Question two: How do you go about choosing composers for your films and how do you decide that you're just going to use source music?
I was a sort of rock journalist - whatever that is - in London in the late '60s. It was a very exciting time to be a rock journalist, and because I was writing these columns in the music magazines, I got the opportunity to be a musical co-ordinator for Irving Allen, who was an American producer based in London. He was just finishing a film called Eye Witness, with Mark Lester in it, and the producer decided that he wanted a contemporary, kind of rocky, soundtrack. So he hired this stoned-out rock journalist - me - to find some musicians or bands or what have you. So I went to two of my favourite bands: Kaleidoscope, which did a very lyrical, beautiful, lush, emotion-filled music, and Vandergraff Generator. My idea was for Kaleidoscope to do the more romantic sequences in the movie, and Vandergraff Generator were real freak-outs so they could do the suspenseful, terrifying schemes. Ironically, the fact is that Kaleidoscope wound up doing stuff far freakier for the suspense scenes. So I don't know.
     In terms of casting a composer, well, I wanted to work with David Byrne because we had such a good time doing Stop Making Sense together. I wanted to warm him up for Bertolucci so that he could get his Oscar nomination, so he did Married to the Mob.
     With Beloved, I had been in touch with Rachel Portman because I admired her work so much, and it struck me as great that I'd have a woman to score Beloved. The irony there is that this movie is very much about motherhood, in addition to the other things, and Rachel ended up doing the score while pregnant and having the child and that whole process. It's wall to wall music, and so amazing what she did.

THE GUARDIAN: It's interesting though because a lot of noted directors, especially those who care so passionately about music as you do, can often work with the same composer over and over and over again, but you seem to have distinctly decided not to do that. Instead you've selected a composer per film and put source music and baroque music in it. That's quite uncommon for a director in some ways, because we know big directors - depending on scheduling - often work with the same people.
Well I love to work again with someone who I've had a great experience with. In fact, Tak Fujimoto who shot Beloved is one such person. I think this is our thirteenth movie together or something like that. And I do love that, but I also feel that the only thing more gratifying than working with someone who you've worked well with is working with someone new and coming up with something great. Music's tricky too. I think cameramen are always looking for something different to do, but composers seem to have some kind of musical demon to get out of their system and are looking for ways to do this. That probably doesn't make any sense at all. In fact I don't buy it. Next question...

Question three: When you're filming do you know you're onto a good thing?
You finish the day's work and then you go onto dailies and see what you shot yesterday. Usually you go into dailies really tired from the day's work. You got up far too early, you've been working hard and you've had a lot of strain and stress. And if the dailies perk you up again and get you all excited and looking forward to the next day's work then you know you're onto something good. So I think that that's the best gage.
     Also, while it's happening, the first three or four movies I made I was always so astonished that I had made it through the process and my name was on the movie. I never had any training as a director and had never aspired to be a director and kind of fell into it in strange kinds of ways, so I didn't really understand what directors were supposed to do. Over time I've come to understand that the trick of making really great movies is to try to find a script that has potential to be a splendid movie in one way or another and then working with fantastic people in all areas. The more you get into that trip, the more the director can relax and enjoy what is going on.
     When we made Beloved, more than any other time previously, we got to a certain point in the day, and the cameras rolling, and you realise that there's theatre going on. I feel that I don't even have to wait for dailies now. If you find yourself transported by what's happening then it's got to be good. Well, you've got to believe that it's got to be good anyway.

Question four: Would you call yourself an independent film-maker or would you sign the three-picture deal with Paramount if the money were right?
You mean if the money was really right? Well it's complicated. I think yes, yes, yes. I mean, Storefront Hitchcock was a Clinica Estetico production - that's a company I'm involved with and our office is paid for, is always being paid for, by one of the big movie studios. In return for that we have to go to them first with any idea that we find interesting - whether it's a script we come across or a story in a magazine, whatever. So long as it isn't tied up elsewhere, we're obliged to take it to Universal - currently that's whom we're working with. So I do have a deal like that, but there's no pressure to make a movie because of that. The pressure is to find something that can be a successful movie to justify the investment they make in keeping the office running all the time.
     I think we're very independent though. We're developing a certain amount of exciting ideas for Universal - one with Paul Thomas Anderson (director of Boogie Nights) and various other people - and we're shooting a $3 million, extremely independent movie in New York called The Opportunist, which Christopher Walken is starring in. And hey, we did Storefront Hitchcock and we make documentaries on videotape, so we do all kinds of stuff. I think we are as independent as they get, but we're also deeply enmeshed in the bowels of the industry, as well, because they pay our bills.

