Interview: Jonny Campbell, Director of J.K. Rowling’s “The Casual Vacancy”

Posted on May 7, 2015 at 12:53 pm

J.K. Rowling’s first book for adults was the dark, sometimes savage story of small town politics, The Casual Vacancy. The title refers to an elected office that is vacated before the term is up, which in this story occurs in Pagford, a small, cozy-looking English village. But its inhabitants are miserable. The town is filled with deceit, selfishness, betrayal, cruelty, and a government that alternates between negligence and incompetence for the poor and highly effective protection for the privileged.

I spoke to director Jonny Campbell about the two-part miniseries adaptation now appearing on HBO, which Slate’s Kay Waldman calls “infinitely better than the book.” At times melodramatic, at time satiric, at times comic, at times tragic, the story follows characters who are often desperate and always trying to protect themselves from hurt and loss.

J. K. Rowling called this story a comic tragedy or a tragic comedy. So how do you as a director signal to the audience what it is that they are seeing, especially since everyone is familiar with her very different Harry Potter books?

The screenplay and the story tell me what I’m supposed to convey to the audience and quite honestly I take great pleasure in the fact that sometimes the tone can be inconsistent, different. Tragic comedy — you don’t get much more extreme than that. People write articles and pieces and analyses of the show, criticisms, features, whatever, and you start to get a picture of how people receive it. I read one earlier today which said it was totally inconsistent and I was left not quite knowing what to feel at the end… Isn’t that brilliant?

For me the tone is the way I like to tell the story. but based on the script. I don’t try and spoon feed it to people. You need to leave people to make up their own mind about the character, rather than dictating and telling people. Now I’m not trying to claim that this is perfect or this is an in-depth insight into the myriad of characters. It just wouldn’t be possible to do that in three hours. What we did try and do is let each character be there on a need to get to know basis. So you kind of stir in the characters as and when you want to turn a new chapter or when the story develops and you feel the audience can withstand yet another new face and we are talking about not less than 30 characters here, you add them in. If people think it’s inconsistent I see that as a strength. Life is full of variation and equally at the end you hope people are moved. If some people are left floundering going, “I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to feel,” that’s fine too.

You’ve got a community of people in Pagford that are living cheek by jowl. The danger is it can become a bit soapy. It’s very much my intention to try and not let it do that because while these people’s lives at the end of the book will still keep going, like the end of the movie you know you want to make people aware that they have stopped, the end of the story is here. And the other thing to say is one of J. K. Rowlings’ intentions in writing this was she wanted to write a contemporary novel which had the sensibilities of the 19th century novels. I didn’t realize this at first when I read the screenplay. And I hadn’t read the book at that point, so the penny dropped for me it when it sort of dawned on me that this was very much in the sort of vein of Charles Dickens in terms of shining a light on every aspect of every strata within society within the confines of the story. I’m a huge Dickens fan. In his books you you have a vulnerable teenage character whether it’s David Copperfield or Oliver Twist or Pip you have this central character who is being sort of bashed around like in a pinball machine through the sort of the straits of life by various eccentric characters who even in the Dickens context has to be sort of slightly heightened and caricature in their nature. But here people often see that as a weakness, saying “that character is stereotypical and caricature.” And yet if they were wearing wigs and bonnets then we never would level that criticism at all Because it is a contemporary setting it just shows what people’s expectations are and why I felt this was really original piece. If you watch it with an open mind you totally get it. If you don’t to be prejudiced by your sort of preconceptions about… I am being introduce to this character, I want to know everything about their story, everything about their journey it is like “hang on a second”, they are playing a part in this machine of telling the story about society, about the family in particular but to be patient and just watch it unfold. Don’t be impatient and let yourself go a bit.

As a director, you had a real challenge in managing so many characters and stories.

When you read the novel, it is one of the difficulties is trying to put a face to a name almost. In a way that makes it easier with an adaptation because at least you have an actor being that character. When you are reading it in a novel you kind of just have to close your eyes and keep reminding yourself as part of the joy of reading a book who is who, but here equally it was about not trying to introduce everybody at the same level one after the other but as and when they become necessary for the storytelling. You might not know their name at first. That might come a bit later.

