:
And I stomped out, and, you know, the dog went and finished my meal. And
then he came in about twenty minutes later and he said, “This is not
what you think it is. We’re not arguing this as though we’re going to
solve this. We could have political arguments and whatever, but you’re
acting on a whole other level here that is getting to you, which for
good reason, but, nonetheless, you can’t take it out like this on us.”
And I heard him, which was good, and from that point on, there was more
of a détente in that way, but it also led to this gift that he gave,
which was basically to say—now as a sixty-seven-year-old person, I can
look back and think from his point of view, he’s just trying to do what
he can to give his child or young man, adult, in this case, the
resources to make some choices where he can begin to see how the world
really is or isn’t for him.
So I ended up taking that money, and I dropped out of college in March
of 1970. I set off just to Europe and around the world and ended up
traveling for ten months till Christmas and went all the way around the
world. In fact, I came back, I had $3,000 when I left and I had 500 left
when I hit Hong Kong, and bought my dad a Nikon camera and then came
back. And I’ve continued sort of to travel ever since. I went back two
years later to Asia to sort of continue what I hadn’t finished in that
area of the world, and then through my work as a production designer,
I’ve continued to travel. And that trip, going to all those places and
having an identity quest at the same time as to who I was and wanting to
find that out and being in foreign places allowed me to personalize that
part of the experience, whether it was good or bad.
It was not like being a tourist or on vacation. And I only called home
once for the entire time, which now I think, oh, my god, what I put my
parents through. And also I have a lot of the letters from those times,
which is nice to see because it gives me a real insight into how I was
and what I was thinking about. There was a point in the trip halfway
through where all my mail was lost, and that’s what prompted the phone
call home just to connect in real time. That seemed a very magical
moment to be able to call and to be talking in real time with people who
were close to me but were being delayed by two weeks, three weeks, four
weeks in any interaction with them, and that kind of distance and then
closeness, again, it’s part of that duality that I’m very aware of, and
the traveling, it can be a very strong experience when it gets into in a
deep way, because it brings up all of those kinds of experiences over
and over again.
You can come to a foreign place and be so distant from it. You can come
to a foreign place and feel so intimate with it. You can meet people
that you have no reason to talk to, and maybe can barely talk to, and
find intimate conversation in—I call them park-bench meetings where you
can go off and, having talked for maybe an hour or something about
something, and then you go off and then never see the person again. The
distance between those kinds of experiences—and I suppose that that’s
what I view, is a do a lot of minding that distance—whether it’s a
physical geographical distance or it’s an intimate part, I pay a lot of
attention to that kind of—whether it’s gray matter or geographical
distance. So what I’ve just described, in a sense, from starting in
Santa Monica and moving in and out, that kind of patterning, it’s almost
like an EKG or an MRI, of going to levels, right? And then they almost
hit like a spiritual level.
Like, if you go to conscience and conscientious objection, you’re at a
spiritual level because you’re looking for faith in something that’s
guiding you as to what’s the moral thing that you should do, how do you
feel deeply about, and that you hope is not transitional, that it will
guide you, once you’ve connected it with it, it’ll have ways of finding
its ways into your consciousness. That range, both the geographical part
of it, the confrontation with the social aspects of whether it’s the
long-hair riot or the war in Vietnam, to personal things that happen
such as having crossed eyes and surgery—for instance, with the surgery,
I ruined the first surgery because I took the bandages off too soon. I
woke up as a two-and-a-half-year-old and took the bandages off, and the
nurse, to this day I can remember, came in and said, “Now you can’t go
home.” And if you think about “Now you can’t go home” as a message and
what does it mean, that’s why in watching, let’s say, like, The Wizard
of Oz, which is the staple of my childhood, and it was a version of a
Hollywood way of telling you about this deep story about leaving home
and coming back home and what have you learned from being away.
And virtually all of the movies that I’ve worked on have been journey
movies that embody that kind of a motif, so the very patterning of these
first twenty years that I’m describing, from being in Los Angeles, the
film capital, the dream factory, and then the good dream, the bad dream,
the personal dream, the social dream, and then starting to play that
out, because I was always into the heroes of my fantasies, whether it
was Zorro or Tarzan or Thief of Bagdad. I mean, all of those aspects of
Hollywood iconography I began to live once I went into the world, and
I’d come to places and they would resonate as though these are places
I’ve seen in the movies that I grew up with, that I already know them,
even though now it’s the real version. I mean, when I was in East
Africa, we were going up the Nile and all these crocodiles and hippos
and giraffes and eagles and all this amazing wildlife, and I was
thinking—I just couldn’t help but comment, I said, “This is just like
the Jungle Land tour at Disneyland.” [laughter]
COLLINGS:
That’s right. [laughs]
0:28:50.2
CARTER:
Because that was my point of reference, and yet those were
intimate-enough early versions that now I was not supplanting them; I
was supplementing them now with these new real-life experiences. So that
kind of melding of the fantasy that was actually already intimate not
just because I’d watched the movie but because I grew up in Hollywood,
and I grew up in Hollywood with my father involved with Jack Lemmon, the
actor, the superstar actor, and so I was aware of even the process of
making the movies.
I’d seen that The Pit and the Pendulum blade, that there was this
threatening thing, and I’d been on the set and seen that it was made out
of balsa wood. And I’d been to the set of Zorro and understood—it was
black and white when I saw it on TV, but it had certain colors, and
those colors were even designed a certain way, like whites were blue or
beige because that’s how it photographed better. So there was a lot of
things that seeped in on that level as well as culturally, how to
interface and interact with people in Hollywood and what they were like,
what their egos are like, what the patterns are, what people’s agendas
are like. I always refer to it now as casual fascism. It all looks very
relaxed, people wearing blue jeans, maybe, as though they’re not really
judging, but they’re just judging incredibly harshly, just as much as in
New York City, it’s just they don’t tell you. It just means that you
just don’t get your phone call returned.
COLLINGS:
Now, did you have a sense of that growing up?
CARTER:
I didn’t so much. I think I heard about it, but it didn’t affect my
life, although, in retrospect, there were things that I heard, like
Academy Award-winning screenwriters who would come over to my house, or
our house, and I would overhear them saying things like, “I can’t
believe that producer just pissed on my script,” and I thought it was
literal. I thought, “Why would he do that? Even we don’t do that.” You
know, like, I’m five years old.
COLLINGS:
Even we in elementary don’t do that.
CARTER:
Yeah, in elementary school we know better than—that’s a very not nice
thing to do, and it seems shocking to me. So there was attitudes, what
people suffered over, particularly the writers, but I think that I had
it absorbed into my system without really knowing about—I certainly
didn’t want anything to do with it in the early seventies as far as—I
mean the late sixties, early seventies, because it just didn’t seem like
a shallow thing that was just kind of not the—but when I came back from
traveling around the world, my father produced a movie called Kotch, so
I offered up my services to—because I wanted to start working and doing
something. It was a joke when I was traveling, I would think to
myself—I’d heard it from somewhere, that “Work fascinates me. I can sit
and watch it for hours.” But I knew that that wasn’t a life that I
really wanted, but I didn’t know what to do other than my own art work,
and as I was discovering in the early seventies, that was not an easy
route to making a living.
And also it made me have to be alone even more than I really wanted to.
I’d been alone so much during that trip around the world that I think it
brought out of me how much I really liked collaborating and interfacing
with people, making them laugh and laughing at what they would do, so
the few times when I was traveling when I was around people, that I
could relax. There was a place in Kenya with the Maasai warriors where
we were building a medical center for a few weeks, and there was a group
of maybe thirty of us, mostly black Kenyan children my age, but there
was three or four other white people. So the group of us, all of us,
would just have a great time just making each other laugh and doing
crazy, absurd things, and that was a big relief to me, because I had
missed that. I hadn’t been around my friends or goofing around. I’d just
been either in a foreign place or around people I didn’t know or off on
the great traveler’s grapevine where the people were very judgmental.
COLLINGS:
And you referred to it as “the hippie trail,” so I was wondering how you
were defining that and who you met.
CARTER:
Well, people in the late sixties started going to Europe partly as a
travel—some of them were just leaving the country because of the war,
and they didn’t know what—going into exile. In fact, at one point, it
said if you want to meet an American student, it’s better to go to
Europe this summer than anywhere else, because that’s where you’ll find
them, and they’ll be looking perhaps to meet you. But I was leaving
because I wanted more experience. I’d been in 1967 to Europe for a
short—more of a tour with a friend, but at this time was leaving in an
indefinite way. And so there was a trail that essentially went from
Europe through the Middle East through Afghanistan to Pakistan to India
and through India up to Kathmandu in Nepal. That was sort of the hippie
trail.
COLLINGS:
At stops like Goa.
0:34:40.9
CARTER:
Yeah, that’s right. I never went down to Goa, but I made my way—I went
all the way down to East Africa first and came back up through the
Seychelles on a British India steamship going third class, and then I
came up to Pakistan and then went over to Amritsar. In fact, I still
wear this bracelet, a Sikh bracelet from Amritsar. And then I went up to
Srinagar into the Himalayas, and I really fell in love with being in the
Himalayas.
So I came back down to Delhi, I went back up into the Kullu Valley in
the Himalayas, and that’s where I first encountered Tibetan refugees,
and I was really fascinated by them as people, had just incredible
dignity and intelligence in a way that I just—and such poverty, but it
didn’t, at least at that point, consume them in a way that so many other
places it did. And the Himalayas were just this magnificent presence
that really—it was like being in frozen waves—
COLLINGS:
Oh, how wonderful.
CARTER:
—and very spiritual. So I made it finally to Kathmandu, and there’s a
place where the hippie trail kind of came to the end. It’s where people
had pie shops, and hashish was legal, and you would just get stoned and
sit around and pontificate and think about things and interact. And it
was kind of a lost place in a way. Like, it was a lost horizon of an
East-meets-West kind of mishmash. You know, you’d have a Buddhist stupa
and Hindu gods and then Clearasil selling. And there was Mom’s Health
Food and pie shops. So eventually I went on a trek and had a really
magnificent trek that helped me to orient myself. Here I was halfway
around the world from home.
COLLINGS:
A trek into the wilderness?
CARTER:
Into the mountains. And asked myself questions. I got into some good
conversations with a couple people about what makes life special and how
I felt so culturally determined at that point, up to the point, by the
upper-middle-class white guy, now I’m sort of being called the problem
for everything, which that seems to have not gone away. [laughs] But at
the time, it really—
COLLINGS:
That was a weight.
CARTER:
It was a weight. I had a friend once say while we were in Berkeley, he
said, “Well, maybe the only legitimate life is that of a martyr.” And it
just seems like a sad, crazy thing. And I couldn’t even do my own art
work, I felt it was so, perhaps, frivolous, you know. But when I got
there, I began to sense I was traveling as far as I could, but I was
still taking myself with me, that old adage, “No matter where you go,
there you are.”
COLLINGS:
Exactly.
CARTER:
And had a sense that, again, I’m halfway on the journey from home,
right? I’m as far away as I could get.
COLLINGS:
Right, without starting to head back the other way around the globe.
0:38:56.5
CARTER:
So, from that point, I think I was starting to head back, and for the
next four months after that, I kind of knew I was—I didn’t know what I
was going to do or not do. But the thing that happened then—and it was
replayed later after my father died and I went back to the Himalayas,
and it became more formalized at that point because I spent a night way
up in the mountains in a virtually abandoned Tibetan temple and had, I
would say, the only just pure religious experience that I’ve had where I
could absolutely say it got me to my soul and it presented an enigma,
but one that I’ve never felt that I had to question, if that makes
sense. I never had to question its existence or its meaning to me.
Instead, it’s just fueled what I’ve experienced.
But I think the initial reason I went back to the Himalayas at that
point later, in 1978, was because I’d had this experience in 1970, and
that was being far away from home, but beginning to feel like I was
somebody, even if I was conflicted in many, many ways. I could feel my
own identity and rhythms and the yeses and the nos. Sometimes when you
think you should be saying yes and you try to say yes or you think you
should be saying no and you try to say no, and then there’s a point at
which the yeses and the nos become both part of—it’s like an arsenal of
how to get through life, but that I felt that I was using them from
another place, which was this place in the middle that could be yes and
no. And it was one of the reasons that I, I think, had been so attracted
to John Lennon and his music and his words and his philosophy, was
because he was able to, at times, articulate through his music and his
expressions and his words actual ambivalence and be strong about it.
There was that point in 1968 when he wrote the song about revolution and
said, “If it’s going to be about destruction, then count me out.” And
later he sort of did a version, he said, “Well, count me out, in.” Then
he was being interviewed by someone who was trying to put him on the
spot, “Well, which is it? You’re either in or you’re out.” He had this
way of—I still remember this interview. He just was very calm and
said—took his time, “Sometimes I feel one way and sometimes I feel
another,” and he let it just sit with that, and not have to explain, not
have to editorialize, not have to make it fit somebody else’s
expectation. And I think it’s that kind of feeling that I had the first
time in the Himalayas, that there was something bigger that I was now
comfortable with, and that the Himalayas themselves had such a spiritual
quality. They invoke something about where the Earth meets the sky and
the sky meets the Earth, and it’s like there’s this kind of—there’s just
something going on that feels dynamic, almost like if you were looking
at it, that it is a life form. And I haven’t had much experience with
that in my life. I think other people have.
Jumping ahead, I would
say Jim Cameron did at the bottom of the ocean, which is why he could
then come back from that experience and portray everything he did in
Avatar, that that’s a reflection of real nature in our world through the
lens of an artist and portrayed in cinema. And for myself, that’s the
level I think I’ve always aspired to understand and to collaborate with,
because when I’m in the presence of people who are wanting to do that
and I can see into them, the metaphors and what they’re really trying to
do, I don’t just take it at the superficial level. I dig deeper in order
to help them to see the connections that are there, I think, to be seen,
so that what their choices are, especially throughout the telling of a
story, just start to resonate more and more. Those are things that
happen from being away from home, but it’s very much, as you can
imagine, in line with you go out, like Dorothy, and you find your own
mind, your heart, courage, and that they’re manifest through other
guides, right, but it’s really about her.
COLLINGS:
Yes, she has those guides, right.
0:43:46.5
CARTER:
But they’re really speaking to that which is—I mean, all of those are
ultimately characters as though we’re in a subconscious dream, right?
But it has such a strong specific message the way it’s portrayed and the
way that particular movie impacted so many of us. In fact, it was all in
black-and-white when I was watching it for the first ten years because
it was always on TV and had a black-and-white TV, and finally I didn’t
even know until I was ten years old that it went into color when it went
into Oz. And then that’s such a big jump, and yet it’s been almost the
staple of all the work that I’ve done in movies, is to explore that
dichotomy between, again, in that case, black-and-white and color, being
at home in Kansas or being somewhere else.
In the movie Avatar when the kind of general says, “You’re not in Kansas
anymore,” that’s my line. I’m the one who said, “This is The Wizard of
Oz meets Apocalypse Now,” and so when you’re there, you’re entering into
another world that is beyond Kansas. So that’s how I see the world, but
it’s partly because of who I am and I think partly because I grew up in
Los Angeles in a Hollywood dream factory employee’s house doing public
relations that still comes into play with everything that I do, and I’m
aware of how is something even being presented.
COLLINGS:
Oh, I’m sure.
CARTER:
So I don’t know how anybody gets anything from any of this that they’ll
want to know in years to come. [laughs]
COLLINGS:
Well, I think it’s very interesting to hear—and you specifically said
“Wizard of Oz meets Apocalypse Now,” and I think that’s an interesting
way of putting it, because it’s the story of growing up within, as you
said, an upper-middle-class environment, and within the real hegemony of
American culture in a particularly pointed way, because you’re inside
the Hollywood system meets Apocalypse Now, meeting some very profound
and cataclysmic political realities that a lot of the youth of that
period were probably unprepared to grapple with. Some people would have
grown up with a lot of political discussion in their house or perhaps
other kinds of background, but most of the people who were hit with that
were completely unprepared for it and had to suddenly face a world that
was not had been advertised—
CARTER:
Right. Especially in the Hollywood way.
COLLINGS:
—growing up, right? So I just think it’s very interesting to hear this
story, which is a story of a generation traveling and getting outside of
anything familiar to try to reconcile these dominant, entirely opposing
forces.
CARTER:
I also do feel that, over time—well, there’s two levels. One is I’ve
obviously played this out for the next thirty years after this, so it
didn’t even stop. In fact, forty years, at this point almost fifty years
after the nineteen, twenty experience of traveling around the world for
a year. I’m almost seventy, so all these movies play out—I mean, the
most recent one, The Post, when you see that one, it goes back to the
beginning because it’s 1971. I mean, it’s literally home base again.
It’s not the only time I’ve hit home base, but it’s one of those
situations where people that grow up a certain way, and then how you
replicate that throughout the rest of your life. But mine has been in
the course of movies. And I didn’t create the movies; they picked me. So
the fact that I got picked to do these kinds of movies, and there’s so
many, and they’re all of a common thread, whether it’s—it was always a
journey. If it’s Back to the Future or if it’s Jurassic Park or if it’s
Amistad or Forrest Gump, Castaway, I mean, you begin to see. A.I.
Artificial Intelligence travels way into the future, and Munich, they’re
running around Europe traveling in relationship to their conscience, War
of the Worlds, Avatar, War Horse.
COLLINGS:
I even saw Lincoln, I mean that wonderful scene of the dream in the
beginning where he’s on the boat, and then all of these other locales
are—you could almost see them—I know they’re not, but you could almost
see them as occurring within the bowels of the sailing ship.
0:50:16.7
CARTER:
Well, they are, because that’s the ship of state. And he even described
it, because he had that dream, but it’s as though he’s describing ship
of state that he’s trying to bring into the harbor and to get it
somewhere, but the horizon keeps going out beyond him, so the toil that
it took and the toll that it took in order to get that ship anywhere
close to being able to land is the life’s journey that’s represented in
that dream. And the values that we’ve had—Spielberg, Zemeckis, Cameron,
myself, even some of the newer generation with J.J. Abrams—is very much
reflected from these times.
It’s reflected in the Baby Boom generation’s desire, some of us, to have
transcendent experiences that find a form of epiphany or a reason why
something’s been happening, that brings with it a catharsis so that you
can accept that your life is the way it is and that the world is the way
it is, and you find some equilibrium for some period of time. It tends
to be disrupted and then you go back into more turmoil. It’s very hard
to maintain mental peace in a kind of—that it’s all one and it’s all
fine. I mean, some people apparently do it. I would say I feel like I
move in and out of it, but that’s one of the reasons for the movies and
the paintings, whatever I do. It’s not about exorcising it as much as
expressing it and having it come back out to me in another form that I
can recognize it.
It’s only been after this length of time since 1974 when I started
working on movies till now, which is—what is it, ’80, ’90—it’s
forty-something years, almost fifty years, it’s going to be pretty soon,
of telling stories in this big social way that has a dialogue with the
world, and yet my dialogue is very much just with myself, the director
that I work with and the crew that I work with, and then try to inspire
them. But I’m not really in dialogue with the culture or the audience in
a specific way. Sometimes I do interviews and that kind of thing, but,
in general, my attention is really just to what do I perceive, why does
that mean something to me, and then how can I express that within the
context of a collaborative form, which is the moviemaking process. But I
think it is generational, and as I see some of the types of movies that
are coming up, good filmmaking and everything, but I don’t see the same
inner drive to make it either really personal, although sometimes I see
it as very personal, but to have it all amount to something so that
you—it’s sort of The Beatles’ influence, again, where you can, at the
end, say something like, “In the end, the love you take will be equal to
the love you make,” and to actually, for me, see that that just plays
out over and over and over again through all these movies.
But, as you said, it’s about going far away in order to look back, and
then be able to get back, not just stay out there and be unassociated
with that which I first knew to be my world, but can I incorporate all
that, can I bring it back? I wrote something back from when I was
traveling, and this young man that I wanted—and it was always just doing
people. That’s my art work on my own. But to go out and to make my art
work reflective of what I could perceive out in the world and then bring
it back in that way, and I even said that in 1972. So it’s amazing to
see how it’s played out, even though I certainly, at times, lost track
of that as far as being something I was thinking about, but as I get
older, because there’s a body of work to look at, I can see it in that
way. And there’s just been a serendipitousness to that travel has become
the motif by which I could have that quest or that series of
explorations, and then have a medium that would allow me to express it.
COLLINGS:
And express it in a way that has those meditative dreamlike qualities.
CARTER:
Right. And that’s been a big part of it, too, which is from the late
1960s and getting stoned and all that kind of seeing things a little bit
different and having a dreamlike quality to my perceptions, and yet they
have to be able to fit into the real world and be actionable. So,
actually, for all the dream stuff I say, I’m also incredibly pragmatic
and strategic with what I do because I don’t like to be disrupted from
the dream in some way that reality slaps me upside the head and says—you
know, I just felt like getting coldcocked by reality, because there’s a
tyranny to reality, as I perceive it sometimes, that means that it has
all the bases covered. I mean, if you go and drive on the wrong side of
the road, you’re going to have a lot of trouble making it home, so you
have to be aware of things.
Now, within that tyranny, there seems to be portals at times that
emerge, and sometimes they emerge just because the logic of certain
arguments and rational run up against something that’s coming the other
which it doesn’t hold or it contradicts itself or is hypocritical or
whatever you want, however you want to encounter, where suddenly
something opens up and you go, “Well, wait a minute. I can’t get there
from here.” liken it to the Transcontinental Railway, which it’s doing
everything—it’s touching, but you can’t run a train on it if it’s only
touching at one point. So somebody made a mistake. They could say,
“Well, what do you want? It’s touching.”
COLLINGS:
Yeah, it’s close.
CARTER:
Close. But in there is what they used to refer to—and probably still
do—it’s like Zen koans, where it’s sort of a mental thing that you can’t
quite rationalize or justify. You can only intuit it, but there’s no
other way, so that opens up something in that tyranny, although
sometimes if you really—like the Zen koan of—this is a little riff of
“You know the sound of two hands clapping, but what is the sound of one
hand clapping?” Do you know what the sound of one hand clapping is?
COLLINGS:
What?
CARTER:
. So I used to think about
that, and I was halfway around the world, and I went, “That one’s easy.”
[claps] Yay! [laughter]
COLLINGS:
Yay! Well, you’re speaking of, like, logistics and pragmatism. I mean,
there has to be a lot of logistical thought going on to navigate a
ten-month trip around the world before the Internet, no iPhone, no apps.
I mean, there’s a lot of planning that goes into that on a day-to-day
basis.
CARTER:
And I think I was always pretty pragmatic and modest in my engagement
with the world so that I was inviting the world to just—
COLLINGS:
Wreak havoc.
0:57:24.1
CARTER:
Wreak havoc and stretch—I mean, that’s one of the things that I saw so
much of in the late sixties, too, which was so many people stretching
beyond what they could sustain, and it just felt very uncomfortable. So
I was pretty conservative in many of the things I thought, but in
retrospect, I see how far I went. But I also wasn’t stupid on a
street-smarts level. I didn’t put myself into terrible situation, take
drugs in all the wrong places. I mean, there’s a lot of things one can
do that I did not do, and I’m glad that I didn’t, and that sort of
taught me that the power of “no” can be very important. It’s not just
“yes” is the answer, but no is a powerful force that needs to be
reckoned with and brought into your arsenal, you know.
But the strategic part of movie planning, I have found that I’m very,
very good at intuitively projecting what’s going to happen. Now,
sometimes I go a little too far, and as I’ve gotten older, my percentage
of being right is less.
COLLINGS:
Why is that? That seems like it would go the other way.
0:58:53.7
CARTER:
I don’t know why that is, but maybe it’s because I speculate on even
more or maybe I’m more opinionated than I was before, and I’m aware of
my own opinions, and then when I see them not happen—but I also note
them so that I don’t—I try to now bring up whatever it is that I see is
happening, strategically where are we within the process of getting
something actually created, the set or a location prepped. But I
don’t—what’s the word? It doesn’t serve a function for me being right,
whereas when you’re younger, or at least when I was younger, but I think
most people, when they’re ambitious, they want to be right because that
proves that they’re credible and maybe even something else that’s even
beyond credible. I have found that in my process, if I can engage and
inspire people that inspires me, then I’ve helped the process get to a
stage that it wouldn’t have been at otherwise.
And when I start thinking like that, and if I think of my role as a
production designer, which is basically—most people would say it’s
setting the stage for the movie, the world that the movie takes place
in. Well, if I say that I’m setting the stage, but it’s not always for a
literal thing, it could just be for, and I’ll just go “dot, dot, dot,”
and that could just be a good conversation in which people have then
ideas that start to become not just their own ideas but a collective
that maybe even leads to something more than the sum of its parts. And
that’s the kind of thing that interests me and has interested me over
the years because it does probably ultimately, for me, fulfill a form of
discovering some oneness or togetherness that I don’t have on my own and
I’m aware that I don’t have on my own, but I’m aware that others don’t
as well, so I mine what they don’t know, but I don’t do it in a fearful
way and try to say, “You don’t know this.”
Some of my best times with Steven Spielberg are, like, to look at him
and say, “We really don’t know what the fuck we’re doing, do we?” And he
would say, “That’s the point. If we knew, then,” he said, “I would be,
like, working at Denny’s carrying out something that’s already known,
and I’m just preparing it and then serving it.” And I said, “Well, it’s
a pretty good job at Denny’s to get to do Jurassic Park. I mean, they
are your ideas.” But then if I have a really good idea, he would also
say, “And some of my best ideas are not my own.” So that is incredibly
encouraging, because then it allows me to have the idea be of value to
me, but know that it has to become his idea in order to be put into the
movie within the construct of everything else he’s doing.
COLLINGS:
It takes a village to raise an idea.
CARTER:
Yeah. But that idea does have to implemented and not just be thrown into
chaos where nobody can take it and make it into something, and yet if
it’s a Steven Spielberg movie, you never question—his imprint is
absolutely throughout it, and yet the amount that he takes from other
people and absorbs from other people is tremendous, but that’s why he
can do so much. He’s learned to delegate, and I learned to delegate from
him. Once I switched the paradigm, I said, “Look how much he’s
delegating to me, so how am I going to succeed when I have so much now
to do? I must learn to delegate.” And that’s an intuitive process to how
you have people—whether they get what you’re talking about, how they can
do something with it, and then they can own it, and then that way,
they’ll run with it and feel very fulfilled and see it all the way
through and take pride in it, just the way I am. And also if they get
credit.