Question five: I love the book Beloved, but is the movie compromised at all because it has been made by such a big company like Buena Vista?
Not in the slightest. We were allowed to make exactly the movie - to the best of our ability - we wanted to make. There are two reasons for that. One of them is that this was a cherished project for Oprah Winfrey. Even Toni Morrison told her, you'll never make a movie out of this book, and I don't know why you want to buy it. Oprah was just utterly committed both to making the movie and playing the part. She has a tremendously successful television show, of course, in America, and that's all very involved with ABC and Disney. So, on one level, Oprah and what she does is such a corporate asset - in the best sense - for Disney and ABC that I can imagine few people there wondering whether to back Oprah's vision here or not! That's one thing.
     The other thing is that the guy who was most responsible for running Disney films is a guy called Joe Roth, and he was desperate to make this movie. The only pressure we got from him was to make sure we gave it our collective best shot. So there was no tampering. This is it.

Question six: Do you have final cut?
Yes. It's a beautiful thing to have. Let me elaborate slightly on that. Being the kind of collaborative film-maker that I am I really do believe that it's not just one person making a movie it's a whole bunch of people. My realization is that other people can have ideas as good as mine and sometimes even better. So it's easy to be a sponge-like open receiver of good ideas when you have final cut, because you can take and choose what you want. After having the experience that I had with Swing Shift this is very important. The next film I made after that was at Orion Pictures - who aren't around anymore - and they were noted for giving an implicit final cut to film-makers. Orion's thing was, we're financiers, you're the film-maker, we trust you, and we don't give notes. Starting with Something Wild I had a de facto final cut anyway. And with the success of The Silence of the Lambs, that we did for Orion, my agents were able to build this final cut into the contracts.

Question seven: Why do you make films?
Hey, it's what I do... Well, gosh I don't know. I feel that I need a deep answer to that. I suppose it's because I love movies. I love humanity and I'm fascinated with the way humanity gets at each other, in good ways and bad, and as a film-maker it gives me the opportunity to trip out on that. I love visual things. It's a very exciting job to have.
     I don't have an agenda, particularly, although from movie to movie there's a momentary agenda. I really wanted to make a movie that addressed the issue of AIDS. A friend of mine, who I love very much, got AIDS and it really got me in a very intense way how tough life was for people with AIDS. Again Ed Saxon and Ron ... who wrote it had similar motivations to say something like that, and to say something about the unspeakable discrimination that was being visited on people with Aids who were up against a very heroic, tough struggle to begin with. With Beloved, I was given the opportunity to have very intense personal feelings about race relations and the state of racial affairs in my country and indeed the world. I had very strong feelings, so the chance to make a film that deals in an imaginative way with stuff you care tremendously about is a real high. It's a really amazing thing to be able to do.

THE GUARDIAN: And rock and roll is the lighter side in that sense...
One of the most significant scenes in any movie for me is in Sullivan's Travels when the director wants to make really meaningful movies. He winds up through a series of events taking a walk on the wild side and ends up imprisoned in this hideous work camp in the South and he's there and they show a movie that night. And he sees all these tragic, broken people laughing at the comedy on the screen, and he looks around and he realizes that that's what he should have been doing all the time. There's no greater gift in this kind of field than to make people laugh their socks off.

Question eight: How much artistic control do you give your editors and how do you choose your editors?
Well until Storefront Hitchcock and Beloved, I'd only worked with one editor since the Melvin and Howard days, which was about twenty years ago. This was an incredibly gifted editor named Craig McKay who is now directing - he's decided now, damn him, to direct!
     I give the editor full creative control on the first cut and by the end of the editing process I know exactly why every single cut is exactly on what frame it's on. The "why cut there?" is such a huge question in the making of a movie. Why not sooner or why not later. At first I tried to give the editors a lot of notes about how I wanted them to put the scene together. But once you start working with gifted editors you can always get to see it the way you want to see it - because you're the director - but you only arguably get to see a very gifted editor's first take on this material that's coming in. So I long ago stopped doing that. Now I'm dying to see what the editor is doing to it. We discuss it now, and stand side by side and get a feel for it. I feel it's a director's job to question every take, unless it's really working great.