So we wanted a sort of contrast in, both in terms of Sarah Phelps writing the screenplay and bring the characters in like a mixture of a recipe. You say, “Well, hang on, we are able to take another character at this point and if so is this the best time to name check them, is this the best time to have a visual cue?” When we first see Colin Wall you just see the back of his head. You’re forcing the audience a little bit to sort of go, “I guess that must be her husband and that’s her son” instead of telling them everything. I find that more interesting. One of the thrills of doing it is setting out all the chess pieces before you could really go to town on cranking up the story, hopefully ratcheting up the stakes.

I noticed several different times where you used images of reflections. What did that convey?

You get an extra mark for spotting that. Whether it’s a reflection in the mirror, or in the water, or in the river that goes around Pagford like a noose sort of tying itself, constricting the village, there’s a visual metaphor. In terms of the reflections that was deliberate in terms of distorting things, showing that things aren’t always what they seem and that it’s a way of holding the mirror up to ourselves. That’s what J. K. Rowling does in the novel very astutely. She has this uncanny ability within one sentence to sum up absolutely the motivation of a character to make a particular decision and that whole process. And I think what they ended up doing thought and action and that’s one of the fascinating joys of reading the book.

When you try to adopt that into a screenplay, it would be foolhardy to try and just verbatim transpose that into a screenplay, it just can’t do it. You would not be successful anyway so we had to make some decisions not everyone was going to agree with what but we did want to try and do was visually to be constantly challenging the viewer to think about those characters their own locations, their environment become a part of the storytelling part of them, sort of an echo of their own characters and there’s a lot of detail in the set design to visualize thoughts. We had to sort of use anything we could to sort of try and get that across. But the mirror itself was about in a very simplistic level about those in society, with a mottled old antique mirror indicating a timeless story and hopefully implicated by the typeface of the Casual Vacancy itself. This is a classic story in a temporary setting.

I was very struck in particular by the performance of Julia McKenzie, as this kindly-looking lady who is shockingly vicious.

She’s a grand dame of the British acting establishment, a huge musical and operatic star and she’s been in lots of comedies over the years and more recently she was Ms. Marple. So she’s a perfect choice to play Shirley because she starts off as this of doddery, smiling, respected sort of harmless cardigan-wearing granny and then as the story progresses you see the Machiavellicome out and you realize that she’s pulling the strings and her husband is pretty much her puppet. And she’s Lady Macbeth by the end. I think she turns in an astonishing performance.

She says to her daughter-in-law, “You are not a victim. You are a failure.” It is devastating.

Yes, it all goes pear-shaped for her from that moment. It is like by speaking what she feels to be the truth, by seeing the inner workings of her mind, we know she is despicable in that moment. So it makes the scene where she’s forgiven all the more touching or at least more meaningful because because part of the story is having not a happy ending but just a sense of “hang on, some kind of change has to come through this village.” That moment of forgiveness is almost like a blessing. It is for me one of the really key moments.

Interview: Alex Garland of “Ex Machina”

Posted on May 1, 2015 at 3:39 pm

Alex Garland is the screenwriter of thought-provoking sci-fi films like “28 Days Later” and “Never Let Me Go.” He wrote and for the first time directed “Ex Machina,” a fascinating story about Caleb, a computer programmer (Domhnall Gleeson), invited to the remote home of Nathan, a reclusive genius (Oscar Isaac), to evaluate a new artificial intelligence persona in the body of a lovely female robot called Ava, with the exquisite face and voice of actress Alicia Vikander. Nathan tells Caleb to perform a “Turing test” but as he and we learn, he is really the one being tested. There’s a reason the Turing test is blind. Ava’s programming and appearance are designed to play into Caleb’s susceptibilities.

I loved talking to Garland about the film.

You must know Domhnall Gleeson pretty well by now. But this was your first time working with Oscar Isaac, right?