Like, I make sure that they’re recognized and they don’t feel like
they’re just in the back and somebody’s grandstanding in front of them.
I have felt that that part of the process is where some of the sixties
values come out, where trying to treat people well and being more
egalitarian and respectful of the humanist aspects of all of our lives,
and being inclusive of other people, because I need it. It’s not because
I’m being altruistic if I need somebody’s help, and as I’ve gotten
older, I’ve been able to say that. And part of that also came from my
interactions with Bob Zemeckis on Back to the Future and Forrest Gump.
He’s somebody who, in the early years, would really—we’d come upon an
obstacle, something that was difficult to solve, he would say, “Well,
that’s an insurmountable opportunity.”
COLLINGS:
What a great phrase.
CARTER:
Isn’t it? Because it’s a wonderful way of looking—you would never be up
against that. It’s like “Necessity is the mother of invention.” When
you’re there, you wouldn’t encounter it, and so now you need to do
something else. So it seems insurmountable because of how much it has to
be stopping you, but then in that lies an opportunity to do something.
And then when you have somebody who thinks like that and he’s looking
then to be sparked, and then he gets sparked by something you say, and
then maybe, in his case what would often happen is he would say
something that then we’d be talking about that scene and I would come up
with some idea as though I was a reconnoiterer and I’m going out and
planting a flag and I’m saying, “How about this over here? What about
this idea?” And then his eyes would bulge and he’d say, “Well, what I
thought you were going to say is—,” and then he’d go into this whole
complete thought that you could literally just put right into the movie
just as is.
COLLINGS:
Wow.
CARTER:
And I would say, “Were you already thinking that?” And he goes, “No, no,
no. Just when you said that, I thought—,” and it all happened in a
nanosecond.
COLLINGS:
Wow. That’s interesting.
CARTER:
Then that made me feel like, well, that means I don’t even have to be
right, so the freedom in not being right, but just having the right
energy for an idea and letting the ideas then be—and if someone else
needs to supplant that idea with a better idea, that’s fine, but the
ideas begat ideas.
COLLINGS:
Exactly.
CARTER:
When you’re flat-lined, don’t have ideas—and they’re contagious and they
make people feel high, and then that leads to a kind of sense of
transcendence. And then if you get one that works, that’s an epiphany,
and after the epiphany comes the catharsis. You go, “Well, good
meeting.” Right? It becomes that joke, “Well, was it good for you? It
was good for me.” [laughter]
COLLINGS:
“Now let’s build it.”
1:06:07.2
CARTER:
Yeah, exactly. And then you actually get to do it as opposed to just a
conversation that goes nowhere or is just painstakingly this detail,
that detail, or an approval process. There’s nothing wrong with having
approvals, but it can be relegated to a kind of a very literal job. And
to look at it, every movie basically looks pretty darn good. They really
do. I mean, so how you judge, well, the art direction—but if you judge
it separate from the movie, which many people do—and that’s why the
awards often go to the most spectacular or the most obviously difficult
ones—it doesn’t really get to, at least the experiences that I’ve had
where the collaboration is working and that I am, in my role, a
significant collaborator to helping set the stage for not just the
physical things that you see or the aesthetics but the very feeling of
the movie because the conversations have gone somewhere.
And you can see even the way I’m talking, obviously I’m moving in and
out of multi-dimensions, and every once in a while, at least for this
context, I feel the desire to say, well, why are we talking like that?
What are we learning about this? Is there anything to be learned or is
it just free-association and it’s interesting unto itself? But I also
demand of myself sometimes what am I saying so that it has a
perspective. So, like, back in the late sixties when I used to get
stoned and we’d just have these wonderful free-association
conversations, and then it’d be like going up on a tree, and then you’d
go way out on a limb, and then the limb would just crash. And then you’d
say, “Whoa, I guess—.” And many people at that point thought, well, that
whole tree was meaningless because it never led anywhere. I actually
started doing something, which was to, even while under the influence of
the chemical, be tracking, double-track what we were talking about, so
then I would reverse the action.
COLLINGS:
You would write it down?
1:07:59.0 1:09:54.3
CARTER:
No. I guess I probably wrote it down afterwards at times, but those were
always pretty hard-to-follow kinds of notes. But I actually think I
mentally started having fun with—what would happen is marijuana would
disengage the judgment so you could then appreciate the moment without a
lot of context that might otherwise say to you it’s meaningless, and
then if you had an idea, just the feeling of an idea, the notion of an
idea was thrilling. The quality of the idea might not really be
something that would hold up the next day.
But often the thing that was there to be read was an almost kind of
Buddha flow that was giving information about what you were talking
about, why you were talking about it, and so that tree that was being
built—and then finally you decide to go out on a branch and you go on a
limb too far and it crashes, and then the conscious mind is sort of
aware that, well, that didn’t amount to anything, right, because you
just hit the end of it and “boom,” and you can’t remember where you came
from, so unless you recorded it, you didn’t know. I found that if I
could go backwards—and John Lennon even was the one who turned me on
because in some of his songs with the backwards guitars and things—that
if I could then trace backwards where we had fallen off, but even keep
going back into—and then where we had started—and sometimes I would lead
everybody on that trip going back just so that I completed the circle of
the journey.
I didn’t like going half—like the Kathmandu and just staying there. I
needed to get home eventually, and so whether I go and go all the way
around or I go and then come back the way I came, I have a strong homing
device in me. So the reason I’m bringing up the double-tracking is
because everything that I’m talking about, even if it sounds like I
introduced a whole other level, because now that means going back in a
linear fashion through what was already not linear, but then is there
something to follow there, and is that something relate to something
bigger that one would say, well, there’s a chapter, now you can move to
the next chapter that would mean something in the context of either my
life or somebody else’s life.
So, just as a riff, going back, not knowing what I’m going to say, if I
say that at a point—let’s just say the end of 1970, coming back from
that trip, and I would be asked what did I learn, and then how did that
propel me forward into the things that I’ve been doing ever since then
for the last forty-something years, in the most succinct way that I
could put it, I would say that being somebody who actually was raised in
a family that did love me, and yet knowing that I had to leave that
family and the confines of that neighborhood over by Sunset and the VA,
surrounded on two sides by war, the Veterans Administration—in fact,
three sides, because the—
COLLINGS:
The cemetery.
CARTER:
The cemetery. I was very aware of a world outside of me in which war was
raging, without knowing it.
COLLINGS:
Was the news on at night in your home?
CARTER:
Well, it wasn’t so much that. It was more that the men from the VA would
sometimes wander into the neighborhood, and some of them would be very
weird and spastic, cripples. I mean, I had a sense of—and then I’d go
over to Westwood and I would go through the graveyard. So some of those
kinds of metaphors—and I’m living next to a freeway in which people are
whizzing past on their way to somewhere else. So my home is surrounded
by war with a throughway coming from somewhere, going somewhere else,
and every once in a while, a car comes off or a car goes on from my
neighborhood.
COLLINGS:
So if you wanted to design a set for the consciousness that you’re
describing, it couldn’t be better than that.
CARTER:
Which is something that I’ve had the notion of, but in this context of
saying it, seems so obvious. And you can’t just see it when you’re
growing up. I always struggled with it, like what’s interesting about
somebody who grows up next to a freeway? It’s like the Zen koan that,
forty years later, you go, well, it’s interesting because you’re
somewhere and everybody around you is nowhere because they’re on their
way somewhere else, and so travel’s already a part of what are all those
people doing.
COLLINGS:
Well, and the freeway system was initiated after World War II for
defense purposes.
CARTER:
And then also the Veterans Administration on a personal level—I mean,
also, I mean they didn’t have the medicine, so you could hear people
screaming at night at the hospital, you know.
COLLINGS:
Really?
CARTER:
Yeah.
COLLINGS:
From your home?
CARTER:
Well, I had friends who lived closer right to that part of it in the
neighborhood.
COLLINGS:
Because that was a psychiatric facility.
CARTER:
That’s right. And, in fact, when I left high school before I went up
to—no. Actually, when I left—jeez, I can’t remember whether it was
between high school and college or whether it was between dropping out
and then going on my trip, but I think it was high school and college,
actually. I did go over and work in a hospital with dogs. They were
being tested in their stomachs for how certain drugs affected them.
COLLINGS:
So that was a job that you had?
CARTER:
Yeah. It was like six weeks or something like that, but it was one of
those—it was literally a shit job, because I had to take these tubes
that actually was what was in their stomach and test it for the pH and
that kind of thing. One totally random thought, though, is that there
was one time—well, there was the dog side, and then across the hall was
the cats. But one time, there was a fire where the cats were—no, it was
a fire where the dogs were, so they had to put the dogs in the same
space as the cats in a room. They tried to cordon it off. I mean, they
did, but it just drove—I mean, it was unbelievable because the smell was
like—I mean, they knew there were cats and they knew there were dogs,
and it was the most wild, just primal—because dogs will fight with dogs,
but you put dogs and cats in the same room like that, they were just
going nuts.
COLLINGS:
Wow.
CARTER:
Anyway, I don’t know why I’m even bringing that up.
COLLINGS:
Yeah, that’s funny.
CARTER:
But I do think that, like as you said—
COLLINGS:
We’ve been talking about these—
CARTER:
The dualities.
COLLINGS:
—opposing forces.
CARTER:
That’s right. And I suppose I’m always looking at those and marveling at
them when I come upon them, especially with something like that. But I
think that the point you made about if you were to design a set that
replicated my consciousness or my upbringing and the fact that it would
be possible to do so is a fascinating way to make a tie-in with my early
years and then the things that I ended up getting myself involved with
for many, many years as a career. And it’s an interesting dynamic where
it obviously comes from an interior space, to some degree, but because
it’s my left eye looking out on the far side, it’s absolutely about me
reflecting what’s on the outside, because I have to make all those
determinations. Whether it’s a fantasy like Avatar or a historical drama
like Lincoln or The Post, I have to be aware of what those things are,
made up or real, but they all have to go through a filter in me that is
my version of both an inner and an outer version of it.
COLLINGS:
Well, as we go on, perhaps in another session we could talk in more
detail about your process, but since you raise it at the moment, I mean,
how do you do your research? How do you come upon the specificity of
what you would like to bring into the dreamscape, so to speak, but
something that has to resonate and has to ring true?
1:17:49.7
CARTER:
Well, the research process, it’s interesting, because, of course, on the
surface, if it’s historical, you ostensibly have a place that you think
you can go because you’re going to look and see, whether it was a
photograph or a painting or an account that’s written, what was
described, can you find a location that matches up to that? Can you
modify a location? Then what you can’t shoot at a location, can you
build a set in order to have the drama that’s required, again using the
specific references that anybody would do as a researcher, right? It
doesn’t make it so much easier than fantasy. It’s more specific,
quicker. But then it’s almost an inverted equation again where what you
have to do is now that you have all these pieces, how do you put them
together so that they have an organic expressive quality and you can
prioritize?
So, for instance, on Lincoln, when I first started, it was a much bigger
movie. We had lots of battles and all sorts of scenes were outside of
Washington. By the time we were making the movie that we could afford to
make, we didn’t have all those battles, and it was very clear to me that
we wanted to do an interior-based movie about Lincoln that started from
the inside out. So, what would be most basic inside-out way to do that?
And it really was where he did most of his work was in his office, and
there was some good research that we could rely on, and to then move out
from there to do the whole floor that he lived on and did his work as
well in the White House, which includes figuring out from descriptions
plus the couple photos we could have, like, what the wallpaper looked
like, and then being very fortunate to have a place in Richmond called
Carter Company that did silkscreen wallpaper the old-fashioned way that
we could afford to get them to do. They’re out of business now, but we
had them do it exactly the way it would have been done.
COLLINGS:
Wow.
1:19:49.1 1:22:08.1
CARTER:
So I knew that this was an opportunity, for instance, to create a
Lincoln’s White House with more money than anybody’s ever going to have
probably again, let alone certainly up to this point, so as accurately
as we could make it would then become something. In fact, it’s still
standing in the Lincoln Museum in Illinois, what we brought together.
They redid the walls in order to fit their space a bit better, and they
computer-generated the wallpaper instead of using the walls that had
our—because we ended up destroying that part, but the set dressing,
everything, the whole layout of it is based on the facts that we could
come up with.
But once you start to see that come together and it has a feeling to
it—and we don’t know everything, so we have to make lots of aesthetic
choices, the rugs and various things—then you move out and say, well,
that’s green, because we knew it was green. And then so what color would
Mary and Abe’s bedroom be? And I wanted to be different so you wouldn’t
have any question when you’re in the private compared to the official,
the presentational part of the presidency, and I picked this purple
because I felt it had a kind of a spiritual quality because Mary was so
into the séances. Once again, she was in a time when transcendence,
transcendental philosophy mattered because of the Civil War. People
were—like during the Vietnam War, they were trying to do things up and
beyond the here and now because of the, I think, effects of war.
And then we had a few pictures that we could rely on that were of the
bedroom in certain small parts, but we had other pictures of the times
and things. Then to lay out the hallway, which is the common—where the
people would come—and they would literally right up and right next to
the living quarters—that formed the basis of the heart of the movie.
Now, I knew we needed to put all of our money into that because that
emotionally—even though the script would say all sorts of stuff, River
Queen and battles, I mean some battlefield stuff, so everything had to
be then prioritized differently because of the emotions of what I
thought was important to depict. And there’s no question that it was
right, especially when people would walk around and we did so much of
the shooting there, but they would just feel like they were
literally—the moment they walked into the set, they were transported.
And it’s interesting because some of the White House, it’s very
familiar—we’ve seen pictures all the way through—but to see it like
this, no one has seen it like this.
So what I’m answering is how to take the sum of all those parts but then
prioritize them, so when I didn’t have any money for signs in
Washington, D.C., the exterior, there are no signs to be seen in the
exterior of Washington, D.C. We just went to a place, Petersburg, had
them take out some telephone poles, which they did at their expense, we
put some dirt down, covered up a few things, and just shot, because I
couldn’t afford it, nor did I want to burden the production with details
when we were already doing these other details. We shot in only four
places, all of which were free to shoot in, and that’s how we justified
being in Richmond. And Richmond is where Lincoln really went after the
war and it was the seat of the Confederacy.
The place we shot in the Capitol building that they gave us the rights
to just go in and shoot, Thomas Jefferson designed it, and, in fact, he
designed the portico that is on the White House, even though it was put
in twenty years after he had designed it. So I just took the portico and
put one on the exterior of the north side of the Capitol building and
called it our White House. And there was a lot of choices that were made
for economic reasons, but that fit within the authenticity of what I
prioritized was important, and that’s where the feeling that it’s
believable, that I care about it, and that it’s authentic is the same
filter. Now, if it’s a fantasy, I have to hear what it is that we’re
trying to do. Is it Back to the Future II where we want to go to the
future Hill Valley thirty years into the future, which was 2012, which
is now the past? On that date, I was giving a talk, which was pretty
funny, about Back to the Future—
COLLINGS:
That is funny
1:26:05.1
CARTER:
—because I was in the future, which was now becoming the past as we
spoke. But all they’d written was, well, that it’s optimistic, because
it was really up to the main character, Marty McFly, to have a flaw and
not that the future had a flaw. Or if it’s Avatar, it’s extracting a
vision that Jim had about another planet by seeing what he saw in the
bioluminescent world at the bottom of the ocean while researching
Titanic. A.I. was a roadmap in a sort of nondescript future that was a
fairy tale that Stanley Kubrick had initially had a lot of ideas for. So
I always draw upon something and somebody or something, and then I work
the same way, which is to get things that stimulate me, and then see
which things stimulate the director and inspire them so that we could
come up with images either as research or then start to make—I’ll
collage it together or the illustrators will start to draw it and we’ll
just start exploring does this make us feel the way we want to feel.
It’s not just about being accurate and having the budget be a part of
it, it’s do you get a feeling. And I think that’s been the primary
strength that I’ve brought into all this, is that I’m aware of how I’m
feeling, and when I try to rationalize that I should be feeling a
different way, it doesn’t work. I mean, I’ve gone through it enough so
that I know what the voice sounds like that’s trying to be rational,
like when the wallpaper wasn’t working in Biff’s apartment in Back to
the Future and I just kept trying to say it was okay to myself, but I
couldn’t because I just struggled with it, and a painter came over to me
and he said, “You seem to be troubled. What’s the matter?” I said,
“Well, this wallpaper’s tyrannizing me because it’s not right and I
spent a bunch of money it and I don’t know what to do.”
He said, “Well—.” First of all, he’d been to Vietnam, and we had a lot
of talks and stuff. He said, “Well, you’re not going to let wallpaper
tyrannize you.” [Collings laughs.] That was kind of like a—and I was
going, “I guess I’m going a little far here as an art director thing,
right?” I mean, it’s one thing about having reality tyrannize me, but
wallpaper? And so, anyway, he solved it. He said, “Well, there’s this
stuff called cloisonné, and let me spray some of this.” It was red and
gold. It looked like a whorehouse that I had picked. It was just too
much. And he sprayed the wallpaper with it, and usually if it’s a color,
it just kind of dinges it down. In this case, it took the gold and it
turned it silver, and it took the red and turned it purple, and it was
like alchemy. It was the most beautiful thing. And then I had some other
red columns in. It was Biff now, and it took the process to get there,
and so that process matters to me, to not know everything to start with.
COLLINGS:
Yeah, and I wanted to ask you about that because you’ve talked about
getting a sense of what it should look like and the conversations and so
forth, and I was wondering what happened once the physical thing starts
to come into being. Does the vision change along with its emerging
physicality?
1:28:04.4
CARTER:
Well, it does in the sense that it talks to you, because it’s
revealing—often the first thing is proportions, did you get the size of
the rooms right, did you get everything to line up where you think it
should so it’s making for good camera angles and it’s doing all the
things that, on paper, or whatever you thought it would do. And it’s
funny, because with computers, you can map out more of that, but then
again, that also can be not real as it is in a physical space.
Like, right away—one of the things is if you ever built a house and you
lay out a house and you’re trying to judge the size of the rooms,
whatever, the weird thing is that once the walls go up, it appears
bigger. You think it would—but it actually makes it feel more spacious
most of the time. So I struggle with that, but I have to often come in
and make sure I’m there to see it so that if I’m wrong, I’m catching it
early rather than later, because the earlier you catch a mistake like
that, the less it is to change it. But if it goes too far, then it can
really be a problem.
COLLINGS:
So how did you start to learn all of those kinds of logistical details?
1:30:29.2 1:32:13.1
CARTER:
I mean, just in terms, again, the emotion of it, where I remember there
was a set on one of the first TV shows I ever did, Six Million Dollar
Man, and there was a door that was put somewhere in the set, and I knew
it was wrong because I’d been in part of the conversation, but I was
just the assistant. I figured somebody knew better and I didn’t say
anything, and then two days later, the director came in and said, “Well,
I can’t shoot this scene because the door is here and we talked about
over here.” And I went to myself, I said, “I knew that, and I didn’t
help anybody by being silent.” So I used to always start saying to
everybody, “If something doesn’t line up with what you think you’ve
heard or you think is right, question it, because it will help the
process.”
So, on the physical—I mean, I made lots of mistakes right away in Back
to the Future II, my first big movie. The whole alleyway going into the
future was four feet too wide for what Bob wanted. We had to move it in.
It was $70,000. Those aren’t fun mistakes to make. Biff’s apartment,
that was a ten-thousand-dollar one hanging there till it was solved. The
apartment, the first apartment, I laid out was too big. Bob came in and
went, “I don’t know where you grew up, but this is not middle-class.”
And it wasn’t because I hadn’t grown up middle-class, it was just I
screwed it up. But he never then made it like, “And you’re terrible, so
you can’t do the job and you’re fired,” or whatever.
So I learned through those periods of mistakes. By making mistakes, you
do learn. That’s why they say there’s no success like failure. Of
course, Bob Dylan says, “There’s no success like failure, and failure is
no success at all.” [laughter] But then again, it’s that kind of thing
where you—in the delegating, if you’re surrounded by collaborators who
are watching and making it work for them, that doesn’t mean they’re
right, it just means that there’s another set of eyes. And so I have
likened my situation, whether it’s spatial relationships or anything I
do—for instance, on the most recent movie The Post, when I went back—and
I was just dropped into New York City. I didn’t know anybody, so I had
to find a crew to pull together.
There was a wonderful group of women who worked on this movie that
really just were on fire to make this movie. I think you’ll know why
when you see it. But the woman who was the location manager, Lauri
Pitkus, was so good and helped me so much in the beginning looking for
locations. She found this great place to build out newsroom set. So at
one point, I said, “I feel sometimes like I’ve become aware that I’m
like Blanche DuBois in Streetcar Named Desire where I rely on the
kindness of strangers.” And so the code name that we had like to access
the site to see it was called “Blanche.” [Collings laughs.]
But I say that just because I have a need to have other people check
what I’m doing, and I reach out and I ask for that so that they don’t
view me as somebody just has all the answers, and that’s the best thing
I can say, is that I’m looking for other people to help me. I think I
have good common sense, instincts about many things, and even technical
things that I’m looking for simple ways to do things, but mostly it’s
about the process and getting the best from the most as the way to solve
those kinds of issues that are logistic.
But sometimes it’s just in the dialogue and bringing up the very thing
like are we scheduling too many of these things in a row and can we
change it up? Because it’s creating a logjam. And then being able to see
outside the box and say, well, what if we removed this one item? Does
that make the logjam suddenly start to move? And often it does, but you
have to change your assumptions as far as what you thought you were
doing enough so that it allows you to find a way forward as compared to
saying, “We are stuck, there’s no way around it, and it’s up to someone
else to figure out. More money, more time, more—.” And then you go you
don’t have that.
COLLINGS:
And if someone screams enough, it’ll—
CARTER:
Yeah, it’ll just somehow—
COLLINGS:
—change the reality.
CARTER:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like the reality we’re in, the whole nation and the
world, apparently, or somebody thinks that. Other people have tried. But
I think that it’s that coming together of people, and it’s not quite
socialist, I wouldn’t call it. I would call it democratic up to a point,
meaning there’s a hierarchy, the director, the producer at the hierarchy
of this in the studio, and I’m at the hierarchy within the art
department. But I don’t try to make my role—certainly not as a tyrant,
and more of a leader that inspires everybody to go out and then know
what they’re doing, and if they don’t, they can ask questions back, then
they can take the next steps. But if I weren’t there for a bit of time,
they could take many steps on their own.
COLLINGS:
Well, you spoke about, like, sort of being dropped into New York City
and you had to find your crew. Do you normally have to find your crew?
You don’t have people that you work with?
CARTER:
In the early years, we were more local and based here, so I would pick
the crew up here and work with the same people, numerous movies,
probably the first all the way through A.I. The first ten movies had
interchangeable people. It wasn’t always the same, but some people were
in multiple movies. Since that time, I can’t think of one person that’s
been any two movies back-to-back, even, because the global economy has
shifted so that movies are not made in Los Angeles, to a great extent.
COLLINGS:
So has that changed your process?
CARTER:
Well, it is in the sense I have to be even more trusting, because if I’m
in London or New York or Richmond, Virginia, or Vancouver or New
Zealand, which are all the places that I’ve made movies, I’ve hired
people just meeting them at the airport on my way somewhere else and
they were recommended, and just saying, “Okay, you’re on,” and just
having to trust, and then hopefully it works out. So far, I’ve been
extremely lucky, maybe because I’ve been working on such good movies
that attract such good talent that, for the most part, they’re—and then
very few have been, like, egomaniacs in some weird way that makes them
difficult. So it’s knock on wood. But it’s changed in that I have to be
even more—more faith, more trustful of what can be done by other people
that I don’t even really know what they can do.
COLLINGS:
Yeah, that’s an interesting—
CARTER:
So you have to size people up.
COLLINGS:
—wrinkle on the globalization of the film industry.
CARTER:
Yeah, and it takes its toll, so obviously in terms of amount of time
that I’m home. And I’ve been trying to rectify that over the last five
years where I’ve been home much more than I was during the—there was a
period where I was just going away too much. So I’m being impacted, once
again, from the outside, but it’s been about how the economy has
shifted, and that’s part of what many, many, many people are up against,
and particularly in my field, there’s many people that—and they have
young families, too, now, so that makes it even harder.
COLLINGS:
No, you couldn’t imagine anything more opposite from the old studio
system than the situation today, from what I hear.
CARTER:
I know. And the initial period of it was pretty exhilarating to be able
to go out into the world again and have it be paid for and all that, to
go to Munich and just travel around Europe on that movie. That was like
going back and having my older travels relived, and I was even then
doing it where I was making a period piece as though it was the early
seventies, so the form and the content were—I was old enough to—I could
have walked by the main character, Avner, on the streets of Paris, you
know, and I knew what it looked like.
COLLINGS:
Yeah, exactly.
CARTER:
So sometimes it’s very interesting in that way. It’s almost
autobiographical. But it does take a toll. I mean, the travel is less
and less enticing to me. It just is. But I feel like a ship’s captain
that now wants to remember a lot of the voyages and the adventures and
where I’ve gone and try to give them some form that is—it’s a little bit
like the Orientalist painters who used to travel, and then they’d come
back, and maybe someone says, well, that’s not what it really looked
like, because it’s a romantic vision, and I’m going, “That’s right. It’s
a Hollywood movie.” [laughter]
COLLINGS:
Right. It is a Hollywood movie.
CARTER:
You know? And there’s a veneer there, and even when they’re sad, they’re
tragedies with happy endings. They rarely leave you just like, “Oh,
well, that’s really real and terrible.” I mean, hopefully they’re
cathartic at that point, because they’re such tragedies that they—like
Godfather II, you just feel the breadth of the tragedy that that’s the
way it went.
COLLINGS:
I mean, maybe that’s sort of the hallmark of the more recent generation
of films that you don’t, in the end, have that catharsis, in many cases.
CARTER:
It’s interesting, yeah. But I certainly am always looking for it, and I
regard it—maybe sometimes they’re tacked on and they’re not really so
interesting, but sometimes they’re earned and they work and they give
you an uplifting experience that you’ve earned or you feel like it was
earned, because you were putting it through your filter of disbelief,
but it won.
COLLINGS:
Oh, that’s an interesting idea, that the audience has earned the
catharsis by going on this journey.
CARTER:
Yeah. Well, I think they do, otherwise they just go, “That’s just a plot
point. Oh, look. Everybody’s happy.” [laughter]
COLLINGS:
I wanted to ask you—and I don’t know if you wanted to get into it today
or if you have time—about your training, your art training, and then
your father said, “Come back to L.A.,” and got you hooked up with—
CARTER:
Richard Sylbert.