Question nine: Will we ever get to see the director's cut of Swing Shift?
You must have read that article in Sight and Sound. That was great! When Swing Shift came out the critics universally trashed it, even some of those critics that I particularly admired and even some that I had previously considered almost friends. This motif was running through the reviews: this guy looked as though he had some kind of promise, but looking at this thing, forget about it. And I thought, my God, if my work is bad, then trash me, but this isn't even my work. There was nothing I could say about it. You can't go whining to the press. But then somehow a videotape of the original - the scripted movie - found its way over to Sight and Sound and an article was written saying it was very good the original way. And it went to great pains to enumerate why it was much better than what Warner Brothers had done. But it will never be seen anywhere, because now the videotape's all faded out and the Warner Brothers post-production people trashed all the out takes and our version as soon as I lost control, so you'll just have to take my word for it that it was really something!

Question ten: What advice would you give film students if they really want to become a director?
To get their hands on a video camera and photograph things that interest them - either make up stories or find a subject. Become a film-maker. The more radical people would say, if you can't buy one, steal one... whatever, but just start filming, because then you're a film-maker. And if you've got something going on then you can get these things seen by agencies and production companies and it happens every day, somebody with that particular kind of drive ends up getting a chance to do it that way.

Question eleven: Did you look at Robyn's concert video from the 1980s before you made Storefront Hitchcock?
No, I didn't want to pollute my thing. For me it isn't good to do that kind of research. In fact, when I did The Silence of the Lambs I started watching the previous Thomas Harris movie which had Hannibal Lecter in it and, not that it was good or bad, ten minutes into it I suddenly felt that I shouldn't be seeing it. It was the same with Storefront Hitchcock. We diligently tracked down all of Robyn's videos and I started looking at them and again I thought I don't want to see these. I wanted the memory of what he was like in performance and do it as seems best at the time.

Question twelve: Are you interested in the new multi-media technology?
No. I know I should be, but no!

Question thirteen: What's happening with The Silence of the Lambs sequel?
Thomas Harris, author of The Silence of the Lambs, has been working on his new book for the last seven or eight years.

THE GUARDIAN: It's been announced that it's coming out several times hasn't it?
Every couple of years, though it's not necessarily true. Thomas and I have become quite good friends and he's - amazingly - a very delightful man and I don't think that he would mind me telling you this story. I went to visit him in person before shooting the last scene of the movie, because I thought it really important to be as faithful as possible to that book. I thought that the book was so powerful and I didn't want to fall into the trap of trying to improve it in the making of the movie. Now the book ends in a certain kind of way. If you've read it you'll know that it just sort of wafts away. It hits a certain kind of climax with the confrontation between Jame Gumb and Clarice Starling and then there's a series of letters that are exchanged. It ends in a very fascinating way for a book but which wouldn't work, we didn't think, on film.
     I had this idea of taking what the book did, which was that in the letters there was a very serious kind of threat to Doctor Chilton, the former keeper of Doctor Lecter, from Doctor Lecter, so we tried to play on that. Ted Tally, the author of the screenplay, and I came up with this idea. But I felt that I didn't want to make this major departure and shoot the ending without Tom Harris's blessing. I'd spoken with him on the phone a couple of times. During our first conversation, I'd told him that when we were having the first cut of the movie he was invited to come and look at it because I'd value the author's criticism - because he'd be likely to be the toughest critic. And he said, "Don't take this the wrong way, I'm glad you're making the movie, but I'll probably never see it." And I asked him why and he said an interesting thing. He said that he read in an interview with John le Carre that after le Carre saw Alec Guinness play Smiley that he could never write Smiley again. This was a character that he thought he would write for the rest of his life, but Alec Guinness had stolen Smiley from him. And he told me this in a very salutary way, because Harris likes to revisit his characters and he didn't want something like that to happen, especially in the hands of someone like Anthony Hopkins. So he gave us his blessing and decided he probably wasn't going to see the movie.
     He was very soft spoken on the telephone, a real Southern gentleman, and finally I phoned him up and said I need to come and see you, because I need to get permission to change the ending. So my wife and I went to visit him at his house in Miami Beach. We went outside and had a little food and were chatting, and he was very soft spoken and intense and interesting. And I finally said, "By the way Tom, I need to talk to you about a possible change to the ending to the film." And he says, "I tell you what John, why don't we go to the rose garden and talk about this." And he picks up these great big shears and says, "Well, John, you know, if you're going to make a departure from the book..."
     And he told me an interesting thing. I told him that I pictured Hannibal Lecter going to a tropical country, not unlike Haiti and he said the greatest thing. He said, "Well Jonathan, I'll tell you, I imagine Doctor Lecter going to somewhere in Europe. My image is of him strolling round the back streets of Florence or Munich, gazing in the windows of watchmakers. But I'll tell you, if he did go to the tropics he wouldn't sweat!" So if you ever see the movie, you'll notice that everybody's perspiring profusely in the last scene, except Doctor Lecter. Anyway, those of us who made the first movie hope that we'll get the chance to make a movie of his work in progress, which may be finished in a year or so and which we believe includes Doctor Lecter. But my hunch is that it won't be a straight sequel. I don't think that he's the kind of writer to do it that way.

