Breaking In: How 20 Film Directors Got Their Start

Book by Nicholas Jarecki

Edward Zwick ABOUT LAST NIGHT

EDWARD ZWICK was born in 1952 in Wyneck, Illinois. He attended Harvard University and began publishing work at the New York Observer and other publications by the time he was twenty-one. During a year abroad in France he met Woody Allen, who gave Zwick his first job working on a film. This exposure pushed Zwick to begin developing his own material. At the age of twenty-six he became producer of the television show "Family." He went on to direct his first feature, About Last Night, starring Demi Moore and Rob Lowe. Subsequently he created the television series "thirtysomething," and directed and produced many more films including Glory and The Siege, starring Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis. He also produced the Steven Soderbergh film Traffic. Zwick lives in Los Angeles with his family.

I grew up in Wyneck, Illinois, an affluent, middle-class suburb of Chicago. I went to a public high school, but it was a very progressive one, called Nutrier High. It's a bit odd, but a disproportionate number of people from this school have gone into the entertainment business, mostly as actors. I can't necessarily say why, but they have a very good drama department and I think it's that combined with the privilege of the suburb. Growing up there you're exposed to a number of artistic things as a child and indeed are given the presumptuous notion that you can go out into the world and succeed. There may be some sense of entitlement that comes from growing up in that particular way.

My mother had once been the assistant director in the high school class play. That was the extent of her theatrical involvement and yet it struck a chord in her. She loved the theater. She loved films. My father had loved film too, and it was important to my mother that we go see movies and important to my father that we go see them the first night. He was very into the glitz and allure of it and I think she was more aesthetically interested in the films themselves. When I was a kid I was initially very drawn to the theater. I first worked on a school play in fifth or sixth grade. By the time I was in eighth or ninth grade I was directing these little productions and acting in them and lighting them and doing all the things that somebody does when you're that age. We lived in a little split-level house that had three bedrooms. I have two younger sisters, and when they no longer wanted to share a room, I moved out of my bedroom and into the den of our house. In the den there was a television set, and although it was scandalous to have a television set in your room, particularly at age twelve or thirteen, I was now in the den, where it was somehow okay. That meant that I could stick a towel under the door so the light wouldn't show and turn the sound down and keep watching. When they thought I was asleep I could watch late-night movies.

It was about 1965 and at that time in the Midwest the late show was a wonderful venue for watching older movies. I remember seeing some of the real American standards such as The Maltese Falcon or Red River when I was supposed to be sleeping. It was a guilty pleasure, and one that I was passionate about, but not one that I ever really thought I could partake of.

WHAT WERE YOUR PARENTS' PROFESSIONS?

My father had several professions over time. He initially went to work for my grandfather in the dress business. Then he was a mortgage banker, which is someone who puts together financing for larger business projects. Then in the midst of one of those projects he chose to open some clothing stores. He had three different incarnations over the course of his life. Each business had a spectacular rise and an even more spectacular fall, and by the time I went to college he was in the midst of the most spectacular fall of all. I think he owed the government a lot of money. My mother took care of us while we were young, and then she and my father divorced when she was forty. She began to work, starting out at Harcourt Brace, a publishing company, and then went on to become director of entertainment at a geriatric hotel as a kind of a recreation director for eight hundred senior citizens.

I had been watching films since I was young, but didn't really ever think that I would be making them, so when I went to college at Harvard University, I didn't study film but instead was an English major, although theater remained central to my life. As well as doing all the things that one does at a liberal arts school, I also spent an inordinate amount of time in the theater.

SO YOU WERE DEFINITELY LEANING TOWARD AN ARTISTIC PATH.

You're getting to a very watershed moment, which is that after working so much at the theater, I began writing. I wrote for Rolling Stone while I was in college and later for a magazine called The New Republic. I also applied and was accepted to Harvard Law School. Certainly law school was a more conventional choice, and one that my parents thought more legitimate. I'll say though that my mother, because she harbored this very secret love of the arts, was encouraging about the idea of me being in theater, and my father, who was at the time in the midst of his business collapse, had lost some moral authority in the argument.

At the same time that I got accepted to Harvard Law, I received a Rockefeller fellowship to go to Europe and work with some local theater companies. It offered a year of grace, a year not to have to decide, and so I took it. It was cash really and tax-free cash and so I took it and went to France.

While I was there, I was very lucky in that when I had worked with The New Republic I had corresponded with Woody Allen because he'd written a number of short humor pieces for The New Yorker. But there were a number of pieces that William Shawn had not published, and Marty Parrots, a professor and a friend of mine from college, had solicited Woody to give those pieces to The New Republic. So I had had a brief correspondence with him throughout that process. I had heard that he was making a movie in France, and so when I actually saw him one day walking on Saint-Germain des Près, I did something that I would never do now. I was twenty-one and brash, and so I walked up to him and introduced myself right there on the street. He was remarkably kind and open. He professed to recall the correspondence, although I'm not quite sure he did. I told him I was in France on a fellowship and asked if I could hang out at the set and see what that was all about. I didn't even know if I was interested in doing that, really, because as I always felt like the technical aspects of film were daunting. I was well aware of film's relationship to what I did in the theater in terms of storytelling and directing the actor and things like that, but I felt that I needed to know the technical side. Then at this encounter Woody invited me to hang out on the set, and work as a kind of a half-assed assistant. I spoke some French, so I could help out, and they didn't have to pay me much.

I could tell very quickly that Woody was not technically inclined, but rather was an artist, a writer with a vision, and that he had surrounded himself with a number of people whose job it was to interpret that vision. Whether it was a cinematographer, or Kurt Gallow as an assistant director, or Paul Veder, Woody had all these wonderfully talented people surrounding him. Although this was before he made what I consider to be the extraordinary breakthrough of his career, stylistically, which was Annie Hall, he had only made a couple of movies at that time, and was now filming Love and Death. I worked on that movie for six weeks in France and then we went to Hungary for two or three weeks and then back to France. Ultimately I got bored because I wasn't doing anything truly interesting, but rather holding a walkie-talkie in the rain or doing office work. But the experience of the filming was revelatory.

HE WAS KIND TO YOU.

He was generous. I don't know how else to put it. He was very important, and yet he honored my idiotic questions and really was a big help to me at that time.

For the rest of that year that I lived in France I would go to the movies often. Paris is about the best place in the world to see movies. There are twenty (or at least there were at that time) revival houses going at any one moment including the cinematèque where they're showing every movie by Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, any Italian director, and at the same time they are doing a retrospective of John Ford and Preston Sturges, along with Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut. It's a remarkable place to get a cinematic education. I spent a lot of time going to movies, mostly because I was lonely, bored, or scared or uncertain as to what my future might be. The movies have always been a lovely refuge for those who want to escape for a couple of hours in the dark, and I wanted to do it for at least twelve hours every day if not more. The difference though was that I began looking at movies as a possible mode of expression whereas before I'd only looked at them as entertainment, or a kind of diversion. During that year in Paris, I also began to write much more seriously. I had written some bad plays in college, but alienation and disenfranchisement are a really good prompt to becoming a more internal writer and I began to do that.

I had always thought that when I started to run out of money I would go to New York, as I had had some offers to work in the theater there. But ultimately, and I can't remember how I heard about it, I decided that I wanted to go to the American Film Institute. I was about twenty-two at this point, I had finished Harvard and my year of rest, and so I wrote for the application and sent it in to the AFI. I didn't have a film to show them so instead I sent them some reviews of a few plays that I had directed, some music and songs that I had written, some articles I had written for magazines, and an essay, a...