COLLINGS:
Right. And that was a mentor—
CARTER:
That’s right.
COLLINGS:
—so that’s training as well. So is that something that you’d want to
talk about today? Or I don’t know what your time is like.
CARTER:
Why don’t I start it, and then we’ll see where it—that might be the good
up from now, and then that would lead probably into the Back to the
Future, and then we could—
COLLINGS:
Talk about the movies.
1:41:33.0
CARTER:
—if you want to go to those. If you want to, sure, that’d be great. When
I came back from traveling in 1972 and had graduated from University of
California at Santa Cruz, I had gone to Berkeley, but then when I
dropped out, when I came back, in 1971 I transferred to Santa Cruz. I
dropped out again for another five months to travel to Asia, which I, in
a sense, finished the trip that I had not done in 1970, or I had not
gone down into Asia, down to Singapore and over to Bali, and spent more
time in that area and back up into Bangkok and then to Taiwan and then
to Japan. I kind of rushed through those on the way home.
When I was on the first trip, I made it down as far as Penang, and
that’s when I decided to turn around and come back to Los Angeles, and
it only took me a week to come back after that point, so that’s the part
I wanted to complete as a journey. And, in fact, when I came back—I
think it was a year and a half later and I landed in Singapore—I did go
around the world, because that’s how I got to Singapore, but it was like
I’d never left, like home had become just a dream, whereas when I was at
home, my travels had been the dream, but once I got back and was in the
smell and the rhythm of Asia, it was like home was a dream. I found that
to be really kind of a jarring, but wonderfully jarring, sense of—well,
Stanley Kubrick later—when I worked on A.I., referred to it as a “mode
jerk.” It was like in his movie when you see the ape in 2001 throw the
bone up in the air and it becomes a spaceship, there’s a big jump
between those two things, and what just happened? You have to fill that
in. There’s absolutely no—it doesn’t literally mean anything. You just
fill it in. So that’s kind of a jerk—
COLLINGS:
Although, like in geological time, it kind of was that fast, right?
CARTER:
Yeah, well, right, right. But, you see, but you filled that in. [laughs]
They didn’t hand out, like, the—
COLLINGS:
“And here are the notes for the film.”
CARTER:
“We’re going to play with time, and some of it’s going to be
geological.” But that’s how big—it’s so big, you do fill it. That’s a
“minding the gap,” to do that. That’s what it was like to go back to
Asia, and that time, I started drawing and I was just drawing like
crazy. I came back with a huge stack of art work, so I was, by that
point, released to be an artist, and at Santa Cruz, that’s what had
happened. I’d graduated as an art major. I had been a sociology major at
Berkeley, so I finally went the other way, although I’ve always had the
sociology as part of my training because I did study it. So that’s a
little bit more like the left-eye outside world, and then the right eye
is like but you can just do your own version of this. So I then moved to
New York to see what it would be like to be an artist there, and I
enjoyed it. I lived a year there and I really enjoyed it, but I found
that, coming out of the winter, I’d kind of realized a couple things.
One is that I was alone a lot because painting, you know, you’re just
alone a lot. And I would go out at night and do all that, and I had a
job at the Whitney Museum four days a week, and I would make enough
money to live on, but I didn’t feel social in a way that dug into things
I had discovered, which is how much I liked being around people and
collaborating. Or just even if I hadn’t done lots of projects with
people, I just knew I liked it. And the political situation of getting
paintings shown—
COLLINGS:
Oh, gosh.
1:45:11.4
CARTER:
In fact, I remember being in a bar with someone who said—this guys comes
in, he goes, “I got a show. I got a show at the—,” blah, blah, blah,
some hole in the wall on the Lower East Side. And I said, “Well, how’d
you get that?” And he goes, “Well, I slept with the woman who I gave my
slides to, and so she gave them to the—.”
And I went, “Wow. That’s like Hollywood in a reverse way that I—if
that’s the way it’s going to be, maybe I need to be around some system
that I already have some awareness of the rules of engagement, because
that’s not going to interest me to do that.” I just remember that being
a little bit of a turning point, and, again, along with being kind of
lonely. So I asked my father what an art director did. He’d been an art
director with Look magazine, and still in print, and he said, well, in
movies—I thought maybe it was the person who hung the pictures, you
know. And he said, “Well, if you end up coming back to Los Angeles, I’ll
introduce you to someone.”
And within two weeks, I had left. My friend, who I still am friends
with, I said, “You know, I’ve got to go.” And for the next, god, three
or four years, he’d say, “That was such a flaky transition. You just
turned around so fast.” And about two years ago, I said to him, “You
thought that was a flaky transition? I mean, look what happened. I came
back to L.A., met that guy, he became my mentor, and that’s what I do,
and I’ve had a career at it.” I mean, it was a joke, but I’m saying this
is when I got my Lifetime Achievement Award in that pursuit. I could
kind of go, “Wasn’t so flaky. It just needed to happen right then, and
there it was to happen, finally, the right thing to happen.” So I did
come back. It had the “art” in it. I met a—
COLLINGS:
Had the word “art” in it.
CARTER:
Yeah, I said “art direction” had the word “art,” and I thought—
COLLINGS:
And it had the word “department” in it, and you said you were looking
for, like, a mechanism.
CARTER:
Exactly. So I met Richard Sylbert. I went over to have lunch with him
that my dad set up one day when he was working on a movie after
Chinatown, and it was called The Fortune, and it was local. I liked him
right away, he liked me, and he seemed like Marcel Duchamp to me, the
conceptual artist. He spoke very pontifically. He’d say, “Kid, if
designing movies was music, I can write all the music, I can play all
the instruments, I can conduct the orchestra, and I can even sell it out
on Tin Pan Alley.”
COLLINGS:
Wow.
CARTER:
Very arrogant, but old-school. I mean, he’d done a lot of great work.
He’d done The Graduate, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, Manchurian
Candidate, but he was a New Yorker and he had a kind of a—but he liked
me, and I was thinking—I was a hippie with this long hair, and I think I
mentioned it was like I was thinking of Joe Cocker, the singer, who
would pretend to have a guitar in his hand, and I’d say, well, I’ll be
like Joe Cocker. I’ll just vibe it.
COLLINGS:
But you were an accomplished artist at this point.
CARTER:
But I could draw people and I could do storyboards, sort of, but I
couldn’t draw background. I still always have trouble really drawing
architecture. I can scribble out what I want, but it’s always been a—but
that’s why I need strangers. I need good set designers and architects to
work with to get my ideas across, whereas he was saying, “I can do
everything,” right? But I liked talking with him, so I went and I
visited him every day for, like, I don’t know, four or five weeks. And
then he liked me, and I even got some feedback from his friends, who
were friends with my parents, that he, like, thought I had something,
which gave me—because I was pretty all over the place as an artist,
philosopher, poet, traveler, vagabond, what you don’t know is what you
know, and all that kind of stuff, which I still am a little bit.
But he introduced me to—well, first I went over to AFI and worked on a
movie there, production design. I just sort of offered my services and I
really got into it, and that was helpful to be around people and work. I
wasn’t making any money, but I had some money that I could live on. And
then Dick introduced me to Hal Ashby, the director who he’d worked with
on a movie called Shampoo, who was working with another production
designer who was the production designer that Hal usually worked with,
and so I got an interview with the new production designer whose name is
Michael Haller. I went in for the interview, and I was wearing red
tennis shoes and Michael was wearing red tennis shoes. These were those
days, right? And we immediately hit it off, and he asked me how much
wanted, and I said, “250 a week.” And he said, “Well, make it 400, and
I’ll get you in the union as well.”
COLLINGS:
Wow. That was easy, because I was going you about how you got in the
union.
CARTER:
I’m just saying nobody was more fortuitous to get into the—it just
happened to be one of those times when the roster went down, and I was
able to get into the union. To this day, I’m sure I knew less than
anybody has ever known in that whole Guild when they got in about how to
do the—
COLLINGS:
The thing.
CARTER:
—the thing, of whatever you perceive that to be, and yet obviously I
knew a process and how to create process and how to be creative in order
to learn “the thing.” But I still don’t illustrate, draft, or decorate
in any really great way, other than—I mean, I’ve done all those things
and laid things out, but it’s much more like the Joe Cocker of it, and
maybe Joe Cocker, in a funny way, meets Bruce Springsteen just because
it’s become so personal, that the work has reflected such a personable
aspect of my character and my own journey.
COLLINGS:
So it’s almost like conceptual art.
CARTER:
Well, that’s what I mean, and that’s why I thought of Dick as Marcel
Duchamp. I could see that this is the idea, and remember, in New York,
painting was dead in the early seventies, so conceptual—and, in fact, I
studied with Hans Haacke for a whole summer, so I was turned on to that
the idea can be the thing, I just didn’t think there was enough craft to
satisfy me if just the idea was the thing. But I liked combining both,
so I think I’m very much a child—not child—an offspring of both those
sensibilities. In fact, when I was in New York, one of the art directors
knew Hans Haacke, which was interesting, because I’d never been around
anybody in the movie world who knew of Hans Haacke. So that point of
view about it as a conceptual art gave me some latitude in that minding
the gap, meaning the minding the gap is then the conceptual space of the
art at that point, if I can do it in the right way, but it takes a long
time to know all of the ins and outs of it, of what the field is and
what you’re trying to accomplish. So I was on a movie called Bound for
Glory, which is kind of an auspicious kind of one to be on. The next
movie that I was on—
COLLINGS:
And you were an assistant—
CARTER:
Assistant art director.
COLLINGS:
—art director. What was your role?
CARTER:
Well, I came in and the first things I did was I did all the shanty huts
that the Okies had made when they had come to California, and I
remember—and, see, this played to my strength, because I remember that
there was some research about all the corrugated tin and cardboard,
these houses, and when I did some sketches, which I could do those
because they were organic, and I would lay out the huts in the research.
But the carpenters, when I’d come back like a day later, they made these
perfect cardboard houses that were not—they didn’t follow the sketch.
They just went, “Well, he must be—,” and so they made them perfect. So
then I had to undo what they were doing and make up funny—but try to do
it in a nice way because I’m a kid who doesn’t really know what he’s
doing, and he’s got these seasoned people. So I said, “How about we do
this? You’re going to build, but if you’re right-handed, you have to
hammer with your left hand”
COLLINGS:
That’s interesting.
CARTER:
You can’t have any levels, you can’t have any nails, and you can’t have
any straight lines. And then you try to get as close to this drawing as
you can.”
COLLINGS:
Boy, that’s a really logistics-oriented way of providing instruction.
1:56:44.1
CARTER:
So I’m not going up against them, because they’re designed to be judged
entirely upon the other set of criteria, how straight is it, how perfect
is it, and I’m trying to undo them of it, but I’m trying to make it so
absurd that they start to understand what we’re looking for, what the
aesthetic was. I still have a scar right here on my chest where when I
went to the dump—I mean, I was the one, like to go and get the tin, and
I was pulling tin out of the—and there was one, and it went
[demonstrates] right into me. So I still have—so I always think about
that. Just to show you how immature I was, though, I asked Michael
Haller how long I would be gone on location because I was living with my
first girlfriend, and he said about three months, and then when they
went over schedule, I said since I told her three months, I said I had
to leave and go back, and I left after three months, but the movie
wasn’t over. [laughter]
And until we died, we still maintained very good friends, but I was so
unprofessional in that way, you know. Now, I’ve sort of done that a few
times, but, I mean, I don’t do in a harrumph. Anyway, I always thought
that was a certain time and a certain person that I could do that with
and not hurt my career. But I then worked on China Syndrome with Jack
Lemmon, who was my dad’s client. He helped me, I think, get a job with
George Jenkins, and that was interesting because I got to work with the
GE physicist who was very disgruntled and was giving us information
about how these nuclear plants were set up. I was in charge of talking
with him, and I would really get into it to make it as accurate as
possible, which was good, because, in the end, when that movie came out,
it was right around Three Mile Island disaster, so it actually mattered
that it was relatively accurate, it wasn’t just gobbledygook. It was
some gobbledygook, but not to the point that it mattered.
There’s, for instance, a reality-based kind of movie as compared to a
fantasy. But, you see, movies are that way anyway. In the beginning of
movies, there was Lumière brothers who went out and they filmed real
life and brought it back to people. Then there was Méliès, who was doing
fantasy. It’s like two sides of the same coin.
COLLINGS:
Isn’t that interesting?
CARTER:
Even the first Academy Award for Best Picture, there’s two of them. One
is Sunrise and one of them is Wings. One’s Best Production and one’s
Best Artistic Achievement.
COLLINGS:
Oh, I hadn’t realized that. That’s very interesting.
CARTER:
Even last year, the Best Movie was La La Land—no. Moonlight. You know
what I mean?
COLLINGS:
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right, yeah.
1:58:19.1
CARTER:
But it’s those two, they couldn’t be more emblematic of those two
sensibilities. So, even as it’s reflected for me, whether it’s realistic
or fantasy, that’s, for me, part of the juice that I use about
conceptual art, that it has to be, because otherwise you’d be playing
one standard to the one thing, one filter to the wrong thing. It’s all
fantasy, it’s all made up. The minute the camera’s there and the minute
you edit the film, you’ve changed it. So I like that aspect of cinema,
and when I was going into these early years, obviously I was just trying
to learn the trade of how to illustrate, how to do my job, how to track
things, how to help sets get made, but I wasn’t an architect, so I
couldn’t really help in some ways.
What that led to was a movie I did for Disney called Magic Journeys,
which was a 3D movie, and, again, remember I don’t see 3D because my
eyes don’t look together. One eye sees far and one eye sees near, so
they’re not looking together to see normal 3D, but I designed it. It was
a free-associative fantasy that played at Epcot for about five years,
and it was a great first movie to work on. It was fourteen minutes long,
double 70-millimeter, huge movie, and it was just a free-associative
trip with these kids going on a journey of their imaginations. So it was
almost, again—if you start with Bound for Glory and then you go to
something that’s real and it’s socially engaged in the world, and then
you go to Magic Journeys, already still, even at that point, there’s all
the makings of all that I was doing once again being played out, the
fantasies that I got from my trips around the world and the reality that
I had interfaced with, and now it’s back and forth in another sort of
almost epoch of five years all the way up until the point when I worked
on Goonies.
Goonies was the movie where I met Steven Spielberg, and I worked with
Michael Riva as a production designer, who he was just a couple years
older than me, but what was great was he was fearless, so he kind of
released me of the fear. We would just be in it for the right reasons,
in fact, to the point where I remember I was going over the Mulholland
hill and I realized that we didn’t know what we were doing, and we were
so far behind, I didn’t know how we were going to get it done. But I
just shifted that paradigm and I said, well, would you want this job
when you were ten years old? And the answer was a resounding yes because
I was being paid to be a swashbuckler. That’s the way I thought of it.
And that movie, to this day—that movie just was—the Library of Congress.
COLLINGS:
I know. I saw that.
CARTER:
Yeah. Because it is such a great kids’ journey that is sort of that type
of thing we were talking about being in the [inaudible] or the Beverly
Glen, and then having an adventure, but there are threats on the
outside.
COLLINGS:
Right, right. But it’s very muted. You don’t know if it’s real yet, and
then it turns out it is real.
2:01:43.7 2:04:07.1
CARTER:
And also it just keeps growing and is growing, and it’s a treasure hunt,
so it was up my alley and Michael’s, and we brought so much to that
movie and the spunk of how we created it. We didn’t know what we were
doing. We couldn’t find anybody to even draft the ship that knew how to
draw a ship. I mean, we couldn’t. I mean, the compound curves. Finally,
we did. But the angle of the ship, we would have swordfights to
determine which angle was the best angle to put the ship on, or I’d pull
out my five-dollar bill and show the scroll on that and say, “Put that
on the side of the ship as the scroll.” I mean, if you actually look at
it, some of the design is so funky that it’s hysterical, but I look at
it and I just look at it and go, “Kids. Just kids playing,” and that’s
what we were.
That’s where I realized that this is something I could do and I liked to
do, and that’s when I met Steven when I took him on a tour, he and Kathy
Kennedy, because Michael was out of town, so I started them in the
beginning and it was like Pirates of the Caribbean. I took them on the
journey in order, so it ended with the ship, and I think they were very
happy with the way I conceived the storyline and could tell them and
show them what we were doing, and so he offered me to do the production
design a few months later on Amazing Stories, and that was this
kaleidoscope of stories that were kind of leftover ideas or fragments of
dreams that Steven had that he wanted to put together in this anthology
TV series. So I was always coming out of the sixties so fragmented with
all the thoughts I had, and yet Amazing Stories was a chance to make it
all look coherent, because it was all under the umbrella of Amazing
Stories.
So I had nine stages going at all times and so much to do. That’s where
I learned to delegate. I had to, like, one time just stop on my bike and
go, “Okay. I can’t do all this.” And then I went, “Well, wait a minute.
Steven has just talked to me for five minutes about a train going
through a house and wants to see me in two weeks, and then we’ll have
worked out how to do that, so look how much he’s delegating to me and
look all that he’s doing. Maybe there’s a trick in there or maybe it’s
not just—what if I do that?” So that’s how I learned to delegate and to
realize how important that was. And I had such a range of directors,
from Marty Scorsese to Steven, Bob Zemeckis and Clint Eastwood, to
college students. Marty Scorsese had an episode where it was about—it
was called “Mirror, Mirror”—about a guy, an actor, who looks in the
mirror and he keeps starting to see this phantom, and finally he flips
out and he throws something and breaks the mirror, and then he sees the
phantom in the mirror. It was supposed to be scary, and it was, sort of,
I mean in a psychological way.
So we started talking, Marty and I, over the phone about a sequence from
Lady from Shanghai. There’s this great mirror sequence, breaking of a
mirror. So he said, “Great.” So I laid out this whole thing, and then a
week before we were going to shoot, he called up and he said, “I can’t
break a mirror on the set. I just can’t do it. That’s just inviting—.”
And he was at a bad point in his life anyway with—things weren’t going
so well, and he was just rebuilding that. So I said, “Okay.” So I came
up with an idea where I put a Plexi mirror and some glass shelves in
front of it that we could throw something at—I can’t remember what it
was he threw—and it appeared to break, and then offstage we had somebody
break a mirror and then bring it in already, and Marty approved that
that would be okay to do, okay, because he was superstitious, right?
COLLINGS:
Right. That in itself sounds like an art installation from New York in
the seventies.
CARTER:
Isn’t that funny? Doesn’t it?
COLLINGS:
Yeah.
CARTER:
And so thirty-something years, thirty-five years later, when I had a
Lifetime Achievement Award at the Art Directors Guild and I was giving a
speech—and Marty was there because he was being given an award for
Cinematic Imagery, and I turned to him and I said, “So, I need to tell a
story. I haven’t seen you in thirty-five years. I want to tell the story
to everybody about you and I.” And he was kind of looking because he was
just right here, and I said, “Don’t worry.” And I told the story about
the mirror and about how he didn’t want to break the mirror on the set.
And I said, “I think that was a really good choice, because look where
we are now.” [laughter]
COLLINGS:
Oh, that was great. [laughter]
CARTER:
For both of us.
COLLINGS:
Who knows what would have happened.
CARTER:
That’s what I said. Who knows? So that was a good one. Anyway, so that
was a nice roundabout way of connecting those times. But we all took
that very seriously. That’s where I met Bob Zemeckis. A lot of fun.
There were great—just a kaleidoscope. What I did learn on it—and maybe
this would be the way to just sort of end this part of it, would be to
say I thought I was fragmented because it was like the kaleidoscopic
sixties of so many influences on my travels, so I felt fragmented at
times in ways that I couldn’t trust myself to go from here to here and
then sustain this. That’s why it was so important to have the Amazing
Stories be an umbrella that made it feel and look like it was all
coherent. We got to do every genre, every type of movie, and just in a
little short hit.
COLLINGS:
Yeah, that’s interesting.
CARTER:
And Steven had said, “This’ll be like a film school for you,” and it
was. But what I learned was that I started to feel that actually I was
something, but that all these different points of view were glimpses
from a different angle of the same thing through a different filter,
seeing it slightly differently if I was—and so that’s when it began to
be much clearer to me how I could have an identity and still go all over
the place. Just two years before that, when I’d gone down the road of
trying to see if I could direct something and how to make that all work,
I had met my wife, and Amazing Stories coming together with the first
year of us getting together and then us getting married the same year,
1985, really became the launchpad for everything else. Those things
finally came together. I’m still married and still have that career, and
that was the real home base then that was being set up that still exists
today.
COLLINGS:
So 1985 was a very good year.
CARTER:
Yeah, it was a very good year.
COLLINGS:
Okay. Let’s leave it there for today.
CARTER:
Okay. Sure. [End of December 22, 2017 interview]
COLLINGS:
Okay, so today is January 12th, 2018, Jane Collings interviewing Rick
Carter at YRL, and we thought we might jump in ahead of ourselves to
talk a little bit about A.I.
CARTER:
Maybe the best way to contextualize that is to realize that even if I
was to start at this point with what would be a linear progression—
COLLINGS:
That would be starting with Back to the Future.
CARTER:
Which is not linear, because its very plot as a sequel, Back to the
Future II, was to go and jump into the future, 2015, and then come back
to 1985, but things had changed, so it was an alternate 1985, in order
to go to 1955 to rectify what had happened in 2015, and eventually in
the third sequel, Back to the Future III, to go all the way back to 1885
before returning to this 1985 of now. And, of course, all of that is now
in the past because we’re in 2018. So jumping out of order, as long as
you stay coherent, or as I try to stay coherent, in an emotional context
might actually be a good way to be able to not have the linearness of
the process obscure some of the more important themes or even the more
important emotions or perhaps even more important historical points of
reference as seen from a broader perspective. So, with that in mind, I
can jump to A.I. because I can overarchingly give it a context and then
tell you the story of A.I.
COLLINGS:
Yes, that would be wonderful.
0:03:14.7 0:05:06.6 0:07:18.6
CARTER:
The context for it is that it’s a story that Stanley Kubrick, the
director of 2001 and so many other movies, Dr. Strangelove, The Shining,
and Paths of Glory, he developed this story about a robot child and the
journey of the robot child’s attempt to become a real boy, essentially
mirroring the Pinocchio story, and going through multiple emotions and
worlds to eventually try to achieve that goal. The reason that I would
bring it up that way is because Stanley Kubrick passed away, and he gave
it to Steven Spielberg before he died as something he thought Steven
could actually achieve after his death. He even, before his death,
thought Steven might be a better choice to tell this story because of
the amount of heart that’s in the story.
But what’s interesting about the story, as told eventually by Steven as
the director from the basis that Stanley laid out, is that really it’s a
dance between the heart and the mind, that it’s very much a Kubrickian
mind at work but a Spielbergian heart, and a lot of people found that
conflicted. I personally thought it was an amazing place to go into,
because at that stage in my career I was past the point of trying to
prove myself on sort of the logistics and the craft and the aesthetics,
but was very interested in the journey that was being told, and also
that the form of the journey had something I’ve never forgotten, which
is essentially a four-act structure rather than a three-act structure,
because you go through the story of A.I., which I could illuminate, but
you end at a certain point which is the natural end of a three-act
structure.
But then it moves into a fourth act, and that fourth act actually
mirrors the attempt to have the main character realize his goal, but
needing to do it through transcending the lifetime that a normal human
being would have. So he actually goes into the future and confronts his
legacy, which actually is not, at that point in the storyline, entirely
different thematically from Back to the Future when Marty McFly goes
into the future, confronts his own legacy, and that’s a sort of a
premise that is a storytelling device to make you think about what
you’re doing and what the complications and ultimately the effect of
your life might be.
In that particular story of A.I., seeking a mother’s love is the primary
driving force, and seeking it in a way that is actually quite heartfelt
so that the very last part of it, which many audiences had trouble with
because it kept going, and they attributed it to Spielberg somehow
sentimentalizing the tale, which was not true, because it was always
Stanley’s story and took us into that dimension, because I think it was
an attempt to synthesize something that was very deep for both of them,
which was actually their loves of their mothers. Steven has a very
strong mother presence in his life who’s the basis of his whole work
ethic, and so did Stanley, and so do I. So I found that I could relate
very strongly to the sentiments, and I could also be willing to take a
complicated and yet hopefully simple journey to rediscover something
that was, in a sense, in the past, but I had to go to the future to find
it, if that makes sense.
When you start off as any human being, but particularly I’ll just say as
a son, with leaving the love of my mother, going to find somebody else
to mate with, and then to also recognize that that love is part of what
sustains me and my ability to, first of all, love, but second of all,
even to feel supported. So I think the going to A.I. as the tale that I
would tell from it is a tale like all of these that I might tell, which
is really my own, because whatever I tell you about it is my version of
it. I’m not just the person who creates the sets, because, while that’s
my job, I take it very personally, and as an artist I can’t help but
apply all the ways that I learned how to personalize my travels as a
young man into these cinematic travels that I embarked upon.
The specifics of that story, the first third of the story is a domestic
tale. It’s all told basically in a house. It’s set in the future after
the Earth has been somewhat flooded, and a couple that have a child that
is in a kind of a hibernation state because he’s damaged, is giving up
hope that they can ever retrieve him, and they’ve come upon this new way
to have a child, which is that they’ve got these sentient robots who can
effect the ability to both give love and receive love. And at first, the
mother resists this, but eventually decides that she should go along
with it, and there’s an awkward kind of getting-to-know-each-other
period, but there’s a bond that starts to develop, but it’s interrupted
when the real natural-born child, or boy, is brought back to life enough
so that he can come back, and so he supplants this boy robot, David.
COLLINGS:
And bringing with him some very uncomfortable human emotions.
0:09:52.2
CARTER:
That’s right, particularly the jealousy, and setting up the robot boy to
always need to compete with him on the terms that he’s better at, which
is—I mean, even just from the simple part of actually just digesting
food, right? So essentially the robot is not designed to even ingest
food but to mimic it, but then feels he should go further with that,
which becomes a very grotesque scene of what it does to just gunk up the
system of the robot. But it starts to speak at that point to the
metaphor of being an outsider that can’t do the natural thing that would
elicit the love that he’s programmed to need. In order to be able to
even desire the love is how you give love. I mean, it’s that
Beatle-esque thing, “In the end, the love you take is equal to the love
you make.” There’s a reciprocation that goes with what you give and what
you get, which, again, comes from my generation’s fascination with that
kind of a message out of the late sixties and the Beatles and all that
kind of philosophical point of view, which I would say is absolutely
woven through all the works that I’ve been involved with.