What a tantalizing prospect. I think we've got time for one last question.

Question fourteen: When you cast Tom Hanks in Philadelphia did you think that it was a gamble?
I guess you mean a creative gamble because he'd essentially done lighter parts thus far. We got the script to a place where we felt we could go forward. Sony Pictures were our parent company at the time and financed the development of it. They were adamant that a movie that was going to be about AIDS and homophobia in some way or other - subjects that they didn't think moviegoers were hungering to visualize - really needed some kind of terrific acting and star power. The part that Denzel Washington played was written very much in the hope of attracting someone like Robin Williams or Bill Murray, someone with a comedic profile. We understood what we were up against in getting an audience for a movie about AIDS so we thought that if we could get someone who could send a funny signal - and this character would certainly be amusing - that would be a step in the right direction.
     We started seeing actors and a number of things happened. A lot of actors didn't really want to consider playing a gay man with AIDS at that stage. So two things happened. One was that our producing partner, Gary, was on a plane with Denzel. He read the script and called up and said he wanted to play the part of Joe Miller, which really thrilled me. Denzel is obviously one of the great American actors and the idea of casting a black man in that part was fantastic. I got on the phone with Denzel and said that I was very excited by his interest but that we'd really envisaged a comedian playing the part, and he said, "Jonathan, I'm hilarious!" And I said, "This character was written picturing a white man, do you think we have to do any work on this script if we choose to cast you in this movie about prejudice and what have you?" And he said, "Do you?" And I heard myself say, "No", and he said, "Good, I don't either."
     But Denzel at that point couldn't get a movie off the ground on his own - well not on that subject anyway. Then we got a phone call that Tom Hanks was going to be in New York, where we were based, and he would love to come by, just for a general meeting. So we thought, great. And we were actually in the editing room, editing our latest Haiti documentary, about the quest for democracy in Haiti, and Tom came in. And we chatted a little bit, and then I walked him to the elevator and he told me he'd read the script for Philadelphia. I wasn't looking for someone like Tom at that time, but he said he'd read it and he'd love to throw his hat in the ring for the part of Andrew. By the way, he said, in case I thought that he'd be appropriate, his agents had been told that the price was not the object. So he was essentially saying that he wanted to play the part and he knew that we had to keep the price down because of the subject matter. By the time I got back to the cutting room from the elevator, I was thinking, my God, we can actually get this movie made.
     I trusted that Hanks would be really good, but I have to say he was even better. I thought he was magnificent in the movie, and I never imagined him being as good as he was.

THE GUARDIAN: I think at that point, with that very interesting answer, we're going to have to wrap. But I still haven't asked you what the significance of the traffic cones is in Storefront Hitchcock.
That'll be revealed in the sequel to Storefront Hitchcock.

Excellent.
I'd like to thank everyone for coming out on a school night. Thank you so much.