It is the third movie we have worked on together. So we’ve known each other backwards. Not only that, the first movie he ever worked on, “28 Days Later,” was with his dad. So out of five movies four of them have been with Gleeson so I know that clan and I know Domhnall really very well. We’re friends. So casting him is different. I just call him up and say, “Look man, there is this thing, I really think it would be good, would you take a look?” The thing about Oscar was I have seen him in stuff like Ridley Scott’s “Body of Lies,” set in the Middle East, and he is acting opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, which can freak people out, and I was thinking, “He is just owning every scene, and what is he doing? How is he owning it?” I can’t see what he’s doing, he is relaxed and he is so natural, an incredibly naturalistic performance but also very magnetic, a sort of gravity suck performance that just pulls you towards it. And so there’s something fascinating about him. Every time I saw him it might be in a bad movie but he’d good.

When you hire an actor it’s like a three years lag in a funny way. Everybody starts talking about these guys before they really hit and everybody knew Oscar was good. That was the word going around, this guy was really good. I knew he was good and then I met him and he was really smart. Again not all good actors are smart. They can project smart, they can act smart but they may not actually be smart. He is really smart and by the end of that meeting I knew he was right for Nathan. And so I got this growing sense of anxiety through the meeting. You start to think, “What if I don’t get him?” I know that there are three other movies trying to get him.

And then you get this crazy thing where you get to know this young man, he’s intelligent, he’s quite slim and he is articulate, he’s quite delicate, he is a guitar player and he says, “I’ll be there in 21/2 months.” and you think, “Yeah, we’ve got this slim young guy,” and he turns up, he’s like a bull, and I don’t know how he did it. And then you get used to this other person because Oscar, the guy you knew, vanished. You can’t find him anymore, he is gone. And instead, there is this powerful muscular, testosterone-driven alpha male and he dominates everything. Often working with him on set was like being in theater where you are watching a performance and I would lose track of all the things I should be watching because I’m completely locked into his performance. Just exactly like being at the theatre with terrific actor on stage. It is incredibly seductive and so you totally forget to say, “Cut.” And I really mean that, it’s not just a set of words that people say. But eventually you get used to it, then the film ends. And you meet Oscar three months later. He was over actually for the premiere of “Inside Llewyn Davis” where he was a completely different person and the bull is gone and the slender young guitar player guy is back again. Everything I just said vanishes. He vanishes part by part.

I didn’t recognize him at first in the trailer, with the shaved head and beard and the thick, muscular body.

It was a result of collaboration and conversation. I liked the idea that Nathan had a beard for various reasons partly because I’ve always being told in previous films when I would write a character with a beard that the studios hate beards, they used to hate beards because it kills international sales or some stupid reason like that. So I knew he had a beard and I knew that I wanted him to be physically powerful because he is a bully on an intellectual level and the implicit violence in him. Oscar arrived with a whole bunch of other things. One thing that Oscar felt that he needed was glasses. It was quite interesting, when he didn’t have classes he looked like a thug but when he wore glasses he was at least an intelligent thug. Somehow we’re taught that glasses make you look smart and it does kind of work. And eventually we settled on the shaved head and beard and he had the muscle mass and the glasses. And then the final thing he did which was really lovely and strange was his Bronx accent which he got from Kubrick because he loved the juxtaposition. Kubrick was is obviously an intelligent man who has this owlish look which Oscar often does if you watch his performance. He has this sort of owlish raised eyebrow look but this Bronx accent that is slightly incongruous.

Tell me about your location — that spectacular Juvet Hotel in Norway.

There’s something that is slightly kind of obscene in a way about this because to say it’s a low-budget film when it’s $15 million, which is obviously a massive amount of money, but in the world of film-making it’s turns out to be a small amount of money. So then what do you got, you’re telling a story about a guy owns the biggest tech company in the world, as rich as anything you can imagine with a property which needs to reflect his level of wealth. How does a low budget film create endless wealth? It is a sort of paradox. We found this beautiful spot in Norway. It wasn’t the just the architecture; it was also the landscape. Some of the mountain landscape was sort of chocolate boxy, a bit like Ansel Adams, too beautiful, too perfect. Norway had a kind of brutal bleak sort of aspect and these big powerful skies and these mountains that could kill you really and not care, with powerful sort of glaciers and rivers and stuff like that.