A.I. then sets that boy on a journey where he has to be thrown out of
his nest by the mother. When the conflict is too great, there’s a threat
that people feel that he’s going to be capable of violence either
against the boy or even against the mother when something’s
misinterpreted as an act of potential danger. Now he’s thrown out, so
now it’s one of those horrific stories where the little child is cast
away, not understanding why. It has no means to survive in this world.
COLLINGS:
And cast away to save him.
CARTER:
To save him, but he doesn’t know that. All he feels is that he’s been
put aside in order to be meaningless, essentially. And then we open up
into a broader world at that point and realize this is a world in which
there are not just this one boy but there’s many robots, and there’s an
actual cultural and philosophical and psychological and personal
conflict with robots, and so that there’s many robots that are cast
aside and they’re kind of just wandering the forests and rounded up to
even be put into these shows in which they’re dismantled for
entertainment. And David is caught up in that whole thing, so he’s now
actually threatened. But what’s interesting in that journey is that up
until that point, he’s only been really able to reference what you would
call life or existence in relationship to his programming in
relationship to his mother and his father, particularly his mother. Now
his own actual, as in any human’s, real development experience is his
own life is threatened, and he actually defends his life. He actually
wants to live on his own terms.
COLLINGS:
So he has this moment of development of—
CARTER:
Under threat.
COLLINGS:
—a will to live, a consciousness of his existence, which is what the Dr.
Hobby character had been—
CARTER:
That’s right.
COLLINGS:
—striving for in his laboratory.
CARTER:
And nobody knew whether it could have that, but now he’s striking out on
his own and has his own actual individualistic desire to live. And while
it’s a violent scene, it’s all told quite meditatively, almost, because
you’re aware that the philosophical underpinnings of a journey and what
life is about permeate this movie, even though it has the veneer of a
kind of Hollywood spectacle, but it’s got a kind of a philosophical
meditation, almost, because it never—
COLLINGS:
Very much so.
CARTER:
When you finish that one beat, you’re not given a kind of an ending or a
finale, you’re really just given an opening into the next dimension, and
the next dimension in this case is that he’s now associated with this
other robot, Gigolo Joe, who you have some backstory on, basically is a
love robot designed to please sexually. And he has a certain amount of
his own existential quandaries, but they’re very seemingly superficial,
but at the same time, because he’s an older male compared to David,
there’s something for him, David, to learn from the ways of the world,
which Gigolo Joe says, “I know everything.”
COLLINGS:
“I know women, and we can find the Blue Fairy.”
CARTER:
Exactly. So because of the Pinocchio quest that takes them, in a sense,
looking for the color blue, if you think about it, because the Blue
Fairy, but you end up going to Rouge City, which is a carnal place of
sexual desire, and it’s like the last place you would think that you
would take a young boy. Now, that’s where the Kubrickian part goes into
a subconscious level that probably Spielberg on his own would not have
designed.
COLLINGS:
And there is a place like that in the Pinocchio story as well.
CARTER:
Oh, is there?
COLLINGS:
There’s an island.
CARTER:
Oh, there’s an island. That’s right. And it has all the kind of vices.
It’s just that this one is overtly sexual, so in the design, one of the
aspects is how do we convey that in enough of an acceptable way that is
not then—meaning to a mass audience—yet still gets across that that’s
what this is about.
COLLINGS:
So how did you decide to do that?
0:16:33.6
CARTER:
Well, I think essentially it’s a little bit of playing off the
whore/Madonna motif and the sense that you’re looking for something
ultimately that is sacred to David, which is the mother’s love and is
not really sexual other than she’s a female, so there’s the kind of—and
it’s a mistaken identity with essentially the Pietà image that he
mistakes for the Blue Fairy. And so I consciously modeled it after the
Pietà because it’s one of the most beautiful and feminine images in
Western civilization that one identifies with a mother. I mean, it’s
Mother Mary. And then you have the women in all of their shapes, in all
their voluptuousness, forming buildings, so it’s kind of the red and the
blue contradicting. And, of course, there’s that one powerful image of
the bridges with the woman, mouth open, you go right into it. So there’s
a whole way that there’s a moving in that is—I just would say it’s a
penetration. It’s a moving within, but what you discover there is
complex for the boy, and a lot of it’s going over his head. He’s not
seeing it in those terms, which I thought was a fascinating way to
create that kind of an environment so the audience is experiencing it
one way, but that’s not the way he’s experiencing it. He’s very
single-minded.
So then he goes to Dr. No, who’s, again, one of these types of
characters that seems to permeate many of the movies I’ve been involved
with, which is—it’s a man with white hair telling you things. It could
Doc Brown, it could be John Hammond in Jurassic Park, it could be John
Quincy Adams in Amistad, it could be—I’m sure there’s others I’m not
even thinking about. But I was very aware—oh, even the man in Munich
who’s the French guy behind the consortium that’s giving him his
information. There often seems to be a white male with white hair who is
a guide.
COLLINGS:
That’s interesting.
0:18:24.5
CARTER:
Doesn’t mean there’s only white men as guides. There’s also others,
femme fatales as well. Like in Death Becomes Her, you’ve got Lisle, who
gives the potion, or you’ve got the woman—ultimately she gets killed,
but she’s a seductress. And so it’s not always for a positive, but often
in the more adventurous of tales, the guide is a—it’s practically
Jungian, I mean at least on that level. But he goes and he finds, from
Dr. No, a path to take that next step, and, again, because he’s got
individuation now—and that’s what the argument is about, “My mother does
love me. You’re telling me—.” That’s what Gigolo Joe says to him, that,
“She doesn’t think you’re special,” and that’s just part of the level
that he knows this is special but it’s not. But he’s going, “That’s not
true.”
So he’s willing to move on, even by himself if he has to, takes the
helicopter by himself. Now, as it turns out, Gigolo Joe goes with him,
but they go to the ends of, in a sense, human world, because it’s where
Manhattan is underwater, and they’re going to find the area where the
Blue Fairy might exist, because that’s when, I guess, she’s been last
seen there. That’s the information. They go there and then they
encounter the workshop, where he’s on the way trying to find the Blue
Fairy, which is like, “Okay, there’s my goal, and it’s still coherent
with where I started.” But along the way, and in finding the workshop
where he was created, he also finds an even worse obstacle, which is
that he isn’t special. He is just one of many—
COLLINGS:
Very demonstrably so.
CARTER:
—and literally encounters an alternate self, which is a huge threat to
everything that he’s just developed, which is an individual identity
going on a journey, which is now absolutely challenged by the very fact
that there’s another one who’s like the chipper young version who hasn’t
gone on a journey that’s like—
COLLINGS:
Yes, he seems quite lithe and limber.
CARTER:
“And I’m David,” you know. And then he literally destroys that David. I
mean, that’s his reaction, is so powerfully human in terms of, “Not only
am I surviving, I’m surviving on the terms I need to survive in order to
be an individual.” So these are levels that, within this journey motif I
was talking about before, I was incredibly gratified to get to—as a
tenth movie, basically, to go this far, okay? Now, we’re not done.
COLLINGS:
Yeah, I know.
CARTER:
I’m just saying. So at this point, that could be—
COLLINGS:
That could be the end, but it’s not.
CARTER:
Well, that could be almost the end, which would be so negative, because
any encounters, all those other boxes of other Davids and Dorises, and
it just—his brain—he says, “My brain’s falling out.” All he literally
does at that point is sit at an edge and let himself fall, and he falls
into his subconscious. I mean, literally, you couldn’t have a more
Jungian subconscious set of images with the fish coming in and
surrounding him and taking him underwater. And where do they take him?
They literally take him ultimately, via the Amphibicopter, to this
underwater amusement park where the Blue Fairy does reside. And you go
by Pinocchio’s journey, which doesn’t exist at Coney island, but exists
in—
COLLINGS:
But it could.
CARTER:
Well, it exists in Disney, right? So now we know we’re in a Disney—it
may say “Coney Island,” but it’s just a sleight-of-hand, because it’s
literally now you’re down into Pinocchio’s world, that island that you
referred to earlier, in order to come upon the Blue Fairy. And I worked
very hard to make that face the perfect face as best I possibly could
because that had to be the mother figure, but also somewhat seductive
along the lines of—at least as seductive as Michelangelo’s—
COLLINGS:
It’s a very striking, mesmerizing image.
CARTER:
For me as somebody who does portraits and working that—because it’s not
just a person. We didn’t just cast one person. We sculpted and then we
just kept working it to try to create some figure that I was hoping
would be timeless, in a sense, of its iconic nature. When he goes in
that Amphibicopter with his little sidekick—again, you have, on a
journey, somebody to talk to, whether it’s a volleyball in Castaway or
it’s a little stuffed animal, someone that can, in a sense, provide an
alter ego, even in that—
COLLINGS:
Yes, the animal is wonderful.
0:24:16.5
CARTER:
Yeah. So he ends up going there. He cannot—it’s just a statue, and he
wants her to make him into a real boy, which he keeps repeating, and as
time passes, the whole amusement park sort of starts to collapse, he’s
trapped there. I mean, this is where the movie—I mean, you could end a
movie there and say it’s a metaphor for the timeless quest for that
which you can’t have. You can never return home to have that, but in the
questing becomes the tale, but it’s, in a sense, unfulfilled and
somewhat tragic because you’re in the search for something you can never
get, and you can never return home, really. That’s a journey that goes
out that does not return home, which is contrary to almost every journey
that’s ever told. There are a few, but you always have to find
something, at least out there, that keeps you—like even if it’s Munich,
the movie I worked on, I mean, when he was in New York, he’s not at
home. There’s an epiphany. It’s an ambivalence, but there’s somewhere to
take that. But a more satisfying journey, even if it’s Apocalypse Now,
sort of ultimately you’ve encountered the horror and you know there’s a
return at that point, even as damaged as the person is. But in The
Wizard of Oz, you return home and you have something you’ve learned from
this journey.
So that’s very much a part of the motif that if this had been presented
to me without a coda of some sort, I would have been questioning why do
we tell all that in order to end here? Well, it wasn’t Stanley, nor
Steven’s, intent to end there, but it is a place where you kind of go,
okay, because if the next sentence that you have to say—and is literally
said in the movie, 2,000 years pass.
COLLINGS:
That’s a mode jump, jerk, as you called it.
CARTER:
Exactly, where you’re jumping into something that you can’t make sense
of, you just have to go with it.
COLLINGS:
“Two thousand years passed.”
CARTER:
Yeah. And not only that, it replicates in content the form that the
digital revolution in cinema is occurring, because every single thing,
almost, at the point forward until you get back home is digital. There’s
a little bit of reality-based set construction, but a lot of it, that
whole first part of it, is all digital.
COLLINGS:
Traveling through the chasm.
0:26:36.8
CARTER:
That’s right. And so that, in form, is what’s happening in cinema as the
creating of environments that had not been created like that before,
including Rouge City. When he’s in Rouge City and standing up there,
there’s an interactive quality that was being presented in the staging
of that that had never been done before. So just the moving of the
camera, the way it does, it was a breakthrough in order to do that. So
now you move 2,000 years in the future, and robots who are sentient
beings that now are the, in a sense, masters of this world, they look
upon David as like a prototype of themselves, but who lived in the time
of their god, their maker, knew their maker, because “we are God,” from
their point of view.
And one of the things I said would be interesting is if these beings,
rather than wearing their emotions on the inside as we humans do, they
wear them on the outside, so that that’s why when they touch him, you
see all the stuff that’s being transmitted by David to them and they’re
transferred on, so that they are getting—and a lot of people thought
they were aliens and couldn’t quite understand. It was hard to design a
2,000-year-in-the-future being, right? But what they do is they finally
give into David’s desire to return home and to see his mother, because
Teddy has a little bit of the DNA of his mother—
COLLINGS:
Right, the hair.
CARTER:
—that just happens to have that little bit with him. So they’re able to
take David back home to have, in a sense, what he was envisioning in his
mind that would be the culmination of his quest, which is to be loved by
his mother and have a perfect day with her. And that’s all that he can
have because the rules that they set up are that if you bring someone
back, you can only do that for a one-day cycle and then they’re gone
forever. So it was a wonderful magical kind of time limit on it, but
then again, being able to get what you want, and they have that sort of
infinite day, and it ultimately takes them to that place where then he
can, in a sense, close his eyes and finally dream, which is the ultimate
sort of level that only come, in a sense, with love that has brought
everything together, and then that’s the fairy tale, the summation. And,
to me, I would say the Kubrickian touches The Beatles touches Steven’s
sensibility is my own, is there’s no movie I’ve worked on that is more
to the core of who I am—
COLLINGS:
That’s what I was thinking.
CARTER:
—and that was interesting that you just started there. So I’ve always
valued that movie more than any other movies because I understood the
fundamental code of it, and I also understood how much further it goes
into the journey motif than most movies would ever dare to go and still
brings you back home. The other ones I’ve worked on, let’s say Avatar,
which is fantastic to the levels that it goes to within the—having a
force in Eywa that can hear you, that can be Deus ex Machina and help
save the day at the end and tie together so much of it, is a truly
magnificent journey—and realized so powerfully. Even Star Wars has a
breadth to it, ultimately, in terms of exploring those types of levels,
the spiritual meets the events of journey.
But as a meditation that goes to the deep levels of our existence and
philosophy and where that spiritual component of why do we quest and
what do we quest for and what is the return to a home base, particularly
at that particular time—I was very aware that if I really had to stop
there as a career, that I could not imagine that I had been robbed of
any part of fulfilling the vision that I had had while journeying,
myself as a young man, that I would get to tell that story one way or
the other, which is something I still attempt to do all the time, which
is to tell that story of the journey that I went on, which is not the
singular, but it did start in 1970, and every time I touch it, it adds
to the fact that it’s a continuing journey.
But I still would say, even now, just speaking personally—and here we
are in the year 2018—that’s not gone away, and it’s even emotional for
me now, given that my mother, who is still alive, has dementia. So now
there’s an aspect of I’m losing her while she’s still here, and she is
still an anchor for me in my whole psyche and ability to orient me,
because there’s nobody that ever takes that place, and yet she’s only
partially there to be that, not entirely gone, still recognizes me and
all those things, but everything—even as I’m talking to you right now,
I’m realizing that the parallels are quite powerful, because with
dementia, in the form at least that she has it, she doesn’t have memory
that goes back, nor can she project very far, so every day that I—
COLLINGS:
So it’s that perfect day.
CARTER:
Each time has to be a perfect day that—let’s put it this way. It is a
containable-entity day that then does not necessarily, other than
through this sub-level, connect to the next one. And that’s a very
powerful, actually, idea for me to just consider right now in light of
what you’ve just brought up with A.I., and that is when things are
confined to a set of parameters that are the reality that you’re
experiencing them in and do not easily connect to the past what came
before or that which comes later, which is the natural way to give them
context as to what their meaning is, then the only other level so far
that I’ve experienced what that context is is a sub-level of emotional
connection or even spiritual connection to why I’m engaging with, in
this particular case, my mother with her recognizing me and I’m
recognizing her, and I can reference certain things in the conversation
or our body language or whatever doing that we both know has resonance
to the past, at least, and to some degree to whatever the next set of
expectations is, even when they’re not fulfilled. But it’s not a
through-line that is based upon, let’s say, the facts of what you talk
about. Let’s say if I’m saying, “Well, I’m here now because I’m
referencing this thing that happened in the past, and we need to resolve
it now so that we can move forward into the future,” that is not—
COLLINGS:
That’s not what’s happening.
0:35:44.6 0:37:59.7 0:41:08.1
CARTER:
That is not what’s happening. Those connections are cut. So then the
question becomes what are the other connections and how do they provide
continuity and context so that you then can have emotion, connection,
feelings that give it resonance? And I think that that’s part of maybe
what all of this, and even talking about A.I., jumping out of order, is
about is that I could go through a litany of all the movies that I’ve
worked on and what they meant in one way or another, but sometimes what
I’ve discovered is really it’s the portals that reveal everything.
Even if you’re not seeing all the details of everything, it’s the nature
of what has all this been about, and so that whether I refer to The
Beatles and whatever they meant to me growing up or whether it’s
traveling to places in order to have that drama reveal what’s important
to me as my own identity or if I’m storytelling, what’s important for a
character, what choices I make aesthetically to depict that or what
stylistic ideas I come upon, such as in A.I., I was very aware that I
was telling a story—it was almost like the Olympics with these worlds
that were like circles and just barely overlapped, and then sometimes
almost didn’t to the point of a mode jerk, as we talked about, but that
ultimately you went through all of this so that form and content starts
to come together and then it repeats itself, not exactly, but the next
one out builds upon, but then again is separate from, and whatever the
continuity of all this is, both sociological, personal, generational,
set in time, mixed up in time, starts to—it’s amazing how, over time,
when you look back and give that context, you can see it as something.
And I have a very strong feeling right now, at age sixty-eight almost,
that that shift, similar in some ways to my previous experience with the
late sixties, but when I was seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen rather
than sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, that the paradigms shifts and
you can begin to see that that which came before was determined by other
forces than the ones that you’re witnessing, and that then the further
you get away from it, the easier it is to see. So the World War II
generation, the World War I generation, their concerns, their
considerations, their humanity was defined by the events that they went
through and who then they were as individuals and which people did what,
which ones survived, which ones didn’t, and the more distance you get,
you contextualize what they were about in a different way.
So my generation, the Baby Boom generation, is hitting a point where
something is literally shifting—I mean, it has occurred to me—and this
is going to sound like what does this have to do with anything, but I
think it ultimately has to do with the journey—that what we’re actually
experiencing, to some degree, in the world is a breakdown on a level
that we can even give a name to, and it’s called Trump. [Collings
laughs.] But seriously. We are not just looking at a fight over the
politics of conservative and liberal as we have known them and fought
over this as a Baby Boom generation back and forth, and quite balanced
in my lifetime between Republicans and Democrats, actually, so the
forces that are liberal, the forces that are conservative, that actually
blow off steam for whoever’s not in power enough at times when they get
some power so that it doesn’t just turn into revolution again or civil
war, because there’s such a diversity of interests.
Now there’s a breakdown. There’s a mental breakdown. We’re now even
calling it that. And like what you just did when you grimace, it’s
beyond where you can get angry at the person. I mean, you’re angry at
the person, but you’re angry because he’s in the position he’s in. But
what’s more threatening is that in that position, not having mental
acuity to recognize the affect of what you do so that you can just every
single day take the people, and it becomes very much like an extended
version of spousal abuse when you don’t know where it’s going to come
from, how it’s going to come from, but you’re trapped in it somehow. But
the reason I bring it up is not so much for a political point of view,
but on a journey to encounter this, I will just tell you that it’s
outside the realm of what I would have imagined we’d encounter, and I’ve
encountered it before in my lifetime so far, to feel this way, but nor
have I encountered my mother’s dementia.
I never accounted that at age sixty-eight I would be encountering a
dimensionality in relationship to my mother’s generation that would
impact me in this way, not only because it potentially is a threat to me
just in my own mind, like, ooh, that could happen to me or my wife or
somebody I love, but because it’s outside of what I’m used to thinking
are the parameters. And the journey motif always takes you outside of
the parameters that you thought were the ones that you knew, and it
doesn’t just end when you’re in your late sixties as though that’s the
end of your life if you’re going to potentially live into your nineties.
So these rites of passage that we go through that we would like to think
we’ve been through and are done with, when it’s all thrown up and you
just don’t know what to do, that’s how I’m viewing it.
It doesn’t mean I have an ironclad version of it that makes me feel
settled with it. I’m aware that it’s happening in a way that if I was
talking right now to somebody fifty years from now, I would say this is
how I am best accommodating this mental stress at this stage, knowing,
though, that it does relate to these other levels of journeying that
I’ve been doing as part of my generational reaction to growing up in
West L.A. and the influences that I’ve had and having had the access to
the various means of expression that I’ve had that are there to be seen.
They can be read into, but they didn’t account for this.
There’s nothing in my journey so far where you come upon somebody has
got tremendous control over what you’re going to experience, but you
realize—it’s one thing to be diabolical and have a plan, even if it’s a
plan to hurt you as the character in this journey, but what if they
don’t even know and they’re diabolical in another level? And that’s
something I never accounted for. So I would be interested in where, if
this ever lasted fifty years, somebody to say, well, oh—and then
obviously they’ll have a lot of information about where it all went and
then what it all added up to and whether there’s other reference points
other than, oh, look, here’s the one—not cassette, but digital thing
that somebody’s talking about, the “it” before—it’s like one of those
Twilight Zone, you know, where there’s something at the center of it.
And you even recognize it with behavior that relates to—it’s, let’s say,
this entity called Trump. We’ll go into a place, and then he’ll have all
these other men come around him, just kind of support him and say,
“You’re okay, you’re okay,” because they’re still getting something from
him that they feel is important. But at the core of it, it’s every
single day—in fact, every single day since the new year has started,
there’s been a breakdown and another breakdown. I’m sure anybody who’s
in this field who’s watching this is very specific—and not unrelated,
what I’m saying, to if I take my mother to be—not every day, but every
month, that they can tell the—
COLLINGS:
The trajectory.
CARTER:
—deterioration. You don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but you
know what’s going to happen, but you don’t know when it’s going to
happen, but it’s going to happen. And so as part of this journey motif,
even though it sounds like it’s a riff into another thing, it’s like
saying none of this about movies and all that goes deep makes anybody
immune from the life and times that we live in that are so fraught with
something that’s unpredictable that we can’t absolutely know how it’s
going to hit. And every time it hits, we know it’s—we’ve all been
conditioned now, and that’s the interesting aspect of it that I feel,
too, is it’s not as literal as—we’re playing out and actually we’re
going at each other in weird ways too. I mean, I think there’s a lot of
fighting now, even on people that would normally be on the same side of
an equation, because everybody is being impacted by this kind of
behavior, and then they don’t know where the boundaries are anymore in
terms of when they’re upset about something, they’re really upset. It
could be Star Wars, it could be how women are treated in Hollywood, it
could be anything, but when they get into now with this Internet and
everything, there’s a tremendous ability to act out your anger very
quickly because we’ve got somebody to talk about who’s continually angry
and upset and belligerent. If I was to put it into movie terms—
COLLINGS:
I was just going to ask you that.
CARTER:
Well, the only movie I’ve ever seen that comes to my mind is The
Manchurian Candidate where there’s a queen of spades, and when that card
is played, the lead character always responds, Laurence Harvey, because
he’s been brainwashed to—now he goes into a zone. The minute it’s
played, he’s in a zone that is controlled by that queen of spades, and
whoever walks forward at that point can tell him something. That’s what
they do. They even play it out—not Angela Lansbury’s character, but even
Frank Sinatra, they try to break him of it by doing all these queen of
spades, blow his mind. But the idea, to me, in a cinematic reference
point—I don’t know where this is going, except for to say the name
“Trump” is a trump card now to us. If I look on my iPhone—
COLLINGS:
It always takes you back to the same place.
0:46:39.2
CARTER:
Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. Google News, Trump. I just the see the name,
Trump, Trump, Trump. Like, two years ago, that didn’t mean anything to
me, that was just a name. And the fact is the name in its normal use and
the specific use, they become the same thing, a trump card. No matter
what I’m thinking, Trump’s action or words can trump that moment of what
I’m thinking, and the reason is also because the levels that it goes to
are not just our social interactions and fighting amongst the things
that we’re used to fighting about; it’s total annihilation. He’s got his
ability to actually annihilate us for whatever his supposed reason would
be, and his form of logic, whatever he thought he was fighting for, he
has that ability. So we have never been in a situation like this, and
then to have so many people—we don’t even know how to fight it. The
complicitness of certain people when they’re getting their agendas
across through this is just enough so that we go deeper and deeper and
deeper.
What this has to do with an account that relates to any of this is
probably minimal, but I would only just say that it is part of this
journey of the life that’s been expressed in movies, at least for me,
coming where I come from, and now am very aware that at this stage of
life I’m not in my fourth act, but the reason that A.I. is so important
is because I’ve experienced a fourth-act structure in that form so that
I feel like I’m heading into a fourth act. I feel very much like the
resolution of—this is just personal—of my journey has been pretty
complete now as far as what I would have known it to be, but now there’s
something else in trying to get back home. What that home is, on one
hand, I’m very aware you can never go home again on a certain level, but
that doesn’t stop me from trying to find a home that feels like home
again, and one of those is literally something I’ve done—again, this
is—I don’t know if it really relates other than however it relates,
which I kind of imagine is kind of somewhat open-ended as to—
COLLINGS:
Well, I mean, just like headline, I think it relates in the sense that
you’re talking about your craft in a very particular way, and that’s
interesting that an individual in this field approaches it in this
fashion rather than—it’s not about these blueprints and drawings, and
then I came up with this—
CARTER:
This design.
COLLINGS:
—computer idea. I mean, this is a different toolbox, and that’s
interesting.
0:50:18.4
CARTER:
Okay. I know to some degree I’m unusual in this. I know of one other
designer who taps into it quite deeply in this way, Dennis Gassner,
who’s also my age. He did Blade Runner, the most recent one, and he’s
done a lot of great movies. We have a parallel path, and we’re probably
the only two people that talk quite like this about what we do. But just
to realize, because I hadn’t thought about this within the context of
the work, if the journey motif has been for me the thing I’ve discovered
as a life thing and then something I’ve used as a tool—and has happened
to me, because the movies have been so many journeys—that motif of
starting at home and then returning home, I’m still trying now to find
where to go home to, even though I’m in my home, fortunately, where I
live, but that’s not the same as it was. So one of the homes that
relates in a personal level and which is at least part of California
history is the house that my father grew up in, which was in Carmel,
that my grandmother, who lived to be 103, and I used to visit her all
the time, and she was the place where I went to when I wrote the
conscientious objector form, which is basically a question “What’s the
nature of your belief?” and you have to answer that question, and it’s a
very deep question to ask, and at seventeen did that.
I now still have that house, my wife and I do, and we’ve rented it out
until the last couple of years. Now we’ve taken it back and have
renovated it. It still looks exactly the same, but it’s now got good
plumbing and all the things, so it’s potentially good to go for more
years. So it’s a kind of archetypal old-style Carmel house. So we’ve
been going back there, and go back there quite a bit, and whenever I do
now, I feel something that’s deep about home. It’s even an antidote to
what’s happened to my mother a little bit because it, like, has a
restorative quality to it. But also then it’s got this slightly yin-yang
relationship to me because I’m not ready to retire. I just go there and
be a part of that as my—that’s my life, and yet I’m drawn to be there
more than I have ever up until now because of something that I’m
getting.
