A Letter to Elia

Would you like some tea? Would you like some rum?

Madam prefers when you smile.

What kind of a person

must a film director train himself to be?

A white hunter,

leading a safari into dangerous and unknown territory.

It's not deserted. They're there.

They know you're here.

A psychoanalyst who keeps a patient functioning

despite intolerable tensions and stresses.

I was born here...

A hypnotist...

...brought me to America 25 years ago when we married.

...who works with the unconscious

to achieve his ends.

He has to have the cunning of a traitor in a Baghdad bazaar.

He must have the kindness of an old-fashioned mother who forgives all,

the sternness of her husband, who forgives nothing.

Why did you push that ice down?

The elusiveness of a jewel thief.

The blarney of a PR man.

...respect, which people are...

Respect?

Did you ever hear of anyone buying any product,

beer, hair rinse, tissue, because they respect it?

You've got to be loved, man.

Loved!

Very thick skin, very sensitive soul,

simultaneously.

What kind of a person must a film director be?

I wonder.

Maybe it was Elia Kazan who started me asking this question myself.

Actually, it was his pictures,

the ones I saw for the first time back in the 1950s,

the ones I grew up with, and that grew up with me.

I remember going to the Loew's Commodore.

It's now gone, like most of the old theaters are.

The Commodore was where I saw On the Waterfront

when it opened in 1954.

It was the faces, the bodies, and the way they moved.

The voices and the way they sounded.

They were like the people I saw every day...

...and poorer now than when I started.

...at the butcher's,

or sitting out in the street at night to cool off,

and church.

I saw the same mixture of toughness and tenderness.

It was as if the world that I came from,

the world that I knew, mattered.

As if the people I knew mattered,

whatever their flaws were.

Hiya, kid.

I was just gonna feed them.

The director's name was interesting to me,

and I remember I wasn't quite sure how to pronounce it.

The very simple essence of it is

it's not fake, it's not pretense.

If you can stir up the real emotion,

whether of anger, or love, or desire,

or any one of the other powerful emotions that make our drama,

if you can stir it up and use it,

you'll have something that's unique, or unusual.

And that's what drama is.

Stir up emotions in the actors and in the audience.

There was another movie made not long after that by the same director.

In fact, about a year later.

Should have gone right on in there and talked to her.

This time it was in color.

It was a story of a father and two sons, two brothers.

It was called East of Eden,

and it certainly stirred up real emotions in me,

emotions that I wasn't really aware

that I had or even what they were.

And I saw it many times.

In fact, I followed the picture, I stalked it,

all over the city, from one theater to another.

He's not watching us.

I feel as if he can still see us.

And I always saw it alone.

I love you, Aron.

Really, I do. Really.

And in a way, what I'm telling you now

isn't really about film history,

I suppose it's about giving and receiving.

When I began to make my own pictures,

I would always ask myself when I was doing a scene,

"Does this have the honesty,

"the eye for detail,

"the loving power of what I experienced in Elia Kazan's pictures?"

I guess every person who starts to make movies

has the same experience.

The current will carry us across.

Slowly.

There's a moment when you see work that sparks something in you,

that stays with you

and becomes the standard you set for yourself, almost unconsciously.

What's that song?

Oh, it's just some old hymn.

And that's what Kazan's work meant to me.

And to a certain extent it still does.

And he tells me I am his own

And the joy we share as we tarry there

None other has ever known

But work like that doesn't come out of thin air.

You have to have lived it.

"Why are you mad?"

My wife asks me that, seems like every morning.

"I'm not mad," I say.

"It's just my face."

I no longer hide it.

It's out in the open.

My perennial scowl.

Which is why my smile, when it does appear, is so dazzling.

The sheer surprise of it.

That's supposed to be a joke.

I look at these pictures

and I can see that Elia Kazan's smile really was dazzling.

And he knew it.

Did he use it as a weapon? A defense?

And if a defense, defense against what?

Against disappointment and failure?

Against fame and success and all the distractions?

Against small talk, which he hated?

Against shame and public scourging?

Against rejection.

Against all kinds of adversity.

They are bringing him, my friend. They are bringing your boy.

See? A fine young man.

Now, smile.

Smile.

I am very grateful to you.

He had a name for this defense.

The Anatolian Smile.

He learned it from the men in his family,

who endured humiliation on a daily basis in the old country.

I like all the Greek subject people.

We all know that.

Anatolian Greeks were Greeks who were afraid all the time

that they might step out of line, and that was my family.

He doesn't know his place.

Well, it's not our affair.

They're Armenians, we're Greeks.

Their necks are not our necks.

In fact, The Anatolian Smile was the original title

for the film he would eventually make

about his uncle, called America, America.

That film was Kazan's favorite.

And the picture is very special to me because it's "the" story.

The passage from the old world to the new world.

The story of his family, and really, actually, of my family, too.

That film tells more about me than I care to say.

Well, what does it tell about you?

"Go fuck yourself."

Well, I'd say that I essentially have the soul of an immigrant.

I'm essentially an outsider.

"The soul of an immigrant."

It's a certain way of looking at the world,

staying outside, being always on your guard,

and it was handed down from the old world to the next generation.

Father communicated to me by example.

Mind your own business.

Don't start up arguments.

Walk away from a fight.

Because out in the world, Father couldn't afford anger.

And, of course, it had to come out somewhere.

And it did, at home.

Cal, listen to me.

A man has a choice. That's where he's different from an animal.

You don't listen. You'll never remember.

Fear, resentment, trusting nobody,

out in the world and back at home.

As if that's the way it's supposed to be.

Kazan understood the way that can feel when you're growing up.

There is nothing in this world

that I wouldn't do for you, boy.

There's nothing I wouldn't do if you do right.

If you do right, Bud.

He knew the weight you can carry through your life.

The way it could feel like a birthright.

Sometimes, though, if things go a certain way for you,

you could find a new home.

Make a new home for yourself.

And eventually, Kazan found his new home in movies,

making movies.

The thing I wanted to be was a film director.

I used to study, I used to go to films all the time.

I saw all the great Russian films.

Dovzhenko, particularly, had a big influence on me.

And I watched them all and I said,

"God, that's it. That's life, doing that."

For a young man with the soul of an immigrant in 1932,

Hollywood would have seemed almost impossible.

So Kazan took a roundabout way into movies.

How do you get a start as a film director in 1932?

There's no such way to do it.

Now you can get into TV

and one thing and another, but then, nothing.

So I got a chance to go with the Group Theater and become an actor.

The Group Theater.

These were the people who changed American theater