What do you see as the significance of the Turing test?

The Turing test is perceived as test of sentience but it is not, it is a language test. It’s a test to see if you can pass the Turing test.

Nathan does not abide by Asimov’s rules preventing robots from hurting a human.

He is doing a self-destructive thing. He’s working on successive machines each more successful and capable than the next. He knows that the intention is at some point one of these machines will outsmart him and when that happens it won’t be good for him. He knows that. He knows it won’t be good for him and he knows it probably won’t be good for us.

He’s very Darwinian about it.

He is very Darwinian and actually that was a very important aspect of this, that they are actually part of us, a continuation of us. We tend to see them as parallel. Either they get presented as a rival species or as a creation is like Frankenstein, semi-religious, where it is not your place to mess with God’s work. I was just trying to present it as a parental thing, the creation of a new consciousness, which is what parents do. And also those consciousnesses do rebel from us and do move on and actually what we ask of them is that they live longer than we do and have better lives. Always for me when she turns around and says to Nathan, “What is it like to have made something that hates you?” — it’s an adolescence.

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Interview: Matt Mamula of Celebrity Impersonator Documentary “Just About Famous”

Posted on April 26, 2015 at 3:59 pm

Matt Mamula co-directed “Just About Famous,” the very entertaining new documentary about celebrity impersonators. He generously took time to talk to me about the unexpected opportunities that open up when someone looks like someone who becomes famous, and it seemed natural for us to call them by their celebrity alter egos. It is available now on iTunes.

https://vimeo.com/123879198

Which celebrity do you think you resemble the most?

It’s funny. I actually get compared to Rick Grimes from “The Walking Dead.” I know it is a good thing. Rick is a good-looking guy. And people have stopped to take pictures with me or asked to take a picture and I kind of feel like, “Oh, I know this world.”

One of the things that I think is so intriguing about the film is that some of the people never intended to be performers. They just happen to resemble somebody who happened to become famous. And then if they take advantage of it, their careers are tied to what happens to the person they look like.

You know it’s funny. The Dame Edna impersonator actually did not use Dame Edna’s standup routines. He actually writes his own material, People ask him, “Why don’t you do your own stand up or your own comedic material and he is like, “I don’t think I could do it.” There is something about putting on a dress and kind of becoming that character — you feel like you can now become a comedian and do that job and write his own material. John Morgan, the George Bush character, was somewhat a musician beforehand but he incorporated George Bush singing into his performances. So yes that definitely pushes them to further that talent that they may or may not have beforehand.

Lady Gaga or Madonna have to be very difficult to do because their acts are so elaborate and demanding.

There is a shot of Lady Gaga’s garage and it is insane how many costumes she has in there. She’s got costume after costume. She actually makes her own costumes which I think is unique and interesting. And Madonna the same way, Madonna has been around since the 80s and really showing no signs of stopping and so is Lady Gaga. So they are constantly having to keep up with new costumes and even just kind of the wear-and-tear that they get on them after they do shows. They don’t have the entourage or the full staff that the real celebrity has so they have to kind of to take that on as well.

How did you first come into contact with this unusual group of people?

My co-director, Jason Kovacsev, read an article about this upcoming celebrity impersonator convention. At the time we were in between projects and we thought, “Well, let’s go check it out and see what’s there.” You know to be honest they were a little hesitant about letting us in because a lot of times people come in there and they kind of mock them and make fun of them. So they really just kind of waited to see What kind of questions we were asking. Once we got really involved with them they were totally willing to share their stories and their adventures.

We did a short film that came out around 2010 and that played at film Festivals and we kind of thought we were done with it. But every time we showed it, people said, “We want more, we want more, I want to see more.” So we basically decided to go back to the convention and look at other characters or further stories with other characters like the Elvis character and different things that happened in his life, like becoming scuba dive instructor in Las Vegas. It was just really was a blast being around them and following them. Some strange and surreal thing always happen so there was never a dull moment.

The Obama impersonator was inspired by his Obama role to get involved in politics for real.