COLLINGS:
Was that your mother’s mother?
0:54:08.3
CARTER:
It was my father’s mother. So that sense of place that I found out on
the road I still find in places in my life, and continue to do it,
whether it’s a movie that I’m creating or in my own life. And as a
motif, years from now, production design and what movies are may be
looked at in a different way, and maybe it will be illuminating to
someone to be able to look at a body of work, if that body of work
exists, and see it within a certain type of expression that doesn’t even
fall within how we normally look at movies now, which is, to a great
degree, by either the star vehicle that they represent for the
characters and the personalities or the genres that have been defined as
this or this.
But this kind of whatever it is that it represents, whether it’s a
journey genre or whatever one wants to say, is something that I feel
that I’ve contributed to in a deep way, and so that’s been at the basis
of how I’ve approached all these movies, as we said, starting from—I
mean, just to do the riff of them is sort of a continual what’s it—if I
was just returning home now and essentially the last place that I went
was in 1971 to do the movie The Post, which is very much about—that was
the year I came back from traveling around the world as a conscientious
objector, which is what that movie is about. It’s about conscientious
objection.
That’s what Daniel Ellsberg does when he releases those pages. It’s what
Kay Graham and everybody has to do in order to stand up to the
government. They have to conscientiously object to this information
being held from the public, and so the role of conscience that’s in
there that has permeated my work and my life is not lost on me as being
the—as my son said, “Is it odd or is it God?” [laughter] But it’s the
serendipity of it is there, because just tracing back just the role of
conscience, I can then go back to right where we were just talking
about, like in a fourth act finding your mother’s love journey. The year
it came out was 2001 right before 9/11, three months before 9/11.
From that point on, even though I did one other movie that was very much
like taking A.I. a little bit further in terms of literally just boy
going into the ice, was The Polar Express, to try to recapture a sense
of innocence and a belief in something from before. In this case, it’s
Christmas, believe in Santa Claus, remembering what it is to believe in
the spirit of Santa Claus. That’s just like a direct response to when
your world is shattered, right? But from that point on, it’s become
absolutely almost literal as a journey in which each time I’m being
called to go on these voyages, it deals with conscience and war, so when
I’m called to do Munich, it starts off with the leader of Israel saying
every civilization has to deal with compromising its values when faced
with certain kinds of situations.
That’s the premise. Then how does that play out amongst the assassins
that go out to have revenge for the massacre of the Munich Olympics, and
what’s the toll of that? Where does that leave you morally? And it’s
very ambivalent. There’s absolutely a very strong ambivalence at the
end. The next movie—and, again, I’m not making these movies up. They’re
coming to me, right? And not because they have this thing like they put
on my résumé and say, “If you need this, you get this guy.”
COLLINGS:
Conscience, journey.
CARTER:
Yeah. “You want to travel somewhere—.” So the next one’s Avatar. Avatar
is about a guy who’s a Marine who changes sides. He not only changes
sides, he changes species.
COLLINGS:
Yeah, changes form.
CARTER:
He changes form, and so the form side of it is that he embraces the
digital realm by being the digital realm, because he’s no longer human
by the end of the movie. The next one is—well, Sucker Punch is a little
bit off to the side. I mean, it does have conscience and war in it, but
it’s an oddball that doesn’t quite fit, but sort of does in the
sense—the iconography is so all over the place that it’s hard for me to
fit it in, not that it needs to fit in. But, I mean, at its premise,
it’s a girl named Babydoll who is abused as a young woman, taken to this
mental institution by her stepfather, and then it turns into, in her
mind, into a brothel. And then to escape that, she goes into these
dances that takes into these journeys that go—these crazy things that
then come back each time till she finally escapes, but she escapes,
like, by having a lobotomy. I’m just saying it’s like—it starts down the
path—
COLLINGS:
[laughs] Good plan.
CARTER:
It starts down the path, but it doesn’t—it just keeps getting crazier
and crazier. I was game for it, you know, but I didn’t relate to it as
strongly because it didn’t do the thing that all the other journeys have
done, which is to account for where they went before, and then try to
get you somewhere so there’s an epiphany at the end that doesn’t just
kind of go, “What?”
COLLINGS:
Well, also, I mean, from A.I. and some of the other ones that we’ve
talked about or haven’t, there is a journey, but within the journey
there’s a very strong sense of places along the way.
CARTER:
That’s right.
COLLINGS:
These places are worlds. These are entire immersive worlds that are the
stopping points along the journey, and from what you’ve described,
that’s more of a narrative trajectory. I don’t hear the sense of place
within it.
1:00:40.5 1:03:15.3 1:04:20.6
CARTER:
Well, I think they were so eclectic, also, as places that they—also,
what happened in the places didn’t seem to do anything other than a very
simple—they were way too elaborate for what was accomplished or what was
experienced, so that they just became gratuitous, going somewhere that
had the eye candy, but the iconography, while I think it was true to the
director, it was just too much, at least for me, and I think for most
audiences, seeing as it had like 20 percent Rotten Tomato positive. So
it’s not that I don’t value it, because I do, but within the context of
how this has all progressed, because, as I said, this sort of dealing
with war and conscience and journeys—I worked on War Horse, which was
about an innocence I view traveling through—almost like a Christ-like
figure through war.
I mean, literally at the end, I wrapped him in barbed wire and had him
carrying those things like he was like carrying a cross and a crown of
thorns, and he’s literally sacrificed, but then is resurrected and is
sort of that which is lost in war or barely survives war, which is any
semblance of innocence. And then Lincoln, which is so much about the
conscience of what essentially makes slavery wrong, and so what do you
do to fight for that, but what toll that takes, not only the—if he’d
been willing to not go for that amendment, then the war would have ended
earlier. It would have saved 100,000 lives, more than that. So we only
say that’s worth it now, but in those days, you could have been on the
wrong side of history with that kind of decision-making. So that’s a
journey that very much relates to conscience, and then going
through—like, you don’t move, but you move through the interior world of
what it takes to get to the end.
And then what’s so amazing is just like—so then, like, Star Wars: The
Force Awakens, it’s about a war, I mean, between the light and the dark
side, and it’s reawakening a new generation, and there’s a legacy of
passing it on, and what’s lost, who gets sacrificed in that process. And
then again, the intergenerational aspects are in play in the movie The
BFG, where you have almost opposites, a young little girl and an old
man, and they’re essentially two halves of the same coin. The two of
them together can function to make something happen that actually rights
a wrong of the sort of evil giants that are terrorizing children, so the
metaphor is that there’s an evil out there, a darkness that’s
terrorizing the children, and only the little girl with the help of this
older giant, but who’s basically kind of been a pacifist but needs to be
called into service, that’s kind of Spielberg’s, I think, looking both
ways at the same time to him as an elder and also still somebody who has
a child’s wonder about the world and what can change, what the
possibilities are.
And I loved working on that one, too, for just those reasons. It’s very
contemplative too. It gets very meditative, and, again, I think that
hurt it for its commercial appeal, but I think it made it very rich as
far as what it really has to offer. And in particular, it’s got a
sequence in Dreamland which is really a wonderful depiction of sort of
the essence—if you were to go into a brain and look at how ideas and
dreams are born and what would that look like, and you’re putting it
through a Fantasia filter, like that kind of visualization, it has that
in it. It’s really quite a sublime sequence. And it’s all designed—I
designed it with this tree that is a big oak tree, and it looks like a
brain, and when you see the things darting in and out, those are like
little synapses and things. Then we did a reflecting pool that it
reflects in, but it’s actually an Escher thing that you can jump into
that and go inside and then be upside down, but you’re right-side up in
that world.
So it has a lot of dimensional—some of the things that I do in my
creative process with Steven and designing the paradigms that I’m
approaching, and then how to shift them so I see it differently. It’s
absolutely in play, depicted right for everybody to look at. I don’t
think too many people picked up on it, but I did, and I knew that that
was at the basis of it, that you’re literally looking at what is the
process of the creation of dreams. And then some of them are good, some
of them are bad, and then where do they exist, where do they go, how do
they get projected out into the world. And I loved being able to do it.
It was like pulling back the curtain, but then behind the curtain is
even more fantastic than what you thought was in front of it as far as
kind of—it’s like The Fantastic Journey. You’re inside, but it’s all
metaphorically being told, but it still has a threat that’s very much
like a war from a dark side.
Then to again come back to 1971, which was The Post, and even before,
the A.I. one, it was always a journey, because I became very aware early
from Back to the Future II and III, and as I said, going into the future
to go back, they keep changing and making something better, and then at
the end they say the future is what you make of it, you know. So that’s
the same kind of Beatlesque message or The Wizard of Oz message. And I
would have thought that was enough journeying, but I did a movie about
eternal life and vanity with Death Becomes Her, then traveled to an
island where they’re resurrecting dinosaurs from the past, and now
they’re in conflict with us. And the very narrative of the movie tells
you that this is not a good idea, even though it becomes a fun thing
that we still have sequels twenty years later.
COLLINGS:
But it’s presented in such a way that you can’t help but think it’s a
wonderful idea.
CARTER:
Isn’t that wonderful? It’s a total dichotomy.
COLLINGS:
There’s such a sense of space and wonder, and when the main character—
CARTER:
Hammond.
COLLINGS:
No, I was thinking of the—
CARTER:
Oh, Grant.
COLLINGS:
Yeah, Grant and Ellie Sattler, when they first see these dinosaurs,
there’s this sense of—
CARTER:
Awe.
COLLINGS:
—awe, and that sells the entire premise right there.
1:06:35.7
CARTER:
And that’s part of where Steven’s heart is so open. He doesn’t hold his
cards back. And there’s nothing there when the actors are doing that, so
he’s asking them to really emote, and he doesn’t even know that the
dinosaurs are fully going to work at that point. So it’s a lot of
make-believe investment in something you can’t know it’s going to work,
but you have to invest in it, and then if you’re lucky enough, it will
be fulfilled, and that’s the Hollywood dream.
And then the same thing, to some degree, even though it’s got some more
ambivalence in it, but just you have a feather, and it comes in and it
just lands, and then there’s Forrest Gump, and he’s an idiot on a bench
telling you his story. And then two-thirds of the way through telling
you the story that reflects my time and my era almost precisely—
COLLINGS:
I know. I was thinking that.
1:08:29.0
CARTER:
It’s literally all these beats from Vietnam and demonstrations, and then
rooting it in a place that’s called home that’s very iconic. I mean,
it’s got the—we built the house just to be framed by that tree so it
looks like Tara in Gone with the Wind. It’s very simple, it just lives
there, it doesn’t change. In the script, it first was supposed to change
and all this stuff. I said, “Why? This wouldn’t change.” So that’s that
home part again. Home doesn’t change. You can go off on the journeys
that he does, but he comes back and there’s Mama. That doesn’t change.
And then what does he find? Then she’s got a certain point of view about
life, which is that it is—there’s something behind us, that you’re okay,
even if they tell you you’re not. And the mother’s love is very
powerful, keeping him oriented. But then there’s Lieutenant Dan that
says it’s all fucked up. And then basically when he’s at the gravesite
with Jenny, he’s talking to her and he’s asking the question which is
it, and he says it must be a little bit of both. And then you meet young
Forrest, and at the very end of the movie, there’s his legacy, and now,
in a sense, the tale has been told, right, and the feather goes off to
somewhere else.
So the journeys that are unraveling, they’re messages, but they have to
be earned. They have to be earned emotionally. The characters have to go
through things and have to really be somewhere, and it’s been my job to
put them somewhere every time so you believe it. If he’s in that room,
he’s looking across at the Watergate to that Democratic thing, that
actually was the room that you could see the Democratic—
COLLINGS:
Oh, that actually was?
CARTER:
Yeah, I stayed there and I went, “Whoa, we can actually do this.”
COLLINGS:
Really?
CARTER:
But then, thirty-something years later, I’m doing The Post where, at the
very end of that movie when you see it—I don’t want to ruin it for you,
but it relates to Watergate. So some of the serendipity when you move
through and then something flashes back and moves forward has happened
to me. Or then just, okay, well, what’s the next thing? Well, what
about—well, we returned to the island, or another island, to experience—
COLLINGS:
The Lost World.
CARTER:
—another level of what’s been lost.
COLLINGS:
But this time, the order, the wonderful order of the—
CARTER:
Right, is sort of all broken down.
COLLINGS:
—sort of mid-century “parkitecture” of the resort is all overgrown.
CARTER:
That’s right. And then the only you can do is actually—at a certain
point for Steven was to say, “Well, I think we’ve told this story, but
what happens if they come to us?” I mean, this kind of crazy third act.
COLLINGS:
That was great.
CARTER:
We’re going to come to San Diego—
COLLINGS:
I love that.
CARTER:
—and have for a moment just a playground of them running through our
world.
COLLINGS:
And of course it has to come to a Blockbuster.
CARTER:
Exactly, exactly. So its reference unto itself is playing the nod, nod,
wink, wink, and it’s literally the screenwriter is running in and
screaming at the Blockbuster in that. That’s the screenwriter.
COLLINGS:
That’s the actual screenwriter?
CARTER:
Yeah, that’s David Koepp.
COLLINGS:
How great.
1:11:34.3
CARTER:
So at that point, if you imagine not everything I just said after A.I.,
but even at that point, it’s a lot of traveling, you know? And then to
think, like, well, but what if you were on a slave ship and you were
kidnapped from your home and taken, and now you’re a slave and you’re
being put through—that’s your coming-to-America experience, the Middle
Passage and the brutality of that, and to walk that into our government
and to see what our values are in and around that issue. Or just sort of
that one—and that was right back-to-back with Lost World, so I was kind
of, like, realizing this is just getting deeper and richer each time,
and there’s metaphors that I can respond to, and sometimes they’re
fantastic—dinosaur thing—but it’s also historical sometimes.
And then Bob Zemeckis, right at the point for him in his life when he
was at the apex with Forrest Gump, was also getting divorced, so he got
kind of cast into a whole other dimension. He worked on the movie
Contact, and I wasn’t available to do that with him because of working
with Steven, but I was a fourth-dimensional consultant, so I was one
helping him design what was in and how you got to the fourth dimension,
because that was a place that was very difficult to design, and I could
help do that.
COLLINGS:
How did you help do that?
CARTER:
Well, for one thing, the machine itself, what does the machine look
like. I thought, well, let’s make sure that it’s readable and
understandable, so if it looks like an atom, we’re all going to think
that’s it related, at least iconography-wise, to something that could
function. And also, if something falls through it, that whole time jump
will, like—somebody saying, “This only took three seconds,” and yet you
had a whole seven-minute scene on a beach in the fourth dimension. How
do those—that’s that duality. Well, at least it had a space that you
could see that it went through. There’s kind of a sleight-of-hand there
because you’re presenting two realities in relationship to one thing,
but at least because it’s moving, you can imagine that that could
happen. Or really esoteric parts like the question of if a message has
been sent out, which was the Nuremberg talk by Hitler, which was the
first broadcast that went out into—potentially those radio waves beyond—
COLLINGS:
Is that true? I didn’t know that.
1:15:30.9 1:17:12.3
CARTER:
It’s what the premise is in the movie. I think it’s true, but it’s one
of the more—the early versions of a big worldwide broadcast that was—or
not worldwide, but substantial enough that they were saying this is the
one that the aliens picked up on in the fourth dimension. Now, they sent
it back to us encoded with all the plans on how to make this machine.
We’re talking about things that are premises that are difficult, right,
just like Avatar is not easy to say lie down, close your eyes, next
thing you know, you’re a nine-foot thing going to run away and be
somewhere else, but you’ve got to believe that. If I say it to you, you
go, “I don’t believe it,” but if I can show it to you in a certain way,
then you will make that jump. It won’t even be a mode jerk. It’ll just
be like, “Oh, I get it. That’s what you want me to do, and I’m going to
do it. I want it to happen.” So, in the fourth dimension, the question
becomes how do you embed that information.
Now, the literal way would be to say, well, you would put it in the
pixels or in the grain of the film and you’d put it back—so you’d still
see it, but then within each frame—each little grain. But that felt kind
of—and the funny thing is it felt literal to Bob. It would be the type
of thing at the time he would say, “Well, anybody can think that. That’s
not good enough.” So I started thinking about it, and I came upon this
idea, because the idea was—and this is a portal type of idea that
relates to something bigger than I may have even been expressing in all
of this, which is when you find an avenue in, you can see things from
the other side that illuminate everything from a slightly different
point of view. So, in this case, the question is what’s the fourth
dimension of film, which means by definition it has to be something that
you’re looking at all the time. It doesn’t mean that—but you can’t see
it.
So what would that be in film? That was the question I posed. I mean,
fortunately, I was able to pose the question to myself, because that
helps. Half of it’s just know what the question is, not just, okay, that
doesn’t work, now what? But the question was, what is the fourth
dimension of film? So then I started thinking, well, we know that time
is related to the fourth dimension, the three physical dimensions, then
in time, that’s something that’s often referred to as the fourth
dimension. So once I started thinking of time, then I asked myself what
am I looking at but I can’t see? And the answer, luckily there is one.
It’s the frame, in between the frames. Every time there’s a frame,
there’s a black, and then you move to the next frame, twenty-four times
a second. So you’re looking at it—always you’re seeing the black.
You’re looking at it, you can’t see it. It’s too fast. So I thought what
if that’s where they put the message, they put it in between each frame,
and then Bob said, “That’s a good one.” And he and I and one other
person are probably the only people to even know that because it’s in
the movie, but it’s not something that seems pertinent. It just solves a
reality-based kind of question so that you can get from here to there to
tell the story that’s fantastic and make it seem like it’s all credible,
and that’s a sleight-of-hand. It’s a part of the thinking, whether it’s
in the script or particularly the production design, how to make
something come across as being real when what it’s doing is not real,
and that’s an aspect to the fantasy in production design I’ve always
enjoyed.
So, anyway, that was my sort of offshoot contribution, but it also went
to the heart of sort of the fourth dimension of film, which started to
allow me to see how I could apply that, which I did, actually, a couple
years later, which was I was on Castaway, which is about a man cast out
of his life for no reason that he did anything, just got in a plane
crash, and he’s then knocked out of time, because time was the whole
thing he was obsessed with and being tyrannized by, and now he had to
reconstruct his life from the very basis of what do I drink, how do I
get fire, what do I eat and what’s my shelter, all the way to getting
back, but never really returning home. He never got to be—he tried, but
that home was gone, so he’s just left at a crossroads, which is a very
strong ambivalence. Now, parallel to that, we actually did the part with
Tom overweight, then had a nine-month break while he lost weight, so we
did another movie, What Lies Beneath, in between, which is to take
another iconically good guy—I mean, at that point, there was Tom Hanks,
Tom Cruise—
COLLINGS:
Harrison Ford.
CARTER:
—and Harrison Ford. But now he becomes a bad guy. He becomes Norman,
like out of Psycho, and he’s malevolent, and it’s not just a shower
scene, it’s a whole bathtub and taking that perfect life—
COLLINGS:
That is a very freaky movie.
CARTER:
Yeah, and especially for women because women like to take baths, and I
think just being in that relaxed zone and having that be a threat is a
very, very diabolical place. I personally had a lot of trouble—I was
glad that it turned out as accessible as it was and not—it’s creepy, but
it doesn’t get totally—I was concerned at the time—I co-designed it,
even. I brought even someone else to help me because I had so much to
do. But it’s one of the more negative movies, that one and I suppose
although it’s got so much wit and there’s a good ending to it, but Death
Becomes Her has got a kind of diabolical core to it. That, be on
Castaway and What Lies Beneath, and over into Fiji and Russia and
Memphis and L.A. and Vermont, I mean, it was all over the place, so you
would think, well, I’ve got my plate full, which I did. But when Steven
then came right in the middle of that and said, “I’ve got this dream
movie that Stanley Kubrick has given me, A.I., and I’d really like you
to do it,” I said yes, even though I had no idea how I could—
COLLINGS:
Possibly do it.
1:21:24.9
CARTER:
—accommodate. And what I did was I literally thought, along the lines of
this portal about the fourth dimension, that the only—I had the will, I
had the desire, I had the energy, but I was up against time because
things were overlapping in time. So, in a funny way, I refused to let
that be a problem. I decided I’m not going to let time be the thing
that’s controlling my life as to whether I can say yes to something. So
it turned out A.I. was delayed a little bit, so it made it all work out,
but I had to do a lot of finessing, and that was sort of when I also
made the decision I really wanted to be with Steven’s body of work
actually more than Bob, not because I didn’t get along with Bob or like
his vision, but also what he was going through at that time was putting
him into a zone that was a just a little—it wasn’t quite the
insurmountable-opportunities point of view that he’d had before, and so
I felt just more akin with where Steven was going. And particularly for
that tale that we started with, A.I., is the one that really went to a
core of something, particularly the love of a mother, that I identified
with so strongly.
And even though I worked on The Polar Express after that with Bob—and
that was when he went into another realm of the all-digital—I felt more
ultimately in tune with Steven, and so if I had to be making a choice,
which I didn’t—I never saw it as a bifurcated thing, but that’s kind of
the way it went, as it turned out, because when Bob got totally into the
digital realm, in many ways, there was less for me, particularly, do to.
I brought on a co-designer to do The Polar Express who was very
digitally proficient, but my role as kind of a—what do you want to call
me?
COLLINGS:
Visionary.
CARTER:
It was kind of like a guide of vision, a vision guide. And it doesn’t
mean that I wasn’t adapting to it. I did Avatar and BFG, but it was very
technical, and I just didn’t want to only just jump into that, and so
that’s I think part of what, if I think about it, led me. But also just
that Steven—well, he was just going somewhere. In fact, the one movie
actually I left out of this whole thing was after Polar Express, before
Munich, was actually the direct response to 9/11, which was The War of
the Worlds, which is very much—if you just—it sort of falls apart
towards the last third in terms of they get caught in a house and they
go through this whole thing with red weed, and Tom Robbins’ character is
kind of demented. It takes a turn that it never quite resolves and then
recovers from at the end to go back to where it started. But that first
part all the way through the ferry scene and this thing coming up out of
the ground and just tearing everything apart is really a great horror
dream in relationship to 9/11, and it’s really staged right—
COLLINGS:
Especially in the beginning when everybody’s trying to figure out what
happened and—
CARTER:
What it is, and the wind’s blowing the wrong way, and, actually, you’re
in New Jersey right looking almost back at Manhattan. I think some of
his best tense filmmaking is actually all the way through the point
where the plane crashes, and maybe even the ferry ride is pretty great,
but then it just kind of, as a story, didn’t know quite how to—I think
it was just too in its own moment of reflecting on the terror that it
didn’t know how to tell the bigger story. There’s points of reference
for the story, but they’re not—what’s the word—satisfying as far
as—again, I think partly because what happens is the characters can’t
solve it themselves. It has to come from the outside.
COLLINGS:
Right. There’s sort of an antivirus or something that just ends it all,
which is from the original story.
CARTER:
Right. And also, of course, we still haven’t solved it, so, in a sense,
a movie that reflects the inability to solve it from the inside is not
lost on the fact that that’s the problem, meaning we still don’t have
that—I would say, if I think about it, actually—and even being on Star
Wars IX, it’s something we have not solved. As a civilization, we never
solve it quite the way I’m talking about, but we’re not able to tell
the—it’s like almost all these stories I’m telling, they add up to one
big dimensional glimpse at something from different perspectives.
COLLINGS:
Well, they tell the story of a post-colonial world. I mean, in Star
Wars, of course there’s that, and I kind of saw that in A.I. where you
have all of these different locations where the Mecha live, and you have
all these wrecked Mecha wandering around, and they’ve all been created
by the humans, so you could say that this is like the sort of ravaged
third world that’s been decimated by the history of colonialism—
CARTER:
Interesting.
COLLINGS:
—and now the colonial powers have sort of retracted into their drowned
Manhattan, but you still have these wrecked life forms.
CARTER:
And we literally—just to take your metaphoric analysis, right, which I
think is really interesting, and I’ll mirror it back to you literally on
this date that you’ve said. What did our president say yesterday?
COLLINGS:
I know. Precisely.
1:27:21.8
CARTER:
I mean, “Why do we need all these people from these shithole countries?”
And doesn’t even think that there’s any—he can’t see into what he’s
saying other than the point of view that they must be shitholes because
the people want to come here, and the people that come here he doesn’t
have any respect for, and we’re having to somehow only just take care of
them. But has no sense of context other than this incredibly, well,
colonialist, but then not give a shit about anything. It’s interesting,
because, in a way, that is kind of the real pressure points of what the
Western civilization or even China does vis-à-vis the affect of who they
are, and Japan as well. I don’t know.
I mean, I don’t know what to make of it, but I think these are the
levels that we reflect ourselves that we can’t possibly know when we’re
doing it, but that through oral histories and time, you can begin to see
what people were interested in. And mine seems very interesting to me
specifically because I’m telling my story and I have a vehicle to tell
it in the sense that I’m saying what I’m saying, but also there are
reference points, at least at the moment, out in the culture that one
can refer to, right? So there’s a dimensionality to that. But the very
nature, as you pointed out, of the story that’s being told is reflective
of something I have no idea of what I’m reflecting.
COLLINGS:
Yeah, because we’re just in it. We’re still in it.
CARTER:
I mean, even the ability or desire to record it in the way that we’re
doing it reflects something, you know. It’s like we’re the McNamaras,
meaning we’re doing the study so someone can at some point later look at
all this, try to figure out what the hell it is that we were doing.
[laughter]
COLLINGS:
Well, I think it’s really interesting that you were saying that one of
the reasons you decided to continue working with Steven Spielberg rather
than Zemeckis was because of this continued ability to create the sense
of these places, to have that kind of opportunity to visualize things
and not go strictly into the digital realm.
CARTER:
That’s right.
COLLINGS:
I mean, that’s a real moment in the history of film, isn’t it?
CARTER:
Well, and obviously I was there and have been there at some of the
important junctures of the creation of it, but it doesn’t hold the same
emotional allure on an artistic level for me to engage in that that I
found so enticing about the production design experience, at least as
I’d known it up to then. Now it’s gotten to be so much more. So I
wouldn’t change anything, but I think that it’s that part of it, because
I didn’t find that just the raw space with nothing there and it’s all
going to happen later just in the film is as satisfying as having a
place that everybody can relate to and then it also shows up in film.
That duality was very powerful for me in creating physical places. And
then it’s turned out that many people value that, that is important as
well, I mean in terms of the creation. They don’t like acting and
vacuous things where they can’t—
COLLINGS:
Sure. They want to have a response to the environment.
1:32:02.7
CARTER:
That’s right. But probably the deeper reasons is because Steven showed
signs, even then, of—in the beginning, he used to storyboard everything
and be very controlling of every single shot that he did, but after—with
Amistad, for instance, once he started down that road—I mean, even
Jurassic Park, to some degree, and Lost World, he was on it as far as
what we were going to do, and it was pretty well defined, even though
everybody was contributing. Amistad, he was doing three movies in a row.
He was doing Lost World, Amistad, and Saving Private Ryan, all shot
within one calendar year, and tremendous amount of shooting. He loves
shooting, but it meant that we never knew what he was going to shoot
when he got somewhere, so I had to lay all of that out as the way I saw
it, and then come to him.
And then every once in a while, he’d say, “Well, I’d rather be over
here,” and we’d have to scramble a little bit. But essentially, he would
go along with the program, whatever it was, and especially if it hit the
price. Then you just trusted. And we would joke like, “You want to see
what you’re going to shoot tomorrow?” “No. Surprise me.” Most directors
aren’t that way. And even on A.I., there was one point where I had given
a bunch of money away to visual effects and it came in—luckily, I got in
a couple weeks early to look at something. He said, “Ooh, I don’t know
how you’re going to make this work.” Most directors would say, “How do
you expect me to make this work?” He would just look and say, “I don’t
know how you’re going to make this work,” which was then the clue to
say, “I do need more.”
And so then Kathy Kennedy, the producer, would say, “Well, is it
something money can fix?” And I could say, “Well, remember the money I
gave over here? Well, I need some of that back,” and then we could fix
it. But the main idea is that I had a lot of freedom to create, and he
would just go with what I created. He didn’t need to put his mark on
everything. And even though Bob was not super precise and persnickety,
Steven was evolving in such a way that—particularly, let’s say, on the
last few movies, whether it’s Lincoln or particularly, let’s say, The
Post, he just comes in and shoots, and that’s very gratifying to me, not
in an ego way—
COLLINGS:
A lot of trust, a lot of communication and trust.
CARTER:
A lot of trust and a lot of appreciation, which allows my process to be
simpler and simpler, so as I get older, I’m not burdened by the
precociousness of a younger person needing to prove everything, get
their hands in and work it over and over, so that even, let’s say, with
J.J. Abrams, who needs to go over things over and over again, I could go
to the big pictures and I could swoop in when I needed to, but that’s
also why I had a co-designer who’s now, for instance, designing on his
own on IX. I’m an associate producer, which means I’m able to noodge,
but even more distant, and not take the responsibility of making every
little thing, “Well, maybe this should be like this. Maybe this should
be this.”
So I think I, even instinctively—that’s sixteen years ago, over the age
of fifty—was beginning to feel the—I don’t know if it was mortality or
just the ticking of the clock or just the I can’t bring everything I’ve
been bringing to this quite in the same way. I have to finesse. I was
very aware of finessing my situation. And now that the travel itself has
become problematic for me just to go away so much, I’m finessing even
more. But now, as I said, that last zone, which is the fourth act. I
think I’ve had a three-act Hollywood career structure in growing up, but
I’d say a fourth act is—and with the paradigms, are very much up for
grabs as far as—
COLLINGS:
They are.
CARTER:
—what do we base things on.
COLLINGS:
What is it about, what’s it for, who’s watching it, and why are they
watching it.
CARTER:
Yeah, exactly.
COLLINGS:
It’s all a question mark.
CARTER:
And in what medium.
COLLINGS:
Precisely, yes.
CARTER:
And it’s like, okay, there’s an Academy Award, but what does Academy
Award represent? I mean, who goes to see those movies? I mean, like, if
the top ten movies are not movies that are getting any box office, then
what are they watching? And there’s nothing wrong with that unto itself,
it’s just that it reflects a certain type of person in a certain part of
the culture and not a mass version of it, and I’m doubling down on that
because I’m even designing exhibits for an Academy Museum, which is
supposed to be for who? Who are we making it for? I mean, I kind of
know, but not really, just because I’ve never really known. I’ve always
had to rely on the filmmakers to say, “Well, we’re making this movie
because this’ll sell.”
COLLINGS:
Well, that’s interesting, the idea of designing exhibits, because, I
mean, in some cases, you could say that a lot of your production design
has been an exhibit, right?
CARTER:
That’s right. I look at it very much like that, but I don’t know if it
really fulfills the function of an exhibit the way I’m—I know that I
really don’t know what I’m doing, but I know that nobody else does
either. That’s the only positive part, because if you’re going to do a
museum, normally you have an object, and that object has the gravitas,
so your presentation of the object, whether it’s a painting or a
sculpture or an artifact, then you present. Now, you can augment that
object with a film clip that can contextualize it either visually or
emotionally or just informationally. But our entity is the film itself,
and it’s not even just clips, because how do you get emotion out of just
that?
COLLINGS:
So they need to be immersive environments.
CARTER:
And yet if they get really too fancy immersive, they’re not what the
movies were either. Now they’re a theme park, and now they become very,
very—the theme park becomes very much, “Well, now we just got to up the
thrill,” thing. So we’re competing with the very nature of what the
cinema was to begin with as though we’re as good, and you aren’t, and
now you’re like a video game or a theme park and you don’t have any of
the—A.I. the ride is not a—
COLLINGS:
A.I. the ride is your life.
1:38:41.6
CARTER:
But how do you then get people—so it’s the act of being in a dream state
as represented—phantasmagoric state as seen in a dream state through the
medium of cinema that is the thing itself, and you can talk about it,
but the experience of it has some other thing, which is the combination
far more than what I do of just the places, but the whole mood, the way
you are, how you become it, it becomes you, then sometimes you’re away
from it, you’re judging it, sometimes you stop it and you go-- And come
back to it. I can tell you what’s so interesting is I’m enjoying that I
have the opportunity to do this. It doesn’t mean it’s stress-free, but
part of it is just to—I’m glad I’m not twenty-five or thirty-five or
even forty-five trying to do it, because I’m just relying on enough
confidence that whatever I do, I recognize other people don’t know, and
also I recognize I’m not the only person who knows, so I have to ask for
help, and who I ask maybe will allow it to be all that it can be at this
point.
But I know in my heart of hearts what I want is for it be a cinematic
experience as a journey through a museum experience, and so whatever I
can bring of everything I’ve been talking about into a person who’s just
walking through and experiencing this and that, and what’s the sound,
what are they focusing on, and where’s the epiphany, like where does it
tell you something that maybe you didn’t know and you’ve earned it, that
each one of these journeys I’ve had on a movie has built into it some
form of an epiphany. I mean, the epiphany, if it’s David, is that he’s
vindicated that he is deserving of his mother’s love, and he gets
rewarded to have that, and then he can finally be fully human and just
dream and not be in pursuit of something he doesn’t have.
That’s the epiphany. And the catharsis is to actually go into the state
at the end, which is the one you’ve been in the whole time, which is
just to dream it, and that’s where it reflects literally the filmmakers
themselves. That’s why it’s potentially so potent. If, in the annals of
moviemaking, it’s viewed in a way I would want it to be viewed, it would
be that there’s almost no other situation where you take two incredibly
powerfully visionary filmmakers and you put them into the same material
at the same time, because even though Stanley was not literally there,
he was there directing from the grave. That was his legacy, so he was—
COLLINGS:
How do you tease apart the two influences?
1:40:51.0
CARTER:
I don’t think you can. I think it’s so intermelded. Steven so gave
himself over at that stage of his life to Stanley’s vision that, of
course, it’s a Steven Spielberg movie, but he wrote the script, Steven
wrote the script. He didn’t have somebody else write the script. He had
to write the script because there was no other interlocker that could
function between those two brains.
So I think that when you look at everything I’ve been talking about,
which is collaboration and where does it break down, there’s the prime
example of that I was on a movie that was already a duality at its
center, and one that’s known for his mind and one that is known for his
heart. One is known for his pessimism and one is known for his optimism,
and where do those two come together? And yet it was the one who’s known
for his pessimism who designed in the fourth act in order to get to
where he needed to go, which is to be able to dream. And I think that’s
fascinating. I love that stuff, because it’s like working on a Beatles
album, right? I mean, when you think about the Lennon-McCartney and the
rest to be able to—at least from my point of view and my age, growing
up, it was like you were so aware that there was a coming together of
entities and elements that you could distinguish, but they always served
each other’s function.
And then even when they started to drift apart and not—there was
frictions, and then albums that were here, here, here, and here, and
eclectic and all of that, but you knew it was human. It just felt—it
just emanated individuals getting along, not getting along, but still
creating at every point in that equation. And as an artist, I just have
never seen anything top that. That’s just that collaborative eclectic
sense of my generation, what I got turned on to, and yet it wasn’t a
didactic like, “This is the better political system of people all
getting together,” and then you go, “Yeah, well, what about greed? And
what about this?”
COLLINGS:
No, it was a real beginning of the sort of juxtaposition of all kinds of
philosophies, foods, points of view.
CARTER:
Well, then people started traveling and going on journeys, so then they
came back with cappuccino machines, they came back with brown rice, they
came back with Eastern religion, they came back with various things that
they found out in the world, tea. I mean, there was English Breakfast
tea and maybe some Darjeeling now and again, and now there’s how many
teas, you know? And then there’s even things where you would speculate
on the whole notion that what you are seeing is not the full reality and
that there is something beyond it that might be influencing, and it was
partly because of, I think, marijuana and various psychedelic drugs, but
it fit together with something that was creating openings when
everything seemed like to be closing in. And now we have that a little
bit again where things are closing in on—and what the reaction is, I
don’t know what it’s going to be.
COLLINGS:
Sometimes people speak of a generation in a particular field. Do you
feel that you are one of a generation of people in production design or
other aspects of the arts in the industry—
CARTER:
Very definitely.
COLLINGS:
—that have also shared these perspectives?
1:44:54.4
CARTER:
Not as much—I’m one of the people who likes to share that perspective,
and in a very kind of open, non-competitive way. Particularly with the
guy that I was talking about, Dennis Gassner, we’ve made it a point—we
had both had mentors who were very close, but competitive and never
really talked, so we’ve made it a point in the last ten years to talk a
lot. In fact, we even record our conversations because we’re really into
that we are doing what are mentors couldn’t do, which is to share and to
be aware of this sort of generational thing.
But I also make a point of it with many of my colleagues to talk along
these levels, and then particularly now when it’s becoming so apparent,
because there’s so many people who are now maybe not even working that
much anymore, so their life is wrapped up in a kind of—that was their
career. But all of us are getting to that point, and I think it’s just a
reflection on who were we, who are we, and what was the body of work,
what did it look like, and then what were the common points of reference
that we would have just never been able to verbalize at the time, but
now we can see. And that’s why I say I think the journey motif that I’ve
been so fortunate to be a part of, because it reflected my life, but
also there’s many movies that are of that motif and the idea of seeking
transcendence and looking for epiphanies, and then just the way the
journey between men and women has played out.
I mean, I just think even as we look at some of the things that are
happening now just generationally, things that people have been through,
when they’ve been through them, it changes their point of view compared
to those that are coming up and experiencing something. Well, I think we
all look at it where you see something you believed in and then you see
where it went in the hands of somebody. I mean, you could be an Islamic
preacher feeling that and then watch where it goes somewhere that’s not
what you would have wanted. You could be a feminist. You could be
somebody who’s for civil rights in a certain way and then it’s coming
back at you, used by somebody else in some way that was never the way
you would have conceived of it. And it’s history itself that creates
things that are outside what you could have possibly seen as what you
thought you were doing, and then it helps you to see what you really
did.
COLLINGS:
Just like the A.I.’s. It took on a life of its own.
CARTER:
That’s right. And I think that’s part of what I think Stanley’s genius
was, was he cared tremendously, obviously, but he had a dispassionate
kind of way in order to get at levels that, in any other way of looking
at it, is tragic, what we’re doing. I mean, Dr. Strangelove is just one
incredible tragedy, but it’s unbelievable where it goes in terms of some
of its absurd humor, particularly when it gets to—and the audacity of
how some of it is created that people don’t even blink at, like just the
idea that Peter Sellars is playing three different characters and you
don’t even think about it in the middle of something that’s—but it’s
part of the underpinning that is letting you know that you can laugh
through some of this because it is so absurd, and yet it’s being played
so straight. And then it’s being sort of straight, you just can’t—and
then certain times, it breaks through.
There’s this wit, like when it’s George C. Scott talking about how his
bombers are going to get through, and then you’ve got Peter Sellars
grabbing his own arm so not to Sieg Heil. [laughter] The reason I bring
it up is because there’s a coolness to it that allows that humor to just
bristle, and then you just—and you may not even fully laugh, but that’s
where the artistry of the director comes through in these ways that they
make their movies, that it’s not just by the route. And I think I got to
be a part of that generation that came up that was liberated by those
guys, and then to be particularly with Steven, but even whether it was
Bob or Jim or even J.J. Abrams now or Zack Snyder, they’re making the
movies that they want. I’ve never worked on a movie that was just
for-hire; the director was just doing a job. They were instrumental in
either writing or making this the movie they wanted to make, so they’ve
always been an auteur in that process.
COLLINGS:
Exactly, this wonderful melding of the notion of the auteur, of the
notion of independent cinema, and the real resources coming out of
Hollywood industry, that’s a real moment.
CARTER:
And the celebration of the individual artist’s ability within a
collective and collaborative thing to be supported in order to make
these magnificent visions. It’s not always about how big they are, it’s
just how rich they are with the dimensionality that they’re able to
express. In the beginning, I thought I came along a little bit late, but
then I didn’t realize I came along, for me, just at the perfect time,
because each one of these junctures, whether it’s the digital realm that
I went into with Polar Express or A.I., Polar Express, Jurassic Park,
Avatar, that dimensionalized the whole pursuit of product design in a
way that I could never have imagined and just took me into so many ways—
COLLINGS:
Made some of these imaginative elements even more realizable.
CARTER:
And also for me personally, the things that were my deficits, which was
I wasn’t a carpenter, I wasn’t an interior decorator, I wasn’t a
particularly good sketch artist for an environment, those were not my
forte, and yet I was able to—then I wasn’t hung up on those things, so
when it became digital, I didn’t, like, become defensive and fight
against digital, I went with it.
COLLINGS:
Oh, that’s so true.
CARTER:
Yeah, and that allowed me to have a whole other half of the career. I
even did something that no one else has followed suit on, which is
amazing to me, but they didn’t. I thought it was so obvious, but I just
start partnering with people, and I would bring in someone younger who
knew the other stuff better than I did technically, but I could provide
the other part of it, and I would just give over half the credit.
COLLINGS:
So you would describe and collage. I think I read somewhere that you
would do collages—
CARTER:
That’s right.
COLLINGS:
—and just have a conversation about what—and they would perhaps be
mocking things up as you speak.
CARTER:
Then as it’s a thing, we just go through, it keeps progressing and
progressing, and it’s a part of the creative what is it to create if
you’re an artist on your own, and you go from one level to another
level, and try something, another level. And each step, what’s the
system that then allows for that to accommodate you, and you learn the
system enough so you know which buttons to push and what to watch out
for when someone’s saying one thing or going away off the—and a big part
of what I learned to do in that way, like painting, is you prioritize
what it is that you’re putting your attention to and you’re focusing on.
And I could make those decisions and I was given that latitude, and then
I would use the budget limitations to my advantage, because that way,
you could want everything, but they want it for a certain price, I’d
start to help them prioritize it, which actually helped me to then focus
on the things I wanted to focus on. And if they said, “Well, no, I
disagree. Put the effort here,” at least I’m getting that direction and
it’s direct, so then I can do that. Sometimes it gets hard because
limitations can be problematic, but mostly, at least from my experience,
they haven’t been. And then the few times when it’s just blown out the
other way, it’s not been gluttonous and it worked out. I mean, Avatar
expanded way beyond its thing, but it all worked out and it wasn’t just
like a gluttonous thing where everybody went, “What the hell. This is
just a big bloated lead balloon, a lead zeppelin.” [laughter]
COLLINGS:
So you would be kind of brainstorming and communicating your ideas to
the digital artist.
CARTER:
Right.
COLLINGS:
And I presume at a certain point, they would be reflecting things back
to you that—
CARTER:
Oh, sure, sure.
COLLINGS:
—that would start shaping your ideas in a more digital fashion.
CARTER:
Oh, absolutely. And also what are they good at, what are they not good
at, how to get the reference point so that what they do is good,
particularly in the early years. But one of the amazing things is to
realize that just because you can do something precocious—well, the
thing I always say about the digital realm is the good news is you can
do anything you want, everything. The bad news is you have to do
everything. You have to create everything, so the sun, the leaves, the
dah, the dah, the dah. So then what happens if you’ve got all these
people, they’re all doing their best. That means like if you were God
and you have to manage, “Okay, that’s enough on the leaves over there.
It’s okay. On the fire, I got it. The smoke, okay. We’re doing some
human beings over here, and we really need some focus on this. That’s
really cool and I hear you, but the rapids, as cool as they are, they’re
not a whole—let’s move over to something else now.” And the reason is
because people in their segmented things just obsess, and then even if
it comes to budget, they’ll protect their domain like a bureaucracy to
get to do stuff, “Well, if want it to look good—.”
COLLINGS:
“If you did want it to look good.”
CARTER:
Yeah. And then so Zemeckis will say, “Well, what if I don’t want to see
it all, I just want to see the smoke of the fire? How much do I save?”
And I’ll, “Motherfucker,” meaning don’t fuck with me, because the people
would do that. You know, “Well, if you want it to look like anything—,”
and they’re kind of like, in the middle of his movie, telling him what
he should or shouldn’t have, and that’s an art to that. I do it all the
time, but I don’t do it like that, and some of those computer people,
they don’t have the greatest social—
COLLINGS:
So that’s a whole culture then.
1:56:41.0
CARTER:
Yeah. And then you catch them lying and just padding their own little
thing. It just was amazing in the beginning, because he’s a very bright
guy, and all these directors, they know what the parameters are of what
it takes to get their shots and their days accomplished, so they’ve
learned to adapt to the system of moviemaking and all the people it
takes to make a movie. For Bob, it became funny, because by Castaway,
he’s going, “I’ve got a guy and a volleyball, and I’ve got 150 people
and an armada of ships to be out on this island. I just can’t take this.
I’m at a crossroads with one guy at the end of a movie, and I’ve got to
deal with fourteen trucks that are back here that if I want to turn
around, then I have to have them all move. I just can’t do this anymore.
I just want it simple.”
So that’s when I went into the digital realm and the motion captures, it
was all going to be simple. And all that he did was he replaced all
those Teamsters with computer nerds. In fact, you could even tell the
same joke in relationship—the old joke about Teamsters, who really
actually work incredibly hard, because they have to wake up so early,
get all those trucks into impossible situations, be there at the end,
move those trucks, and have them be at the next place early in the
morning. It’s not so easy, but in the middle of the day, there’s not a
lot for them to do. The joke says you’ll see some teamster looking down
and he sees these ants and he says, “Goddamn ants. They’ve been
following me around all day,” meaning he’s not doing a lot of moving,
right? [laughter] So, same thing can be said of computer nerds. They
just go, they sit at their terminals, and they got their Star Wars
things or they got their Star Trek things, and they won’t even talk to
each other, those people.
And if you ask if you talked to so-and-so about something, they go,
“Well, I sent them an email or texted them.” But text, at least you get
the response usually right away, but it’s like you don’t know. And then
now even those people are the older guard, and so when I talk to some of
them—I was talking to this young guy who was a really whiz kid twenty
years ago, and he’s wondering where he should—now he’s, like, about
fifty, and which direction to go with things, which is around when I was
hitting, like, the A.I. level, and what direction do you go. And I just
was kind of commiserating with—like, he’s not making this up. You were a
young gunslinger, you came in, and now you’re not, and someone else is
coming up behind you, and how are you going to finesse that? It’s the
fifty-year-old juncture. Then you get further into it when you hit the
post-sixty-five, it’s a whole other—you’re sanctioned as old, meaning
once you get Medicare, the federal government knows it.
COLLINGS:
Yeah, but you have all this experience that you’re bringing.
CARTER:
That’s the good news. You just don’t have quite the same energy.
COLLINGS:
But if everything’s changing, then how valuable is the experience?
CARTER:
Yeah. I probably should stop now only just because I have to go
somewhere, but took an interesting turn.
COLLINGS:
Yes.
CARTER:
I hope it’s of value to whatever your point of view on all this is,
because you’re very nice to be so open-minded.
COLLINGS:
Well, I think it’s wonderful to hear your point of view.
CARTER:
Oh, good. Okay.
COLLINGS:
Let me turn this off. [End of January 12, 2018 interview]
COLLINGS:
So we’re on, and today is February 1st, 2018, Jane Collings interviewing
Rick Carter at YRL, and you were just saying that you are working on
exhibits for the new museum, and one of the issues that you’re focusing
on is the changing production lines. So how are you seeing that?
0:03:25.6 0:05:18.1
CARTER:
Well, it’s the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that finally
has found a place to create a museum, and so it’s at the old May Company
at Fairfax and Wilshire. It goes chronologically through the sort of
inception of cinema back in the 1800s, late 1800s, with magic lanterns
and zoetropes and the different spectacle things, and it moves through
the Lumière brothers and Méliès and that of kind duality between the
types of cinema that they expressed all the way through the early story
films, as they were called, so the whole idea of the medium could create
an actual story, not just a spectacle, and then into the early
Expressionism often fueled by the German Expressionists in the teens and
early twenties in silent movies, leading into the era where the industry
started to coagulate and come together, especially in Los Angeles, and
the Academy was born out of that, and that’s all the silent-era stars of
Chaplin and Fairbanks and Mary Pickford and Lon Chaney and that whole
group.
It also explores those that were left out of the dream that have had
kind of a more outsider perspective, particularly in the early years of
cinema. So in the Dream Factory era, which is essentially from the early
thirties through the sixties, where the studio systems were the
strongest, one of the things that they did is they created is a
production idea and sort of the assembly line for the movie productions
and all the different crafts that partake in that. So this chart here
showing the sort of breakdown at that point, it, in a sense, has the
production authority, and it reaches out to the story. It’s funny, under
the story you have the screenplay, of course, and then on the cast you
have the stars, and right in the center is the art director, then you
have production and post-production.
And this is all under the director and the producer, but it puts the art
department right at the center of the production, and very much, because
most everything that was created in those days was a physical set build.
They didn’t go on locations very often, nor did they have very elaborate
special effects, so that began to change in the seventies where the
movies would either go out on the road and to locations, as my mentor
took them, Richard Sylbert, with Chinatown and The Graduate, those kinds
of movies.
Then the digital age kind of started hitting in the nineties, which is a
part of the era I’ve been a part of, and the interesting thing for me
on, I suppose, both a very real pragmatic level and conceptual level is
that the role of the art director/production designer has evolved. And
one of the things is just the evolution from art director to production
designer, because, for instance, it’s still called the Art Directors
Guild, which is what I’m a part of, because they love that name. I mean,
that’s why I got into it, because of the word “art” in it, and you have
an art and you’re directing art, what could be better? Just those two
words.
But production design became the sought-after title once Cameron
Menzies, who did Gone with the Wind, created that paradigm in a movie,
which is sort of the penultimate of being at the center of the movie and
how it’s created as a production, even when directors came and went, for
instance, on Gone with the Wind. So that became what I would say is a
paradigm in people’s minds, but in practice, it rarely occurred, and it
was actually abused tremendously by some production designers such as
Cedric Gibbons, who became the top production designer at MGM, and he
put his name on every single movie that came out. So he has, like,
twenty Academy Award nominations, six or seven Oscars, and he even
supposedly designed the Oscar, but what he ever actually did is really
in question, whereas Cameron Menzies, you can at least see the
illustrations that he created.
So the evolution of the production designer out of art director as the
top sort of visualist of the movie other than the director, of course,
has evolved. It also evolved a lot because it changed methodologies from
just sets on the stage or the back lot, as Cameron Menzies did, where
all those movies in the fifties and early sixties, to then movies out on
the street in locations where sometimes they wouldn’t even need a
production designer. They’d just get a set decorator to come and dress
an existing place. And then with special effects coming back in the late
seventies with Jaws and Star Wars and Close Encounters and those kinds
of movies that became the blockbuster cycle that we’re still in,
especially with the corporations now fueling them—and, of course, the
budgets have grown—the production designers are still at the center of
it, but there was a point where it was very much, I think in the late
1990s, where it was really under question as to what that role was,
given the fact that the visual effects supervisors had such an advanced
technology with the computers that were coming in, making the imagery,
so they really, I thought, could probably usurp the production
designers’ purview, for the most part.
But it was interesting, because they didn’t. They did not actually
conceptually move into that zone, and that zone is kind of an artistic
zone. There was like a blank canvas that you have to imagine what it
could be, not just how to realize what it already is. There’s different
types of visualizations in a movie. One is the what could it be? First
of all, just what’s the idea at all? That often is the purview of the
writer and the director, is coming up with the idea. But often there’s a
visual idea that’s needed, not just an illustration of an idea, like
something that you say, well, that’s what it is and that’s how it’s
going to be manifest in the movie. And that’s the idea. One of the
movies I just recently did, The Force Awakens, and the major threat by
the dark side is that they’re going to take the light out of the sky or
out of the star and then use it as a weapon. That came as a
visualization, not as a plot point from the director or the—
COLLINGS:
It came as a visualization with you and your crew?
CARTER:
That’s right. I asked the question, “What would actually scare you for
real or metaphorically if the dark side was coming back? What would they
do?” One of the older people who’d been on the first Star Wars, Dennis
Muren, who was a visual effects supervisor, said, well, if they could
take the light out of a star, that would be a great metaphor. And then
we thought, well, how do we visualize that? But we ended up doing it and
turned it into a weapon that was used by the dark side in that is the
main threatening force. So that’s just an example, but—
COLLINGS:
Yeah, it’s a great example.
0:09:20.1
CARTER:
—it’s where you’re not just illustrating an idea, you’re coming up with
a notion that performs a function in the movie fundamentally as to why
you’re watching those scenes unfold. But with the advent of the
computer, conceptually that position was, I think, not under attack,
just that the adaptation to it and not just be relegated to the idea
that the production designers did physical sets and that’s all. And I
was very much at the center of that evolution because I had the first
part of my life, and it was right up until the movie A.I., and with the
advent of the computer coming in with the dinosaurs, it hadn’t fully
been utilized in the service of making worlds, but it was in the service
of making characters or creatures.