He had done some gigs for a Democratic club as an Obama impersonator and then he got involved and they kind of said,”Hey, what would you think about this?” or maybe it is this dual idea. He’s a teacher during the day and he says something like yes “Yes, I would like to move in this direction.” There are things that happened on the road but he is still trying to push that angle. He knew the resemblance would hurt him and help him. There are two sides to that coin but it is definitely life imitating art.

What happens when the person they resemble becomes less visible in real life?

Obviously, George W. Bush has been out of office for a while. So he has been trying to reinvent his image, and as you see in the film do a lot of motivational speaking. People kind of see the comedy and the impersonation and it draws attention and then he can switch to the motivational speaking behind it. He’s always trying to look for angles to kind of use his impersonation to become something else or utilize it for something as well. Like the Tiger Woods when Tiger was going through a rough patch, the phones were not ringing as much. When Tiger is winning the phones are ringing more. So Madonna has got a new album, she probably gets more. So they definitely keep track of and follow their celebrities and I think when the celebrity goes through rough times in some ways they go through a rough time. With the Bush impersonator, I think that Bush was just such a polarizing figure good or bad during that time that people still kind of cling onto him. But yes it is definitely a concern for when their celebrity fades — how do I re-invent this and how do I still get hired?

You had a couple of people who met their doppelgangers in real life. Do celebrities get upset about being imitated?

From what we understand some of them are kind of cool with it so to speak, they don’t really kind of acknowledge it but they aren’t really are negative towards it. I know like the Brett Michaels impersonator had met with the real Brett Michaels. I know the Bush impersonator was with Bill Clinton one time and George W. Bush’s dad was there and he was yelling out, “Dad, hey Dad” trying to get his attention.I know a lot more are trying to meet them too; they all would love to. So yes, I think some of them think it’s weird and they don’t want to be part of it but other ones kind of give their approval in a way. At times they go to concerts because they want to kind of feel like they’re doing justice to them and they want to kind of earn their respect as well. Sarah Palin’s impersonator met her a couple of times and Sarah thinks it’s really funny and interesting and she’s had fun with it.

What is it that you’re hoping people will get from the film?

We are definitely hoping that they laugh, laugh out loud, chuckle and really have a good time. For us is like a popcorn film, it is not an in-depth documentary. It’s meant to be a fun, whimsical. We were hoping to basically create the same feeling that we had when we were around them. It is really just this surreal fun environment.

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Interview: Barak Goodman of “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies”

Posted on April 26, 2015 at 3:55 pm

Director Barak Goodman talked to me about his superb series for PBS, Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies, now available on DVD. The series is produced by Ken Burns, based on the book by book by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Everybody who worked on the show had some direct or very close experience with cancer. How does that affect the way the show is made?

It certainly made it very personal for all of us. In my case it was my grandmother. When she died when I was in my early 20’s. I didn’t even know what she had died of. My parents thought it was better not to actually tell me. Even then, which wasn’t that long ago, it shows how much stigma there was still around this word “cancer” and this whole set of diseases. And I think that’s persisted to some degree up to today. When we started this project we did so knowing that somebody in the own production team was going to be diagnosed or have someone very close to them diagnosed with cancer during the project. Sure enough there were three separate episodes during the two years we were working on this film. Edward Herman, our narrator, received a diagnosis and or died from the disease so it was very personal from the very beginning.

The series really comes at cancer in several different ways. There is a historical part, there are the individual stories, there is a science story. How do you keep that presented in an accessible way?

This is a bold experiment in filmmaking. We were not sure at all if these three strands that you just identified would work together. I’m not aware of it ever having being really tried on this scale before. Essentially we have been working in historical film which Ken Burns and I are very familiar with doing. We have pieces following patients through their journeys, being with them every day, letting the cameras roll. Then we have a very heavily scientific story in which the we are trying to explain to people and what we found to our delight was that each strand kind of resonated with the other and sort of vibrated with the other and you have almost a kind of music coming out as a result.

And when you see for example a contemporary story of Terrence deciding whether or not to roll their child in a clinical trial agonizing over the pluses and minuses and all the unknowns, we get a deep insight into what the parents must have been going through the 1950s when the first multidrug clinical trials were happening at the National Cancer Institute and children were literally being almost sacrificed for science, for the knowledge that was coming out of these trials to with very little benefits to them. Those parents must have faced an even more intense decision to make about whether to go forward with this. So the only way to understand that historical time is to see it with your own eyes, happening right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDsqTGJ9lYo

What were some of the challenges that you had to convey the scientific material and did you use animation? Did you do microscopic photography?

All of the above and many more things. That was in some way the most challenging part of the film itself. In the first place we had to satisfy ourselves that we understood it. So my litmus test is always, if I can understand it simply and clearly I can get it across to our viewers. So it was really about not pretending that we understood something that we didn’t understand, really asking these world-class researchers and Nobel prize-winning scientists to try to talk as if they were talking to their grandchildren. And they were remarkably successful at that.

They were able to simplify these concepts so that it really does become comprehensible and then we availed ourselves of some really, really beautiful animation. And we kind of had a worldwide search to find an animator who could do this and we actually ended up working with a woman who lives about three blocks away from me in Brooklyn. And she just happened to be really an artist not so much kind of trying to literally show what is going on but almost create a world that the viewers can kind of sink into and that way really the science became much more accessible to people, much more interesting to people.

One of the things that I think is frustrating to non-medical people is that it seems that every day there is a headline that something either does or does not cause cancer or reversing what we were told last time. What is the reason for that and what is the best way to understand it?

I think that it’s born of frustration. I mean it is still the case that some half of all cancers have no known cause at all and maybe, it’s very possible are the result simply of random copying errors inside our always dividing cells. I think this is partly especially for Americans who want an identifiable cause, something that we can stop and so we won’t ever get this disease in the first place. And while certainly true that there probably are carcinogens that we probably haven’t yet identified certainly many of these so-called causes whether it’s power lines or cell phones or sugar or whatever it is, really there’s no serious scientific evidence showing that these are carcinogenic.

The number of known carcinogens once you get past tobacco, obesity, sunlight, some viruses, there are very few that have been identified solidly. I think that is just tremendously frustrating for people so there’s that vacuum into which is poured all sorts of half-baked theories that I think do a real disservice. People running around not knowing what to eat or what to drink or where to stand on where to live and it is really, really a problem and I think one of the most important and promising areas of cancer research are in kind of honing our understanding of what is preventable and what is not preventable.

You show in the series how just a few decades ago the word “cancer” was spoken in whispers, if at all. Now Angelina Jolie writes about her surgery in the newspaper. How have we changed in the way that we talk about cancer?

I think we have made a lot of progress in that area. Cancer isn’t quite the taboo subject it was even 30 years ago when my grandmother died. And we owe a debt to people like Angelina Jolie or Betty Ford or Nancy Reagan or people who have publicly shared their particular stories. And I think in the case of Angelina Jolie there are some people who criticize her because she has taken these what seems like drastic steps for perhaps very little medical reason but that is a very dangerous thing to do, is to criticize another person’s choices. The service that she’s giving us is that she’s willing to talk about it and she’s willing to say, “I have a gene that may well give rise to cancer and this is what I’m going to do personally to try to prevent that from happening. You don’t have to follow my lead but this is one option.” And I think it is less what she has chosen to do than the fact that she has discussed it at all openly that is a real achievement and service she has given us.

What do you think is the most promising avenue that you have discovered for either prevention or treatment in the course of working on the series?

Just since this book came out five years ago, there is a whole new sort of frontier in how cancer research has developed. Immunotherapy is setting the cancer world on fire. It’s not just us, our decision to focus on it, it’s really universally thought of as being the most exciting new area of cancer research. And the reason for that is that for centuries people wondered why the human immune system couldn’t, didn’t fight cancer the way it fought every other infection. Why can’t our immune system help us? So (a), it does help us we probably have cancer all the time in our bodies and the immune system is part of the defense mechanisms that are fighting the cancer but more importantly even there are very specific reasons that the immune system as it turns out doesn’t fight cancer mostly because it doesn’t see it, it doesn’t recognize it as ‘other’ and that’s partly because cancer is so close to our cells, it really is our cells.