So A.I. actually was an opportunity to take the very form that was
evolving and put it into the content of the movie, and, in fact, the
structure of the movie is the first third of the movie is a domestic
drama set in the future with this robot being brought into the family,
but it all happens in a house, and all the technology you see—there was
very little technology, actually, that you ever seen in the movie other
than the boy himself. And it was done as a fairy tale, so it wasn’t
trying to predict the future as much as say, “Here’s what might happen
in terms of the aspirations of an artificial intelligence as it relates
to human beings.” But the first part of that movie was structured
literally—and I think Kubrick and Spielberg instinctively knew this, but
they weren’t necessarily addressing the technology when they projected
the story. So what I mean by that is the first part, it was a domestic
drama for the first forty minutes, fifty minutes of the movie. Then the
boy is cast out into the world.
COLLINGS:
Right, into this forest.
CARTER:
And the forest. And then he goes to Rouge City, and then he goes to
beyond the edge of where humans go with the water having submerged
Manhattan to find his own maker. All of that part, even including then
going down underneath the water, is a part of what I would call the road
movie, you know, takes on the quest of identity has we had in the early
seventies, who are you and how do you survive and what’s your meaning of
your life.
COLLINGS:
And it’s also asking that question of cinema, too, as you have put it.
0:13:14.1
CARTER:
That’s right. So what’s interesting is as it’s going on that road, it
starts to evolve more and more in the sense that the worlds that it goes
into are less and less capable of being created for real in the physical
world, so that even Rouge City became actually one of the first shots
ever where you had characters and a moving camera move in an environment
that was digitally put in there later with the blue screen and all had
the same parallaxing views that were shifting with the moving camera
from that point of view. So we did a lot of what was then known as
tracking, where the characters are in space, and then how that relates
to the background, different than what we ended up doing later with
Polar Express or Avatar where the entire characters and background are
being simulated in a computer.
But in this case, the step was Rouge City was you’re now going into the
digital realm, which was, for me, fulfilling, and what Richard Sylbert
has said about his progression, taking what he learned from Cameron
Menzies about building sets on the back lot or in soundstages, and then
he integrated the real-life world of locations into the overall design.
There still was some stage sets. Then I was going into this dimension
where there’d be stage sets, as we had on A.I.—we built those at Warner
Brothers, a number of stages there—and then going out a little bit into
location in Oregon and in the forest, and also building locations in
huge environments, like at the Spruce Goose Dome for the Flesh Fair and
the forest. Those were all built inside because they were night scenes,
and we built huge exteriors, but inside of a huge dome.
And now once he went into the water and he was in this kind of CG water
world, then the interesting thing was the progression moving forward
was, well, 2,000 years are going to elapse, and that was all digital at
that point. So every single thing that you saw for the next three or
four minutes moving into the ice was all a digital recreation until we
started integrating the live-action David back into those worlds once he
was in the ice world and then was brought back into his home, and then
that was an enhanced version of the physical.
So it was kind of coming back together and being a hybrid again for the
end. But I found it to be very much like what I referred to earlier, I
think, some of the way The Beatles imagined—or at least the way I
imagined what The Beatles stimulated in me, which is this kind of
expansive form of entertainment on a questing kind of theme, sort of
like a day in the life where you start with something that seems almost
tangible, becomes more and more surreal once you realize that you’re
caught, in that particular moment, in between—in form, the question
you’re being asked is can you empathize with this artificial being who’s
so close to a human being, but reminds you every once in a while that
this is an artificial being.
So the very thing that the parents, particularly the mother, Monica, is
being asked to regard in relationship to this new surrogate son is the
same thing being asked of the audience: can you empathize and relate to
this kid’s journey when he’s not really a real boy? But then he aspires
to be a real boy, fights for his life. How can you not then give him
that regard? And I found that fascinating. I mean, I could, but I think
that was one of the troubles that the movie had with a wide audience,
was partially just because it was asking you to make a jump that maybe
people are not entirely comfortable making with who they empathize with.
COLLINGS:
Well, I love the movie because it’s so self-reflexive, and
structurally-- It is structurally what it is saying, and that’s
something very unusual.
CARTER:
I look for that, too, and it’s been one of the—and I think that was the
movie that was the penultimate of my experience. Maybe Avatar also has
that as well, but I think that because of Stanley Kubrick’s involvement
in the inception of it, the self-reflectiveness of making a movie about
what you’re making the movie about and knowing it, even in a slightly
cool way, is one of the things that drew me to it so strongly, because I
could see it was a dance between that self-awareness and the heart that
only wants what it wants and does not really want to be aware of itself
because then it gets in the way of the feelings that the heart wants,
but at the same time, at the center of it it’s a heart driving it, but
then you’re questioning whether the heart is real in terms of being
human.
It comes from us, and then it asks that very real question, is what we
create us? And in some ways, there’s no way that it isn’t, but then
again, it’s not because it’s not—even if we’re—I mean, it’s like one
step removed, because if God or whatever form of whatever created us,
and then we create, someone can say—and it’s a fundamental argument or
debate, which is anything we create is us, and it’s in the image of
whatever begat us in whatever form you put that. Or are we the turning
point at which it no longer is of what was created, which is us, and
it’s our creation? I would say that when you’re an artist, there’s a lot
of times when you can’t tell the difference as to whether you’re the
creator or the creation is flowing through you as the medium in order to
get created in this next form. And I’ve even joked to myself that we as
humans create, but we’re amateurs. We’re not professionals, because
that’s procreation.
COLLINGS:
That’s true, yeah.
CARTER:
But all those kinds of notions are actually at work in that movie, and
the physicality of the movie was substantial in the sense that we took
over six—
COLLINGS:
Yeah, talk about that. You’re talking about the second part of the movie
in the Spruce Goose Dome.
CARTER:
Well, even the first part, I would say. We built the apartment, and one
of the themes that we had, some of which came from Kubrick’s initial
explorations with the illustrator, Chris Baker, that I picked up on and
I went further with, which was the motif of the circles and kind of—
COLLINGS:
Yes, the home is circular.
CARTER:
Yeah, like a half circle, and the Flesh Fair’s circular, the pit, the
moon, the Ferris wheel.
COLLINGS:
Even that very predominant back wheel of the little machine, car
machine.
CARTER:
Exactly. So that there was a kind of a moving—Dr. No’s insignia.
Everything, when we could, we put the circle in—to me, it was like
Olympic rings intersecting, because it wasn’t so much that they were
all—they seemed to be almost equal parts in a journey that were linked.
There’d be some form of a transition from one to the next. So we built
this sort of half-circle, quite large interior set on Stage 16 at Warner
Bros. It’s the same stage where we’d done the Jurassic Park main road
part with the T. rex coming out and trashing the car and terrorizing the
kids. It was also the same place that we built the ship for Goonies. So
I always have a nice feeling about that stage—
COLLINGS:
Is that right?
CARTER:
Well, there’s a way that you can anthropomorphize almost anything, in a
way, if it becomes a place that you’re used to going and having an
experience, and particularly if it’s with a lot of people, so that
you’re walking into a big space and there’s nothing there other than the
bones of the building, and within it you are imagining, and with a lot
of people figuring it out, you actually watch something be created. And
then in a very Buddhist kind of impermanent way, it all gets destroyed
and it’s only there either in a photograph that was taken or it’s in the
film in whatever way it was shot.
But it’s very different than the feeling of the physicality of having
something there that you’ve had a part in the construction, if it’s a
pirate ship or it’s a T. rex or it’s that house. There’s certain stages
that I’ve had numerous sets on, many at Universal, but that I have a
feeling about the stage literally, because it’s like having a magic box
that you get to fill with imagination, and you go check on it and watch
you thing and you tweak it as it goes together. I mean, it’s one of the
real joys of being a production designer, art director, is to be
responsible for so much coming together, and it’s one of the things that
when you do the motion capture, you don’t have that. So anyway, we built
that on one of the stages. We built the Dr.—what’s his name?
COLLINGS:
Johnson?
CARTER:
Hobby, his place at another—
COLLINGS:
That’s a very interesting studio that he has. It’s very nineteenth
century early medicine—
CARTER:
That’s exactly right. What we did is instead of going forward trying to
project in a kind of sterile way maybe what the future would be, and
particularly because Steven was back-to-back going to do Minority
Report, which has lots of predictions about the future and its
technology. It permeates the whole movie, whereas ours was really about,
I thought, more of a nineteenth century fairy tale, and so the science
that you see is very rudimentary, not that it’s test tubes, but the
dressing of it, the feeling of it, the woodwork, the windows, all of it
feels like it’s a bit retro.
COLLINGS:
Right. And you’ve got this gathering of—
CARTER:
All the Davids.
COLLINGS:
—students. Oh, in the beginning, yeah, and all of those.
CARTER:
So, for me, what it was, of course, was it was Geppetto’s workshop, you
know, meaning that’s why you saw all the dolls. Those were all the
Pinocchios, but it’s just that the one Pinocchio found out that he
wasn’t the only one, right? And to make that very—they’re not behind
glass cases and they’re not in some kind of foggy thing with some weird—
COLLINGS:
Some kind of vapor or something.
CARTER:
Yeah, or just very architecturally designed just for that. It’s more
like he made then, and then as he made them, he—
COLLINGS:
Stuck them up on a—
CARTER:
—hung them up. And they were all there as part of his grief, really,
because it was all based upon a loss of his own child that he was
replicating. So keeping the environments, even the place where they
lived, it was not about it being so much futuristic as it was, it was
kind of a little bit like the House of Tomorrow in Disneyland meets
Frank Lloyd Wright, was the way I was thinking.
COLLINGS:
Yeah, I think that’s a great way of putting it.
CARTER:
I wanted to make it warm, and particularly because if the Earth is
flooded, then there’s a lot of water, and I just felt like greenery
would be actually in a lot of places. We don’t really see out the
windows. I mean, I put obscure things on the windows, but that just
helped so we weren’t fighting the artificiality of backings all the
time. Another circle, for instance, is just when David’s sitting at that
bed when his mother or when the robot comes at the very end. There’s
just this big circular window, which we just sort of put into the motif,
anytime we could, something that was just kind of big in its simplicity,
which was the circle. So then the next part, as I said, on the journey
we went down to the Spruce Goose, which is an enormous space—I can’t
remember. Whereas a normal huge stage is 200 feet long, this was 500
feet by 200-and-something feet or 300 feet of usable space in a circular
space, so we could do the whole Flesh Fair inside. On all those scenes,
it wasn’t outside at night, which with a little boy, that’s very
problematic as an actor. You just can’t do it.
COLLINGS:
Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah, of course. That makes sense.
CARTER:
Just the work restrictions. Then all the forest that we were in, not in
daylight, but once it got into night, that was all on stage.
COLLINGS:
That’s a very deep, dark forest.
CARTER:
And kind of like Snow White, right? I mean, it’s like that kind of
threatening and moody, and that’s where the pit with all the robot parts
is, and then the big moon rises on the—
COLLINGS:
That is an astonishing machine.
CARTER:
The moon machine?
COLLINGS:
Yeah.
0:28:37.6
CARTER:
Well, I think that’s a perfect Kubrickian idea, where you see something
and it’s a natural occurrence, supposedly, like a moon rising, and then
the moon rising becomes a threat because it’s actually a machine with an
intent, and the intent is bad against you. Even though you’re a robot,
you’re now relating to it that it’s another level of machine, but it is
being commandeered by a human. So the allegiances are really quite
interlaced with not confusion so much as what side are you on. The side
that you’re on is threatening the boy and the other domestic robots is
actually us, but it’s now threatening something that we maybe value.
Now, that same theme, of course, is in Avatar, because we become the bad
guys, our whole species, compared to where our human sentiments as a
person in the audience take us. In fact, I would even say, now that I’m
thinking about it, the ending is very close to the same also, which is
that even though in Avatar it’s Jake turning sides and switching to this
other—if it was robots, he would have become a robot, if he was a Na’vi,
which is another form of being, then he’s taking that. But, in fact,
what he’s doing is he’s embracing the other, which in this case is not
just the other on Pandora, it’s the whole digital form of creation.
So the embracing of that in form is the same as what’s happening in the
content, whereas in A.I. what’s happening is you’re emoting with David,
and when he dreams at the end and gets his life’s dream accomplished by
having a perfect day with his mother, you’re with his sentiments, and
yet you’ve been reminded over and over and over again he’s not human,
and that which is human, which was the mother, is passing away and gone,
so you’re only left with him and then that little toy robot, Teddy.
So I think there’s probably, at some point, something to be said for
this transition that the filmmakers are reacting to in terms of
thematics, whether the movies are successful or not, how they integrate
something that’s subconscious that relates to—I would say it’s an
age-old issue, but it’s humans and that which they begat artificially.
And then that can be a robot or it could be a half-bionic child,
artificial insemination, I mean any form of that which is being aided or
even caused by or created by something that we create. It’s one step
removed, right?
COLLINGS:
Yes.
0:31:08.9
CARTER:
So I think subjectively as we embrace as artists its power, we’re also
sometimes reflecting our own fears. Jim Cameron would claim, I’m sure,
that what he’s doing is he’s utilizing all of that in order to create
cautionary tales for our own humanity, the limitations and what are we
doing. At the same time, by embracing that form, he’s potentially giving
it even more power that he may or may not know its actual effect on us.
That’s not to say it’s a deliberate conscious affect, but all you have
to do is feel your—if you were to try to describe your relationship to
your iPhone and somebody didn’t know what it was, they would, I think,
say that there was a kind of a dependency that borders on an addiction
that you don’t have control over, even though you’re using it
supposedly—or we are using it for what we perceive to be our intentions
to accomplish things, and then the more that we can accomplish, the more
that we partake of that drug or that addiction in order to accomplish
more.
There’s no way that I think we can be doing—I’m just spinning
philosophically—that we can be involved that much in this type of an
activity that was not here for us to do fifty years ago in the same way,
not like this kind of intense—it’s the casualness of it, it’s the
familiarity of it, it’s even that which makes us feel like we are in
control of it. And all it takes is what we’re experiencing now to see
when some aspects of that start to turn so that the very fundamentals of
getting at something become impossible because the form itself, while
making it democratic, it dilutes the ability to have a singular there
there, so the values that you bring to it that you might even associate
with fundamentals of human values start getting shifted, in some manner
affected.
I can’t tell what it is, but I think at its core it has to do with being
able to focus, whether it’s on a conversation with someone or another
person. There’s just this other presence that if I’m looking at you and
I’m ten years younger, maybe, I’m just going to maybe have the phone out
here, and I might even just glance and double-track and think that I’m
paying just as much attention to you as I would if I wasn’t doing that,
which I’m not. But the point I’m making, I can imagine believing that I
can double-track like that and there’s no problem.
COLLINGS:
Well, it’s also just the awareness of these vast crowds of people that
you have at your disposal to consult on things, to weigh in—
CARTER:
Or be insulted by.
COLLINGS:
Be insulted by.
CARTER:
So they get your blood pressure going up and down over things that are
not right in front of you at all. The question is, is it something
that’s any business, really, of yours in a normal—what we thought of as
normal up till now—human identity.
COLLINGS:
Well, in Avatar, this vast group consciousness is viewed as something
that can be channeled for the good, but perhaps that’s optimistic. We
don’t know yet.
0:34:57.7 0:37:18.2 0:39:29.3
CARTER:
I would say that’s very true, and I think that we are in the midst of
something that we can almost know for sure is going to be considered
historically with different perspective than what we have about it right
now. I mean, we always are, but there’s things moving so fast, and you
read all the people that you want to, and nobody seems to be able to
say, “I got it, and this is what we’re looking at, and here’s—.” I mean,
everybody’s fighting very hard for something that I don’t think I was
even aware that we were fighting for, but whatever that is, we’re now
fighting very hard. I don’t just mean on the left or the right wing of
the political spectrum. I mean on an identity level of how we identify
who we are, whether it’s by nation, race, ethnic, culture, global, these
types of values of how we identify and that which is considered
sometimes tribalism compared to something else, but then what’s
sustainable and how do we really live? Like, what differences have we
really seen in our lifetimes?
So, going back all the way to the beginning of this interview, growing
up in West Los Angeles, a child of Hollywood, going into the movie
industry as a place of dreams to be fulfilled, progressing through it in
the various forms that I’ve been able to, to have those stories all out
there and reflective for me of my own journey, all of those things feel
to me like of a time, and I’m even aware of that. It’s not that it’s
coming to an end; it’s coming to some form of not being what’s really
happening at the most vibrant part of what our culture or society is
about. It doesn’t mean everybody my age. I’m just saying personally I
feel not so much a—what’s the word? I have a perspective on things, but
that perspective—it’s interesting, because George Lucas said something
to me, and he doesn’t often talk like this, in metaphors, but when I was
starting The Force Awakens, he said—as he was sort of handing it over,
and sort of ambivalent about handing the whole thing over, but he said
as he’s gotten older, it’s like the difference between being young and
seeing with binoculars everything up close that it’s bringing, and if
you take the binoculars and you flip them the other way, it pushes
everything away.
Now, on one hand, you can say that that’s giving your more perspective
because you’ve got some distance between the raw emotions and passions
that you have and then the thing that you’re engaging or not engaging,
but the other part is there’s just a distance, and whether you can
figure it out or not—and, of course, the other thing is to not feel like
because things have changed, that categorically that means it’s for the
worse or that the bitterness that could happen to people and you see
happen all the time, particularly when you stop at the end of things and
you go—a lot of people can take that harness off and go, “I feel freer
now not to have to do all that.”
But that’s not my relationship to my work. My work has always been a
good place to go, and it’s not that it isn’t, it’s just that as I get
older, my perspective is shifting, some of these issues about
technology, about focus, and just the stories that we tell with movies
and the way we tell them and how that evolves, it’s a philosophical
point of view not because it’s a young person’s sport to be
philosophical and think you’re going to surf some wave that you’re going
to see all the way to the end of your life and then you’re the one who
got it, you’ve found a philosophy and you could surf that. It’s more
like philosophy comes because there are so many questions, even after
you’ve been in and doing and you think you found some forms that give
you some criteria to look at things, so even when we’re talking about
this duality that I’ve talked about or this duality now that I’m
presenting with the technology and the more practical side of physical
filmmaking.
And those are just small waves, really, in what the levels are that this
expression is, because what form cinema takes, the communal experience
of going to a theater or what you see on a small screen or how you view
your dreams, and just because they’re smaller doesn’t mean that they’re
not big. It’s just that in the art direction realm, going back to this
chart, the reason that art director’s put there is because in order to
realize these dreams, somebody pretty important has to be at the center
in the sense that they hold a lot of responsibility to making the
visualization process, which is being recorded by the camera, strong and
productive, and in a production setting, making it such that it actually
performs what it’s supposed to for the people at the top and for the
audience.
So I take a lot of pride in that, having been a steward of this epoch of
it, but I’m very much aware that it’s hitting that point where—I don’t
know how to put it. You’re so aware that you’re not inventing the wheel
when you get older, how many people have been there before you in this
stage of life. If it’s my mother, she’d say aging’s not for sissies.
[laughter] There’s lots to be read into even that line just in terms of
what’s a sissy, what I grew up with, or just any of those ideas. But as
I hit it, then it becomes a whole new thing for me, even though it’s
literally age-old. So some of these perspectives on the movies, they’re
philosophical because that’s the only way I can really regard them,
because I can talk about all the specifics, theoretically I can talk
about them, but I’m so not interested in them anymore because they sound
like as though I was a craftsman trying to explain how a nail and a
hammer work together, and you see it everywhere you look, and you’re
amazed that it works, and that somebody who really can maybe show
you—and then how they learn to hit the hammer a certain way and not have
to hit it five times, and how to make an assembly-line version, and all
those things that people do with their lives to make their work lives
more efficient or better or more meaningful.
But at this stage, it’s very hard to get that into that. When I was
younger, I could do that. When people interview me now—because they’ll
never know. They just can’t know. “So what does a production designer
do?” They have to ask that question, but at least they can ask the
question because they’ve got a visual in front of them that they think
relates to what I’m doing. If I’m an editor, they have no idea. They
can’t possibly look at a bad edit, you know? They can only know—what
they see is what they get, and that it either worked or it didn’t. They
don’t even know there was the edit to begin with, right? And then the
musical score, that’s kind of—if you can extrapolate it, maybe you can
say, “I like that music,” but did it fit the movie? Sound effects, you
can’t even possibly hear them, other than a few things—
COLLINGS:
Other than what they were.
CARTER:
I mean, these parts of the movie process are so intangible for people
when they’re perceiving their dreams in this form that it’s truly—and
even the Academy that tries to honor the excellence is swept up in
whether the movie works overall, because if it doesn’t—any set that’s
constructed, if you got cheesy or cheap or shallow or stupid things
going on in front of it, looks shallow, stupid, cheesy. I mean, it just
can’t escape that. Every once in a while, you’re in a movie and go,
“Well, the acting wasn’t so great and the story I’m not sure, but I
really like the way it looked and felt,” but that’s a rarity, and
usually—
COLLINGS:
I feel that way about The Man in the High Castle. I mean, the story is
fine and everything, but the sets are—it’s the sets. It is the set.
CARTER:
So that that’s what’s drawing you in to even being there to watch at
all. And that’s good, as long as you stay with it and you think that
that will survive. I found that, in general, most people cannot regard
art direction or production design in that way and let it sustain them
for very long. I would say twenty minutes usually is—because you’re not
emotionally engaged with what’s going on, either the story or the
characters. And secondarily, you find yourself admiring it, which is
different than believing it and just being submerged, which is
when—that’s why two hours can go by in a movie when you’re just in it,
and you maybe note that, “Ooh, that’s—,” but now you’re in it. “Oh,
look, that—,” now you’re in it.
COLLINGS:
“Oh, that wallpaper is fantastic. It’s perfect.”
CARTER:
But if you’re kind of going, “I can’t wait for the next wallpaper,” then
you’re just that kind of a person, but you’re in a real small minority.
And I’m not the type, also, that goes back and looks at my own work, the
things I’ve been involved with, and say, “Oh, I wish I’d done this,” or,
“I could have done that.” It’s too consuming making it happen for the
first—
COLLINGS:
Consuming.
0:46:10.8
CARTER:
Consuming. And my ability just to create it with a group of people at
all is just too overwhelming to say, “Well, I should have done this.”
Every once in a while, I’ll say, “Well, maybe that movie could have been
shorter and maybe there could have been some scenes taken out and it
wouldn’t have missed that maybe overall,” but then again, now I’m just
getting into someone else’s part in it, as though someone would say to
me, “Well, wouldn’t it have been better if,” blah, blah, blah, “you
picked another color here or did that?” So it’s the gestalt, the overall
of the whole movie is so overwhelmingly the experience that when we pick
it apart, even in this, I would hope that anything that comes out of
anybody listening to this is just that there’s a type of thinking that
goes into what you’ve seen that may not be evident when you’re just
looking at it on its surface because you can’t see it, but then maybe if
somebody illuminates that, then you say, “Oh, they were thinking about
this, and that’s interesting, that interpretation.” But usually not in
the middle of it, more in a, I would think—I’m not going to say
academic-only setting, but certainly to the extent that somebody is
studying the subject for whatever purpose, and just the way with art
sometimes when you learn something was created for a certain purpose,
and then you go, “Oh, look at that. Now I see it. I couldn’t see it
before.”
You can be attracted to a movie or a painting and go, “I’m just
attracted to that, even though I don’t know the subject matter. I don’t
know who’s in it and what’s it about.” Then maybe you find out, “Oh,
that’s Christ and Mary Magdalene. Oh, that’s interesting.” So what is
the story that that is now conveying about those two? Are they intimate?
Is there a suggestion of that? Is that part of what’s risqué or is that
just something that’s heartfelt? And is it commissioned by someone who
maybe didn’t want to hang it because it was too provocative in that
sense? Then it adds something to the regard of the work, so I think
that’s kind of what I would think anything along these lines does. And
then maybe just to try to imagine it, it’s, again, that thing of at
certain time periods, a certain body of work was created in a certain
place by certain people who were thinking a certain way, not all the
same, but they were of a generation.
COLLINGS:
Well, that sort of brings me back—what you said about this almost
Buddhist practice of going into a large soundstage and all of these
people putting this world together and then having it be dismantled and
be gone, so here we have A.I. where, of course, that happens, and in any
movie, that happens. And then in the last scene, there’s that moment,
the day that you experience, and then that’s gone. So, really, all of
that mirrors the experience of even going and seeing a film and living
within this world, and then you walk outside and it’s all gone, so
there’s this construction and destruction even within your own mind. But
then in the case of A.I., you’ve got David, who was going to presumably
outlive this day, and now films are not on nitrate, they’re not even on
film, they’re digital, they won’t decompose, they won’t get acid
syndrome, they’re just going to be migrated forward in whatever digital
format forever, presumably.
CARTER:
Well, David then, in a sense, is the medium, right? He’s the embodiment
and the metaphor for the medium itself, and no matter in whose hands or
in what form, lives on beyond us and is those people in the future’s
best version or access point to what begat them, but more distantly.
COLLINGS:
And the aliens are even having that kind of experience with David.
CARTER:
And they’re not even aliens, which is the very interesting ambivalent
thing, because in designing them, what does a future robot look like?
And it ended up, for Steven, wanting to look like that, which looks a
lot like his aliens, right, which tells you that his aliens are not
aliens, meaning they are from somewhere else, as these creatures are
from somewhere else in our imaginations, and they’re metaphors for an
other. But saying they’re from another planet or saying they are
artificial intelligence is, in fact, one and the same, which is why the
ambivalence between them being aliens or just robots that have been
begat by us is an absolute mystery, ambivalent place, which I think is
great, because it ends up being unable, in a sense, to predict anything
that is that clear as to what that other might be.
But you know it when you see it, and you can call it whatever you want
to call it, but that’s what it is. It’s other and it’s beyond us and it
has a relationship to us that’s not—it’s actually, in this particular
case, not malevolent, although if you look at Spielberg’s work, you
could also see, let’s say, in War of the Worlds, a design for a
malevolent version that you can easily imagine coexisting with the
aliens that you see in Close Encounters or the robots that you see in
A.I. as though that’s all part of some otherness that is in existence,
but really it’s only in existence in our subconscious version of how do
you invoke “other,” right? And I think that starts to, I think, define
something that I don’t know what it is, but I can tell that it’s
defining something about how we’re thinking now and the fact that these
filmmakers could put out this type of imagery and have it be received
not always perfectly or great, but—
COLLINGS:
But be understood.