So what’s so exciting about this is that they have devised ways to basically unblind the immune system, to take the restraints off the immune system and that means a possibly non-toxic therapy, a therapy against which the cancer cannot form a resistance. All the defense mechanisms that cancer has are rendered useless when the immune system is unleashed against it. This isn’t even hypothetical, there is a billion-dollar industry already, and there are approved drugs out there that are working remarkably well against certain types of cancer. And every month it seems there is a new clinical trial for a different kind of cancer. You rarely see scientists in this field jumping up and down and getting giddy and childishly giggling but you do see that when you talk to them about immunotherapy. With all the caveats about where we’ve been before and had all these promising sort of moments before it in history cancer research there is still a lot of optimism about this new field.

Interview: Cecilia De Mille Presley on Her Grandfather Cecil B. De Mille

Posted on April 8, 2015 at 3:18 pm

The great director Cecil B. De Mille, known for his grand, lavish epics like Claudette Colbert’s sizzling Cleopatra and the Biblical epics The Ten Commandments and Samson & Delilah, and Best Picture Oscar winner The Greatest Show on Earth deserves a book tribute every bit as big in scope and scale as his films. And he got one in the truly spectacular Cecil B. DeMille: The Art of the Hollywood Epic, a massive, sumptuous, and simply gorgeous book that is sure to be treasured by anyone who loves movies. It is filled with never-before-shared behind-the-scenes drawings and production stills. And it features the recollections by De Mille’s granddaughter, Cecilia de Mille Presley. I had the very great pleasure of chatting with Ms. Presley about the book and about being on the set of “The Ten Commandments” with her grandfather when she was just 15 years old.

How is it that you and your mother happened to go and be on the movie set while the film was being made?

Well mother was his right-hand man from forever and he raised me, I went everywhere with him.

And the sets were already built when you arrived?

Yes, well, they still had the scaffolding so if grandfather wanted to make any change he could. The scaffolding was still there but when we rounded that corner and saw the row of sphinxes it was amazing!

What did you do during the day while they were filming?

Just what I did on every other picture that I was on that he made. Just try to be of help, cart water, soothe people’s nerves, whatever I could do.

What were some of the challenges that he faced filming in Egypt?

The special effects came later but in Hollywood but in Egypt we hired whole tribes with thousands of people. We hired whole tribes out of the desert. They came with their flocks and their wives and their children and their camels and their geese and their water buffalo. And Frank Westmore, who was head of makeup, used to get in at five with with Dorothy Jenkins who did the costumes. I used to meet him on the set at five o’clock and help get everybody made up. Most of them were okay because a lot of the Bedouins dressed just like they did 5000 years ago but if they were wearing a watch I actually had to get it off of them. The Egyptians were wonderful.

Your grandfather became ill during the filming I understand.

He did, he had a major heart attack but it would have been a publicity nightmare to say that, so he said it was just a bout of dysentery and mother took over and directed the film. He never missed a day on the set. He knew if he wasn’t there it would be news so he went and sat quietly behind the camera and mother made all the decisions. Mother and Loyal Griggs, his cinematographer made all the decisions and after a week he felt stronger though very weak still and very skinny and then he recovered his strength and went back to Hollywood and he continued and made the film.

Did you spend any time with the lead actors?

Oh sure, I mean they were all friends Yul Brynner and Charlton Heston were the ones that went there. They were wonderful anything they could do to help. Everybody just pitched in. When Yul walked in a room he would just make some kind of statement and everybody would look at him, he was just that imposing. He wasn’t a really tall guy but he had a gorgeous build with great body and worked out, very handsome man; spoke three or four or five languages. He read constantly, very intelligent, he was an artiste. He was just a really nice guy to be around. You know I’ve known actors all my life, both actors and actresses and usually they are almost with no exception, they are just really nice people. Charlton Heston was a very good friend of mine and of the family. Chuck was very straight, very studious, he walked around with all the books on Moses he could find reading everything he could read about the life and times of Moses. He wanted to know what it was like to be there then. And he had many talks with Egyptologists and people that were familiar with that era. How would he act? What would he be seeing? He did that with every film, Chuck was like that when he played Michelangelo and Ben Hur, he always wanted to know everything.