CARTER:
But to be understood, or the way it’s not understood, still potentially
provocative in its time, thus it has a language. That’s why when you
look back, you see the epochs and what they were doing. Like, Byzantine
perspective, what is that? Right? But we can also begin to go,
“One-point perspective, I see what they’re going after, but what is that
all about?” as compared to even David Hockney’s latest work, which is
multiple points of perspective, and then it starts to look sort of like
some things in the past before they had that point of reference of a
singular point of view capturing a moment, which often is really just
the influence of the camera saying we can imagine catching a moment, as
opposed to pictures before, paintings before, which are not capturing
any moment in time, that’s a whole series of things. In the Sistine
Chapel, you see Adam and Eve with the apple and the serpent, and you see
them leaving in the same frame, so it tells you that story.
Now, when you’re doing movies, even though you seemingly are capturing
one moment at a time, one snapshot that leads to the next moment, they
also do play with time in ways, not just in the most literal way, like
saying, “We’re going to take you into the past,” or we’re going to do
what Chris Nolan does, which is to show you intercutting three different
timeframes, like a whole day, an hour, like, a week. Dunkirk does that.
It intercuts three stories, but they’re all being told in a different
timeframe, but it all holds together. You can track that. Where I’m
going with this is to say there’s so many subjective moments being
created in cinema when they edit it together that it starts to reflect
how we perceive ourselves and time and our dreams, which is different
than what came before, and it’ll be very different from what comes
after, and it will only be seeable once you see far enough into the
future to look back on it and say, “Ah, that’s why they were doing it
that way. They needed to do this.”
COLLINGS:
It very much describes the cultural sense of how time works, how one
perceives reality, which is now very fragmented, and there’s a lot of
simultaneity in terms of attention, as you were describing before.
CARTER:
And let’s just say somebody in the future was listening to this, so
we’re addressing that person and saying for some reason, we think it’s
very fragmented right now compared to something that we perceived
before. And then they’re listening to us and going, “You think that’s
fragmented?” Or, “Yeah, it sounds like you’re all over the place.” I
don’t know which it’ll be from whatever their perspective is.
COLLINGS:
Well, it’s going to depend on what happens in terms of energy, I
suppose, because everything that we’re talking about requires enormous
amounts of energy.
CARTER:
That’s right. See, but even that, we think we’re so smart because we
think we’re now regarding energy as an issue, and that somehow that puts
us—
COLLINGS:
Might be nothing.
CARTER:
It might not only be nothing, it might just be the tip of the iceberg of
something that was only representing itself or making it seeable, just
like artificial intelligence is, like as though—I’m trying to think of
what it would be like, but I can imagine—and even while making A.I., it
was the most philosophical—even if Avatar plays that out, it’s much
simpler in its dynamic as compared to—it doesn’t then bring in the
intimacy of mother’s love and child rivalry.
COLLINGS:
And the relationship between the audience and the film. I mean, you
could say that it’s the audience that activates David and keeps David
alive, and, in fact, that’s what happens in every film.
CARTER:
Yeah. But it’s being, in a sense, commented on while it’s happening, and
it’s almost like with Kubrick having Spielberg doing it and being not
there, he no longer carries the responsibility of being intelligible or
approved of in a certain way, so the story that Steven was able to tell
is being guided the best he can by just giving over to what he thinks
Stanley would have done or liked and not necessarily judge it too much.
That’s why I think he had to be the one to write the screenplay. I mean,
he took it on as an absolute dialogue believing in what Stanley had laid
out, but I think Stanley was getting to a point where he was free of
making a movie that was catering to an audience as much as it was a—it’s
like Goya at the end of his life. Goya was not painting for the court
anymore. He wasn’t painting things that he probably thought would even
survive, because they were just dark paintings with rags, and very,
very, very troubled by the Civil War and humanity, and Disasters of War.
That’s not to say that A.I. is only negative, because it obviously
offers this kind of glimmer of emotional truth about love, and
particularly a mother’s love.
COLLINGS:
But is that what Spielberg brought to it?
CARTER:
No, I think it was inherent in the story. I mean, I don’t think you can
tell the story, which was all laid out by Stanley, without the—I think
he emotionalized the relationships in the acting and what performances
he wanted to see out of them, but the story arc was always about you
love your mother unconditionally, and she, for reasons that we as humans
in the audience can perceive, has to let you go because you’re—David
doesn’t know that he’s acting out of his own jealous instincts in
relationship to his brother Martin, or his half-brother, whatever form
of brother he is, but the very fact that he is acting at all in
relationship to the brother who is jealous means that he’s partaking now
in something that ends up, unbeknownst to him, to be life-threatening to
the mother. I mean, he certainly could poke her eye out, if nothing
else, with the scissors. So then it’s like this has gone too far. I
can’t tell you who’s at fault, what the thing is, but there’s the son,
he’s human, we can deal with that, but we don’t know what this means.
COLLINGS:
Right. It could turn into a malevolent being just like Dr.
Johnson-Johnson’s—
1:00:34.3
CARTER:
That’s right. We don’t even know that that’s like—it’s not the intent,
even. It doesn’t matter. It’s just not human, so it’s not going to have
the same parameters of even punishment, so take it back to its maker
and—it’s like in Woody Allen’s Sleeper. Take its head off and replace it
or something. Upgrade the model. But she can’t do that because she
realizes that she will literally be destroying it, so she just says,
“Don’t go that way. Go that way, and that’s all I can do.” That’s a
wrenching scene of, like, a mother who does love him but, both for his
own good and her own good, has to separate, and so the trauma of—and for
him, he has no point of reference as to—other than the budding emotions
of, “I’m real, Teddy’s not.” He knows he can’t criticize Martin
inherently for his own survival, but he can criticize that he’s not a
Teddy. So that’s all Stanley.
Then put him out into the journey and the spare parts and the moon
rising and the Flesh Fair and Rouge City and finding Dr. No and going to
Manhattan and finding your maker and then finding out that you’re not
special and then just going into your subconscious underneath and going
to just being taken wherever you can go because you no nothing other
than being driven by some forces way bigger, and what are those forces
that are taking him? See, we’re no longer watching him; we are him.
Because, I mean, all that happens is he goes in the water and a bunch of
fish come around, and it’s like the subconscious just, like, just guide
him. They guide him where he needs to go at that point, right? As far as
he can get on his own is just ask the single question or ask the demand
of this figure, which is, “You’re the one who can make me a real boy.”
It’s like a roadmap that’s inescapable the way it was laid out.
You could be emotionalized and reinterpreted a million different ways,
but what he laid out there was so fundamental in its expansiveness, and
that everybody wanted it to kind of, like, conform, but I don’t think
Stanley was conforming to anything, because he was already gone. And so
now if you’re going to make the movie, you’re making it from his point
of view for his point of view, which is no longer contained in a
three-act structure. Now you’re just 2,000 years—the only way to figure
out what this is about is just to make something up that’s emotionally
resonant, hopefully, and it’s 2,000 years from now, which is beyond our
ability. Not 1,000 years, no, it’s just like—
COLLINGS:
“Two thousand years passed.” What?
CARTER:
What? Okay, visualize that. Okay. And that becomes kind of also
emblematic, potentially, of our era in which we’ve had some dreamers
that were capable of dreaming this big of a dream, Kubrick, Spielberg,
Cameron, Zemeckis, the Star Wars of it, and I’ve just been fortunate
enough to be sort of ringside seat and participating in those dreams as
this person who saw a big dream when he knew it, which was some
combination of The Wizard of Oz and Disneyland, right, because
Disneyland is a physical space you could go into and still kind of, in
real time, dream, and yet the cinema of it, it was cinematic, you went
from place to place, and they did this kind of journey, and then you’d
be exhausted and you’d have the long ride home from Burbank.
COLLINGS:
Well, there’s an interesting progression where some of the theme park
rides are developed out of some of the films, and then you could argue
that certain films, in effect, take the next step from theme park rides
in terms of being a highly immersive, spectacular experience.
1:04:46.8
CARTER:
Yeah. I was definitely there for the Jurassic Park, Back to the Future
ride, the movies that Universal created. I even helped design some of
those. In fact, The War of the Worlds set of the plane crash is still a
part of the attraction at Universal. So, just inadvertently, almost,
between Back to the Future, Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds, Avatar,
Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and Lincoln, which has our set at the
Lincoln Museum in Illinois, so that’s five or six movies that have lived
on in the theme park or historical park, and now I’m designing this
museum, the exhibits, and trying to do that, which is not easy to do.
I don’t know why me, but I find myself at the nexus of those things, and
it’s incredibly thick with not just politics but the morality of our
time, who gets included, who doesn’t get included, and for what reasons,
you know. I mean, that’s a whole other discussion to have at some point.
I’m not sure getting to have it right now, but what I’m trying to get at
is our culture is now going through some very wrenching times in which
issues are being brought up in relationship to art and artistry and who
gets included and who’s not included that you could not imagine even
three years ago.
So it’s moving that fast, and to kind of respond to whose voice is the
loudest in the present tense is kind of where we are, and that’s kind of
not just where we are with arts, certainly with where we are in
politics, right, and maybe even where we will be with war. I mean, this
is not necessarily going to be a time, at least far as I can perceive,
where reason and patience is going to win out. I think people are pushed
so quickly beyond their patience points that they go into an attack mode
because they feel they’re being attacked.
COLLINGS:
Well, maybe the museum should be designed up until, say, the year, I
don’t know, 2010, and then there would be a participatory thing where
visitors send Tweets or something about what they think the rest of it
should look like, and then that would be designed ten years from now.
1:08:56.3
CARTER:
If it were so easy, and the reason is because we don’t think like that.
So we have to tell a story now that relates to the inclusion of people
that would not be told in the traditional, up till now, way of telling
the story, which now would be relegated—would consider, well, that’s the
white man’s point of view on it. What about this other point of view
that exists? How do you include that, and why can’t you tell that story?
And at what point does the initial story fall apart when you’re trying
to just do that? So now that’s just theoretically, but is absolutely
real in terms of what I would call the exclusion side, and it’s the
exclusion side that claims to have a moral imperative attached to it,
which I’m not antithetical to at all personally, but that’s just my
personal take.
So just because I think, oh, yeah, that’s valid—and, yes, everything we
always do is subjective, but when you pay attention and you say, “Well,
yes, you know what’s the good thing? Inclusion.” Right? You could hear
that. You could imagine that’s just—you hear that everywhere. What about
exclusion? Now, who gets excluded now? Because now that same moral
imperative is saying that on top of us wanting to be in, we want those
out because they are offensive. And that’s happening now. So now this
moral imperative seeming righteous, whatever, has decided who should be
included and who should be excluded, so the very thing that they were
offended by, which was being excluded, becomes the thing that they are
doing.
And that’s happening for real, the minute you put anything in a cultural
setting like this, and that’s just a different type of era. It’s like
walking into the late sixties when up is down and bad is good and
Disneyland’s bad, that’s fascist, you can have long hair there, so those
are a bunch of bad guys, or dah, dah, dah, dah. I mean, everything turns
on itself, and it doesn’t just turn one way and that’s the way it is
forever. It just goes that way, and then something else happens.
So, just going back to this body of work, this is kind of a group of
movies that I think are influenced by what happened in the late sixties,
that social turmoil, and a group of white men and women, but
particularly—and then dealt with some of the issues that they could the
best they could, given the commerce of the time, what was perceived as
the way to make money or not, and that’s the body of work that was
created within those parameters. And when and if that truly shifts, then
that will bring up another group of people, because I was very aware in
the very beginning I knew lots of smart people, but their zeitgeist was
different than the one of the way it was going, and the ones that I got
involved with were ones who, fortunately for them—and for me by
extension—the audiences wanted to see those kinds of movies.
If Steven Spielberg came earlier and tried to make it in in the early
seventies, truly early seventies when everything was anti-establishment
and anti-classical storytelling, he wouldn’t have been perceived the
same way. Doesn’t mean he wouldn’t have adapted somewhat, but he found
his time to be appreciated. George Lucas, Bob Zemeckis, Jim Cameron,
their dreams lined up with dreams that people wanted to pay money for
and to promote, and big chunnels were created to the world in order to
get those dreams out, whereas many other people had other things that
then they couldn’t get any financing anymore. And if it’s a movie, you
need to have some financing, so that means other people have to buy into
the dream even before they’ve seen the dream.
COLLINGS:
Well, in the case of Jim Cameron, it seems that his shift into the—it’s
always so fascinating that we call it the digital realm because it’s
like a place that you go to, and in Avatar, you’ve got the industrial
space, and then somebody like Jake goes into the digital realm, which is
this phantasmagorical place, and I think that’s probably how most people
are experiencing the Internet and visiting websites. So, it seems that
if this is his vision, then he’s perfectly positioned to have a movie
where I think with the IMDb, the list of crew is fifty pages long.
[laughter]
CARTER:
There you go.
COLLINGS:
So, I mean, that’s a large community—
CARTER:
That’s right.
COLLINGS:
—that he was able to marshal to promote this vision, which is seen by an
even larger community.
1:13:15.0
CARTER:
Well, I think that it’s also that ability, yes, to command a whole group
and to get them on a wavelength, and that you have to be able to hold
the center of, and that’s a unique talent as well as just directing,
frame by frame, a movie. So, in order to get that kind of vision across,
it takes a certain kind of talent that is very, very unique, ultimately,
because it’s not only that part of it, it’s also that every time Jim
Cameron makes a movie, he’s making the most expensive movie that’s ever
been made and he’s putting the studio at risk.
He’s at risk because he puts everything he’s got into it, including
financial, so that if he has to—at a certain point when it’s going over,
he’ll put his money back into it, and if it succeeds, he succeeds even
more, if it fails, he’s getting hurt. But that’s his methodology and
that’s him as a person, but as a capitalist, they don’t usually like
that kind of being put into that context, but they are every time
because he cannot help but do that. But that’s the way he also
psychologically makes sure that everybody is at the level he’s it, which
is there’s something at stake. They’re not just doing their job and
punching their clock, and, “I got it. We’re going to see the money at
the other end.”
So Avatar as a sequel is a no-brainer, no matter what they spend on it,
but if you do four of them, now you’re going to be making something that
is going to cost almost as much as they’ve already made in order to make
the others, and now everybody’s got to watch it and they’ve got to pay
attention, and they’re going to have to fight with him over certain
aspects, and he wants to have some of those fights, not because he’s
trying to be antagonistic, it’s just that if he wasn’t, I think he would
feel that his vision wasn’t challenging enough, not just for the movie
itself but the whole form of how it engages the marketplace and those
that put up the money to begin with.
COLLINGS:
Right, because the form itself—
CARTER:
That’s right, the medium.
COLLINGS:
—as in A.I., is integral to the meaning.
CARTER:
That’s right. Yeah, it’s integral even to what is investment, what is
risk. And he, on top of that, is Canadian, so he’s actually an outsider
from the system, to some extent, who has made his way into something,
and he loves it, but he’s also not, in a sense—he’s not supporting the
system as much as he’s in business with the system in order to realize
his vision.
COLLINGS:
What would supporting the system entail?
CARTER:
Well, I think it would be like, “Let’s be reasonable. Now, we can’t
spend that kind of money on a movie.” And then let’s say it was
Zemeckis, as it was on Back to the Future II as a sequel, when the
sequel was going to cost $70 million and the first one only cost 35, but
all the elements that were in Back to the Future II and III were in I’s
script, all those places, and the head of the studio was very
supportive, but he said, “We spent $35 million on the first one, even
with the reshoots, and made a lot of money, and it’s great, but we don’t
want to spend $70 million on a sequel. Twice, you know, that’s too
much.”
So Bob’s response—again, this’d be more—it’s like more supportive of the
system. Jim would just basically—he would go, “Well, then I’m going to
go somewhere else and make it,” or something like that, and then he
would call that bluff until finally they acquiesced to letting him make
the movie, even if there would be continuous fights. Bob was more of
like, “Well, why don’t we then break it up into two movies for $90
million.” So that’s like playing—and then they went, “Oh, okay. Yeah,
we’ll do that.” So now each one of them is ten over, but that type of
math they could accommodate, if that makes sense.
COLLINGS:
So is there more and more not supporting the system going on, do you
think?
CARTER:
Well, the system’s awfully strong, so it can pretty much crush what it
doesn’t want. It’s just that Cameron is delivering them what they want.
I mean, he’s never been a bad bet, so if he didn’t get them their money
on the other end, then he would not be allowed to do it. They would
literally pull the plug. But he fights in such a way, and he’s always
delivered before, so he’s not a bad capitalist bet, but it’s risky and
it keeps them up at night, just the way he’s kept up at night. So I look
at that as his way of making sure, “If I’m going to be up at night doing
this, everybody else is going to be as well.”
COLLINGS:
So were you kept up at night working on that one?
CARTER:
Sure. Sure, yeah, because it’s just so many details and so many things
to think about. On that one, I felt like I was a—what’s it called—an RF
cable, like from a TV to an old VCR, and I was trying to carry—at that
time, it was FireWire 800 data, down to New Zealand and back, and not
just by me, what I would do on a call or a Skype conference thing, but I
would go down there for whatever, but it was just the amount of
information that I had to synthesize and then make into a coherent
process so they could do their job.
COLLINGS:
The Weta Workshop.
CARTER:
Not only Weta, but the actual set builders, because they had no
infrastructure to make sets like that. They didn’t have any of the
processes we have here. I mean, we were turning to China and to
shipbuilders. It’s a small island, so they had to literally revamp the
whole—not revamp, but shipbuilders became part of it. The whole
infrastructure of the country came up and met the challenge—
COLLINGS:
That’s what I was thinking when I looked at the credits.
CARTER:
Yeah. New Zealanders are a very can-do group, and they really got into
it and they performed fantastically, but I was having to carry a lot of
that information down and synthesize it so it could be understood and
then put into a methodology that could work. In fact, Jim had come to me
at one point—it might have taken us normally, for something that
elaborate, five months to build everything once it was designed, but
this took ten months. So we weren’t even fully designed, but I had to
get things going, and Jim just wasn’t ready to go through all that, so
he was working out all these other motion-capture things. So finally
when we were turning to this, he says, “Now—.”
And this is three months after we’d started building, and the producer
knew, but he just didn’t really comprehend that we were doing that. I
literally had to just say to myself, “Well, I’m going to take the shit
if I have to because this has to happen for the good of the movie.” But
he came and he said, “Now, I don’t want you to start building until I’ve
worked out all the lighting in this virtual thing.” And I knew we were
already—it wasn’t to say we couldn’t accommodate some things we learned,
which we did, and he loved the sets, but it was a process that we were
extending into, in form, something that was difficult, even just on the
physical side, let alone the digital side, to create those characters,
and particularly Neytiri and Jake and the ones you had to really emote
with in some manner and know how they were feeling. But anyway, I think
that’s probably about all I have to—
COLLINGS:
Okay. Let me just ask you one last question. The Post, it really seems
to resonate with today. Is there a way that you feel that your
production design work in that film sort of helps it to feel like
something that’s not just entirely a period piece?
CARTER:
Well, I think the first and foremost is because I grew up in that era. I
was twenty-one in 1971, having traveled around the world, and this was
my coming back and becoming aware that all those things that had
bothered my conscience about the war and my not going to the war were
now being vindicated by a government study, not just Ramparts magazine
or the Berkeley Gazette that was against the war from whatever their
sources were, but now an actual study was being revealed that
corroborated all of the issues of corruption, and not just corruption,
but a needing to lie and to cover over what had happened in order to
sustain something that was ultimately unsustainable and costing so many
lives. So to know that not as something to study but that I’d lived
through, I was the guy who could come in and say, “I know this period. I
know what it’s about.”
And I made a big collage with the group that was like a Rauschenberg
about the whole era that got the younger people into the kind of
craziness of it, so on a method level—and we hired a lot of women on the
movie partly just because they were who were available, but they were
just the perfect group. I mean, not just that two of the producers were
women and the primary first screenwriter, but—and the production manager
and the two art directors and the set decorator and the props person. I
mean, and they were just right in a zone of it was perfect for them to
get into this story because of it being about Katharine Graham finding
her voice, and then her ability to become a true hero in terms of the
press finding its voice and establishing that fourth estate sense of who
monitors the government.
But on the personal side, knowing about the issues, I could be much
more—what’s the word? I knew we had to just get everybody working very
fast. We had to be shooting within eight weeks, so let’s go. I’d been
mentored by the production designer who did All the President’s Men, but
we didn’t have the money nor time to build a set, so I just went to a
building that we found and said, “We’re going to do it here,” and then
we did a tremendous amount of work in it. But the structure was there,
and I knew that meant that Steven would just come to work every day like
he’s working. He’s making a movie and he’s putting out a paper at the
same time, in the same way, so the form and the content are very close.
We’re making this movie the way they put out the paper, and we’re doing
it for the same purpose. We’re doing it as a social arbiter of what is
right in terms of that perception of what secrets should be not kept,
and the democracy does die in darkness, so those values. And then going
back to that time for cinema when movies were that kind of a social
arbiter of conscience for people to see issues brought up, and it swayed
how they felt about things.
COLLINGS:
Yeah, exactly.
CARTER:
So all of that was very much a part of my upbringing. I try to work it
in whatever I can, but this one was the most directly political. Lincoln
was very political on certain levels, but it was even more distant to
things that even more people would agree with, whereas this is something
that’s right in the middle of, like, well, what is treason and what are
our allegiances, and just to think of how complicated it is now.
Literally the group that’s in power is going after the institutions
which are the ones that are actually holding together the institution to
begin with in terms of—these are times we’ve never even seen anything
like this, let alone—it’s not just the press, it’s all sorts of—for
what?
For some agenda and maybe even some psychosis. This movie was at least a
small version of being able to do something along the lines of what I’m
good at and to organize people to perform a function, what they are good
at, and so we could bring a production together very quickly, and within
essentially eight weeks have a movie that would then be able to come out
and become a part of the dialogue, such that it is, with the culture.
Mostly it probably hits those that already are convinced there’s
something terribly wrong, but it at least reaffirms to them that there
was a time when this played out in a way that was positive. We don’t
know that it’s going to now. We don’t know that we would have a Supreme
Court that would go that way.
COLLINGS:
I thought that was an extremely important element to have at the end of
the film rather than just have that as a sidenote.
CARTER:
That’s right. And to celebrate that, because that that was part of our
institutions working for what I would say is a humanist, democratic set
of values. But there are other values out there that we’re always up
against, and I would say that almost all the movies I’ve gotten to work
on to some degree celebrate a certain kind of value that would be
perceivable. Maybe it would be called liberal, I’m not sure, but it will
be perceived a certain way. And I think The Post falls into that as the
most kind of direct engagement in kind of—while it starts far away as
far as like—and this is Kay Graham, and there’s lots of design aspects
to their homes and how their work lives come into their homes and how we
put them back-to-back on stages, so it’s like Juliet and Romeo.
I mean, it’s a platonic love story, really, in which they make each
other better. But the real, I think, summation of it is that as the
movie quickens in pace towards the end, even though you know basically
what’s going to happen, how it happens and how complex it is makes you
realize how hard it was, and then it goes right through being about them
to—and basically going, “I don’t think I can go through this again,” and
it’s like a joke that Katharine Graham’s telling, because we know now
when we see the next scene that she’s about to go in through it again,
only this time it even brought down the guy who was the antagonist,
which was Nixon. And the funny thing was it wasn’t about him at all. He
was only protecting something that was something he felt the need to
protect, but it was nothing critical of him.
It’s just that he was propagating the same lie, and so that if that lie
was true for them, it’s going to be true for him. It turned out it was
even more lies than just about Vietnam, and once you start, that
cover-up just doesn’t stop. And then you want to hope that the truth
wills out, and, oh, what a tangled web we weave, and that eventually you
get brought down. But we don’t know that, and every time it comes back
around, a lot more is at stake than when it’s just history. And, being
older now, it feels like I don’t know where this one’s going, you know,
and I think there’s been a certain amount of satisfaction in the last
thirty years that things would play out—and I would even say—
COLLINGS:
The sense of an evolution in the right direction.
1:29:47.2
CARTER:
And even just a balance. Honestly, in my lifetime, because the president
has been held by Democrats and Republicans, each side has had some form
of the pressure valve removed. Now it’s going past very quickly those
lines of putting the country first, and now the retribution that’s going
to come from the left to the right when the left finally finds its way,
and that won’t all be good either. And then finding a balance between
these two things, because I think that the person at the center of that,
Trump, will have no compunction about—there’s no line that he won’t
cross, I mean none whatsoever.
He would never step down, he would never admit that he’s wrong on any
level, and so there will be no way to ever get him, that personality,
out of power, other than removing him from power, and that’s going to be
by force. And that force I don’t even think’s going to be able to be,
personally, in the form of impeachment, because I don’t think that will
ever happen, unless somehow the body politic is so outraged that they
actually elect all Democrats to perform that function, but even then,
I—so that’s how dramatic the movie that we’re in that is our lives
appears now.
But I do not personally feel up to being able to fully metaphorically
engage that one and understand. If called upon by Steven, I will try to
perform any function I can within the world that he perceives as being
valuable, but other than that, I’m a little more arm’s distance if I can
be. Who knows whether I will be, just because it really—I think I felt
like I knew what was going on subconsciously and I was on this journey,
and now the last part of it, however long it is, is taking a turn in
which the fights that I only heard about are now about to happen again,
the World War II-level fights.
The wars that I faced, that I was a conscientious objector in
relationship to, were wars of choice. Vietnam was a war of choice. I’m
not sure World War II was, and now I think that we’re heading into a war
that’s not of choice, because, first of all, it could be thrust upon us
and you’re not going to know what you think, because if it’s against
North Korea, you know that you’re not on their side, but you certainly
don’t trust our side for telling you the truth or negotiating something
that could have been negotiated.
COLLINGS:
Yeah, see Pentagon Papers.
CARTER:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And is there anybody with a prick of a conscience
who’s keeping a paper trail for all of this? There’s The Post.
COLLINGS:
There’s The Post. Okay.
CARTER:
All the news that’s fit to print and all the cinema to be made.
COLLINGS:
Right. Shall we leave it there then?
CARTER:
Sure. [End of February 1, 2018 interview]