And you worked with the camels? How was that?

Camels are kind of cranky but they are ok. They are fun to ride. But it is a rocky ride. The roughest ride was in the chariot. Chuck Heston took me for a ride in the chariot. I tell you I hung onto him with my life because there are no shock absorbers. But he loved it.

Tell me about the book.

Mark Viera<img src="https://ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=nellminowthemovi&l=ur2&o=1" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" / has have been after me for some time to write that and I finally thought, "Why am I doing saying no?" I have all these wonderful archives that nobody has ever seen. I mean the art and the photographs. You know it weighs over 6 pounds and it sold out in four months. We are on the second printing and we are going to into a third. They did such a beautiful job on this book it is spectacular, of all the reviews we have had not one has been a bad review. They’ve all been over the top. Not even one criticism of anything in that book of all the reviews we have had.

I think what the book is about, it’s about certainly De Mille and how he made movies. De Mille was a modern-day Medici which doesn’t happen now. He brought in artists from all over the world, costume, jewelry, painters, everything from all over the world. He would tell them the story from his perspective and let them go. He didn’t want to tell them what to paint; he wanted them to tell him the new ideas. I have and we show in the book a concept drawing and this happens all the time, an artist would bring a concept drawing for the scene and he would film that scene exactly as that artist had shown. Where does the light come for the drama? These guys were brilliant and he knew they were brilliant. He wanted their ideas and used them. That is why when he accepted the Academy Award he said, “Pictures aren’t made by one man.” He said film is a collaborative art form and he was very well aware of all that.

My grandfather raised me. I moved in with him at seven and when I could dress myself he took me everywhere that he went, everywhere. And I bring those stories that nobody’s heard or knows about the actors we knew, about what he was thinking about all that and just fun stuff.

What made your grandfather want to oversee such enormous and complicated productions?

He was in his element doing that. People loved working with him and he worked with the same people over and over. He knew how to work with crowds. He could have 1000 extras and make it work. On the set if he didn’t think extras were giving the performances he wanted, he would pick one guy out that was just not paying attention and get him and say, “What are you doing? You have to act!” and be rough on him and then he might call him at the end of the day and say, “Look, I chose you and I’m going to give you more parts in this.”

And people love the films. One year, ABC didn’t run it and they called me and said, “We have never received more letters in our lifetime that we received because we didn’t show “The Ten Commandments.” I get letters saying, “The only time my teenage son will sit down with me is to watch “The Ten Commandments.” So you know it’s a lasting, wonderful thing.

Is that your favorite of his films?

I love The Sign of the Cross, that is a brilliant epic. And I love “The Ten Commandments, of course, I love The Plainsman. I love watching Gary Cooper — how good is that! And Union Pacific was one of my very favorites. Joel McCrea was so handsome. And Barbara Stanwyck was by far grandfather’s favorite actress. She was always on time, always knew her lines, never groused, willing to do anything the script called for. And she loved him. There is a quote in the book that she said, “I loved Mr. DeMille and Mr. DeMille loved me.”

And I understand you are still sending checks to people who worked with him.

Yes I am. you know he did something unusual twice when Joe Pew who had the Pew foundation. Joe Pew was a friend of his and a very wealthy man and they put a great deal of money in the making of The King of Kings and they sat down just the two of them and watched the movie and they agreed after seeing it that they would pay back the cost and they would never take a profit. De Mille gave all of his checks to charity and Joe Pugh gave all of his money to getting new prints out all over the world. They never took a dime of profit ever. And in “The Ten Commandments,” De Mille took ten percent of his profit and divided it among the hundred people that were key to the production of this film. And those checks I still write, unfortunately not as many as I used to. But I mean that has never been done.

What do you miss the most about that era of Hollywood?

The studio system of course is gone as it should be gone because actors should be able to call their own shots. But if you have a good studio head, like Paramount was at that time with Barney Balaban and Jesse Lasky, it was like a family. People got along, they all backed up each other. You know, it’s an absolute cut throat business today.

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